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Primary Sources: American Women
Primary Sources: American Women: Sexuality
primary sources related to women in early America and the United States
General - Books
General - Online
Abolition & Slavery
Reproductive Issues
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Movies, TV & Radio
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African-American Women
Online Sources: Sexuality - American Women
Documenting Lesbian Lives
"... is a collection of life histories of women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, woman-identified-woman, queer, or who prefer not to identify with sexuality categories. The project provides a complex and nuanced collective story of American lesbian history and experience. Interviews were conducted by Smith College students in Kelly Anderson's 'Documenting Lesbian Lives' course in the spring of 2010 and 2011. "
Transcripts available online
Gender Bender: Mary Masquerades as Murray
"Most people have a clear stereotype of the urban political boss of the early 20th century, and in many ways Murray Hall, a leader of New York City’s notorious “Tammany Hall,” was its embodiment. Hall was known as a poker-playing, cigar-chomping, whiskey-drinking, “man about town.” But in one significant way, Hall departed from the stereotype: she was actually a woman (by the name of Mary Anderson) who “passed” as a man for more than a quarter century. Tragically, Hall died of untreated breast cancer and her deception was only discovered at her death in 1901. “Passing” was a strategy that some lesbians (a term that was not in use at that time) used both to avoid public condemnation and to increase their earnings so that they could live independently. It could also be an assertion of political independence—Hall managed to vote and serve as a political leader in an era when women were denied the franchise."
Studies in Scarlet
Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. and U.K., 1815-1914
"presents the images of over 420 separately published trial narratives from the Harvard Law School Library's extensive trial collections. Included are a number of trials of the wealthy and renowned such as an account of the adultery trial of Caroline, Queen Consort of George IV, the sodomy trial of Oscar Wilde, and the trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of Stanford White, the famous architect who was Evelyn Nesbit Thaw's lover. The larger part of the collection, however, consists of the stories of ordinary men and women thrust into the public eye when their marriages and love affairs went wrong or their relationships did not conform to social standards." Harvard University Library
“All These Mean Dykes Standing Around:”
Shelley Ettinger Describes the Lesbian and Gay Community of the 1970s
“No Snuggling!” Sex Talks to Young Girls
"In the 1920s, in part because of prohibition and the emergence of speakeasies, homosexuality became more open. At the same time, psychologists, physicians, and social reformers had been at work for several decades attempting to study, classify, categorize, and label human sexual behavior. Practices that had long been common, or at least tolerated, were now being viewed as problematic. In an excerpt from Ten Sex Talks to Girls, published in 1914, Dr. Irving Steinhardt of New York warned that any affection or intimacy—indeed, any sort of physical contact between women at all—carried the potential for disease, pauperism, and death. Steinhardt’s book attempted to classify as dangerous forms of intimacy between women that previously had seemed completely "natural.""
Book Sources: Sexuality - American Women
#MeToo: Women Speak Out Against Sexual Assault by New York Times Editorial Staff (Editor)
Call Number: Online - Ebook Central
American Sexual Histories by Elizabeth Reis
Call Number: HQ18.U5 A458 2012
"... collection of sixteen articles by prominent historians and their corresponding primary sources that investigate issues related to human sexuality in America from the colonial era to the present day."
Eugenics, Marriage and Birth Control, Practical Eugenics by William J. Robinson
Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States: A Documentary History by Walter L. Williams and Yolanda Retter
Call Number: HQ76.8.U5 G37 2003
An anthology of primary documents for high-school and college students who are studying or debating the issues of gay and lesbian rights in America, dating from colonial times to the present.
Gender Issues and Sexuality: Essential Primary Sources by K. Lee Lerner et al.
Call Number: Online - GVRL
Healthy Happy Womanhood: A Pamphlet for Girls and Young Women by United States
The Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute by Maimie Pinzer; Sue Davidson (Editor); Ruth C. Rosen (Introduction by)
Call Number: HQ146.P4 P661 M2
Letters written 1910-1922 chiefly to Fanny Quincy Howe.
The Politics of Sexuality by Raymond A. Smith
Call Number: HQ23 .S65 2010
A Documentary and Reference Guide
Proud Heritage: People, Issues, and Documents of the LGBT Experience by Chuck Stewart
Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader by Barbara A. Crow
Call Number: HQ1426 .R325 2000
Sex Knowledge for Women and Girls by William J. Robinson
What every woman and girl should know
Sexual Preference by United States
Government publication.
Ten Sex Talks to Girls (14 years and older) (1914) by Irving David Steinhardt
Call Number: Online - Internet Archive
Women on Women: An Anthology of American Lesbian short Fiction by Joan Nestle et al.
Call Number: PS648.L47 W66 1990
<< Previous: Health
Next: Reproductive Issues >>
URL: https://cnu.libguides.com/psamericanwomen
Subjects: American Studies, History, Primary Sources, Women & Gender Studies
Tags: history, primary sources, women
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CohenConnect.com, Honest, accurate & outspoken: Lenny's thoughts on this world of ours
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Posted on January 27, 2018 February 26, 2019 by Lenny Cohen
Two articles got my attention as I recover, tonight. You'll remember yesterday, I couldn't read or even think. Now, look how far I've come -- and for how many hours! The first, called How Facebook Can Grow Its Media 'Likes' by Harry A. Jessell on TVNewsCheck continues the discussion I wrote on Rupert Murdoch saying Mark … Continue reading Facebook, Twitter, and Fox (Fox x 14)!
Posted in Austin TX, business & corporations, character traits, Cincinnati, Cleveland, E.W. Scripps, errors, Facebook, FCC Federal Communications Commission, Fox, Fox TV Stations Group, FTVLive.com, Houston, journalism, Mark Zuckerberg, media, New York, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Phoenix, ratings/analytics, Rupert Murdoch, Sinclair Broadcast Group, social media, Tampa FL, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Tribune Media (1847-2019, separated from Tribune Publishing in 2014), truth, TV news, Twitter, Washington DC, WCPO-9 (Scripps ABC Cincinnati), websites, WJW (Nexstar Fox8 Cleveland), WKRC-12 (Sinclair CBS Cincinnati), WLWT-5 (Hearst NBC Cincinnati), WNYW (Fox5 New York), WTXF (Fox 29 Philadelphia), WXIX-19 (Gray TV Fox Cincinnati)Tagged Harry Jessell, Michael Mann, Raycom, Scott Jones, Steve Stephens16 Comments
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Martin Luther King Jr. DayJanuary 20th, 2020
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Groundhog DayFebruary 2nd, 2020
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Quiet Weather Pattern for U.S. Monday; Cold Front to Move into Pacific Northwest Monday Night January 20, 2020
Today, and click for National Forecast Discussion
Tomorrow, and click for Philadelphia Area Forecast Discussion
School for Casey and a snow day for Frisky…
The Philly Files' latest Instagram: Click a picture. Then follow!
Jadeveon Clowney not fined for hit on #Eagles' #CarsonWentz. #NFL https://thephillyfiles.com/sports-schedules/philadelphia-eagles/
📆Calendar catch you off guard?😲 Colder & counting down December🎁🎉 www.ThePhillyFiles.com
NEW TONIGHT on ThePhillyFiles.com:
DID YOU KNOW IT’S NOT AGAINST THE #LAW for cops in #Pennsylvania to have #sex with someone in their custody? What’s being done that could change things: https://wp.me/pb5TSh-Xk
MORE REASON THAN EVER to suggest your friends follow @FilesPhilly and get weekly emails from ThePhillyFiles.com, starting shortly. https://mailchi.mp/5272b7eb3555/thephillyfiles
Lots to look at over the #weekend, starting with this guide for subscribers: https://mailchi.mp/1add4d405683/lots-new-at-thephillyfilescom
Another new section on www.ThePhillyFiles.com: #RECALL CENTRAL! Potentially life-saving #information from four #government agencies and departments, all in one place! https://wp.me/Pb5TSh-LU
NEW SECTION! Enjoying #CollegeFootball? How about a sneak peek at some local college #basketball? The #season is less than a month away! #Big5 and more! www.thephillyfiles.com/sports-schedules/college-basketball/
#CollegeFootball update: Temple beat Memphis, and Penn beat Sacred Heart. Penn State plays Iowa at the bottom of the hour. www.thephillyfiles.com/sports-schedules/college-football/
THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST WEEKEND in #Philadelphia in quite a while! There’s plenty to do from now through Monday, over #ColumbusDay weekend. #activities Get days, times and links. https://wp.me/pb5TSh-Jx
LAST DAY SUNDAY! Important information on #free dog and cat adoptions! @ACCTPhilly will get to regroup, but you and your new best friend will be the really big winners! https://wp.me/pb5TSh-Im #ACCTtotheFuture #DoBetterPhilly @cityofphiladelphia
VIDEO: Indecent exposure on #Johnson Street. #Police are still looking for their suspect. And, of course, of all the #places this crime could’ve happened. https://wp.me/pb5TSh-Hz
WANTED MAN seen on #video approaching a woman and grabbing her from behind. She tried to get away and luckily, a passerby helped #free her from the suspect’s arms! @PhillyPolice released several of the man’s attempts on #women. They all took place within 90 minutes! Clips here: https://wp.me/pb5TSh-Gr
WANTED: See the suspects on #video not just holding the #money they’re accused of stealing from a bar. @PhillyPolice say they took the whole #CashRegister drawer. https://wp.me/pb5TSh-Gg
ARE THESE YOUR BOYS? Hard-to-believe VIDEO of #kids having a hard time breaking into this #Comcast #Xfinity store. And watch what they did when they got inside. #Police are asking for help ID'ing these suspects, so they get taught a *really hard* lesson! https://wp.me/pb5TSh-Eu
ThePhillyFiles.com is two months old today! What does a website give its faithful web subscribers, #Twitter followers,#Facebook and #Instagram likers, readers, etc.? How about arrows on each story to help you navigate better?! You're welcome, and a sincere thank you for your support!
Update: Two #Philadelphia schools are delaying opening. Reminder for other families: Get a #great start, tomorrow! 🏫 Be in class before the first bell on the #FirstDayOfSchool, and good #luck! https://wp.me/pb5TSh-x9
To all of our faithful subscribers, followers, likers, readers, etc… From ThePhillyFiles.com…
Philly, We’ve made it into #HurricaneDorian’s tropical storm-force wind speed probabilities. See how close to #Florida this #Category5 seems headed after it devastates the NW Bahamas, through tomorrow. Plus, get links for everywhere from Key West to Virginia. https://wp.me/pb5TSh-z2
THESE PEOPLE WERE MURDERED here in #Philadelphia. Violence has become way too common and this new #website PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com — with #photos and #stories from the victims’ own families — strives for justice by calling for tips and offering rewards. https://wp.me/pb5TSh-sX
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‘If You Save One Life, You Save A Family’: New Award-Winning Film Highlighting Opioid Crisis In Kensington - CBS Philly
What Two Centuries of Census Records Taught Us About Philadelphia - Philadelphia magazine
Man critical after struck by hit-and-run driver In West Philadelphia - 6abc.com
Sneak Peek: Inside Philadelphia Magazine’s February 2020 Issue - Philadelphia magazine
Philadelphia’s Teachers Union Expected To Announce Legal Action Against School District Over Asbestos Problem - CBS Philly
‘We cannot wait:’ Philly area youth tackle gun violence, climate change at this year’s Women’s March - WHYY
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I’ve known Philadelphia’s City Council president, who also represents my district, is out of his mind and his response to the *few* Mummers in blackface at this year’s parade confirms that. He posted on Facebook: Also, Darrell Clarke told the Inky, “At some point, there needs to be a conversation about whether or not this … Continue reading Far worse crimes […]
It’s that time of year again. No. I take that back. A few weeks ago, it was that time of year again. Regular and long-time CohenConnect readers may recognize the Comcast graphic with Santa Claus. I came up with that two years and a week ago, on Dec. 20, 2017. But I’ve been busy and … Continue reading Have you noticed Comcast’s Christmas gift to itself? […]
We all have good days and bad days, but both of these quotes refer to the bigger picture at different times in different people’s careers, and they both just happened to show up today. “Unfortunately, the [TV] station is no longer a good fit for me. I have to respect myself enough to walk away … Continue reading The bad and the good at work (media edition) […]
This year, I reposted a Facebook memory from all the way back in 2018. It contrasts my good feelings about the holiday growing up in Florida, through last year, which was much colder than this one. Last year, I also posted something nostalgic: my 20th anniversary of being in Philadelphia. Yes, I moved from Hartford … Continue reading To Thanksgiving, and the […]
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Really? There’s something about catching up on a newspaper or magazine when you’ve fallen behind in your reading. This past weekend, I read both last week’s and this week’s editions of PGN, Philadelphia Gay News. (Yes, it’s the same paper I freelanced for in the beginning of this year.) In the Oct. 18-24 edition, it … Continue reading “Your rights in Philade […]
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The Origin of Colectivo Felix
Our mission is to transmit through the simple yet monumental acts of cooking and eating an appreciation of Latin American culture, the importance of edible biodiversity, and the necessity of small scale and ecological food producers. Across the Americas we create intimate dining experiences,
spaces for celebration and nourishment in the form of creative, artful cuisine.
Diego Felix and Sanra Ritten moved from San Francisco to Buenos Aires in 2007 to learn and investigate everything edible the South American continent had to offer. They began to showcase and share their findings to friends and adventurous eaters during dinners in their very own home. By word of mouth, Casa Felix gained popularity and introduced Latin American food culture to thousands of people from around the world.
Now based out of the town Santa Cruz in search of a permanent base in California, they are again a roaming restaurant, a band of culinary troubadours, doing private dinners, weddings, catered events and cooking classes in the Bay Area and beyond.
In Argentina, a colectivo is a public bus used by thousands of people on a daily basis, who continuously hop on and off. We aim to embody the same concept: friends, family, sommeliers, farmers, chefs, and countless others we’ve met along the way who have the same ideas about sustainable food culture contribute to our ideas and events. Even patrons who attend our dinners are passengers, helping make each Colectivo Felix dining experience unique and dynamic.
Whether you are in California, Buenos Aires, or New York we invite you to take a culinary ride with us!
Sign up to our international biannual newsletter here!
Sign up here for our Californian newsletter to receive emails about our events in the golden state.
WEB = BABUNI + CLUB AVENIDA // COPYRIGHT © COLECTIVO FELIX
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‘Doctor Strange’: First Look at Chiwetel Ejiofor on Set as Baron Mordo
by Chris Cabin November 7, 2015
The fact that Doctor Strange is currently shooting in Nepal has been making for quite a lot of set photos and videos, uncovering our first look at the great Benedict Cumberbatch transformation into the mighty sorcerer, or whatever we’re calling the good doctor this week. Now comes our first look at the similarly astounding Chiwetel Ejiofor on the set of the film, from The Kathmandu Post. The film is being helmed by Scott Derrickson, the director behind the chilling horror gem, Sinister.
Image via Roadside Attractions
The casting of Ejiofor as one of Strange’s primary villains, Baron Mordo, was one of the first elements of this production to gain attention even from Marvel skeptics, including yours truly. The fact that his appearance is packaged alongside the likes of Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Michael Stuhlbarg, and, reportedly, Hannibal himself, Mads Mikkelsen has made Derrickson’s film the crown jewel for 2016’s onslaught of Marvel and DC properties heading to the big screen.
The shots we’ve seen thus far from the Nepal set don’t quite give us a sense of how the film will look under Derrickson’s direction, but that will likely not be revealed until we get our peepers on the first trailer for the film, which likely won’t hit the web and theaters until late this year, or, more likely, early-mid 2016. It will likely prove to be a busy year for Ejiofor, who will also appear in John Hillcoat‘s furious action-thriller Triple Nine and Billy Ray‘s Secret in Their Eyes, a remake of a very good Argentinian thriller-drama from one of the lead directors of Halt and Catch Fire, Juan José Campanella. On top of these projects, Ejiofor had a pretty successful 2015, appearing both in the box-office smash The Martian and indie favorite Z for Zachariah, following the tremendous success of his turn in the lovely, effective, yet irrefutably flawed 12 Years a Slave. If he brings half of the passion he brought to that film though, Doctor Strange will likely prove to be an out-and-out event.
Check out the first looks at Ejiofir as Baron Mordo, with Cumberbatch, below:
Amidst a whole bunch of new Twitter pics from Doctor Strange’s Nepal production, a couple have surfaced showing Chiwetal Ejiofor’s Baron Mordo in full costume There’s a WHOLE lotta talent in this picture alone ☺ (random fact – my lil brother knows Ejiofor) #marvel #makeminemarvel #doctorstrange #baronmordo
A photo posted by JC (@jccub) on Nov 7, 2015 at 10:59am PST
#DoctorStrange Set Photo – First Look at #ChiwetelEjiofor as #BaronMordo – #BenedictCumberbatch #Marvel #Nepal A photo posted by We Geek Girls (@wegeekgirls) on Nov 7, 2015 at 11:21am PST
Chloe Moretz Is 'The Little Mermaid' for Universal Pictures
'Better Call Saul' Season 2 Trailer Teases Bob Odenkirk's Dark Turn
• Baron Mordo • Benedict Cumberbatch • Chiwetel Ejiofor • Doctor Strange • Marvel • Scott Derrickson
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CommuniKait
A Hawaii Lifestyle Blog By Kait Hanson
About Kait
Ultimate List Of 50+ Psychological Thrillers To Read
Life, Lifestyle · November 21, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good psychological thriller book. The more suspenseful or mind-bending…the better! What can I say? Psychological thriller novels are my favorite! I think I first got hooked with “Gone Girl” and since then it’s been a thriller book bender! This post has been a long time in the making, but it’s my ultimate list of psychological thrillers that are must-reads — one of my most requested post topics! There is a nice mix of authors, plots and twists within this list and I really hope that if you are a lover of books like this that you’ll find something to keep you up at night on here 🙂 Whether you’re looking for a new read or a gift for a friend, here is the ultimate list of 50+ psychological thrillers to read!
The New Neighbors – “Londoners Jack and Syd found their dream home: lots of space, a great location, and a friendly owner who wanted a young couple to have it. Everything is exactly what they hoped for when they move in–except Jack makes a disturbing discovery in the attic, and Syd begins to wonder about the girl next door. And they each keep the other in the dark. A mistake. Because someone has just been killed outside their back door, and now the police are watching them. This is their chance to prove they’re innocent–or to get away with murder.”
The Ex-Wife – “Newly married Natasha has the perfect house, a loving husband and a beautiful little girl called Emily. She’d have it all if it wasn’t for Jen, her husband’s ex-wife who just won’t leave them alone …Then Natasha returns home one day to find her husband and Emily gone without trace. Desperate to get her daughter back, Natasha will do anything even if it means accepting an offer of help from Jen. But can she trust her? And do either of them really know the man they married?”
The Perfect Friend – “My name is Alex, and my world has been shattered. My husband has left me. My children won’t speak to me. My friend Carrie is the only person I have. She’s the only one I can trust to keep all my secrets. She’d never do anything to let me down. Would she?”
The Affair – “The moment she opened her eyes, she knew everything had changed. The stale taste of alcohol; her uneasy stomach. She looked at her husband sleeping peacefully, and knew she would never tell anyone what happened last night.”
Our Little Lies – “Marianne has a life others dream of. A beautiful townhouse on the best street in the neighbourhood. Three bright children who are her pride and joy. Sometimes her past still hurts: losing her mother, growing up in foster care. But her husband Simon is always there. A successful surgeon, he’s the envy of every woman they’ve ever met. Flowers, gifts, trips to France – nothing is too good for his family. Then Simon says another woman’s name. The way he lingers on it, Caroline, gives Marianne a shudder of suspicion, but she knows she can’t entertain this flash of paranoia. In the old days, she’d have distracted herself at work, but Marianne left her glamorous career behind when she got married. She’d speak to a friend, but she’s too busy with her children and besides, Simon doesn’t approve of the few she has left. It’s almost by accident that Marianne begins to learn more about Caroline. But once she starts, she can’t stop. Because what she finds makes her wonder whether the question she should be asking is not ‘should she be jealous’, but… ‘should she be scared’?”
The Proposal – “Teacher Pippa wants a second chance. Recently divorced and unhappy at work, she uproots her life to renovate a beautiful farmhouse in the countryside, determined to make a fresh start. But Pippa soon realises: your troubles are never far behind. When Pippa meets blue-eyed Ryan Marks, he is funny, charming, and haunted by his past. He might just be the answer to all her problems. But how well does she really know him? She knows the story of his life, the pain that stays with him, the warmth of his smile and the smell of his skin. She knows he can make her laugh over a glass of wine. Pippa can tell truth from lies. She’d know if she were in danger. Wouldn’t she?”
A Simple Favor – “It starts with a simple favor—an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When glamorous Emily asks Stephanie to pick up her son after school, Stephanie happily says yes. Emily has a life that would make any woman jealous. She is the perfect mother with a dazzling career working for a famous fashion designer in Manhattan. Stephanie, a widow with a son in kindergarten, lonely in their Connecticut suburb, turns to her daily blog for connection and validation. Stephanie imagines Emily to be her new confidante and is shocked when Emily suddenly disappears without a trace, leaving her son and husband with no warning. Stephanie knows something is terribly wrong. Unable to keep away from the grieving family, she soon finds herself entangled with Sean, Emily’s handsome, reticent British husband. But she can’t ignore the nagging feeling that he’s not being honest with her about Emily’s disappearance. Is Stephanie imagining things? How well did she really know her “best” friend?”
The Lying Game – “On a cool June morning, a woman is walking her dog in the idyllic coastal village of Salten, along a tidal estuary known as the Reach. Before she can stop him, the dog charges into the water to retrieve what first appears to be a wayward stick, but to her horror, turns out to be something much more sinister…The next morning, three women in and around London—Fatima, Thea, and Isa—receive the text they had always hoped would never come, from the fourth in their formerly inseparable clique, Kate, that says only, “I need you.” The four girls were best friends at Salten, a second-rate boarding school set near the cliffs of the English Channel. Each different in their own way, the four became inseparable and were notorious for playing the Lying Game, telling lies at every turn to both fellow boarders and faculty. But their little game had consequences, and as the four converge in present-day Salten, they realize their shared past was not as safely buried as they had once hoped…”
Everything We Left Behind (but read Everything We Keep first!) — “Two months before his wedding, financial executive James Donato chased his trade-laundering brother Phil to Mexico, only to be lost at sea and presumed dead. Six and a half years later, he emerges from a dissociative fugue state to find he’s been living in Oaxaca as artist Carlos Dominguez, widower and father of two sons, with his sister-in-law Natalya Hayes, a retired professional surfer, helping to keep his life afloat. But his fiancée, Aimee Tierney, the love of his life, has moved on. She’s married and has a child of her own. Devastated, James and his sons return to California. But Phil is scheduled for release from prison, and he’s determined to find James, who witnessed something in Mexico that could land Phil back in confinement. Under mounting family pressure, James flees with his sons to Kauai, seeking refuge with Natalya. As James begins to unravel the mystery of his fractured identity, danger is never far behind, and Natalya may be the only person he can trust.”
Into The Water – “A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.”
The Woman In Cabin 10 – ” Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…”
Luckiest Girl Alive – “As a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School, Ani FaNelli endured a shocking, public humiliation that left her desperate to reinvent herself. Now, with a glamorous job, expensive wardrobe, and handsome blue blood fiancé, she’s this close to living the perfect life she’s worked so hard to achieve. But Ani has a secret. There’s something else buried in her past that still haunts her, something private and painful that threatens to bubble to the surface and destroy everything.”
The Silent Wife – “Lara’s life looks perfect on the surface. Gorgeous doting husband Massimo, sweet little son Sandro and the perfect home. Lara knows something about Massimo. Something she can’t tell anyone else or everything he has worked so hard for will be destroyed: his job, their reputation, their son. This secret is keeping Lara a prisoner in her marriage. Maggie is married to Massimo’s brother Nico and lives with him and her troubled stepdaughter. She knows all of Nico’s darkest secrets – or so she thinks. Then one day she discovers a letter in the attic which reveals a shocking secret about Nico’s first wife. Will Maggie set the record straight or keep silent to protect those she loves? For a family held together by lies, the truth will come at a devastating price.”
The Surrogate – “Kat and her husband Nick have tried everything to become parents, and are on the point of giving up. Then a chance encounter with Kat’s childhood friend Lisa gives Kat and Nick one last chance to achieve their dream. But Kat and Lisa’s history hides dark secrets. And there is more to Lisa than meets the eye. As dangerous cracks start to appear in Kat’s perfect picture of happily-ever-after, she realises that she must face her fear of the past to save her family…”
Liar – “Single dad Ben is doing his best to raise his children, with the help of his devoted mother Judi. And then Ben meets Amber. Everyone thinks this is a perfect match for Ben but Judi isn’t so sure…There’s just something about Amber that doesn’t add up. Ben can’t see why his mother dislikes his new girlfriend. And Amber doesn’t want Judi anywhere near her new family. Amber just wants Ben and the children. The further Judi delves into Amber’s personal life, the closer she gets to shocking secrets that could change everything. And Judi must make a decision that could lead to the most disastrous consequences.”
I Am Watching YOU – “When Ella Longfield overhears two attractive young men flirting with teenage girls on a train, she thinks nothing of it—until she realises they are fresh out of prison and her maternal instinct is put on high alert. But just as she’s decided to call for help, something stops her. The next day, she wakes up to the news that one of the girls—beautiful, green-eyed Anna Ballard—has disappeared. A year later, Anna is still missing. Ella is wracked with guilt over what she failed to do, and she’s not the only one who can’t forget. Someone is sending her threatening letters—letters that make her fear for her life. Then an anniversary appeal reveals that Anna’s friends and family might have something to hide. Anna’s best friend, Sarah, hasn’t been telling the whole truth about what really happened that night—and her parents have been keeping secrets of their own. Someone knows where Anna is—and they’re not telling. But they are watching Ella.”
Guilty – “On a warm summer’s morning, thirteen-year-old school girl Constance Lawson is reported missing. A few days later, Constance’s uncle, Karl Lawson suddenly finds himself swept up in a media frenzy created by journalist Amanda Bowe implying that he is the prime suspect. Six years later …Karl’s life is in ruins. His marriage is over, his family destroyed. But the woman who took everything away from him is thriving. With a successful career, husband and a gorgeous baby boy, Amanda’s world is complete. Until the day she receives a phone call and in a heartbeat, she is plunged into every mother’s worst nightmare.”
Neighborly – “Kat and Doug felt like Aurora Village was the perfect community. Minutes from the city, affluent without pretension, low crime with a friendly vibe—it’s everything Kat never had, and that she’s determined to provide for her infant daughter. Snagging a nice bungalow in this exclusive enclave was worth all the sacrifice. But everything changes overnight when Kat finds a scrawled note outside their front door. That wasn’t very neighborly of you. As increasingly sinister and frighteningly personal notes arrive, each one stabs deeper into the heart of Kat’s insecurities, paranoia, and most troubling, her past. When the neighbors who seemed so perfect reveal their open secret, the menace moves beyond mean notes. Someone’s raising the stakes. As suspicious as she is of every smiling face and as terrified as she’s become of being found out, Kat is still unprepared for the sharp turn that lies just ahead of her on Bayberry Lane.”
The Mistake – “Eight-year-old Billy goes missing one day, out flying his kite with his sister Rose. Two days later, he is found dead. Sixteen years on, Rose still blames herself for Billy’s death. How could she have failed to protect her little brother? Rose has never fully recovered from the trauma, and one of the few people she trusts is her neighbour Ronnie, who she has known all her life. But one day Ronnie falls ill, and Rose goes next door to help him… and what she finds in his attic room turns her world upside down.”
Blink – “What if the person you love most in the world was in terrible danger … because of you? Three years ago, Toni’s five-year-old daughter Evie disappeared after leaving school. The police have never been able to find her. There were no witnesses, no CCTV, no trace. But Toni believes her daughter is alive. And as she begins to silently piece together her memories, the full story of the past begins to reveal itself, and a devastating truth.”
Guilty – “It begins with a phone call. It ends with a missing child. On a warm summer’s morning, thirteen-year-old school girl Constance Lawson is reported missing. A few days later, Constance’s uncle, Karl Lawson suddenly finds himself swept up in a media frenzy created by journalist Amanda Bowe implying that he is the prime suspect. Six years later …Karl’s life is in ruins. His marriage is over, his family destroyed. But the woman who took everything away from him is thriving. With a successful career, husband and a gorgeous baby boy, Amanda’s world is complete. Until the day she receives a phone call and in a heartbeat, she is plunged into every mother’s worst nightmare.”
Mother – “Christopher would never hurt anyone. Not intentionally. Even after everything that’s happened I still believe that…Christopher Harris is a lonely boy. A boy who has never fitted in to his family. Who has always felt something was missing from his life. Until one day, when he discovers a suitcase in his family’s attic. Inside the suitcase is a letter. Inside the letter is a secret about his mother that changes everything. What price would you pay for the perfect family?”
The Daughter – “You lost your daughter. You will never forgive yourself. Now someone’s determined to make you pay… Seventeen years ago, something happened to Jess’s daughter Beth. The memory of it still makes her blood run cold. Jess has tried everything to make peace with that day, and the part she played in what happened. It was only a brief moment of desire… but she’ll pay for it with a lifetime of guilt.”
The Visitor – “When Holly moves in to Baker Crescent, a quiet suburban street she causes quite a stir. Beautiful, talented, and friendly, it doesn’t take long for her to charm the other residents. But why has she left the bright lights of the big city behind and settled in with Cora, a lonely old lady who is delighted to offer her visitor a place to stay? The neighbours are fascinated by Holly and watch her from their windows every opportunity they get. Just when Holly has begun to feel at home someone sees something that they shouldn’t – something that’s impossible to ignore. What is Holly hiding? And are the dark secrets from her past going to put them all into terrible danger?”
Little Liar – “The perfect family… or the perfect lie? To the outside world, Gemma Bradley has it all – a doting husband, high-flying career and two delightful kids – but inside the four walls of her tastefully renovated home, she is a mother at her wits’ end who has given too many last warnings and counted to ten too many times. When a child’s scream pierces the night, Gemma’s neighbour does what anyone would do: she calls the police. She wants to make sure that Rosie, the little girl next door, is safe. Gemma knows she hasn’t done anything wrong, but the more she fights to defend the family she loves, the more her flawless life begins to crumble around her. Is the carefully guarded secret she’s been keeping suddenly in danger of breaking free?”
The Social Affair – “A timeless, perfect couple waltzes into the small coffee shop where Izzy Lewis works. Instantly enamored, she does what she always does in situations like these: she searches them out on social media. Just like that—with the tap of a screen— she’s given a front row seat to the Dunns’ picturesque life. This time, she’s certain she’s found what she’s been searching for. This time, she’ll go to whatever lengths it takes to ensure she gets it right—even if this means doing the unthinkable. Intense and original, The Social Affair is a disturbing psychological thriller that explores what can happen when privacy is traded for convenience.”
The Perfect Roommate – “She’s my roommate. I know how she takes her tea, how she organizes her closet.
I know when she goes to bed each night, what she eats for breakfast, the passcode on her phone. I know she calls her mother on Mondays, takes barre on Thursdays, and meets her friends for drinks on Fridays.
But more important than any of that … I know what she did.”
Liars – “He loves you. He’d do anything for you. But you shouldn’t trust him. Jenny – poor, bullied and nursing her sick mother – hasn’t had an easy time of it. But at last things are beginning to look up. Through writing about her experience online she’s discovered new friends – a whole community of people who understand what she’s going through. And when a shy young man called David gets in touch to ask her on a date – well, it feels like all her dreams have come true. But just as Jenny is beginning to picture her future in David’s sprawling family home, something feels wrong. How can David be so perfect? Little comments and gifts make Jenny begin to wonder: does David know things about her past that she’s never told anybody?”
The Babysitter – “You trust her with your family. Would you trust her with your life? Mark and Melissa Cain are thrilled to have found Jade, a babysitter who is brilliant with their young children. Having seen her own house burn to the ground, Jade needs them as much as they need her. Moving Jade into the family home can only be a good thing, can’t it? As Mark works long hours as a police officer and Melissa struggles with running a business, the family become ever more reliant on their babysitter, who is only too happy to help. And as Melissa begins to slip into depression, it’s Jade who is left picking up the pieces. But Mark soon notices things aren’t quite as they seem. Things at home feel wrong, and as Mark begins to investigate their seemingly perfect sitter, what he discovers shocks him to his core. He’s met Jade before. And now he suspects he might know what she wants …Mark is in a race against time to protect his family. But what will he find as he goes back to his family home?”
The Reunion – “They were all there the day your sister went missing… Who is lying? Who is next? THEN – In charge of her little sister at the beach, Claire allowed Eleanor to walk to the shop alone to buy an ice cream. Placing a coin into her hand, Claire told her to be quick, knowing how much she wanted the freedom. Eleanor never came back. NOW – The time has finally come to sell the family farm and Claire is organising a reunion of her dearest friends, the same friends who were present the day her sister went missing. When another girl disappears, long-buried secrets begin to surface. One of the group hides the darkest secret of them all…”
The Pact – “You made a promise to your sister. It could destroy your daughter. 15-year-old Rosie lies in hospital fighting for her life. She’s trying to tell her mother what happened to her, and how she got there, but she can’t speak the words out loud. Rosie’s mother Toni has a secret. She had a traumatic childhood, and she and her sister Bridget made each other a promise thirty years ago: that they could never speak the truth about what they went through as children, and that they would protect each other without asking for help from others, no matter what…”
The Perfect Neighbors – “When Helen moves abroad with her loving husband Gary, she can’t wait to meet her fellow expat teachers from the local International School. But her new start is about to become her worst nightmare…As soon as the charming family across the way welcome Helen into their home, she begins to suspect that all is not as it seems. Then Gary starts to behave strangely and a child goes missing, vanished without a trace. When violence and tragedy strike, cracks appear in the community, and Helen realises her perfect neighbors are capable of almost anything…”
Jar Of Hearts – “This is the story of three best friends: one who was murdered, one who went to prison, and one who’s been searching for the truth all these years…How far will someone go to bury her secrets and hide her grief? How long can you get away with a lie? How long can you live with it?”
The Girl Before – “Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life. The request seems odd, even intrusive—and for the two women who answer, the consequences are devastating. An enthralling psychological thriller that spins one woman’s seemingly good fortune, and another woman’s mysterious fate, through a kaleidoscope of duplicity, death, and deception.”
Silent Child – “In the summer of 2006, Emma Price watched helplessly as her six-year-old son’s red coat was fished out of the River Ouse. It was the tragic story of the year – a little boy, Aiden, wandered away from school during a terrible flood, fell into the river, and drowned. His body was never recovered. Ten years later, Emma has finally rediscovered the joy in life. She’s married, pregnant, and in control again… … until Aiden returns.”
A Stranger In The House – “Karen and Tom Krupp are happy—they’ve got a lovely home in upstate New York, they’re practically newlyweds, and they have no kids to interrupt their comfortable life together. But one day, Tom returns home to find Karen has vanished—her car’s gone and it seems she left in a rush. She even left her purse—complete with phone and ID—behind. When Karen returns, something’s not quite right. And the police won’t stop asking questions. Because in this house, everyone’s a stranger. Everyone has something they’d rather keep hidden. Something they might even kill to keep quiet.”
In A Dark, Dark Wood – “When reclusive writer Leonora is invited to the English countryside for a weekend away, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. But as the first night falls, revelations unfold among friends old and new, an unnerving memory shatters Leonora’s reserve, and a haunting realization creeps in: the party is not alone in the woods.”
The Last Mrs. Parrish – “Amber Patterson is fed up. She’s tired of being a nobody: a plain, invisible woman who blends into the background. She deserves more—a life of money and power like the one blond-haired, blue-eyed goddess Daphne Parrish takes for granted. Amber’s envy could eat her alive . . . if she didn’t have a plan. Amber uses Daphne’s compassion and caring to insinuate herself into the family’s life—the first step in a meticulous scheme to undermine her. Before long, Amber is Daphne’s closest confidante, traveling to Europe with the Parrishes and their lovely young daughters, and growing closer to Jackson. But a skeleton from her past may undermine everything that Amber has worked towards, and if it is discovered, her well-laid plan may fall to pieces.”
Something In The Water – “If you could make one simple choice that would change your life forever, would you? Erin is a documentary filmmaker on the brink of a professional breakthrough, Mark a handsome investment banker with big plans. Passionately in love, they embark on a dream honeymoon to the tropical island of Bora Bora, where they enjoy the sun, the sand, and each other. Then, while scuba diving in the crystal blue sea, they find something in the water…”
The Woman In The Window – “Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare…”
The Girl I Used To Be – “The morning after real estate agent Gemma Brogan has dinner with a prospective client, she’s furious at herself for drinking so much. But there will be more to regret than a nasty hangover. She starts receiving mementos from that night: A photo of a hallway kiss. A video of her complaining about her husband. And worse…much worse. The problem is she doesn’t remember any of it. As the blackmailing and menace ramp up, Gemma fears for her already shaky marriage. The paranoia, the feeling that her life is spiraling out of control, will take her back to another night–years ago–that changed everything. And Gemma will realize just how far the shadows from her past can reach…”
The House Swap – “When Caroline and Francis receive an offer to house swap–from their city apartment to a house in a leafy, upscale London suburb–they jump at the chance for a week away from home, their son, and the tensions that have pushed their marriage to the brink. As the couple settles in, the old problems that permeate their marriage–his unhealthy behaviors, her indiscretions–start bubbling to the surface. But while they attempt to mend their relationship, their neighbor, an intense young woman, is showing a little too much interest in their activities. Meanwhile, Caroline slowly begins to uncover some signs of life in the stark house–signs of her life. The flowers in the bathroom or the music might seem innocent to anyone else–but to her they are clues. It seems the person they have swapped with is someone who knows her, someone who knows the secrets she’s desperate to forget…”
Bring Me Back – “Finn and Layla are young, in love, and on vacation. They’re driving along the highway when Finn decides to stop at a service station to use the restroom. He hops out of the car, locks the doors behind him, and goes inside. When he returns Layla is gone—never to be seen again. That is the story Finn told to the police. But it is not the whole story. Ten years later Finn is engaged to Layla’s sister, Ellen. Their shared grief over what happened to Layla drew them close and now they intend to remain together. Still, there’s something about Ellen that Finn has never fully understood. His heart wants to believe that she is the one for him…even though a sixth sense tells him not to trust her. Then, not long before he and Ellen are to be married, Finn gets a phone call. Someone from his past has seen Layla—hiding in plain sight. There are other odd occurrences: Long-lost items from Layla’s past that keep turning up around Finn and Ellen’s house. Emails from strangers who seem to know too much. Secret messages, clues, warnings. If Layla is alive—and on Finn’s trail—what does she want? And how much does she know?”
The Next Girl – “Deborah Jenkins pulls her coat around her as she sets out on her short walk home in the pouring rain. But she never makes it home that night. And she is never seen again. Four years later, an abandoned baby girl is found wrapped in dirty rags on a doorstep. An anonymous phone call urges the police to run a DNA test on the baby. But nobody is prepared for the results. The newborn belongs to Deborah. She’s still alive.”
Sick Girl – “25-year-old scrappy Aubrey is fed up with Tom, a married neurologist with two children. When he’s not shoving their relationship on the back burner, he’s canceling their dates. With a frightening health diagnosis looming over her shoulder, Aubrey concocts a desperate plan to have Tom forever. Kill the wife. Take her place. Befriending Tom’s successful, kind wife comes easily to Aubrey. However, the closer they become, the more doubts Aubrey has about following through. Then a shocking discovery changes everything…”
The Husband Hour – “When a young widow’s reclusive life in a charming beach town is interrupted by a surprise visitor, she is forced to reckon with dark secrets about her family, her late husband, and the past she tried to leave behind.” **TRIGGER WARNING: This book involves the death of a U.S. Army soldier.**
How To Walk Away – “Margaret Jacobsen is just about to step into the bright future she’s worked for so hard and so long: a new dream job, a fiancé she adores, and the promise of a picture-perfect life just around the corner. Then, suddenly, on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life, everything she worked for is taken away in a brief, tumultuous moment…
Then She Was Gone – “Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was fifteen, the youngest of three. She was beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers. She and her boyfriend made a teenaged golden couple. She was days away from an idyllic post-exams summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her. And then she was gone. Now, her mother Laurel Mack is trying to put her life back together. It’s been ten years since her daughter disappeared, seven years since her marriage ended, and only months since the last clue in Ellie’s case was unearthed. So when she meets an unexpectedly charming man in a café, no one is more surprised than Laurel at how quickly their flirtation develops into something deeper. Before she knows it, she’s meeting Floyd’s daughters—and his youngest, Poppy, takes Laurel’s breath away. Because looking at Poppy is like looking at Ellie. And now, the unanswered questions she’s tried so hard to put to rest begin to haunt Laurel anew. Where did Ellie go?”
It’s Always The Husband – “Kate, Aubrey, and Jenny first met as college roommates and soon became inseparable, despite being as different as three women can be. Kate was beautiful, wild, wealthy, and damaged. Aubrey, on financial aid, came from a broken home, and wanted more than anything to distance herself from her past. And Jenny was a striver―brilliant, ambitious, and determined to succeed. As an unlikely friendship formed, the three of them swore they would always be there for each other. But twenty years later, one of them is standing at the edge of a bridge, and someone is urging her to jump. How did it come to this?”
I Liked My Life – “Maddy is a devoted stay-at-home wife and mother, host of excellent parties, giver of thoughtful gifts, and bestower of a searingly perceptive piece of advice or two. She is the cornerstone of her family, a true matriarch…until she commits suicide, leaving her husband Brady and teenage daughter Eve heartbroken and reeling, wondering what happened. How could the exuberant, exacting woman they loved disappear so abruptly, seemingly without reason, from their lives? How they can possibly continue without her? As they sift through details of her last days, trying to understand the woman they thought they knew, Brady and Eve are forced to come to terms with unsettling truths.”
Want to keep this list for later? Be sure to pin it below 🙂
9 New Psychological Thrillers For 2020
Books To Read If You Liked “The Nightingale”
9 New Psychological Thrillers For Fall
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Conservative Flash
Mueller Humiliates CNN And MSNBC, Says Russia Interference Predated Trump
The media should be ashamed of themselves after the release of the long-awaited Mueller report.
Now, the Mueller report makes clear a few things – that the Trump campaign was inexperienced but was not malicious.
Further, Russia has been interfering in our elections for years (truth be told we interfere in elections too but we are much better at it) and in fact their attempts in the 2016 election predated Trump.
Let that sink in. In 2014 before Trump wasn’t even a politician and Putin was meddling. The media needs to apologize right now to President Trump. From Big League Politics:
The Mueller Report, released today by Attorney General Bill Barr, reveals that Russia’s Internet Research Agency has been engaged in “active measures” using social media to direct American political discourse since at least 2014, predating President Donald J. Trump’s entrance onto the national stage.
Russians both traveled to the United States for “intelligence gathering” operations and used social media to sway public discourse as early as 2014, according to the newly released, redacted Mueller Report.
“In mid-2014, the IRA sent employees to the United States on an intelligence-gathering mission,” the report reads. It continues that “the IRA later used social media accounts and interest groups to sow discord,” noting that the program began in 2014.
“The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015,” according to the Mueller Report.
It is also noted that “As early as the spring of 2014, the IRA began to hide its funding and activities” to allow it to facilitate this program.
At around the same time, “the IRA began to consolidate U.S. operations within a single general department, known internally as the ‘Translator’ department.”
The IRA employees who traveled to the United States in 2014 “applied to the U.S. Department of State” under false pretenses, “lying about the purpose of their trip and claiming to be four friends who had met at a party.”
The report notes that “Ultimately, two IRA employees–Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova–received visas and entered the United States on June 4, 2014.”
“Starting as early as 2014,” the report continues, “the IRA’s U.S. operations included social media specialists focusing on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter” and eventually included “specialists who operated on Tumblr and Instagram accounts.”
Featured Image Source H/T: KAGDaily
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After Adam Schiff’s Impeachment Crumbles – Incoming IG Report Sends Democrats Scrambling
Judicial Watch: Obama Is To Blame For Russia Hoax, Get Him Under Oath RIGHT NOW
Joe Biden Dazed By 3 Senate Committees – They Are All Investigating Joe, Hunter And Ukraine
Clarence Thomas Breaks Silence On Joe Biden – Drops His 2020 Supreme Court Hammer
Devin Nunes Drops His Impeachment Hammer – Promises 2 Media Outlets He’s Going To Sue Them
Copyright © 2019 Conservative Flash
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Zenith DEFY 21 Land Rover Edition Wristwatch
The long-awaited return of the legendary Land Rover Defender SUV brings modern tech, materials, and construction to an off-roading icon. Now, the brand has commissioned Swiss watchmaker Zenith to build a watch to celebrate the…
More:Men's Watches, Style, Land Rover, Zenith
New in the Shop: GL Stapler
In the age of multi-page PDFs, email attachments and online document repositories, does anyone really need a stapler on a regular basis? Probably not. But every so often, whether it's tax-time, quarterly reports or end-of-year reconciliations, even those of us that are opposed to paper documentation find ourselves in need of a way to combine multiple pages for storage purposes. There's no better answer than a stapler, and there's no better option than this GL Stapler. This HD-3 model classic stapler was launched the better part of a century ago and, to this day, is…
Daily Steals
Today’s Steals (1.17.2020): Levi’s Premium Corduroy Sherpa Trucker Jacket – 72% Off ++
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With all his rockets and cars and transportation inventions, there’s no denying the fact that Elon Musk is a straight up genius. He’s also way ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing and…
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Damon Motorcycles Hypersport Electric Superbike
When does an electric motorcycle look like a gas-powered track rocket? When it’s built by Damon for the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show. The very yellow and very fast superbike uses none other than Blackberry’s QNX…
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Ben & Jerry’s NETFLIX & CHILLL’D Ice Cream
No, Netflix is not making food. Well, not really. They have, however, collab’d with Ben & Jerry’s to concoct a flavor that’s best consumed while binge-watching the streaming service. NETFLIX & CHILLL’D is packed with…
More:Food & Drink, Ben & Jerry's, Netflix
Uniti One
An electric car doesn’t have to be fast, nor does it need to look like a sports car to be really good. Case in point, the Swedish-built Uniti One. It has a 186-mile range on…
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And you thought Lamborghinis from the ’80s and ’90s were crazy. This obscure 200+ mph Vector W8 looks like a Lamborghini made love to an alien spacecraft. Now, this very rare (1 of 18), very…
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Super73-S1 Universal Motorbike
Another e-bike has hit the market, but it’s unconventional in the best of ways. It looks more like small motorcycle than a bicycle, and that higher style quotient should be a draw. The new Super73-S1…
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Today’s Steals (1.16.2020): Timex x Todd Snyder Military Watch – 40% Off ++
CDT Multi Functional Pen
Tired of having to switch between separate black pens, red pens and mechanical pencils based on what you’re working on? Want that old school nostalgia of the multi functional click pen from your youth? Check…
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MotorcyclesRides
Over the past handful of years we’ve seen a big resurgence of custom bikes based on the American classic that is the flat tracker. Leave it to Deus Ex Machina to add the special touches…
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Today’s Steals (1.15.2020): Relwen Covert CPO Jacket – 46% Off ++
These Are the Official Art Posters for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
There’s absolutely no denying the fact that the Olympics are a huge deal every other year they happen. Since the early 20th century, posters created by the Olympic Organising Committees of the Olympic Games have…
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NIU Technology’s first attempt at a motorcycle cannot be understated. Not only is it one of the cleanest, most attractive designs we’ve come across, the electric bike is infused with Smart technology like Bluetooth, GPS,…
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windeln.de initiates efficiency and profitability measures in context of upcoming CEO change and targets break-even early 2019 already
Home / Press Release / windeln.de initiates efficiency and profitability measures in context of upcoming CEO change and targets break-even early 2019 already
In 2018e
windeln.de initiates efficiency and profitability measures in context of upcoming CEO change and targets break-even early 2019 already2018-02-062018-02-09/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/windeln_logo.pngWindeln/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/windeln_logo.png200px200px
• Measures initiated to (i) reorganize operations and reduce headquarter costs in Germany, and (ii) focus international operations on regions with short- to mid-term profitability potential; break-even target for early 2019
• Capital increase of up to 2.6m shares with exclusion of pre-emptive rights from authorized capital subscribed by existing shareholders, new investor group, all members of the management board including founders and Matthias Peuckert
• Starting date of designated CEO Matthias Peuckert on May 1, 2018, succeeding founders and Co-CEOs Alexander Brand and Konstantin Urban
• Preliminary 2017 financials: Revenues EUR 211 to 213 million, adjusted EBIT EUR (26) to (24) million ((13) to (11)% margin) and net liquidity of EUR 25.7 million. Publication of 2017 financials on March 14, 2018.
Munich, February 6, 2018: windeln.de SE, (WKN WNDL11/ ISIN DE000WNDL110) one of the leading online retailers for baby and toddler products in Europe and for customers in China, went through a thorough assessment of its businesses in context of the upcoming management change and initiated several measures to further increase efficiency and reduce costs. The targeted cost reduction amounts to approx. EUR 10 million based on 2017 financials and to a large extent have immediate impact. One-off direct reorganization costs will amount to approx. EUR 1.5 million, which will be recognized in fiscal year 2018. Active headcount at windeln.de group is expected to go down from 387 active full-time equivalent (FTEs) employees (including Feedo) as of December 31, 2017 to approx. 250 (excluding Feedo) or -35% by year end 2018. These measures will lead to a more efficient set up to achieve sustainable and profitable growth mid-term. Adjusted EBIT break-even is expected to be reached early 2019 already.
Reorganization and reduction of headquarter costs in Germany
At the German headquarter workforce will be reduced across all back-office functions and certain departments will be reorganized. In addition, the product assortment of currently 52,000 products will be further optimized to increase margins. Meanwhile, the marketing spent in Germany will be lowered. Total other SG&A cost savings of approx. EUR 4 to 5 million compared to 2017 are targeted.
Focusing of international operations
windeln.de focuses its international business on the German speaking region (DACH), Spain, Portugal, France and China to reduce complexity in the group and to increase profitability. In this context, the management decided to:
(i) explore the divestiture of the standalone business “Feedo” which is present in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. Feedo recorded revenues of EUR 24 million in 2017 (+27% year over year growth) and had 86 FTEs employees as of December 31, 2017;
(ii) close the Italian online shop, the local Italian office and warehouse;
(iii) increase profitability of the Southern European business “Bebitus” in Spain, Portugal and France by optimizing assortment and streamlining the organizational setup after the integration which was completed October last year.
As a result of these three measures, the management expects annual cost savings of EUR 5 to 6 million based on 2017 financials.
Due to the reorganization in Germany and internationally, the Company decided to put the planned relocation of the central warehouse to Eastern Europe temporarily on hold.
Capital increase of up to 2.6 million shares
In connection with the contemplated efficiency-enhancing measures and the further development of the Company’s business, the management board and supervisory board today resolved to increase the Company's share capital from authorized capital against cash contributions from EUR 28,472,420.00 by a nominal amount of up to EUR 2,628,323.00 (corresponding to approximately 10% of the share capital at the time of authorization) to up to EUR 31,100,743 by issuing up to 2,628,323 new ordinary shares (the "New Shares"). The pre-emptive rights of the Company's existing shareholders have been cancelled. The New Shares are entitled to dividends as of January 1, 2018. Certain existing shareholders, a new investor group around the entrepreneur Clemens Jakopitsch as well as all members of the Company’s management board including founders and the designated CEO Matthias Peuckert, will participate in the capital increase. The final placement volume, placement price and the proceeds from the capital increase will be announced later today.
Willi Schwerdtle, chairman of the supervisory board of windeln.de SE, “The supervisory board of windeln.de SE supports the new management team with Matthias Peuckert as designated CEO, Jürgen Vedie as COO and Nikolaus Weinberger as CFO on implementing the announced measures to increase efficiency and profitability. It is a strong sign of commitment by existing and new investors as well as all members of the management board to support the company through the capital increase. Going forward, we expect the organization to be more cost-efficient and flexible to steer towards profitable and sustainable growth in 2019.”
Preliminary 4th quarter and fiscal year 2017 results
Preliminary fiscal year financials for 2017 amounted to EUR 211 to 213 million revenues (+8 to +10% growth year over year), adjusted EBIT at EUR (26) to (24) million ((13) to (11)% margin) and yearend liquidity of EUR 29.2 million (EUR 25.7 million net excluding EUR 3.5 million drawn borrowing base facility). Revenues in the fourth quarter were EUR 52 to 53 million and (10) to (8)% lower than in the fourth quarter 2016 due to continued profitability focus in Germany and temporary integration effects at Bebitus. Adjusted EBIT was EUR (7) to (6) million ((13) to (11)% margin) and change in net liquidity EUR 4.9 million in the fourth quarter 2017 and therefore improved to the previous year period.
windeln.de bringt eigene Premium-Windel „darly“ auf den Markt
windeln.de leitet im Rahmen des bevorstehenden CEO-Wechsels Effizienz- und Profitabilitätsmaßnahmen ein und plant Break Even bereits Anfang 2019
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Home » Radha, Hayder (x) » Electrical engineering (x) » Brain-computer interfaces (x) » Brain--Computer simulation (x)
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Directed information for complex network analysis from multivariate time series
Liu, Ying
Complex networks, ranging from gene regulatory networks in biology to social networks in sociology, havereceived growing attention from the scientific community. The analysis of complex networks employs techniquesfrom graph theory, machine learning and signal processing. In recent years, complex network analysis tools havebeen applied to neuroscience and neuroimaging studies to have a better understanding of the human brain. In thisthesis, we focus on inferring and analyzing the complex...
Show moreComplex networks, ranging from gene regulatory networks in biology to social networks in sociology, havereceived growing attention from the scientific community. The analysis of complex networks employs techniquesfrom graph theory, machine learning and signal processing. In recent years, complex network analysis tools havebeen applied to neuroscience and neuroimaging studies to have a better understanding of the human brain. In thisthesis, we focus on inferring and analyzing the complex functional brain networks underlying multichannelelectroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Understanding this complex network requires the development of a measureto quantify the relationship between multivariate time series, algorithms to reconstruct the network based on thepairwise relationships, and identification of functional modules within the network.Functional and effective connectivity are two widely studiedapproaches to quantify the connectivity between two recordings.Unlike functional connectivity which only quantifies the statisticaldependencies between two processes by measures such as crosscorrelation, phase synchrony, and mutual information (MI), effectiveconnectivity quantifies the influence one node exerts on anothernode. Directed information (DI) measure is one of the approachesthat has been recently proposed to capture the causal relationshipsbetween two time series. Two major challenges remain with theapplication of DI to multivariate data, which include thecomputational complexity of computing DI with increasing signallength and the accuracy of estimation from limited realizations ofthe data. Expressions that can simplify the computation of theoriginal definition of DI while still quantifying the causalityrelationship are needed. In addition, the advantage of DI overconventionally causality measures such as Granger causality has notbeen fully investigated. In this thesis, we propose time-laggeddirected information and modified directed information to addressthe issue of computational complexity, and compare the performanceof this model free measure with model based measures (e.g. Grangercausality) for different realistic signal models.Once the pairwise DI between two random processes is computed,another problem is to infer the underlying structure of the complexnetwork with minimal false positive detection. We propose to useconditional directed information (CDI) proposed by Kramer to addressthis issue, and introduce the time-lagged conditional directedinformation and modified conditional directed information to lowerthe computational complexity of CDI. Three network inferencealgorithms are presented to infer directed acyclic networks whichcan quantify the causality and also detect the indirect couplingssimultaneously from multivariate data.One last challenge in the study of complex networks, specifically in neuroscience applications, is to identifythe functional modules from multichannel, multiple subject recordings. Most research on community detection inthis area so far has focused on finding the association matrix based on functional connectivity, instead ofeffective connectivity, thus not capturing the causality in the network. In addition, in order to find a modularstructure that best describes all of the subjects in a group, a group analysis strategy is needed. In thisthesis, we propose a multi-subject hierarchical community detection algorithm suitable for a group of weightedand asymmetric (directed) networks representing effective connectivity, and apply the algorithm to multichannelelectroencephalogram (EEG) data.
Kernel methods for biosensing applications
Khan, Hassan Aqeel
This thesis examines the design noise robust information retrieval techniques basedon kernel methods. Algorithms are presented for two biosensing applications: (1)High throughput protein arrays and (2) Non-invasive respiratory signal estimation.Our primary objective in protein array design is to maximize the throughput byenabling detection of an extremely large number of protein targets while using aminimal number of receptor spots. This is accomplished by viewing the proteinarray as a...
Show moreThis thesis examines the design noise robust information retrieval techniques basedon kernel methods. Algorithms are presented for two biosensing applications: (1)High throughput protein arrays and (2) Non-invasive respiratory signal estimation.Our primary objective in protein array design is to maximize the throughput byenabling detection of an extremely large number of protein targets while using aminimal number of receptor spots. This is accomplished by viewing the proteinarray as a communication channel and evaluating its information transmission capacity as a function of its receptor probes. In this framework, the channel capacitycan be used as a tool to optimize probe design; the optimal probes being the onesthat maximize capacity. The information capacity is first evaluated for a small scaleprotein array, with only a few protein targets. We believe this is the first effort toevaluate the capacity of a protein array channel. For this purpose models of theproteomic channel's noise characteristics and receptor non-idealities, based on experimental prototypes, are constructed. Kernel methods are employed to extend thecapacity evaluation to larger sized protein arrays that can potentially have thousandsof distinct protein targets. A specially designed kernel which we call the ProteomicKernel is also proposed. This kernel incorporates knowledge about the biophysicsof target and receptor interactions into the cost function employed for evaluation of channel capacity.For respiratory estimation this thesis investigates estimation of breathing-rateand lung-volume using multiple non-invasive sensors under motion artifact and highnoise conditions. A spirometer signal is used as the gold standard for evaluation oferrors. A novel algorithm called the segregated envelope and carrier (SEC) estimation is proposed. This algorithm approximates the spirometer signal by an amplitudemodulated signal and segregates the estimation of the frequency and amplitude in-formation. Results demonstrate that this approach enables effective estimation ofboth breathing rate and lung volume. An adaptive algorithm based on a combination of Gini kernel machines and wavelet filltering is also proposed. This algorithm is titledthe wavelet-adaptive Gini (or WAGini) algorithm, it employs a novel wavelet trans-form based feature extraction frontend to classify the subject's underlying respiratorystate. This information is then employed to select the parameters of the adaptive kernel machine based on the subject's respiratory state. Results demonstrate significantimprovement in breathing rate estimation when compared to traditional respiratoryestimation techniques.
Convolutional neural networks for automated cell detection in magnetic resonance imaging data
Afridi, Muhammad Jamal
Cell-based therapy (CBT) is emerging as a promising solution for a large number of serious health issues such as brain injuries and cancer. Recent advances in CBT, has heightened interest in the non-invasive monitoring of transplanted cells in in vivo MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data. These cells appear as dark spots in MRI scans. However, to date, these spots are manually labeled by experts, which is an extremely tedious and a time consuming process. This limits the ability to conduct...
Show moreCell-based therapy (CBT) is emerging as a promising solution for a large number of serious health issues such as brain injuries and cancer. Recent advances in CBT, has heightened interest in the non-invasive monitoring of transplanted cells in in vivo MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data. These cells appear as dark spots in MRI scans. However, to date, these spots are manually labeled by experts, which is an extremely tedious and a time consuming process. This limits the ability to conduct large scale spot analysis that is necessary for the long term success of CBT. To address this gap, we develop methods to automate the spot detection task. In this regard we (a) assemble an annotated MRI database for spot detection in MRI; (b) present a superpixel based strategy to extract regions of interest from MRI; (c) design a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for automatically characterizing and classifying spots in MRI; (d) propose a transfer learning approach to circumvent the issue of limited training data, and (e) propose a new CNN framework that exploits labeling behavior of the expert in the learning process. Extensive experiments convey the benefits of the proposed methods.
Hardware Algorithms for High-Speed Packet Processing
Norige, Eric
The networking industry is facing enormous challenges of scaling devices to support theexponential growth of internet traffic as well as increasing number of features being implemented inside the network. Algorithmic hardware improvements to networking componentshave largely been neglected due to the ease of leveraging increased clock frequency and compute power and the risks of implementing complex hardware designs. As clock frequencyslows its growth, algorithmic solutions become important to...
Show moreThe networking industry is facing enormous challenges of scaling devices to support theexponential growth of internet traffic as well as increasing number of features being implemented inside the network. Algorithmic hardware improvements to networking componentshave largely been neglected due to the ease of leveraging increased clock frequency and compute power and the risks of implementing complex hardware designs. As clock frequencyslows its growth, algorithmic solutions become important to fill the gap between currentgeneration capability and next generation requirements. This paper presents algorithmicsolutions to networking problems in three domains: Deep Packet Inspection(DPI), firewall(and other) ruleset compression and non-cryptographic hashing. The improvements in DPIare two-pronged: first in the area of application-level protocol field extraction, which allowssecurity devices to precisely identify packet fields for targeted validity checks. By usingcounting automata, we achieve precise parsing of non-regular protocols with small, constantper-flow memory requirements, extracting at rates of up to 30gbps on real traffic in softwarewhile using only 112 bytes of state per flow. The second DPI improvement is on the longstanding regular expression matching problem, where we complete the HFA solution to theDFA state explosion problem with efficient construction algorithms and optimized memorylayout for hardware or software implementation. These methods construct automata toocomplex to be constructed by previous methods in seconds, while being capable of 29gbpsthroughput with an ASIC implementation. Firewall ruleset compression enables more firewall entries to be stored in a fixed capacity pattern matching engine, and can also be usedto reorganize a firewall specification for higher performance software matching. A novelrecursive structure called TUF is given to unify the best known solutions to this problemand suggest future avenues of attack. These algorithms, with little tuning, achieve a 13.7%improvement in compression on large, real-life classifiers, and can achieve the same results asexisting algorithms while running 20 times faster. Finally, non-cryptographic hash functionscan be used for anything from hash tables to track network flows to packet sampling fortraffic characterization. We give a novel approach to generating hardware hash functionsin between the extremes of expensive cryptographic hash functions and low quality linearhash functions. To evaluate these mid-range hash functions properly, we develop new evaluation methods to better distinguish non-cryptographic hash function quality. The hashfunctions described in this paper achieve low-latency, wide hashing with good avalanche anduniversality properties at a much lower cost than existing solutions.
Privacy and integrity preserving computation in distributed systems
Chen, Fei
Preserving privacy and integrity of private data has become core requirements for many distributed systems across different parties. In these systems, one party may try to compute or aggregate useful information from the private data of other parties. However, this party is not be fully trusted by other parties. Therefore, it is important to design security protocols for preserving such private data. Furthermore, one party may want to query the useful information computed from such private...
Show morePreserving privacy and integrity of private data has become core requirements for many distributed systems across different parties. In these systems, one party may try to compute or aggregate useful information from the private data of other parties. However, this party is not be fully trusted by other parties. Therefore, it is important to design security protocols for preserving such private data. Furthermore, one party may want to query the useful information computed from such private data. However, query results may be modified by a malicious party. Thus, it is important to design query protocols such that query result integrity can be verified.In this dissertation, we study four important privacy and integrity preserving problems for different distributed systems. For two-tiered sensor networks, where storage nodes serve as an intermediate tier between sensors and a sink for storing data and processing queries, we proposed SafeQ, a protocol that prevents compromised storage nodes from gaining information from both sensor collected data and sink issued queries, while it still allows storage nodes to process queries over encrypted data and the sink to detect compromised storage nodes when they misbehave. For cloud computing, where a cloud provider hosts the data of an organization and replies query results to the customers of the organization, we propose novel privacy and integrity preserving schemes for multi-dimensional range queries such that the cloud provider can process encoded queries over encoded data without knowing the actual values, and customers can verify the integrity of query results with high probability. For distributed firewall policies, we proposed the first privacy-preserving protocol for cross-domain firewall policy optimization. For any two adjacent firewalls belonging to two different administrative domains, our protocol can identify in each firewall the rules that can be removed because of the other firewall. For network reachability, one of the key factors for capturing end-to-end network behavior and detecting the violation of security policies, we proposed the first cross-domain privacy-preserving protocol for quantifying network reachability.
Stochastic modeling of routing protocols for cognitive radio networks
Soltani, Soroor
Cognitive radios are expected torevolutionize wireless networking because of their ability tosense, manage and share the mobile available spectrum.Efficient utilization of the available spectrum could be significantly improved by incorporating different cognitive radio based networks. Challenges are involved in utilizing the cognitive radios in a network, most of which rise from the dynamic nature of available spectrum that is not present in traditional wireless networks. The set of available...
Show moreCognitive radios are expected torevolutionize wireless networking because of their ability tosense, manage and share the mobile available spectrum.Efficient utilization of the available spectrum could be significantly improved by incorporating different cognitive radio based networks. Challenges are involved in utilizing the cognitive radios in a network, most of which rise from the dynamic nature of available spectrum that is not present in traditional wireless networks. The set of available spectrum blocks(channels) changes randomly with the arrival and departure of the users licensed to a specific spectrum band. These users are known as primary users. If a band is used by aprimary user, the cognitive radio alters its transmission power level ormodulation scheme to change its transmission range and switches to another channel.In traditional wireless networks, a link is stable if it is less prone to interference. In cognitive radio networks, however, a link that is interference free might break due to the arrival of its primary user. Therefore, links' stability forms a stochastic process with OFF and ON states; ON, if the primary user is absent. Evidently, traditional network protocols fail in this environment. New sets of protocols are needed in each layer to cope with the stochastic dynamics of cognitive radio networks.In this dissertation we present a comprehensive stochastic framework and a decision theory based model for the problem of routing packets from a source to a destination in a cognitive radio network. We begin by introducing two probability distributions called ArgMax and ArgMin for probabilistic channel selection mechanisms, routing, and MAC protocols. The ArgMax probability distribution locates the most stable link from a set of available links. Conversely, ArgMin identifies the least stable link. ArgMax and ArgMin together provide valuable information on the diversity of the stability of available links in a spectrum band. Next, considering the stochastic arrival of primary users, we model the transition of packets from one hop to the other by a Semi-Markov process and develop a Primary Spread Aware Routing Protocol (PSARP) that learns the dynamics of the environment and adapts its routing decision accordingly. Further, we use a decision theory framework. A utility function is designed to capture the effect of spectrum measurement, fluctuation of bandwidth availability and path quality. A node cognitively decides its best candidate among its neighbors by utilizing a decision tree. Each branch of the tree is quantified by the utility function and a posterior probability distribution, constructed using ArgMax probability distribution, which predicts the suitability of available neighbors. In DTCR (Decision Tree Cognitive Routing), nodes learn their operational environment and adapt their decision making accordingly. We extend the Decision tree modeling to translate video routing in a dynamic cognitive radio network into a decision theory problem. Then terminal analysis backward induction is used to produce our routing scheme that improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio of the received video.We show through this dissertation that by acknowledging the stochastic property of the cognitive radio networks' environment and constructing strategies using the statistical and mathematical tools that deal with such uncertainties, the utilization of these networks will greatly improve.
High-dimensional learning from random projections of data through regularization and diversification
Aghagolzadeh, Mohammad
Random signal measurement, in the form of random projections of signal vectors, extends the traditional point-wise and periodic schemes for signal sampling. In particular, the well-known problem of sensing sparse signals from linear measurements, also known as Compressed Sensing (CS), has promoted the utility of random projections. Meanwhile, many signal processing and learning problems that involve parametric estimation do not consist of sparsity constraints in their original forms. With the...
Show moreRandom signal measurement, in the form of random projections of signal vectors, extends the traditional point-wise and periodic schemes for signal sampling. In particular, the well-known problem of sensing sparse signals from linear measurements, also known as Compressed Sensing (CS), has promoted the utility of random projections. Meanwhile, many signal processing and learning problems that involve parametric estimation do not consist of sparsity constraints in their original forms. With the increasing popularity of random measurements, it is crucial to study the generic estimation performance under the random measurement model. In this thesis, we consider two specific learning problems (named below) and present the following two generic approaches for improving the estimation accuracy: 1) by adding relevant constraints to the parameter vectors and 2) by diversification of the random measurements to achieve fast decaying tail bounds for the empirical risk function.The first problem we consider is Dictionary Learning (DL). Dictionaries are extensions of vector bases that are specifically tailored for sparse signal representation. DL has become increasingly popular for sparse modeling of natural images as well as sound and biological signals, just to name a few. Empirical studies have shown that typical DL algorithms for imaging applications are relatively robust with respect to missing pixels in the training data. However, DL from random projections of data corresponds to an ill-posed problem and is not well-studied. Existing efforts are limited to learning structured dictionaries or dictionaries for structured sparse representations to make the problem tractable. The main motivation for considering this problem is to generate an adaptive framework for CS of signals that are not sparse in the signal domain. In fact, this problem has been referred to as 'blind CS' since the optimal basis is subject to estimation during CS recovery. Our initial approach, similar to some of the existing efforts, involves adding structural constraints on the dictionary to incorporate sparse and autoregressive models. More importantly, our results and analysis reveal that DL from random projections of data, in its unconstrained form, can still be accurate given that measurements satisfy the diversity constraints defined later.The second problem that we consider is high-dimensional signal classification. Prior efforts have shown that projecting high-dimensional and redundant signal vectors onto random low-dimensional subspaces presents an efficient alternative to traditional feature extraction tools such as the principle component analysis. Hence, aside from the CS application, random measurements present an efficient sampling method for learning classifiers, eliminating the need for recording and processing high-dimensional signals while most of the recorded data is discarded during feature extraction. We work with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers that are learned in the high-dimensional ambient signal space using random projections of the training data. Our results indicate that the classifier accuracy can be significantly improved by diversification of the random measurements.
Unconstrained 3D face reconstruction from photo collections
This thesis presents a novel approach for 3D face reconstruction from unconstrained photo collections. An unconstrained photo collection is a set of face images captured under an unknown and diverse variation of poses, expressions, and illuminations. The output of the proposed algorithm is a true 3D face surface model represented as a watertight triangulated surface with albedo data colloquially referred to as texture information. Reconstructing a 3D understanding of a face based on 2D input...
Show moreThis thesis presents a novel approach for 3D face reconstruction from unconstrained photo collections. An unconstrained photo collection is a set of face images captured under an unknown and diverse variation of poses, expressions, and illuminations. The output of the proposed algorithm is a true 3D face surface model represented as a watertight triangulated surface with albedo data colloquially referred to as texture information. Reconstructing a 3D understanding of a face based on 2D input is a long-standing computer vision problem. Traditional photometric stereo-based reconstruction techniques work on aligned 2D images and produce a 2.5D depth map reconstruction. We extend face reconstruction to work with a true 3D model, allowing us to enjoy the benefits of using images from all poses, up to and including profiles. To use a 3D model, we propose a novel normal field-based Laplace editing technique which allows us to deform a triangulated mesh to match the observed surface normals. Unlike prior work that require large photo collections, we formulate an approach to adapt to photo collections with few images of potentially poor quality. We achieve this through incorporating prior knowledge about face shape by fitting a 3D Morphable Model to form a personalized template before using a novel analysis-by-synthesis photometric stereo formulation to complete the fine face details. A structural similarity-based quality measure allows evaluation in the absence of ground truth 3D scans. Superior large-scale experimental results are reported on Internet, synthetic, and personal photo collections.
Efficient and secure system design in wireless communications
Song, Tianlong
Efficient and secure information transmission lies in the core part of wireless system design and networking. Comparing with its wired counterpart, in wireless communications, the total available spectrum has to be shared by different services. Moreover, wireless transmission is more vulnerable to unauthorized detection, eavesdropping and hostile jamming due to the lack of a protective physical boundary.Today, the two most representative highly efficient communication systems are CDMA (used...
Show moreEfficient and secure information transmission lies in the core part of wireless system design and networking. Comparing with its wired counterpart, in wireless communications, the total available spectrum has to be shared by different services. Moreover, wireless transmission is more vulnerable to unauthorized detection, eavesdropping and hostile jamming due to the lack of a protective physical boundary.Today, the two most representative highly efficient communication systems are CDMA (used in 3G) and OFDM (used in 4G), and OFDM is regarded as the most efficient system. This dissertation will focus on two topics: (1) Explore more spectrally efficient system design based on the 4G OFDM scheme; (2) Investigate robust wireless system design and conduct capacity analysis under different jamming scenarios. The main results are outlined as follows.First, we develop two spectrally efficient OFDM-based multi-carrier transmission schemes: one with message-driven idle subcarriers (MC-MDIS), and the other with message-driven strengthened subcarriers (MC-MDSS). The basic idea in MC-MDIS is to carry part of the information, named carrier bits, through idle subcarrier selection while transmitting the ordinary bits regularly on all the other subcarriers. When the number of subcarriers is much larger than the adopted constellation size, higher spectral and power efficiency can be achieved comparing with OFDM. In MC-MDSS, the idle subcarriers are replaced by strengthened ones, which, unlike idle ones, can carry both carrier bits and ordinary bits. Therefore, MC-MDSS achieves even higher spectral efficiency than MC-MDIS.Second, we consider jamming-resistant OFDM system design under full-band disguised jamming, where the jamming symbols are taken from the same constellation as the information symbols over each subcarrier. It is shown that due to the symmetricity between the authorized signal and jamming, the BER of the traditional OFDM system is lower bounded by a modulation specific constant. We develop an optimal precoding scheme, which minimizes the BER of OFDM systems under full-band disguised jamming. It is shown that the most efficient way to combat full-band disguised jamming is to concentrate the total available power and distribute it uniformly over a particular number of subcarriers instead of the entire spectrum. The precoding scheme is further randomized to reinforce the system jamming resistance.Third, we consider jamming mitigation for CDMA systems under disguised jamming, where the jammer generates a fake signal using the same spreading code, constellation and pulse shaping filter as that of the authorized signal. Again, due to the symmetricity between the authorized signal and jamming, the receiver cannot really distinguish the authorized signal from jamming, leading to complete communication failure. In this research, instead of using conventional scrambling codes, we apply advanced encryption standard (AES) to generate the security-enhanced scrambling codes. Theoretical analysis shows that: the capacity of conventional CDMA systems without secure scrambling under disguised jamming is actually zero, while the capacity can be significantly increased by secure scrambling.Finally, we consider a game between a power-limited authorized user and a power-limited jammer, who operate independently over the same spectrum consisting of multiple bands. The strategic decision-making is modeled as a two-party zero-sum game, where the payoff function is the capacity that can be achieved by the authorized user in presence of the jammer. We first investigate the game under AWGN channels. It is found that: either for the authorized user to maximize its capacity, or for the jammer to minimize the capacity of the authorized user, the best strategy is to distribute the power uniformly over all the available spectrum. Then, we consider fading channels. We characterize the dynamic relationship between the optimal signal power allocation and the optimal jamming power allocation, and propose an efficient two-step water pouring algorithm to calculate them.
Harnessing Low-Pass Filter Defects for Improving Wireless Link Performance : Measurements and Applications
Ameli Renani, Alireza
The design trade-offs of transceiver hardware are crucial to the performance of wireless systems. The effect of such trade-offs on individual analog and digital components are vigorously studied, but their systemic impacts beyond component-level remain largely unexplored. In this dissertation, we present an in-depth study to characterize the surprisingly notable systemic impacts of low-pass filter design, which is a small yet indispensable component used for shaping spectrum and rejecting...
Show moreThe design trade-offs of transceiver hardware are crucial to the performance of wireless systems. The effect of such trade-offs on individual analog and digital components are vigorously studied, but their systemic impacts beyond component-level remain largely unexplored. In this dissertation, we present an in-depth study to characterize the surprisingly notable systemic impacts of low-pass filter design, which is a small yet indispensable component used for shaping spectrum and rejecting interference. Using a bottom-up approach, we examine how signal-level distortions caused by the trade-offs of low-pass filter design propagate to the upper-layers of wireless communication, reshaping bit error patterns and degrading link performance of today's 802.11 systems. Moreover, we propose a novel unequal error protection algorithm that harnesses low-pass filter defects for improving wireless LAN throughput, particularly to be used in forward error correction, channel coding, and applications such as video streaming. Lastly, we conduct experiments to evaluate the unequal error protection algorithm in video streaming, and we present substantial enhancements of video quality in mobile environments.
Scalable pulsed mode computation architecture using integrate and fire structure based on margin propagation
Hindo, Thamira
Neuromorphic computing architectures mimic the brain to implement efficient computations for sensory applications in a different way from that of the traditional Von Neumann architecture. The goal of neuromorphic computing systems is to implement sensory devices and systems that operate as efficiently as their biological equivalents. Neuromorphic computing consists of several potential components including parallel processing instead of synchronous processing, hybrid (pulse) computation...
Show moreNeuromorphic computing architectures mimic the brain to implement efficient computations for sensory applications in a different way from that of the traditional Von Neumann architecture. The goal of neuromorphic computing systems is to implement sensory devices and systems that operate as efficiently as their biological equivalents. Neuromorphic computing consists of several potential components including parallel processing instead of synchronous processing, hybrid (pulse) computation instead of digital computation, neuron models as a basic core of the processing instead of the arithmetic logic units, and analog VLSI design instead of digital VLSI design. In this work a new neuromorphic computing architecture is proposed and investigated for the implementation of algorithms based on using the pulsed mode with a neuron-based circuit.The proposed architecture goal is to implement approximate non-linear functions that are important components of signal processing algorithms. Some of the most important signal processing algorithms are those that mimic biological systems such as hearing, sight and touch. The designed architecture is pulse mode and it maps the functions into an algorithm called margin propagation. The designed structure is a special network of integrate-and-fire neuron-based circuits that implement the margin propagation algorithm using integration and threshold operations embedded in the transfer function of the neuron model. The integrate-and-fire neuron units in the network are connected together through excitatory and inhibitory paths to impose constraints on the network firing-rate. The advantages of the pulse-based, integrate-and-fire margin propagation (IFMP) algorithmic unit are to implement complex non-linear and dynamic programming functions in a scalable way; to implement functions using cascaded design in parallel or serial architecture; to implement the modules in low power and small size circuits of analog VLSI; and to achieve a wide dynamic range since the input parameters of IFMP module are mapped in the logarithmic domain.The newly proposed IFMP algorithmic unit is investigated both on a theoretically basis and an experimental performance basis. The IFMP algorithmic unit is implemented with a low power analog circuit. The circuit is simulated using computer aided design tools and it is fabricated in a 0.5 micron CMOS process. The hardware performance of the fabricated IFMP algorithmic architecture is also measured. The application of the IFMP algorithmic architecture is investigate for three signal processing algorithms including sequence recognition, trace recognition using hidden Markov model and binary classification using a support vector machine. Additionally, the IFMP architecture is investigated for the application of the winner-take-all algorithm, which is important for hearing, sight and touch sensor systems.
A multivariate time-frequency based phase synchrony measure and applications to dynamic brain network analysis
Mutlu, Ali Yener
Irregular, non-stationary, and noisy multichannel data are abound in many fields of research. Observations of multichannel data in nature include changes in weather, the dynamics of satellites in the solar system, the time evolution of the magnetic field of celestial bodies, population growth in ecology and the dynamics of the action potentials in neurons.One particular application of interest is the functional integration of neuronal networks in the human brain. Human brain is known to be...
Show moreIrregular, non-stationary, and noisy multichannel data are abound in many fields of research. Observations of multichannel data in nature include changes in weather, the dynamics of satellites in the solar system, the time evolution of the magnetic field of celestial bodies, population growth in ecology and the dynamics of the action potentials in neurons.One particular application of interest is the functional integration of neuronal networks in the human brain. Human brain is known to be one of the most complex biological systems and quantifying functional neural coordination in the brain is a fundamental problem. It has been recently proposed that networks of highly nonlinear and non-stationary reciprocal interactions are the key features of functional integration. Among many linear and nonlinear measures of dependency, time-varying phase synchrony has been proposed as a promising measure of connectivity. Current state-of-the-art in time-varying phase estimation uses either the Hilbert transform or the complex wavelet transform of the signals. Both of these methods have some major drawbacks such as the assumption that the signals are narrowband for the Hilbert transform and the non-uniform time-frequency resolution inherent to the wavelet analysis. Furthermore, the current phase synchrony measures are limited to quantifying bivariate relationships and do not reveal any information about multivariate synchronization patterns which are important for understanding the underlying oscillatory networks.In this dissertation, a new phase estimation method based on the Rihaczek distribution and Reduced Interference Rihaczek distribution belonging to Cohen's class is proposed. These distributions offer phase estimates with uniformly high time-frequency resolution which can be used for defining time and frequency dependent phase synchrony within the same frequency band as well as across different frequency bands. Properties of the phase estimator and the corresponding phase synchrony measure are evaluated both analytically and through simulations showing the effectiveness of the new measures compared to existing ones. The proposed distribution is then extended to quantify the cross-frequency phase synchronization between two signals across different frequencies. In addition, a cross frequency-spectral lag distribution is introducedto quantify the amount of amplitude modulation between signals. Furthermore, the notion of bivariate synchrony is extended to multivariate synchronization to quantify the relationships within and across groups of signals. Measures of multiple correlation and complexity are used as well as a more direct multivariate synchronization measure, `Hyperspherical Phase Synchrony', is proposed. This new measure is based on computing pairwise phase differences to create a multidimensional phase difference vector and mapping this vector to a high dimensional space. Hyperspherical phase synchrony offers lower computational complexity and is more robust to noise compared to the existing measures.Finally, a subspace analysis framework is proposed for studying time-varying evolution of functional brain connectivity. The proposed approach identifies event intervals accounting for the underlying neurophysiological events and extracts key graphs for describing the particular intervals with minimal redundancy. Results from the application to EEG data indicate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in determining the event intervals and summarizing brain activity with a few number of representative graphs.
Theory, synthesis and implementation of current-mode CMOS piecewise-linear circuits using margin propagation
Gu, Ming
Achieving high energy-efficiency is a key requirement for many emerging smart sensors and portable computing systems. While digital signal processing (DSP) has been the de-facto technique for implementing ultra-low power systems, analog signal processing (ASP) provides an attractive and alternate approach that can not only achieve high energy efficiency but also high computational density. Conventional ASP techniques are based on a top-down design approach, where proven mathematical...
Show moreAchieving high energy-efficiency is a key requirement for many emerging smart sensors and portable computing systems. While digital signal processing (DSP) has been the de-facto technique for implementing ultra-low power systems, analog signal processing (ASP) provides an attractive and alternate approach that can not only achieve high energy efficiency but also high computational density. Conventional ASP techniques are based on a top-down design approach, where proven mathematical principles and related algorithms are mapped and emulated using computational primitives inherent in the device physics. An example being the translinear principle, which is the state-of-the-art ASP technique, that uses the exponential current-to-voltage characteristics for designing ultra-low-power analog processors. However, elegant formulations could result from a bottom-up approach where device and bias independent computational primitives (e.g. current and charge conservation principles) are used for designing "approximate" analog signal processors. The hypothesis of this proposal is that many signal processing algorithms exhibit an inherent calibration ability due to which their performance remains unaffected by the use of "approximate" analog computing techniques. In this research, we investigate the theory, synthesis and implementation of high performance analog processors using a novel piecewise-linear (PWL) approximation algorithm called margin propagation (MP). MP principle utilizes only basic conservation laws of physical quantities (current, charge, mass, energy) for computing and therefore is scalable across devices (silicon, MEMS, microfluidics). However, there are additional advantages of MP-based processors when implemented using CMOS current-mode circuits, which includes: 1) the operation of the MP processor requires only addition, subtraction and threshold operations and hence is independent of transistor biasing (weak, moderate and strong inversion) and robust to variations in environmental conditions (e.g. temperature); and 2) improved dynamic range and faster convergence as compared to the translinear implementations. We verify our hypothesis using two analog signal processing applications: (a) design of high-performance analog low-density parity check (LDPC) decoders for applications in sensor networks; and (b) design of ultra-low-power analog support vector machines (SVM) for smart sensors. Our results demonstrate that an algorithmic framework for designing margin propagation (MP) based LDPC decoders can be used to trade-off its BER performance with its energy efficiency, making the design attractive for applications with adaptive energy-BER constraints. We have verified this trade-off using an analog current-mode implementation of an MP-based (32,8) LDPC decoder. Measured results from prototypes fabricated in a 0.5 μm CMOS process show that the BER performance of the MP-based decoder outperforms a benchmark state-of-the-art min-sum decoder at SNR levels greater than 3.5 dB and can achieve energy efficiencies greater than 100pJ/bit at a throughput of 12.8 Mbps. In the second part of this study, MP principle is used for designing an energy-scalable support vector machine (SVM) whose power and speed requirements can be configured dynamically without any degradation in performance. We have verified the energy-scaling property using a current-mode implementation of an SVM operating with 8 dimensional feature vectors and 18 support vectors. The prototype fabricated in a 0.5μm CMOS process has integrated an array of floating gate transistors that serve as storage for up to 2052 SVM parameters. The SVM prototype also integrates novel circuits that have been designed for interfacing with an external digital processor. This includes a novel current-input current-output logarithmic amplifier circuit that can achieve a dynamic range of 120dB while consuming nanowatts of power. Another novel circuit includes a varactor based temperature compensated floating-gate memory that demonstrates a superior programming range than other temperature compensated floating-gate memories.
Reducing the number of ultrasound array elements with the matrix pencil method
Sales, Kirk L.
Phased arrays are diversely applied with some specific areas including biomedical imaging and therapy, non-destructive testing, radar and sonar. In this thesis, the matrix pencil method is employed to reduce the number of elements in a linear ultrasound phased array. The non-iterative, linear method begins with a specified pressure beam pattern, reduces the dimensionality of the problem, then calculates the element locations and apodization of a reduced array. Computer simulations demonstrate...
Show morePhased arrays are diversely applied with some specific areas including biomedical imaging and therapy, non-destructive testing, radar and sonar. In this thesis, the matrix pencil method is employed to reduce the number of elements in a linear ultrasound phased array. The non-iterative, linear method begins with a specified pressure beam pattern, reduces the dimensionality of the problem, then calculates the element locations and apodization of a reduced array. Computer simulations demonstrate a close comparison between the initial array beam pattern and the reduced array beam pattern for four different linear arrays. The number of elements in a broadside-steered linear array is shown to decrease by approximately 50% with the reduced array beam pattern closely approximating the initial array beam pattern in the far-field. While the method returns a slightly tapered spacing between elements, for the arrays considered, replacing the tapered spacing with a suitably-selected uniform spacing provides very little change in the main beam and low-angle side lobes.
Biometric template security
Nagar, Abhishek
"This dissertation provides a thorough analysis of the vulnerabilities of a biometric recognition system with emphasis on the vulnerabilities related to the information stored in biometric systems in the form of biometric templates."--From abstract.
Exploiting node mobility for energy optimization in wireless sensor networks
El-Moukaddem, Fatme Mohammad
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become increasingly available for data-intensive applications such as micro-climate monitoring, precision agriculture, and audio/video surveillance. A key challenge faced by data-intensive WSNs is to transmit the sheer amount of data generated within an application's lifetime to the base station despite the fact that sensor nodes have limited power supplies such as batteries or small solar panels. The availability of numerous low-cost robotic units (e.g....
Show moreWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become increasingly available for data-intensive applications such as micro-climate monitoring, precision agriculture, and audio/video surveillance. A key challenge faced by data-intensive WSNs is to transmit the sheer amount of data generated within an application's lifetime to the base station despite the fact that sensor nodes have limited power supplies such as batteries or small solar panels. The availability of numerous low-cost robotic units (e.g. Robomote and Khepera) has made it possible to construct sensor networks consisting of mobile sensor nodes. It has been shown that the controlled mobility offered by mobile sensors can be exploited to improve the energy efficiency of a network.In this thesis, we propose schemes that use mobile sensor nodes to reduce the energy consumption of data-intensive WSNs. Our approaches differ from previous work in two main aspects. First, our approaches do not require complex motion planning of mobile nodes, and hence can be implemented on a number of low-cost mobile sensor platforms. Second, we integrate the energy consumption due to both mobility and wireless communications into a holistic optimization framework.We consider three problems arising from the limited energy in the sensor nodes. In the first problem, the network consists of mostly static nodes and contains only a few mobile nodes. In the second and third problems, we assume essentially that all nodes in the WSN are mobile. We first study a new problem called max-data mobile relay configuration (MMRC) that finds the positions of a set of mobile sensors, referred to as relays, that maximize the total amount of data gathered by the network during its lifetime. We show that the MMRC problem is surprisingly complex even for a trivial network topology due to the joint consideration of the energy consumption of both wireless communication and mechanical locomotion. We present optimal MMRC algorithms and practical distributed implementations for several important network topologies and applications. Second, we consider the problem of minimizing the total energy consumption of a network. We design an iterative algorithm that improves a given configuration by relocating nodes to new positions. We show that this algorithm converges to the optimal configuration for the given transmission routes. Moreover, we propose an efficient distributed implementation that does not require explicit synchronization. Finally, we consider the problem of maximizing the lifetime of the network. We propose an approach that exploits the mobility of the nodes to balance the energy consumption throughout the network. We develop efficient algorithms for single and multiple round approaches. For all three problems, we evaluate the efficiency of our algorithms through simulations. Our simulation results based on realistic energy models obtained from existing mobile and static sensor platforms show that our approaches significantly improve the network's performance and outperform existing approaches.
Robust signal processing methods for miniature acoustic sensing, separation, and recognition
Fazel, Amin
One of several emerging areas where micro-scale integration promises significant breakthroughs is in the field of acoustic sensing. However, separation, localization, and recognition of acoustic sources using micro-scale microphone arrays poses a significant challenge due to fundamental limitations imposed by the physics of sound propagation. The smaller the distance between the recording elements, the more difficult it is to measure localization and separation cues and hence it is more...
Show moreOne of several emerging areas where micro-scale integration promises significant breakthroughs is in the field of acoustic sensing. However, separation, localization, and recognition of acoustic sources using micro-scale microphone arrays poses a significant challenge due to fundamental limitations imposed by the physics of sound propagation. The smaller the distance between the recording elements, the more difficult it is to measure localization and separation cues and hence it is more difficult to recognize the acoustic sources of interest. The objective of this research is to investigate signal processing and machine learning techniques that can be used for noise-robust acoustic target recognition using miniature microphone arrays.The first part of this research focuses on designing "smart" analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) algorithms that can enhance acoustic cues in sub-wavelength microphone arrays. Many source separation algorithms fail to deliver robust performance when applied to signals recorded using high-density sensor arrays where the distance between sensor elements is much less than the wavelength of the signals. This can be attributed to limited dynamic range (determined by analog-to-digital conversion) of the sensor which is insufficientto overcome the artifacts due to large cross-channel redundancy, non-homogeneous mixing and high-dimensionality of the signal space. We propose a novel framework that overcomes these limitations by integrating statistical learning directly with the signal measurement (analog-to-digital) process which enables high fidelity separation of linear instantaneous mixture. At the core of the proposed ADC approach is a min-max optimization of a regularized objective function that yields a sequence of quantized parameters which asymptotically tracks the statistics of the input signal. Experiments with synthetic and real recordings demonstrate consistent performance improvements when the proposed approach is used as the analog-to-digital front-end to conventional source separation algorithms.The second part of this research focuses on investigating a novel speech feature extraction algorithm that can recognize auditory targets (keywords and speakers) using noisy recordings. The features known as Sparse Auditory Reproducing Kernel (SPARK) coefficients are extracted under the hypothesis that the noise-robust information in speech signal is embedded in a subspace spanned by sparse, regularized, over-complete, non-linear, and phase-shifted gammatone basis functions. The feature extraction algorithm involves computing kernel functions between the speech data and pre-computed set of phased-shifted gammatone functions, followed by a simple pooling technique ("MAX" operation). In this work, we present experimental results for a hidden Markov model (HMM) based speech recognition system whose performance has been evaluated on a standard AURORA 2 dataset. The results demonstrate that the SPARK features deliver significant and consistent improvements in recognition accuracy over the standard ETSI STQ WI007 DSR benchmark features. We have also verified the noise-robustness of the SPARK features for the task of speaker verification. Experimental results based on the NIST SRE 2003 dataset show significant improvements when compared to a standard Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) based benchmark.
MEASURING AND MODELING THE EFFECTS OF SEA LEVEL RISE ON NEAR-COASTAL RIVERINE REGIONS : A GEOSPATIAL COMPARISON OF THE SHATT AL-ARAB RIVER IN SOUTHERN IRAQ WITH THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA IN SOUTHERN LOUISIANA, USA.
Kadhim, Ameen Awad
There is a growing debate among scientists on how sea level rise (SLR) will impact coastal environments, particularly in countries where economic activities are sustained along these coasts. An important factor in this debate is how best to characterize coastal environmental impacts over time. This study investigates the measurement and modeling of SLR and effects on near-coastal riverine regions. The study uses a variety of data sources, including satellite imagery from 1975 to 2017, digital...
Show moreThere is a growing debate among scientists on how sea level rise (SLR) will impact coastal environments, particularly in countries where economic activities are sustained along these coasts. An important factor in this debate is how best to characterize coastal environmental impacts over time. This study investigates the measurement and modeling of SLR and effects on near-coastal riverine regions. The study uses a variety of data sources, including satellite imagery from 1975 to 2017, digital elevation data and previous studies. This research is focusing on two of these important regions: southern Iraq along the Shatt Al-Arab River (SAR) and the southern United States in Louisiana along the Mississippi River Delta (MRD). These sites are important for both their extensive low-lying land and for their significant coastal economic activities. The dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter one introduces the topic. Chapter two compares and contrasts bothregions and evaluates escalating SLR risk. Chapter three develops a coupled human and natural system (CHANS) perspective for SARR to reveal multiple sources of environmental degradation in this region. Alfa century ago SARR was an important and productive region in Iraq that produced fruits like dates, crops, vegetables, and fish. By 1975 the environment of this region began to deteriorate, and since then, it is well-documented that SARR has suffered under human and natural problems. In this chapter, I use the CHANS perspective to identify the problems, and which ones (human or natural systems) are especially responsible for environmental degradation in SARR. I use several measures of ecological, economic, and social systems to outline the problems identified through the CHANS framework. SARR has experienced extreme weather changes from 1975 to 2017 resulting in lower precipitation (-17mm) and humidity (-5.6%), higher temperatures (1.6 C), and sea level rise, which are affecting the salinity of groundwater and Shatt Al Arab river water. At the same time, human systems in SARR experienced many problems including eight years of war between Iraq and Iran, the first Gulf War, UN Security Council imposed sanctions against Iraq, and the second Gulf War. I modeled and analyzed the regions land cover between 1975 and 2017 to understand how the environment has been affected, and found that climate change is responsible for what happened in this region based on other factors. Chapter four constructs and applies an error propagation model to elevation data in the Mississippi River Delta region (MRDR). This modeling both reduces and accounts for the effects of digital elevation model (DEM) error on a bathtub inundation model used to predict the SLR risk in the region. Digital elevation data is essential to estimate coastal vulnerability to flooding due to sea level rise. Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 1 Arc-Second Global is considered the best free global digital elevation data available. However, inundation estimates from SRTM are subject to uncertainty due to inaccuracies in the elevation data. Small systematic errors in low, flat areas can generate large errors in inundation models, and SRTM is subject to positive bias in the presence of vegetation canopy, such as along channels and within marshes. In this study, I conduct an error assessment and develop statistical error modeling for SRTM to improve the quality of elevation data in these at-risk regions. Chapter five applies MRDR-based model from chapter four to enhance the SRTM 1 Arc-Second Global DEM data in SARR. As such, it is the first study to account for data uncertainty in the evaluation of SLR risk in this sensitive region. This study transfers an error propagation model from MRDR to the Shatt al-Arab river region to understand the impact of DEM error on an inundation model in this sensitive region. The error propagation model involves three stages. First, a multiple regression model, parameterized from MRDR, is used to generate an expected DEM error surface for SARR. This surface is subtracted from the SRTM DEM for SARR to adjust it. Second, residuals from this model are simulated for SARR: these are mean-zero and spatially autocorrelated with a Gaussian covariance model matching that observed in MRDR by convolution filtering of random noise. More than 50 realizations of error were simulated to make sure a stable result was realized. These realizations were subtracted from the adjusted SRTM to produce DEM realizations capturing potential variation. Third, the DEM realizations are each used in bathtub modeling to estimate flooding area in the region with 1 m of sea level rise. The distribution of flooding estimates shows the impact of DEM error on uncertainty in inundation likelihood, and on the magnitude of total flooding. Using the adjusted DEM realizations 47 ± 2 percent of the region is predicted to flood, while using the raw SRTM DEM only 28% of the region is predicted to flood.
Smartphone-Based Sensing Systems for Data-Intensive Applications
Moazzami, Mohammad-Mahdi
Supported by advanced sensing capabilities, increasing computational resources and the advances in Artificial Intelligence, smartphones have become our virtual companions in our daily life. An average modern smartphone is capable of handling a wide range of tasks including navigation, advanced image processing, speech processing, cross app data processing and etc. The key facet that is common in all of these applications is the data intensive computation. In this dissertation we have taken...
Show moreSupported by advanced sensing capabilities, increasing computational resources and the advances in Artificial Intelligence, smartphones have become our virtual companions in our daily life. An average modern smartphone is capable of handling a wide range of tasks including navigation, advanced image processing, speech processing, cross app data processing and etc. The key facet that is common in all of these applications is the data intensive computation. In this dissertation we have taken steps towards the realization of the vision that makes the smartphone truly a platform for data intensive computations by proposing frameworks, application and algorithmic solutions. We followed a data-driven approach to the system design. To this end, several challenges must be addressed before smartphones can be used as a system platform for data-intensive applications. The major challenge addressed in this dissertation include high power consumption, high computation cost in advance machine learning algorithms, lack of real-time functionalities, lack of embedded programming support, heterogeneity in the apps, communication interfaces and programming abstractions and lack of customized data processing libraries. The contribution of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. We presented the design, implementation and evaluation of the ORBIT framework, which represents the first system that combines the design requirements of a machine learning system and sensing system together at the same time. We ported for the first time off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms for real-time sensor data processing to smartphone devices. In this process we considered the power and memory limitation of smartphone, and for each algorithm we provided two versions: the light and the heavy version. This is a leap forward from previous approaches, which relied on custom-designed sensing and computing platforms. We highlighted how machine learning on smartphones comes with severe costs that need to be mitigated in order to make smartphone capable of real-time data-intensive processing. Some of the costs can be managed with an adapting re-design of the off-the-shelf processing pipeline with additional real-time hyper-parameter control parameters to control the precision and computation cost of the pipeline respect to available resource smartphone in terms of battery duration. We showed that some of the limitations imposed by a mobile sensing application can be overcome by having a multi-tier framework allowing us to split the computation pipeline between the smartphone and two other tiers namely extension-board and cloud, by identifying the bottlenecks in the computation graph. We showed that computation blocks can be can be adopted at execution time leading to further improvement in the resource consumption while maintaining the algorithm accuracy and yet shortening the computation time. We reported on our experience deploying ORBIT at scale with a few case studies as well as multiple deployments on active volcanos in Ecuador and Chile. We extended the scope of our work from platforms to application and presented SPOT. SPOT aims to address some of the challenges discovered in mobile-based smart-home systems. These challenges prevent us from achieving the promises of smart-homes due to heterogeneity in different aspects of smart devices and the underlining systems. This owes to lack of dominating standards in smart-home technologies, leading to the fragmented digital homes rather than truly smart homes. We face the following major heterogeneities in building smart-homes:: (i) Diverse appliance control apps (ii) Communication interface, (iii) Programming abstraction. SPOT is an enabling technology for smart-homes system that allows the integration of hetrogenious smart-device seemless by proposing a novel dynamic draver loading schema. SPOT introduces two driver models namely XML-based and library-based allowing the integration and manipulation of smart devices easy for both programmers and users. SPOT makes the heterogeneous characteristics of smart appliances transparent, and by that minimizes the burden of home automation application developers and the efforts of users who would otherwise have to deal with appliance-specific apps and control interfaces. SPOT is evaluated through several benchmarks and three case studies: cross-device programming, central usage analytics and residential energy management via demand response commands. Our evaluation demonstrates the generality of SPOT’s design and its driver model. After discussing two aspects of this dissertation namely the framework and the application, we finally presented the algorithmic aspect of the dissertation by introducing two systems in smartphone-based deep learning area: Deep-Crowd-Label and Deep-Partition. Deep neural models are both computationally and memory intensive, making them difficult to deploy on mobile applications with limited hardware resources. On the other hand, they are the most advanced machine learning algorithms suitable for real-time sensing applications used in the wild. Deep- Partition is an optimization based partitioning meta-algorithm featuring a tiered architecture for smartphone and the back-end cloud, which helps to deploy and execute deep neural models more efficiently. Deep-Partition provides a profile-based model partitioning allowing it to intelligently execute the Deep Learning algorithms among the tiers to minimize the smartphone power consumption by minimizing the deep models feed-forward latency. Extensive microbenchmark evaluation and three case studies on representative deep neural models validate the performance gain by Deep-Partition. In addition, we presented Deep-Crowd-Label, a novel algorithm designed for distributed collaborative smartphone systems for crowd-sourcing applications. Deep-Crowd-Label is prototyped for semantically labeling user’s location. Deep-Crowd-Label is a crowd-assisted algorithm that uses crowd-sourcing in both training and inference time. It builds deep convolutional neural models using crowd-sensed images to detect the context (label) of indoor locations. It features domain adaptation and model extension via transfer learning to efficiently build deep models for image labeling. By fully exploiting the pre-trained models and available datasets, Deep-Crowd- Label builds ensemble of models to increase the robustness and improve the accuracy of prediction. Moreover, Deep-Crowd-Label aggregates several individual predictions of images obtained from the same location to infer the contextual label of a location. The prototyped system and the preliminary experiments on 26 different in-door locations show the high accuracy of the model and demonstrates the generality and robustness of the underlying approach. The work presented in this dissertation covers three major facets of data-driven and compute-intensive smartphone-based systems, platforms, applications and algorithms; and helps to spurs a new area of research on smartphone sensing and opens up new directions in mobile computing research.
Graph-based methods for inferring neuronal connectivity from spike train ensembles
El-dawlatly, Seif El-din
Understanding the brain's inner workings requires studying the underlying complex networks that bind its basic computational elements, the neurons. Advances in extracellular neural recording techniques have enabled simultaneous recording of spike trains from multiple single neurons in awake, behaving subjects. Yet, devising methods to infer connectivity among these neurons has been significantly lacking. We introduce a connectivity inference framework based on graphical models. We first infer...
Show moreUnderstanding the brain's inner workings requires studying the underlying complex networks that bind its basic computational elements, the neurons. Advances in extracellular neural recording techniques have enabled simultaneous recording of spike trains from multiple single neurons in awake, behaving subjects. Yet, devising methods to infer connectivity among these neurons has been significantly lacking. We introduce a connectivity inference framework based on graphical models. We first infer the functional connectivity between neurons by searching for clusters of statistically dependent spike trains. We then infer the effective connectivity between neurons within each cluster by building Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) model fit to the spike train data. Using probabilistic models of neuronal firing, we demonstrate the utility of this framework to infer neuronal connectivity in moderate and large scale networks with a substantial gain in performance compared to classical methods. We further use this framework to examine the role of spike timing correlation in infragranular layer V of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) of the rat during unilateral whisker stimulation in vivo. Stable, whisker-specific networks provided more information about the stimulus than individual neurons' response. We finally demonstrate how this framework enables tracking and quantifying plastic changes in connectivity in biologically-plausible models of spike-timing-dependent-plasticity as well as changes in S1 response maps following sensory deprivation in the awake, behaving rat.
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APIs Tutorials
By David Walsh January 17, 2019
Amazing User Agent API with userstack
We do our best to design and code websites so that they look and perform the way they should regardless of device or browser, but the truth is we sometimes we need to code for specific device, browser, or crawler. Whether it's a quick hack or...
By David Walsh October 9, 2013
5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of
My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible. I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out. MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...
Change Mac App Icons
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I recently got a new MacBook Pro. Setting up a new machine is a pornographic euphoric experience: no app collisions, optimal performance, and a fresh canvas to work with. The first step is setting up your...
Using Font Awesome Icons without <i> Tags
If you've not used glyph icon libraries like Font Awesome before, you're really missing out. They're incredibly useful, flexible, and are easy to implement via markup. The normal method for using font awesome is by using an <i> element with an icon-specific CSS class: This...
By Chris Coyier August 13, 2013
Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos
David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...
By David Walsh June 4, 2013
Prism Line Number Plugin
The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is in the midst of a remodel (sorry for the spoiler) and we've been implementing features incrementally. One larger front-end change we'll be implementing is using the PrismJS for document code syntax highlighting. One requirement of MDN's syntax highlighter...
How to Create a Twitter Card
One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook. Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...
By David Walsh November 17, 2012
Xbox Live Gamer API
My sharpshooter status aside, I've always been surprised upset that Microsoft has never provided an API for the vast amount of information about users, the games they play, and statistics within the games. Namely, I'd like to publicly shame every n00b I've baptized with my...
Twitter META Tags
Facebook implemented Open Graph META tags to allow developers more customization of how their site's content is represented on the Facebook website when shared. Adding these META tags, which take all of five minutes, can have an incredible impact when it comes to marketing.
By David Walsh January 1, 2012
JavaScript CDN Fallbacks
CDNs are great for pulling shared resources from, especially JavaScript libraries. The advantage in the likelihood that a file is already cached before the user gets to our site is huge. The only problem with using a CDN is that it's out of control;...
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Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Tosh Yasutake Interview
Narrator: Tosh Yasutake
Interviewers: Alice Ito (primary), Tom Ikeda (secondary)
Densho ID: denshovh-ytosh-01-0021
<Begin Segment 21>
TI: And tell me about, we got into it a little bit, but the casualties of the medics. I mean, you mentioned you had to replace someone who was shell-shocked. Was it pretty common for the medics on the front lines to be injured or killed, and had to be replaced? Was that pretty --
TY: Yeah, when a fellow, when I got wounded, the fellow that replaced me got killed the second day. And the fellow that replaced him got seriously wounded. So, and I, now how many, actually the KIA, the killed in action medics weren't that many. Well, one is too many, actually. But I'd say at least a dozen of the group were killed in action. And George Sawada that I was telling about, he was one of the first ones. He was about, maybe a week or so after we're on the front lines.
TI: You mentioned he was shot by a sniper?
TY: Pardon?
TI: He was shot by a sniper?
TY: Sniper. Actually, he was such a valuable personnel that he was assigned to headquarters, also. And he -- when we're in thick of battle, when things are getting so bad that they needed volunteers to volunteer as litter bearers, and he volunteered to go. And on the way back, well, sniper got him. And after, I remember after he got back --
TI: Now, litter bearers, would they have arm bands --
TY: Yeah, at that time we still had arm bands on.
TI: -- designated as Red Cross?
TY: And the Red Cross on the helmet, and at that time we did. As I told you before, it was shortly thereafter we just took 'em all off. We took the arm bands off and helmets off, not that they were particularly picking on us, on medics, but we thought that, well we don't wanna take a chance. I mean, why take a chance and, such a good target that we decided would be best to, not to wear them, so we didn't. Yeah, well, I kept the medic roster and I think the record I have it must be about, not even a dozen, maybe ten or so medics were KIAs. But there were a lot of them wounded, though.
TI: But when your friend was killed, it must have been devastating to the other medics.
TY: Yeah.
TI: Because he was such a --
TY: Because, for one thing, he was one of the first casualties. And so it hit us all real hard. And not only that, I remember Dr., or Major Buckley, or was it Dr.? Captain Hogan, anyway, he lambasted the sergeant who was in charge of the litter bearer to even let George go as a litter bearer. He says, "You shouldn't have let him go even if he volunteered." I remember him bawling him out. But, that's the way things happen in wartime, I guess.
TI: 'Cause trained medical staff were, I mean it was, they were so valuable --
TY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
TI: -- the trained medical staff. That they were to be protected and...
TY: Yeah, he was very valuable man, but, well that's one thing I've -- my philosophy during the war time has changed because I became a fatalist because without being that I think that it would have been difficult to survive psychologically. I began to think that, well, when my time comes, it'll come no matter where you are. We might be just sitting eating lunch and some stray bullet will hit you or, or when your time comes, well, it will just come and it doesn't matter what you'll be doing. You might be in thick of battle and if you're lucky you just be okay. And so I just felt that -- so once I philosophized that, well I decided, then things keep, took, it was little easier to take. Because once when I got, we got assigned to, as a company aid man, Company I, well, every day during the battle you think, "Well, I wonder if today is the day." And I think everybody thinks that. But, in the beginning you worry about it, but then later on you decide that maybe the fate will take care of it and so why worry about it so much. Otherwise you end up in Section Eight, being a psycho case or something so... I think a lot of people, the fellows often, their thinking changed a lot during the wartime like that. And even now I feel that in a way. I feel that one of these days my time comes it will come whether I'm walking in the street or driving a car or, it's just so...
TI: Well, do men turn towards religion or other things at times like this to help them try to regain some sense of control over --
TY: Well, I'm not really a particularly religious individual. I went to Japanese, Seattle Japanese Methodist Church for years until December 7th. And I was baptized a Christian, but of course when I was baptized I was only about fourteen years old and I was -- since the war, after I came back, I really didn't go back to church. But I did become a Unitarian, which is a lot more liberal-thinking. And so, and, but I, I envy people who are very religious because they have something to fall back on when things get really tough. I mean, I think from a psychological standpoint, I think it's very good, but, but I'm not very religious, actually, and --
TI: You mentioned earlier, though, there was something and, and you called it a superstition --
TI: -- with, could you talk about that a little bit?
TY: Oh, well, what I mentioned was that I'm not a superstitious individual, either, really, but at times, stressful time like during the war, I remember I did smoke, not smoke a lot, just smoked occasionally, smoked cigarettes, and we're out in the line just smoking. All of us really took care not to light three individuals with one match, three cigarettes with one match, because that was considered bad luck. And I remember when they lit two, well, we always blew that one out and lit another one and, with another match and I don't think I -- if there was a ladder I would have walked under that, either. [Laughs] Even if I didn't, wasn't superstitious, I thought, well, just in case, why take a chance? Why tip the scale if you don't have to? And I guess lot of people felt that way. Lot of fellows felt that thing. And I say, "Well, are you superstitious?" "No, I'm not superstitious." Yeah, right. [Laughs]
<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.
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Vibhore Sharma, CTO of Info Edge moves on
Sharma was Chief Technology Officer at Info Edge for 2 years.
Volkswagen to football, cloud’s deeply impacting everything
Volkswagen has 122 factories around the world, but the tech used in them are often disconnected from each other. So it is working with AWS to lift all the factories into the cloud with one common architecture – the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud.
From retail to robotics, Jeff Bezos is betting big on technology
Amazon Inc is getting ready to disrupt several sectors outside of retail, as it becomes more nuanced and moves up the value chain to reach the common man. Technology is at the core of whatever Amazon does, from algorithms that forecast demand, and robots that sort and pack items in warehouses to drones that will soon drop packages off at homes.
Prime Leverage: How Amazon wields power in the technology world
Amazon's cloud computing arm — called Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short-has given an edge to its own services by making them more convenient to use, burying rival offerings and bundling discounts to make its products less expensive.
New York Times/
AWS drives cos to use data, says Amazon CTO
Data-driven analytics and data-driven decision-making are “around the corner”, Werner Vogles, vice president and chief technology officer at Amazon told ET on the sidelines of Amazon Web Services’ annual developer conference
Microsoft knockout: Why AWS CEO must not lose his cool
As the CEO of a $36 billion enterprise that leads the global infrastructure Cloud market with over 175 services -- more than any other Cloud vendor -- Andy Jassy is deeply hurt at the Microsoft's $10 billion Pentagon Cloud win and is leaving no stone unturned to criticise the company, despite knowing the fact that a "significant political interference" killed the chances of Amazon Web Services (AWS) which was a favourite to seal the deal.
IANS/
AWS ready to help Indian govt with safeguarding sensitive data
As Amazon Web Services (AWS) doubles down on reaching out to the Indian government with its Public Sector Cloud offerings, the key is to bring the message home that AWS is the only player which can isolate sensitive data from the routine open data with even a single "instance" (a virtual server in the AWS Cloud) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and keep it safe within the boundaries of the country.
Amazon's cloud arm AWS unveils plethora of new services
Amazon EKS and Fargate make it straightforward to run Kubernetes-based applications on AWS by removing the need to provision and manage infrastructure for pods.
AWS extends Alexa voice controls to low-powered devices
To the delight of third-party developers, Amazon's Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) has decided to bring Alexa voice control capabilities to low-powered devices.
digital-security
OnePlus probes breach; payment data secure
“OnePlus has notified impacted users that we have discovered some of their order information was accessed by an unauthorised party. We took immediate steps to stop the intruder and reinforce security. Before making this public, we informed our impacted users by email,” the company said.
Are data localisation norms in sync with India's Cloud vision?
Amidst the growing demand for data localisation norms around the world, India has also jumped on the bandwagon for the same. But, according to a new report, the storage of all the country's critical data within India does come with a host of big risks.
Data Centre business picks up pace in India
According to various industry estimates, the data centre outsourcing market in India, currently pegged at close to $2 billion, is projected to grow at a CAGR of 25% to reach $5 billion by financial year 2023-24.
Amazon's consumer business fully sheds Oracle, moves on AWS
In what could give the ongoing bitter war between Cloud majors Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS) a rest, Amazon has announced it has completely shed legacy Oracle databases and its entire consumer business is now running on its own AWS databases.
VMware sees Cloud adoption growing across sectors in India
Enterprise software major VMware is seeing consistent demand from all sectors when it comes to Cloud adoption in India, with more and more enterprises now aiming to be agile and deliver optimal environment for all applications, a top company executive has said.
Oracle Gen 2 data centre opens in Mumbai, 2nd coming next year
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Tech giants aim to skill Indian govt officials in AI, Cloud
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Riding on Cloud, India set to help farmers reap gold: AWS
India which currently hosts more than 450 start-ups in the agri-tech sector and every ninth start-up in the world in this field is originating from its soil, the nation has a humongous task at hand - educating farmers in Machine Learning (ML)-powered Cloud technologies.
VMware expands hybrid Cloud operations
As IT organisations increasingly shift to hybrid Cloud to deliver optimal environment for all their applications, enterprise software major VMware has expanded its Cloud offerings that aim to help customers meet the unique needs of traditional and modern applications.
To cloud or not to cloud? There's no simple answer
While public clouds are still growing strongly, many who went to the cloud are said to be reconsidering at least some part of their choices.
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40mUS to start FY21 H-1B application process in March 2020
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1sClearview AI: The company that might end privacy as we know it
1hThe transformation role of APIs in healthcare
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Tag: Black Student Union at WMU
Black Student Union: Passion for Serving Students Runs Deep
Today we highlight the Black Student Union at Western Michigan University. At the 11th Annual Champs Celebration, presented by Kalsec, the Black Student Union was honored with a 2018 Champ Award which was sponsored by Old National Bank. CIS Board Member Namita Sharma presented the award.
Since 1968, the Black Student Union has been
CIS Board Member Namita Sharma addressing the crowd at Champs
empowering and uniting minority students on the campus of Western Michigan University. Because they value community service, they began partnering with CIS three years ago, initiating a female empowerment group, Young Women With A Purpose, at Kalamazoo Central High School. CIS Site Coordinator Deborah Yarbrough says, “Their passion for serving our students runs deep. By creating a safe place, our students can open up; they feel more connected to themselves and others in the group, and, in turn, feel more connected with school.”
In a few short years, the Black Student Union has grown their volunteer force from one to 12, expanded their programming to meet needs, and reached into Linden Grove Middle School. Linden Grove’s CIS Site Coordinator Tamiko Garrett recounts Ms. Carney, who teaches strategic math, saying, “My student has gone from hating math and being disruptive in class to looking forward to math because he knows that on Tuesdays, Autumn is going to be there to help him.”
Kalamazoo Central’s Principal Valerie Boggan says, “We talk often about giving back and the students from the Black Student Union are examples of how to give back. KC students look forward to the exchange and appreciate having relationships with students who are able to relate to their life and school experience. The passion they bring to create change and to generate enthusiasm around reading, writing and verbal expressions is phenomenal! I look forward to the continued partnership.”
Parents, too, are noticing positive changes in attendance, behavior, or academics and will stop by CIS to make sure their child continues working with these Western students. The high school students themselves have been recruiting other students they think could benefit from this Champ’s support.
Part of the Black Student Union’s success is that their passion is paired with the mindset that, in order to empower young people to succeed, we must work together. So, they’ve joined forces not just with CIS, but also some of our other partners coming into the Kalamazoo Public Schools, like WMU’s School of Social Work and Mt. Zion Baptist Church.
Mt. Zion’s director of youth ministries Reverend Morris “Mo” Brooks, comes out to Central each week to work with the KC Men of Change, and sees them in action. He says, “What the Black Student Union is doing is great! It’s encouraging to see them reaching out to youth. It takes a lot of energy to go to college and, in many cases, also work. This awesome group of young people is doing just that—going to school, working, and then choosing to spend time with youth. And they’re doing a phenomenal job with the students!”
We couldn’t agree more.
Black Student Union, we thank you for helping kids stay in school and achieve in life.
Posted in Champs, PartnershipsTagged Black Student Union at WMU, Champ Award, CIS, Communities In School of Kalamazoo, Deborah Yarbrough, Kalamazoo Central High School, Kalsec, Linden Grove Middle School, Mt. Zion Baptist Church, Namita Sharma, Old National Bank, Reverend Morris "Mo" Brooks, Tamiko Garrett, Valerie Boggan, Western Michigan University, WMU School of Social Work
Eight Shining Stars. One Unforgettable Event.
Wednesday, May 9th will mark the eleventh year of Champs, a celebration in which Communities In Schools of Kalamazoo (CIS) recognizes those who are making a difference in kids’ lives. CIS is thrilled that Kalsec is the presenting sponsor for this year’s event.
So, who will be honored this year? Drum roll, please! This year’s Champs are:
Kalamazoo College Civic Engagement Scholars, CIS Higher Education Partner
Diane Fuller, CIS Volunteer from Miller-Davis Company
Nkenge Bergen, Director of Student Services for Kalamazoo Public Schools
Woods Lake Math Squad, CIS Volunteers
Black Student Union at WMU, CIS Higher Education Partner
Chris Werme, CIS Volunteer
Sally Stevens will also be honored with the Gulnar Husain Volunteer Award, a new recognition established by Gulnar’s family to honor her long-time contributions to Communities In Schools and work as a CIS Site Coordinator at Arcadia Elementary School. For more than 38 years, Gulnar dedicated herself to being an effective volunteer for many causes throughout the Kalamazoo community, as well as cultivating and supporting volunteers to benefit others, particularly children. This award recognizes a CIS volunteer who emulates Gulnar’s belief that there is no greater calling than serving children.
The CIS Board will also be honoring Dr. Marilyn Schlack with the Diether Haenicke Promise of Excellence Award. Established in 2010, this award is named for Western Michigan University President Emeritus Diether Haenicke. Dr. Marilyn Schlack has served as the president of Kalamazoo Valley Community College for more than three decades, becoming Michigan’s first female community college president in 1982. With her leadership and vision, KVCC has grown to four campuses and more than 10,000 students, each campus responding to unique student, educational, and community needs. Despite overseeing an expansive, increasingly complex institution, Dr. Schack has maintained a commitment to understanding the needs and challenges of individual students whose circumstances are filled with obstacles to college completion.
We thank all of our event sponsors for sharing our vision and igniting in kids the hope and belief that they can succeed in school, graduate, and be prepared for life. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Kalsec, Fifth Third Bank, Maestro, PNC, Anonymous, BASIC, Borgess, Chase, Humphrey, Miller-Davis Company, Old National Bank, TowerPinkster, Warner Norcross + Judd, Zoetis, 1st Source Bank, Bronson Healthcare, BDO USA, LLP, First National Bank of Michigan, Greenleaf Trust, Lake Michigan Credit Union, Western Michigan University, and CSM Group.
Stay tuned to Ask Me About My 12,000+ Kids. Over the coming weeks we will spotlight each of these award recipients. You’ll learn what they are doing to make a difference in kids’ lives.
Posted in Champs, EventsTagged 1st Source Bank, Anonymous, BASIC, BDO USA, Black Student Union at WMU, Borgess, Bronson Healthcare, Champs, Chase, Chris Werme, CSM Group, Diane Fuller, Diether Haenicke Promise of Excellence Award, Dr. Marilyn Schlack, Fifth Third Bank, First National Bank of Michigan, Greenleaf Trust, Gulnar Husain Volunteer Award, Humphrey, Kalamazoo College Civic Engagement Scholars, Kalsec, Lake Michigan Credit Union, LLP, Maestro, Miller-Davis Company, Nkenge Bergen, Old National Bank, PNC, Sally Stevens, TowerPinkster, Warner Norcross & Judd, Western Michigan University, Woods Lake Math Squad, Zoetis
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Tag Archives: Bird Don’t Sing
There’s an unwritten rule that if you’re going to release any music, you do it in the first eleven months of the year. That way it’s out there in time to be included in any end of year lists, and you don’t end up competing for anyone’s attention with X-factor contestants or Greatest Hits compilations. But obviously nobody told the musicians of Brighton – we’ve got sixteen different tracks for you in this post.
First up is the new release from David Harks, who’s been posting up other tracks from his Lomo EP over the past few months. The title track Odyssey is now out there, and the whole EP is available to buy on iTunes, out now on his own Jumjum Records imprint.
Next we have the first new music from Brighton Music Blog favourite Anneka for a while. End of It is built up from a number of vocal lines sung by her, with mournful harmonies and percussive exhalations. Apparently the track (which is available as a free download if you click through and follow the links) is a taster of more to come in early 2015.
Ital Tek has been busy working on his next album this year so hasn’t appeared too active to the outside world. Last Christmas he gave away a free download of one of his tracks and this year he’s doing the same, with new tune Crossed Wires:
Fickle Friends are also giving away a track for Christmas. If you head over to their bandcamp page you can grab their cover of Gorgon City’s Ready For Your Love
Sticking with tracks for Christmas, here’s Crayola Lectern‘s seasonal offering. (No More) Happy Endings is a little cheerier than last year’s SFXmas, and gives us some a hint of what we might expect when the band finish recording their second album:
Soccer96 have a new EP out on Wotnot records on 7″ and download, entitled Jupiter Masterdrive. The title track is a few minutes of wonky hip hop and is called Constellation. To hear the rest of the EP and buy it on either format head over to the band’s bandcamp page
A lot of people were quite excited about the recent news about Twin Peaks returning, and we can probably count electronica band Dark Train amongst that number. Their latest offering is a cover of Julee Cruse’s Falling which featured heavily in the original series.
We loved Cate Ferris‘ Disappear EP which came out earlier this year. Last week saw the release of the sister remix EP, suitably entitled Reappear:
Another new EP is the new release from Man Ray Sky (currently hosting their launch party at the Hope as I type). The EP name and lead track is the breezy Ether Song:
Kanzi‘s debut EP isn’t out until January sometime (I’ve read several different dates on different bits of the internet), but you can check out lead track Two Hearts now:
Troves debut double a-side single came out back in September on Nude Records. Keeping interest up for the release is a new video for the beautiful track Afterthought:
Anushka have released another single from their Broken Circuit long player. Kisses is a different version from the one on the album, with the addition of of extra vocals from guest MC Trim. I’ve also also just seen in the PR email I got that I missed out on a live performance from the band last weekend. Sorry!
If you fancy some electro pop then get your ears around Astrid’s Tea Party‘s debut single. What’s in it for Me? is up as a free download for a limited period and will be followed up with an EP in early 2015.
Math-pop band Orchards new single Chemystery was released last thursday. It’s taken from their new EP which is due to drop in March next year:
Rooster Cole has uploaded a few tracks to Soundcloud and has promised more music and more live shows for 2015. Here’s one of those tracks, the quirky Bird Don’t Sing:
Finally we finish up a video from Battery Operated Orchestra. Flouro Sushi is taken from the band’s debut album Incomplete Until Broken, out now via Bandcamp.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "Astrids Tea Party", "Cate Ferris", (No More) Happy Endings, Afterthought, Anneka, Anushka, Battery Operated Orchestra, Bird Don't Sing, Chemystery, Constellation, Crayola Lectern, Crossed Wires, Dark Train, David Harks, End of It, Ether Song, Falling, Fickle Friends, Flouro Sushi, Ital Tek, Jupiter Masterdrive, Kanzi, Kisses, LOMO, Man Ray Sky, Odyssey, Orchards, Ready For Your Love, Reappear, Rooster Cole, Soccer96, Troves, Two Hearts, What's in it for Me? | Leave a reply
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@BSCswimdive
2019 SAA Championship
Panthers Sweep SAA Swimming & Diving Championship Crowns
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The Birmingham-Southern men's and women's swimming and diving teams defended their Southern Athletic Association Championship titles on Saturday night, capturing the conference crowns yet again.
With the win, the men's team secured its fourth-consecutive conference title, totaling 1,070 points while the women earned their second straight championship with 909 points.
On the fourth and final day, the Panthers won five championship finals to cap their impressive championship weekend.
Nico Medina (Hollywood, Fla./American Heritage HS) picked up BSC's first win of the day in the 1650-yard freestyle with a mark of 16:00.03, earning an NCAA B-cut and setting a new SAA and BSC record.
Patrick Dunne (Mobile, Ala./McGill-Toolen HS) found the top of the podium next after winning the men's 200-yard backstroke with a time of 1:47.93, setting a new SAA record and breaking his own program record. Dunne and Noah Young (Clinton, Miss./Clinton HS) both earned a B-cut in the event.
Sophomore Becca Erwin (Duluth, Ga./Duluth HS) also made it back atop the medal stand with a first-place finish in the 100-yard freestyle. She won the race with a time of 50.43, breaking her own conference and school records.
Birmingham-Southern ended the championships with wins in the men's and women's 400-yard freestyle relays. The men finished the relay with a time of 3:04.35 and the women set a new relay SAA and school record with a time of 3:29.66, good enough to beat the B-cut standard.
The annual SAA Swimming and Diving superlatives were also announced at the conclusion of the meet. Birmingham-Southern won four of the yearly honors:
Men's Swimmer of the Year: Nico Medina
Women's Swimmer of the Year: Becca Erwin
Men's Newcomer of the Year: Patrick Dunne
Men's Coach of the Year: Toby Wilcox
2018 SAA Swimming & Diving Champions
Women's 800-yard Freestyle Relay: Becca Erwin, Mary Beth Ronne, Rachel Sullivan, Savannah Barber – 7:36.96
Men's 800-yard Freestyle Relay: Patrick Dunne, Ryan Emili, Wil Barton, Nico Medina – 6:43.87
Men's 200-yard Freestyle Relay: Patrick Dunne, Luke Huffstutler, Ryan Emili, Noah Young – 1:24.16
Women's 500-yard Freestyle: Becca Erwin – 4:54.67
Men's 500-yard Freestyle: Nico Medina – 4:39.40
Men's 200-yard IM: Noah Young – 1:49.54
Men's 400-yard Medley Relay: Noah Young, Caleb Riggs, Will Retersdorf, Ryan Emili – 3:25.61
Men's 400-yard IM: Patrick Dunne – 3:56.76
Women's 100-yard Breaststroke: Becca Erwin – 1:02.27
Men's 100-yard Backstroke: Noah Young – 50.74
Women's 200-yard Medley Relay: Kasey Godwin, Becca Erwin, Chelsea Chamblee, Savannah Barber – 1:47.60
Men's 200-yard Medley Relay: Patrick Dunne, Caleb Riggs, Luke Huffstutler, Noah Young – 1:32.73
Men's 1650-yard Freestyle: Nico Medina – 16:00.03
Men's 200-yard Backstroke: Patrick Dunne – 1:47.93
Women's 100-yard Freestyle: Becca Erwin – 50.43
Women's 400-yard Freestyle Relay: Savannah Barber, Chelsea Chamblee, Mary Beth Ronne, Becca Erwin – 3:29.66
Men's 400-yard Freestyle Relay: Patrick Dunne, Ryan Emili, Will Retersdorf, Noah Young – 3:04.35
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India’s First Dictator — Indira Gandhi
June 25th, 1975 was the day that Indira Gandhi revealed that within her beats the heart of a ruthless dictator. On the 35th anniversary of that day, it is appropriate to remember that the Congress party brought authoritarian rule to India for the first time after independence. More accurately, Indira Gandhi brought dictatorship to the land. What matters today is that the descendants of Indira Gandhi are becoming increasingly powerful and could very well revert to dictatorial ways. Let’s ponder that for a bit.
I have nothing per se against dictators. In small or large measures, organizations and institutions have people at the top who make decisions and enforce their dictates either through force or through persuasion. There’s nothing in a flawed democratic setup that recommends it over the rule of an enlightened dictator. What I am against is the rule of ruthless selfish myopic unintelligent dictators.
Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorship is not the kind that recommends itself to me.
I was not thrilled by the dictatorship of the original Mrs Gandhi. I am even less thrilled by the dictatorship of the Italian Mrs Gandhi. For now, she’s just dictating to her lackeys such as Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil, and the party she heads. But if the Congress ever gets a majority in the parliament, we can expect a full-blown dictatorship for India.
Italy gave the world fascism. Mussolini was an Italian. Worth keeping in mind.
But we should pause here to remember that dictators and dictatorships are endogenous, not exogenous, to the population.
In an introduction to Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1576), Murray Rothbart writes that the fundamental insight was
. . . that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.
India needs enlightened leaders, whether dictators or democrats. But it has been getting stupid leaders — dictators and “democrats” — not because of some unfortunate accident but because the population at large is not “enlightened.”
For India to get decent leadership, Indians have to change. At a minimum, Indians have to stop being impressed by charlatans and crooks. Indians have to demonstrate that they can take the long view, that they are not willing to vote criminals into office.
Indians have granted “their obedience by their own consent” to dictators for a long while. The most recent in living memory is Mrs Indira Gandhi. Before that it was to their British overlords. Before that to the Islamic invaders. It goes into remote antiquity perhaps.
On the 35th anniversary of Mrs Gandhi’s revelation of her true nature as a dictator, it is absolutely important that we remind ourselves that it is high time Indians gave up voluntary servitude.
[See also: “THE POLITICS OF OBEDIENCE: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.”.]
Author Atanu DeyPosted on June 25, 2010 Categories Random Draws
34 thoughts on “India’s First Dictator — Indira Gandhi”
veer says:
my friend..its time for a celibate visionary. MODIJI!!!
Pingback: Tweets that mention Atanu Dey on India's Development » Blog Archive » India’s First Dictator — Indira Gandhi -- Topsy.com
Atanu,
I find your subtle endorsement of”good dictatorship” at odds with your advocacy of free speech.i think what you mean (in spirit)of good intelligent dictatorship is leadership as so well exemplified by Mr.Lee Kuan.
Politicians across the spectrum need to learn one simple dictum. Democracy is not about choosing people who will give people what they want, It is about doing what is right albeit bitter and painful in the short term
Atanu Dey says:
Ravi,
There’s nothing subtle about my endorsement of ‘good dictatorship’. I would any day take good dictatorship over incompetent ‘democracy’. If given a choice between starving in a slum under incompetent ‘democrats’ and living a decent life under an intelligent dictator, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat. I realize that too many Indians have a romantic love affair with ‘democracy’ but going by what the so-called ‘democrats’ have achieved so far — hundreds of millions of Indians living in degrading poverty — I am sure that I would choose an intelligent dictator over an incompetent idiot. Your mileage my vary, as the disclaimer goes.
Ludwig says:
> Italy gave the world fascism. Mussolini was an Italian.
> Worth keeping in mind.
Wow. You’re really losing it now, aren’t you?
‘Ludwig’,
Losing it now is better than having lost it long ago, isn’t it? I bet you are a great admirer of Mr Benito Mussolini who lost it long ago.
To have a dynamic leadership we need enlightened junta….and to have enlightened junta we direly, need a good education sytem. But the incumbent party won’t let that happen…so that leaves us to ….?!
Vinod Sharma says:
Thank you for reminding us that we are also responsible for what has befallen us and that we need to give up “voluntary servitude” before any real change can be made.
“Enlightened leaders” are exactly what India needs, has not got. I agree with you up to that point. Dictators, no matter how ‘enlightened’ to begin with, rarely live up to the promise. Absolute power does what it has to, whether the dictatorship is of an individual, a Family or a an ideology, secular or religious. This is particularly true if a long view is taken.
TiredProf says:
Everyone should play a little game with themselves. Suppose you do not approve of MMS and her boss. You are told that you can effectively express your disapproval, but there is pain involved:
* Sacrifice dessert for a day, week, month, year
* Stop using imported shaving cream
* Never pay for juvenile media like DNA, ToIlet paper, etc. at the cost of not being able to ogle at the items on display
* Give up owning a car and use public transport for a day, week, …
* Spend one full day a month building community in your neighborhood
* Spend 3 hours a week teaching at least two disadvantaged kids
You will see how rapidly the ranks thin out.
rajkamal says:
atanu dey is a bengali. bengal gave us naxalism. kanu sanyal was a bengali. worth keeping in mind.
yayaver says:
@Rajkamal, stereotyping is the first step of going wrong.
@Author, The point here is not about dictatorship but the authority in taking decisions. I will agree with you that Indira Gandhi acted as dictator but will not say so for Sonia Gandhi. Congress is a party having internal politics is a nefarious web of patronage, sycophancy and shady deals. Sonia Gandhi is just riding on the system. Its our habit of kow towing that is keeping them in the power. And democracy doesn’t provide justice or best possible way, it gives majority choosen solution.
Christopher Hitchens summarises dictatorship governance as : The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong. The ability to run such a “system” is among the greatest pleasures of arbitrary authority;
@ludwig oh wait, here are better ones:
lk advani was born in sindh. sindh is the birthplace of partition. ma jinnah was a sindhi.worth keeping in mind.
atanu dey lives in maharashtra. maharashtra gave us dawood ibrahim. and bal thackeray. and zakir naik. all are maharashtrians. worth keeping in mind.
Kaffir says:
“There’s nothing subtle about my endorsement of ‘good dictatorship’. I would any day take good dictatorship over incompetent ‘democracy’.”
Atanu, and why are these two the only options? False dichotomy?
Why not make an effort at improving democracy and making it better?
Kaffir:
No, that does not imply that I only think that there are two options. It’s that if I had to choose between the two, I would choose competent dictators over incompetent ‘democrats’. Like if I was offered a choice between ice-cream and cookies, I choose cookies but that does not mean that there are no other treats possible in the world.
Regarding ‘improving democracy’: I believe democracy is all fine and good as a mechanism for governance. Where India fails is in meeting the conditions that allow democracy to function. I have written before
In the case of India, we have a cargo cult democracy. It looks like one with electronic voting machines and election speeches and manifestos, with pollsters and pundits, with election commissioners and voting stations. Only the deep backend is missing. There is no understanding of issues of substance among the people who vote. Put up a name which is recognizable, and they would vote for or against that name. Promise enough freebies (free electricity, for instance) and they will vote for you, never mind that it may bankrupt the state and that eventually it will impoverish the same voting public. For democracy to work, you need accountability — both among those who vote and those who are elected. In an area where the government is seen as a source for endless handouts by the people, and the leaders look upon their stint in the driving seat as an excellent opportunity to steal from the public, democracy is not likely to work. All the talk about the smart voter is so much hogwash that the mind boggles.
See a previous post May 2004 “Cargo Cult Democracy” for more.
Pingback: Voluntary Servitude « An introvert's introspections
dark lord says:
The one who believes in enlightened /competent dictators is either naive or a fool or both. No electorate in the world would understand free trade being beneficial to countries over countries which do not nor do they understand budget deficits.
rajkamal, this is not a site befitting your intellectual abilities. Please watch bollywood movies and spend your leisure time. If I start writing a list of great bengalis, you will never make a stupid statement like that. Iam not a bengali and dont mind being called one…just read the literature son..grow up..
as Francois Gautier said eloquently, India should get rid of Nehru family from Delhi, otherwise there is no future for that land. I dont think India will be governable without the rogue lawmakers getting elected in good numbers, they are better off inside assemblies and parliament than in the street.If thrown in the street they will burn their own nation overnight to smithereenes…on a sidenote,even Margaret Thatcher was described as a dictator
Incognito says:
Roman Empire, Constantine, Roman Catholic Church, Popes, Inquisitions, Christianity, ‘witch’ burnings, ‘heathen’ killings, destruction of ‘pagan’ cultures…
Mussolini is comparatively small fry.
> Losing it now is better than having
> lost it long ago, isn’t it?
Yes, in the same manner that dying in your sleep is better than being burned alive in a riot.
> I bet you are a great admirer of Mr
> Benito Mussolini who lost it long ago.
Si, si. How nice of you to continue being so astute. Viva il Duce!
All the very best.
@surya good. now replace bengali with italian. maybe you will reach puberty
Why Indira Gandhi withdrew the Emergency?
“Indira Gandhi may have thought she was invincible after reducing India [ Images ] to a dictatorship under the Emergency, but she had to pay a heavy price for the excesses of those 19 months of autocracy.
The Congress party was wiped out in North India making way for the first non-Congress government to govern India, though for a short time.”
also guys read story in the below link
http://news.rediff.com/special/2010/jun/25/why-indira-gandhi-withdrew-the-emergency.htm
>>Italy gave the world fascism. Mussolini was an Italian. Worth keeping in mind.
More important than that: Sonia “Gandhi”‘s dad was a fascist, a fact that, predictably, is never mentioned in her hagiographies.
In other words, Rahul Gandhi has a fascist grandpa on mother’s side, and a fascist grandma on father’s.
Encore, keep going, folks.
“it is absolutely important that we remind ourselves that it is high time Indians gave up voluntary servitude.”- agree with that. One way is to educate people thru blogs; this small step may result in a cascading effect in the course of time. The famous frenchman, Voltaire, was thrown in Bastille for his bok, CASTRIDE. He had emigrated to lead a free life in England after serving the sentence. Englnad was ready for him. But sadly, only later posthumously, France claimed back its illustrious son with all the adulation. As a step in right direction, I myself invaded the blogs of a few Indian (and US) newspapers including the TOIlet paper. I dont call myself an armchair revolutionary anymore instead I call myself Iam an humble activist now.Stop with stupid classifications like maharashtrians, Bengalis, Gujjus so forth. Those states, remember, gave us Vivekananda, Shivaji and Sardar Patel.The state division is only for ease of administrative purposes and nothing more.cheers…surya, chicago
Sammy Blues says:
@Surya
Wish more people start thinking like you.
http://bit.ly/3K4Dhk
Just a movie, but would be nice if it happened for real at least once.
Loknath says:
Unfortunately, some people of her times e.g. R K Dhawan, the original sycophant of the bitch, are speaking up now to make brownie points. These sycophants are not normal sychophants who suck dicks to fulfill certain ambitions. R K Dhawan has gone all too far to say that indira gandhi never wanted to enforce emergency (rediff today). Come to think of it, these coterie of people of indira and rajiv gandhi times have kept the whole nation in dark. now they are marketing themselves to the only saviour sonia mata who might give a reward for the demonstrated loyalty to the lineage. Arjun singh was another such character. He still pays obeisance with his ass facing the graves of nehru and indira and spares no opportunity to praise these devils in human disguise.
I would say this – First Official Dictator of Independent India is Indira Gandhi.
But first non-official dictator of India is Nehru. He led the partition of India, gave away Kashmir and ensured that his next generations continue to dictate India. He ensured all capable leaders are either wiped out or pushed below (sometimes with the support of Gandhi).
Bottomline: As you have said time and again, Indians are bunch of retards, hypocrites and self serving individuals who do not know what they are doing and only think of short term gain. It is us who have created this dynasty monster. And we continue to do so and are hugely divided in the name of religion, caste, and language.
And even now, some people tell me, that India will become a super dooper developed nation, when Rahul takes on the job of PM!! I am not joking, some educated people debated with me saying that Rahul understands the plight of the common man and rural areas and will do wonders when elected as PM!!!
I wonder when will this bunch of morons a.k.a Indians forget the Gandhi family!!
The best thing Indira Gandhi did: Sever East Pakistan from West Pakistan in 1971 war.
hey indians want to comment on this in Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/balkanizing-pakistan-a-co_b_635950.html
SV says:
I am shocked to read that it takes just two persons (the PM and the President) to change the country from a democracy to dictatorship! I am not sure what were the lessons learned from this emergency period in India. And nobody was even held responsible for the acts done during the emergency period. No doubt our constitution is so fragile!
Funny part of it all was that Congress could still get 153 MPs in the Lok Sabha in the elections of 1977. If it were a wise society entire party would have perished in the dust forever
Nalliah Thayabharan says:
Edvige Antonia Albina Maino was born December 09, 1946 to Stefano and Paola Maino in Lusiana, a little village 30 km from Vicenza in the region of Veneto, Italy. Edvige Antonia Albina Maino spent her adolescence in Orbassano, a town near Turin, attending a Catholic school. In 1964, Edvige Antonia Albina Maino went to study English at the Bell Educational Trust’s language school in the city of Cambridge. She met Rajiv Gandhi, who was enrolled in Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 1965 at a Greek restaurant while working there, as a waitress to make ends meet. In all three years of Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure at Trinity College had not passed a single examination. Edvige Antonia Albina Maino and Rajiv Gandhi married in 1968.Rajiv Gandhi changed his so called Parsi religion to become a Catholic to marry Edvige Antonia Albina Maino. Rajiv became Roberto. His daughter’s name is Bianca and son’s name is Raul. Quite cleverly the same names are presented to the people of India as Priyanka and Rahul. What is amazing is the extent of Indians’ ignorance in such matters. The press conference that Rajiv Gandhi gave in London after taking over as prime minister of India was very informative. In this press conference, Rajiv Gandhi boasted that he was NOT a Hindu but a Parsi.
Edvige Antonia Albina Maino was given the name ‘Sonia’ by her late mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi. But there is no notification in the gazette regarding this change in name. This change of name runs in Nehru family is to fool the Indian public for their votes. Indira Gandhi’s real name was Indira Priyadarshini. In 1935, Indira joined Shantiniketan,a school set up by Rabindranath Tagore. When Indira was found in the bed with her German teacher at Shantiniketan she was chased out of the Shantiniketan Rabindranath. Subsequently, she went to England and sat for the University of Oxford entrance examination, but she failed, and spent a few months at Badminton School in Bristol, before passing the exam in 1937 and enrolling at Somerville College, Oxford where she never finished her degree. Khushwant Singh, who has personally known Indira Gandhi, has said that she felt uncomfortable around educated people because she had no real education. During her stay in the UK, she frequently met Feroze Khan, whom she knew from Allahabad, and who was studying at the London School of Economics. Before Indira’s marriage, the then Governor of Maharashtra Dr Shriprakash had warned Nehru in a meeting and through a letter, that Indira was having an illicit relationship with Feroze Khan. Feroze Khan was quite sympathetic to Indira and Indira married Feroze Khan in a London mosque as per Islamic rites Feroz Khan after converting herself to Islam. Indira’s muslim name was Maimuna Begum and later both had changed their name to fool the public of India by an affidavit in a court to Indira Gandhi and Feroz Gandhi.
After Rajiv’s birth Indira and Feroze lived separately, but they were not divorced. Feroze used to interfere in Nehru’s political activities. Nehru got fed up and left instructions not to allow him into the Prime Minister’s residence Trimurthi Bhavan. The death of Feroze in 1960 before he could consolidate his own political forces came as a relief to Nehru and Indira. Feroze had even planned to remarry. The second son of Indira known as Sanjay Gandhi was not the son of Feroze Khan. Sanjay’s real father was Mohammad Yunus who served as India’s ambassador to Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq and Spain. Mohammad Yunus represented India at the Non-Aligned Summits at Lusaka, Algiers, Colombo, New Delhi, and Harare. Baby Sanjay had been circumcised following Islamic custom, although the reason stated was phimosis. Incidentally, Sanjay’s marriage with the Sikh girl Menaka took place quite surprisingly through a civil ceremony(on 23 September 1974)in Mohammad Yunus’ house in New Delhi. And the marriage with Menaka who was a model (she had modelled for Bombay Dyeing wearing just a towel) was not so ordinary either. Sanjay never attended college, but took up an apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce in Crewe, England. Sanjay Gandhi’s name was actually Sanjeev Gandhi. He was arrested for a car theft in England. Since his passport had been seized, the then Indian Ambassador to England Krishna Menon changed his name to ‘Sanjay’and procured a new passport for him. Mohammad Yunus who cried the most when Sanjay died in the plane accident.
At the end of Rajiv Gandhi’s five years in office, the Bofors Scandal broke out. Ottavio Quattrocchi an Italian business man believed to be involved was a friend of Sonia Gandhi, having access to the Prime Minister’s official residence.
In 1980 Sonia’s name appeared in the voter’s list for New Delhi prior to her becoming an Indian Citizen. At the time she was still holding Italian Citizenship. A violation of Form 4 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which states that “Only the names of those who are citizens of India should be entered on the electoral rolls.” When she did acquire Indian Citizenship, in April 1983, the same issue cropped up again, as her name appeared on the 1983 voter’s list when the deadline for registering had been in January 1983.
Swiss magazine Schweitzer Illustrierte in 1991 claimed that Sonia was controlling accounts worth $2 billion US dollars in her son Raul’s name.
Harvard scholar Yevgenia Albats cited KGB correspondence about payments to Rajiv Gandhi and his family, which had been arranged by Viktor Chebrikov, which shows that KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov sought in writing an “authorization to make payments in U.S. dollars to the family members of Rajiv Gandhi, namely Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Paola Maino, mother of Sonia Gandhi” from the CPSU in December 1985.
Payments were authorized by a resolution, CPSU/CC/No 11228/3 dated 20 December 1985; and endorsed by the USSR Council of Ministers in Directive No 2633/Rs dated 20 December 1985. These payments had been coming since 1971, as payments received by Sonia Gandhi’s family and “have been audited in CPSU/CC resolution No 11187/22 OP dated 10/12/1984.
In 1992 the media confronted the Russian government with the Albats disclosure. The Russian government confirmed the veracity of the disclosure and defended it as necessary for “Soviet ideological interest.”
In 2008 Sonia’s party appointed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Manmohan Singh was the only international leader to initially refuse data provided by the German authorities during 2008 Liechtenstein tax affair.
Indira didn’t have any knowledge about constitution and constitutional procedures.Indira furthered creation of democratic dictatorship, first kicked off by her father Nehru. Indira never trusted anyone but her family only and so made Sanjay Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi heroes without any deed during her lifetime. Her leadership plunged India into depths of darkness. India needs enlightened leaders. But it has been getting stupid leaders because the population at large is not “enlightened.”
For India to get decent leadership, Indians have to change. Indians have to demonstrate that they can take the long view, that they are not willing to vote criminals into office.
Indians have granted “their obedience by their own consent” to dictators for a long while. The most recent in living memory is Indira Gandhi. Before that it was to their British overlords. Before that to the Islamic invaders.
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Home » News » Business news
Duffy new Absolut boss
By Christian Davis
Pernod Ricard has announced that Paul Duffy has been appointed chairman & CEO of Absolut.
The Absolut Company is responsible for the manufacturing and marketing of the premium Swedish vodka brand Absolut and other brands such as Malibu and Kahlúa.
Duffy succeeds Philippe Guettat, who has been appointed to another position within Pernod Ricard.
Previously Duffy was CEO of Pernod Ricard USA, CEO for Irish Distillers and CEO for Pernod Ricard UK. Duffy is Irish and started his career at KPMG in Dublin.
“With my experience from the US, which is the biggest market for Absolut, Malibu and Kahlúa, I hope that I will be able to contribute to the further success of our brands there, as well as in the rest of the world. Together with our team, I want to make sure that our global brand ideas are relevant to the local markets,” Said Duffy.
Duffy replaces Philippe Guettat, who will be moving to a new position as CEO for Martell Mumm Perrier-Jouët within Pernod Ricard.
“Absolut has great possibilities for continued growth. Despite a challenging economic environment, we have managed to beat previous sales and this year sold 100 million litres of Absolut,” says Duffy.
The Absolut Company is headquartered in Liljeholmen, Stockholm. Absolut is the world's fourth largest international premium spirits brand in the world, says Pernod Ricard. In 2011/2012, it sold 100 million litres of Absolut.
Keywords: vodka, pernod ricard, absolut, malibu, irish distillers, kahlúa, Absolut Company, paul Duffy, Philippe Guettat, Martell Mumm Perrier-Jouët
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Absolut goes denim with Cronk
Pernod targets US for Absolut Gräpevine and Miami
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Economists don’t see recession in 2020, including Southwest Colorado
Region 9 director addresses local strengths, liabilities
By Patrick Armijo Education, business & real estate reporter
Thursday, Jan. 9, 2020 5:30 PM
Updated: Thursday, Jan. 9, 2020 10:32 PM
Follow @Patrick_Armijo
Sarah House, senior economist with Wells Fargo Securities, sees economic growth in 2020, albeit at a slower pace than 2019.
Patrick Armijo/Durango Herald
Sarah House, left, Laura Lewis Marchino and Richard Wobbekind all delivered presentations at the 28th annual Southwest Economic Outlook on Thursday at the Student Union Ballroom at Fort Lewis College.
With the United States in its longest economic expansion ever, worry about when the next recession hits and how it might harm Southwest Colorado seemed to be a shadow looming over the 28th annual Southwest Economic Outlook.
[image,3,mugshot]“Fortunately, expansions don’t die from old age, and while this expansion is the record longest, it’s also been one of the weakest,” said Sarah House, director and senior economist with Wells Fargo Securities.
The Economic Outlook, held Thursday in the Student Union Ballroom at Fort Lewis College, brought together Richard Wobbekind, executive director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder; Laura Lewis Marchino, executive director of the Region 9 Economic Development District of Southwest Colorado; and House, Wells Fargo’s top economist, to examine the economic tea leaves heading into a new year.
Both House and Wobbekind see continued, but slowing economic growth in 2020, with a recession unlikely in the next 12 months.
Wobbekind
“We’re calling for a growing, but slowing economy, a nonrecession scenario,” Wobbekind told several hundred people who gathered for the event.
Last year, he said he recorded 51,000 new jobs created in Colorado, and this year he sees an increase of 40,000 new jobs, consistent with his expectation for the economy to remain strong albeit growing more slowly than in 2019.
House examined three factors some economic observers suggest might lead to the next economic dry spell – an inversion of the yield curve, the national election and increasing debt burdens on corporations and the federal government.
However, House said none of those factors seem likely to be strong enough to throw the economy into reverse.
The yield curve inversion – when short-term interest rates on debt exceed the rates for long-term debt – is a gauge economists watch as an early indicator of an oncoming recession. House said the yield curve indeed inverted several times in 2019, the first occurrence being Aug. 27.
But she cautioned that the gauge does not necessarily coincide with a recession 100% of the time.
“I think there’s reason, this time, to take it with caution considering that the Fed has been through quantitative easing and has been trying to push down rates, and so it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing that it used to,” she said.
Despite the partisan political bickering – to be expected in presidential election years – House said economic contractions rarely occur during presidential elections. More typically, she said, presidential election years are associated with increased investments by businesses across the nation.
Growing corporate and federal debt are at historic highs compared with the size of the economy, but again, House said that valid non-recessionary reasons exist for that as well.
Marchino
“You have to bear in mind that assets are also at an all-time high,” she said. “We’ve seen a lot of the debt held long term, locking in low-interest rates. So, with historically low rates, in some ways it makes sense for businesses to be taking out a little more debt at this time, given that it’s so cheap.”
House said mounting federal debt is unlikely to be dealt with anytime soon, and while it might eventually trigger a crisis, no one knows when.
The growing debt is on track to increase from 75% of annual gross domestic product to 95% of gross domestic product, she said. “So, when does this all fall apart? Well, hard to say. You know, if you look at Japan this could go on for a while.”
The most likely principal impact of the growing debt, she said, is when the next recession hits, the government will have fewer resources to devote to discretionary spending to stimulate the economy.
Marchino noted several “thumbs-up” factors that should aid Southwest Colorado’s economy in 2020:
New activity in logging to remove beetle-killed timber and to promote forest health.Strong support systems for entrepreneurs and small businesses.New creative districts to spur the arts in Durango, Ignacio, Silverton and Mancos.Innovate farm-to-table agricultural enterprises.A vibrant, attractive area that attracts people working from home, retirees and second homeowners.Marchino’s “thumbs-down” factors were:
An economy that continues to struggle in Farmington.Higher-than-average suicide rates in Southwest Colorado.A lack of drug treatment and mental health facilities.Higher health care costs compared with Colorado’s average.Gaps in telecommunication infrastructure.Problems of supply of affordable housing for wage workers.parmijo@durangoherald.com
Do you expect the economy to grow in 2020?
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“Writing a book by committee is a great idea in every way!” said everyone but the writer.
Imagine all the people from all the classes you’ve ever taken in one room. Each group has its own character, but today we’re going to focus on the outliers and oddball characters with whom you’ve gone to school. I’m not talking about those who stand out for their smarts and sweetness. I’m talking about the girl who, just before the last bell rang, reminded the teacher about extra homework for the class just before the long weekend. Remember the annoying guy who always had another question or inane comment to add long after a subject was beaten to death? And don’t forget the person who was really stupid, but for some reason thought he should speak a lot. Worse, he was smug about it.
Now put all those people you didn’t like in school and put them in charge of your work in progress.
That pressure behind your eardrums is your brain trying to escape.
This scenario isn’t entirely theoretical.
Recently, I listened to two different podcasts about two of the most successful television shows that exist. These were true fans…but:
1. On several points, they seemed determined to be confused about plot points even though the answers were readily available on screen, if only they’d looked.
2. Several weenies missed subtleties that weren’t really that subtle. It’s not the fault of the show’s writers if you aren’t paying attention. If you’re missing something, stop tweeting while you watch The Walking Dead.
3. Someone objected to issues within the shows that are non-issues. e.g. Is Leonard’s mom on The Big Bang Theory really a licensed psychiatrist? If true, she’s terrible! Answer: it’s a comedy and you aren’t supposed to like that character and it’s a comedy and it’s a comedy and oh, for the love of Thor! Stop!
4. These dedicated amateurs had one or two good suggestions (I’m guessing by accident.) The rest of their requests for changes were objectively terrible, like dumping beloved characters that made the shows work, for instance.
There’s a reason we don’t write by committee.
It’s good that writing is a lonely job. You don’t get book ideas and plot points from other people. The elements develop organically, rising up from character and logic and by answering the question, “What’s next?” And then answering it again and again until you stop writing or die. The writing grows from the act of writing.
Input is helpful after you’ve done the work, sure, but don’t even ask a trusted friend what to do when you’re still in the second draft. He doesn’t know. How can he? You wouldn’t ask if you should turn left or right when all he knows is that you’re somewhere in New Mexico.
“Is this the right direction? Should the Mom die in the middle of the book?” A good friend will tell you to keep writing and hang up on you so you can get back to it. Finish something before you show it to anyone. You’re in command. Steer your ship solo. Lots of people will have their say later.
Everyone has an opinion on everything, even more so when they know less about the subject.
Once upon a time at a writing conference, an author asked me about the book I was writing. I gave him the broad strokes and he said, without hesitation, that my second act was “wrong”. If there’s a high school suicide in the first act, then the main character has to be torn up about it.
“Not if he hated the suicidal kid’s guts to begin with,” I replied.
“Dude!” he said without a microbe of doubt, “High school kids don’t act that way. They shouldn’t act that way!”
“In my book they do.”
Summarily dismissed, I slunk away and have since dedicated my life to hating Stephen King with the fiery heat of a thousand suns. (No! I’m kidding! The offending author was not Stephen King. I love Steve! Him, I would have believed.)
Here’s the crux:
There are few rules in writing, but one I’m sure of is this, “If it plays, it plays.” You can make anything work in context. You can sell anything if the story sells it.
My luckless hit man is a funny guy in big trouble.
People doubted me, but I created a sympathetic hit man named Jesus (in second-person throughout, no less.) I create a lot of anti-heroes and no, I don’t care if readers love and agree with all my characters. Loving and agreeing with characters is overrated. Interesting is more important than loving.
Many of my stories don’t yield an easy happy ending but give unexpected, yet satisfying endings instead. I rarely do happily ever after, but you’ll often find transcendence there.
My main character in This Plague of Days is on the autistic spectrum and hardly ever speaks (and when he does, it’s often in Latin phrases.) When Doubting Tommy asks, “How the heck are you going to make that work?”, the answer is, “Watch me.”
My mission isn’t to write something easy that entertains. My mission is to write something different that entertains. Too much consultation, especially early on, would squelch my process. We don’t write by committee because committees are how most things don’t get done. Committees are where good ideas go to die. Committees are where you’ll find three reasonable, intelligent and helpful people compromising with one insane fascist to arrive at something closer to crazy than good.
Choose your beta readers, editors and allies carefully and don’t show them anything too early in your process. The book is only yours as long as you’re writing it. After that, it goes out to the world and it’s up to thousands of readers to decide if your vision pleases them.
Make sure that, whatever you write, it pleases you.
~ The latest All That Chazz podcast is up at AllThatChazz.com. You’ll also find helpful affiliate links to my books there so you can buy them, which is quite a happy coincidence, isn’t it? Thanks. For a topic sort of related to this one, you can also get the latest update on Season 3 of This Plague of Days here.
Filed under: All That Chazz, publishing, Writers, writing tips, All That Chazz, beta readers, characters, crime novels, ebooks, editors, horror, main character, opinions, plotting, Podcast, publishing team, readers, Stephen King, suspence, television, The Big Bang Theory, The Walking Dead, This Plague of Days, vampires, vision, writers, writing, writing advice, writing books, writing process, zombies
iCarly, Art and what it means
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The news came in last night that I am no longer an artistic hero to a friend of mine. My fall from grace came when I announced on Facebook that I looked forward to seeing the series finale of iCarly. As a crime novelist whose anti-hero gets tortured and frequently kills, clearly I’d damaged any tough guy rep I’ve built in the Hit Man Series. I’m not too torn up at my fallen status in the eyes of my friend, but his joke did get me thinking about the big question: What is the nature of Art and what’s good Art?
As a stay-at-home dad, I’ve watched a lot of kid shows with my children. Most shows came and went as the kids went through stages. Teletubbies was a short foray followed by The Wiggles. Dora the Explorer was great but the kids outgrew it and declared it a “baby show” quickly. iCarly hit my kids at just the right time. As the stars of the show got taller, so have my kids. The two constants have become Spongebob and iCarly. Somebody told me they thought the stuff that qualifies as Great Art is the stuff that lasts. (Not sure about that. How long does a shooting star last?)
Let’s address the worry first: What’s a grown man doing watching iCarly? It’s simple. I have a pretty bleak outlook and monstrous rage I sublimate with humor. iCarly is silly fun and in each episode I was sure that everything would work out okay. Entertaining TV lights a candle where there is so much darkness.
It is clever silliness, though. If you are a little older and you watched the iCarly finale with your kids, there was a moment when you roared with laughter and your kids have no clue why. They did a tribute to another iconic moment in television history: The group hug/group shuffle from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That bit was a wink and a nod for the old ones watching with their kids. I loved it.
Watching iCarly kind of balances out my favorite shows: Dexter, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. I’ve also become riveted by season 1 of a Showtime drama called Sleeper Cell which is a taut story about an FBI agent who is out to bring down terrorists. He’s undercover and also happens to be Muslim. I mention these shows not to try to win back any lost cred, but to say that Art comes in all shapes and sizes, tastes and brands.
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Recently a troll went to work on a colleague’s blog, acting unnecessarily rude in a comment thread. My first reaction was what troll’s want: I was annoyed. Then I thought about the chasms and vast distance between iCarly and Sleeper Cell and how I enjoyed them both for different reasons. A commentator from On The Media mentioned recently that he didn’t think a famous self-published author’s work was very well-written. He then added, “But how great does it have to be when you can buy her books for $2.99 cents?”
I suspect the troll doesn’t understand what the commentator groks: There is no real Art in the sense that “This is The Good and This is the Bad.” There is nuance and too many variables for our pea brains to handle when it comes to what people like. The commentator allows a nuance that doesn’t register in Troll World: If you get it cheap, you don’t expect it to be perfect. And what a relief that is! We all strive for excellence, but nothing is perfect. Through that lens, I saw the troll differently, too. In Troll World, criticism is used to try to control others so you feel better about yourself. How else to explain anger directed at artists that comes with a heat that should be reserved for perpetrators of genocide? My annoyance melted to pity. How sad and lonely trolls must be when they project such anger. They bring no joy because they have no joy.
There’s room for all kinds of Art. That book you love? I hate it. The book I love? You hate. Someone once said criticism (distinct from trolling) has value because it isn’t merely subjective. It is intersubjective. Yes, when it’s practiced at a high level, you can provide measures and good reasoning why I shouldn’t like something. However, like and love is like laughter: It is involuntary. Bad reviews are often irrelevant. I notice now that a vocal group (the minority?) don’t trust good reviews, either. A good critique is often entertaining, but that does not automatically equate to believing the critic. Several times I have soothed a fellow author’s hurt feelings over a bad review by pointing out that people often pay no attention to a bad review, especially if it’s poorly written or the reasoning is shaky. Criticism is an art in itself, but I give it a small a, not a capital, because it based on what others speak, write, produce, act, direct or sing first. I’ve read a lot of art criticism, but for its own sake, not to determine which movie to see on any given Saturday night. The critic is not me. To believe the critic, he or she has to share my sensibilities. How often do we match up so well that we can switch out our opinion for another’s judgment? Rarely.
Art is the place where we meet strangers in safety. You wouldn’t want to meet my characters in real life. They’re dangerous. I write
A quick-moving plot with lots of surprises and a clear-eyed examination of addiction.
stories of Bad versus Evil. But I’m complex and I have an emotional range. There’s room for a sponge who flips burgers and whose best friend is a starfish who is so creative in how entertainingly dumb is. And there was room in iCarly for Sam to get into and out of trouble by beating people with a slab of butter in a gym sock. Spencer hanging with an ostrich? Priceless. And we need Gibby and Guppy to be freakishly obtuse and endearing because all your surreal friends in real life are in jail for possession.
What’s good Art? That’s not the big question I thought it was. The nature of Art trumps the question because Art is so much bigger than that question. Art is multidimensional with infinite variety, as varied as we are. There’s room for everything and for everyone’s individual taste.
And now, one last time: “Gibby!”
Goodbye iCarly (edgeofstory.com)
Bigger Than Jesus: My Cuban hit man is in love and on the run.
‘iCarly’ and ‘Victorious’ spinoff coming to Nickelodeon (family-room.ew.com)
“iCarly” and “Victorious” spinoff gets greenlight from Nickelodeon (scooprocket.com)
‘iCarly’ & Miranda Cosgrove Say ‘iGoodbye’ To Fans With Series Finale (hollywoodlife.com)
~ Robert Chazz Chute is the author of Crack the Indie Author Code and Write Your Book: Aspire to Inspire as well as a bunch of books of suspense including Bigger Than Jesus, Higher Than Jesus and Self-help for Stoners. His new book, Murders Among Dead Trees, is the definitive collection of his short stories. It will be released later this week. To hear the All That Chazz podcast, go to the author site, AllThatChazz.com. For all the links to Chazz’s books, click here.
Filed under: publishing, Art, Bigger than Jesus, blogging, comedy, Crack the Indie Author Code, crime novelist, Criticism, Drama, entertainment, Gibby, higher than jesus, Humor, iCarly, mary tyler moore show, Nickelodeon, reviews, Sleeper Cell, television, thriller, trolls, What is Art?, What is the nature of Art?, What makes art good, Write Your Book, writer, writing
Writers don’t get enough credit
The kids asked us which celebrities we want to date. At first, in deference to my beautiful wife, I said no one. Then my daughter said, “Mom wants to go out with Johnny Depp.”
“What?” Time to reconsider. There are celebrities I’d like to meet, sit around and talk with over a big plate of nachos. I know Kevin Smith would be cool to hang out with because he’s funny off the cuff. Same with Joe Rogan. But mostly, celebrities would disappoint in that regard.
Just as winners on Survivor rarely credit luck for their win (though that’s an obvious component), actors often want their fans to think they are every bit as clever and witty as they appear on TV.
That’s why I appreciated Jim Parsons from The Big Bang Theory. In his Emmy acceptance speech, he took great pains to thank the writing staff for their work in getting him up on that stage. Jim Parsons makes Dr. Sheldon Cooper live. He’s a talented comedic actor who does a lot with body language and expression to make such a weird character work. But the words coming out are from a script and he knows it.
Thanks, Mr. Parsons, from writers everywhere.
And no, I’m not worried about losing my wife to Johnny Depp. But he doesn’t live next door , either.
Chazz Writes: The Top Post of 2010 was… (chazzwrites.wordpress.com)
Kevin Smith Trades Barbs with Phelps Kids Over Twitter (crushable.com)
Westboro Baptist Church Family Attends Kevin Smith’s ‘Red State’, Leaves in Disgust After 15 Minutes (slashfilm.com)
VIDEO: What Would Sheldon Say About Jim Parsons’ Emmy Win? (omg.yahoo.com)
Filed under: television, Writers, Big Bang Theory, Emmy Award, Jim Parsons, Joe Rogan, Johnny Depp, Kevin Smith, Sheldon Cooper, television
What writers can learn from House
Fans had an interesting response to last week’s episode of House. I’m not going to spoil anything for you. Let’s just say some people loved it and some people hated it. As far as I could tell, celebrants and detractors were pretty evenly split. Many agreed the episode was a heartbreaker but they drew different conclusions about the success of the story: people loved it and hated it for the same reasons.
This is why you don’t arrive at your story by committee.
The episode was, by any measure, a success because people cared. The web was full of passion about House and lots of amateur advice about what should and what should not have happened.
The worst response to your fiction is not a negative reaction. The worst response to your story is, “Who cares?” As you write your story, listen to your instincts. And know that if you try to please everyone, you will fail.
Take risks.
And if it plays, it plays.
House, M.D.’s Lisa Edelstein and Greg Yaitanes Talk About “Bombshells” (blogcritics.org)
‘House’ Fan Columnist: House Tells ‘Two Stories’ (buddytv.com)
‘House’ Fan Columnist: The End of Huddy? (buddytv.com)
Writing Is A Journey Not A Destination (pittsburghflashfictiongazette.com)
Filed under: rules of writing, television, Writers, writing tips, audience, Drama, fans, fiction, House, plot, television, writing stories
Bad Writing, Jim Belushi and Charlie’s Angels
Last night I watched TV as I puffed along on a treadmill at the gym. Jim Belushi’s sitcom was on. I was listening to a podcast on my headphones but the
Big Bang Theory writing is flashy, fast and funny. Good writing there.
onscreen captions caught my eye. It was an According to Jim episode with all the predictable elements: a hot wife, Jim, a wacky neighbor who is fatter than Jim so the “star” looks smaller. There were a couple of cute kids running around.
David Cross tells a story about Jim Belushi (in Cross’s excellent book I Drink for a Reason) that is pretty awful. I won’t repeat it here. Go get Mr. Cross’s book for the full chewy goodness. Anyway, Jim is no John. But that wasn’t why I disliked the show. Yes, there was a tone of he-man homophobia which was distasteful and seemed dated to me, but it was the writing that was most egregious.
Perhaps it was the captions that alerted me to what was going on in the episode. I don’t mean the story per se. I mean the subtext of bad writing. Jim was there to crank out the stale and predictable jokes. The neighbor was there to make Jim seem more normal. The part of the wife could have been played by a whiteboard. She may, in fact, be a terrific actress. We’ll never know. No one on the staff was writing for her.
As I ran on the treadmill I wished I’d seen it from the beginning so I could keep a tally of how many times the wife’s lines were:
“Okay. Okay? Okay.”
And then back to “What?!”
Wouldn’t it be great if everybody in the show got great lines? It’s either a power/insecurity thing* or the actress really couldn’t remember words longer than a few at a time. Maybe some day she’ll get to be a mindless exposition device. On this show, she may as well have been a cue card.
Watch The Big Bang Theory. Everybody gets great lines, not just Sheldon. Watch King of Queens reruns. Kevin James was consistently funny and you never once thought, “I bet that guy’s a real prick.” King of Queens was an underrated show, but it’s exactly what According to Jim would have been if it were any good.
Good luck to Mr. Belushi in his new fall show, The Defenders. I sure hope he got a whole new bunch of writers. I don’t want to see Jerry O’Connell going through entire shows saying “What? What? What?” so Jim can throw out another pithy line. It won’t matter too much. From now on, at the gym I’m sticking to Writing Excuses podcasts on my iPod.
*William Goldman relates a great story about the tense set of Charlie’s Angels. The actresses grew to hate each other and counted all the lines and words to make sure no one was getting more lines than they were. The writers ended up calling it Huey, Dooey and Louie dialogue because the angels would each have a line of equal length at all times.
Angel 1: “I think we should…”
Angel 2: “Get to the beach!”
Angel 3: “…and find our Charlie!”
Quack!
A producer was asked the secret to Charlie’s Angels success. He didn’t laud his writing staff or the acting. He said one word: “Nipples.”
Filed under: Media, Rant, writing tips, bad writing, charlie's angels, david cross. I Drink for a Reason, jim belushi, television
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Complex organic molecules
I am studying astronomy and came across the following term in the astrochemistry course called 'complex organic molecules' or also written as COMs. My question is: What is exactly meant with these molecules? Is it just a molecule with more than one carbon atom?
organic-chemistry
Mathphys meisterMathphys meister
$\begingroup$ This Wikipedia may be helpful. $\endgroup$ – Mathew Mahindaratne Jan 14 '19 at 14:21
tl;dr: two different definitions. Astronomy: multiple carbon atoms in molecule. Chemistry: polymer
Interestingly enough, after reading about COMs here, as well as reading the Wikipedia page and the corresponding arXiv paper, it seems like chemists and astronomers have different definitions of what a complex organic molecule should be!
As far as I knew, in chemistry complex organic molecules were long polymers, such as proteins, which were composed of thousands upon thousands of amino acid units. In the astronomy paper, however, they cite other types of molecules.
$\ce{CH3OH, CH3CHO, HCOOCH3 and CH3OCH3}$, all cited as "complex" (haha) organic molecules in the paper, would appear to chemists as relatively simple molecules. (I read the paper, because it piqued my interest that something like a protein could be found in space). I then read the Springer article.
The term “complex organic molecules” is used differently in astronomy and chemistry. In astronomy, complex organic molecules are molecules with multiple carbon atoms such as benzene and acetic acid. These molecules have been detected in interstellar space with radio telescopes. In chemistry, “complex organic molecules” refer to polymer-like molecules such as proteins.
JSCoder says Reinstate MonicaJSCoder says Reinstate Monica
$\begingroup$ I think the term is highly context dependent. In space molecules are pretty complex in that environment. Some chemists would argue that polymers are complex (others would disagree as they are big but repetitive so don't contain much complexity) Others (like me) would argue that molecules like taxol are complex because it has 4-fused different-sized rings in its core and 10 stereo centres and I don't have enough atoms in my modelling kit to come close to building it. $\endgroup$ – matt_black Jan 14 '19 at 15:03
$\begingroup$ Don't even think about asking astronomers to define "metals" if this upsets you! $\endgroup$ – Chris H Jan 14 '19 at 15:39
$\begingroup$ @Dani I can't possibly comment. I work with too many of them. Besides I'm a physicist and you should hear how we are with chemistry $\endgroup$ – Chris H Jan 14 '19 at 19:37
$\begingroup$ I note that you give the example of $\ce{CH3OH}$, but your quotation specifies "multiple carbon atoms". I wonder if this means that there's disagreement about the definition used in astronomy? $\endgroup$ – ruakh Jan 14 '19 at 21:27
$\begingroup$ @ruakh hmm, the thing is that was directly quoted from ArXiv $\endgroup$ – JSCoder says Reinstate Monica Jan 14 '19 at 21:38
Here is a prime example of how much a "complex" is a simple organic molecule for Astrophysicist when the data are coming from interstellar space, which has made a Science article (Ref. 1):
Abstract: The largest noncyclic molecules detected in the interstellar medium (ISM) are organic with a straight-chain carbon backbone. We report an interstellar detection of a branched alkyl molecule, iso-propyl cyanide $(\ce{i-C3H7CN})$, with an abundance 0.4 times that of its straight-chain structural isomer. This detection suggests that branched carbon-chain molecules may be generally abundant in the ISM. Our astrochemical model indicates that both isomers are produced within or upon dust grain ice mantles through the addition of molecular radicals, albeit via differing reaction pathways. The production of iso-propyl cyanide appears to require the addition of a functional group to a nonterminal carbon in the chain. Its detection therefore bodes well for the presence in the ISM of amino acids, for which such side-chain structure is a key characteristic.
In September, 2014, a science reporter, Michael Eyre wrote an article about this discovery in BBC News under the title of "Complex organic molecule found in interstellar space," stating that iso-propyl cyanide has been detected in a star-forming cloud 27,000 light-years from Earth. This star-forming cloud or the star-forming region where the current observations made is Sagittarius B2(N) or Sgr B2(N). According to the authors of Science article, Sgr B2 is the most massive star-forming region in our Galaxy, which is located close to the Galactic Center, and contains two main sites of star formation, Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M). In particular, Sgr B2(N) has been nicknamed Large Molecule Heimat because it is the source of many "complex organic molecules," most of which are found for the first time in space (Ref. 2).
Using the 30-m single-dish radio telescope of the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM) in France, the authors have previously discovered the straight-chain organic molecules, ethyl formate $(\ce{C2H5OCHO})$ and normal-propyl cyanide $(\ce{n-C3H7CN})$ in Sgr B2(N) (Ref. 3). To date, more than 165 molecules have been discovered in the interstellar medium or in circumstellar envelopes over the past five decades and approximately 2-4 "new" interstellar or circumstellar molecules are found each year. Among them, “complex” organic molecules with up to 13 atoms have been found, showing that the interstellar chemistry in some regions is efficient enough to achieve a relatively high degree of chemical complexity (For the authors credit, they have clearly stated that these molecules are “complex” for astronomers, not for biologists!). Yet, the discovery of ethyl formate (3 carbon atoms) and n-propyl cyanide (4 carbon atoms) sited in Ref. 3 is claimed to be the first clear detection of these molecules in space, and $\ce{n-C3H7CN}$ be the largest molecule yet detected in this source at the time. It is also noteworthy that the authors detected neither ethyl formate nor n-propyl cyanide toward the more evolved source, Sgr B2(M).
Even though, ammonia $(\ce{NH3})$ and water vapors $(\ce{H2O})$ have been discovered in space respectively in 1968 and 1969, the first "complex organic species" from space is believed to be formaldehyde, which was discovered and reported in 1969 (according to Ref. 2). Since then, a real Gold Rush broke out for "complex organic species," and approximately 165 molecules detected (by 2012) in the interstellar medium, 20 of which are cyanides (Ref. 4).
A. Belloche, R. T. Garrod, H. S. P. Müller, K. M. Menten, "Detection of a branched alkyl molecule in the interstellar medium: iso-propyl cyanide," Science 2014, 345(6204), 1584-1587 (DOI: 10.1126/science.1256678).
K. M. Menten, “Perspective from a Younger Generation — The Astro-spectroscopy of Gisbert Winnewisser,” In The Dense Interstellar Medium in Galaxies: Proceedings of the 4th Cologne-Bonn-Zermatt Symposium (Zermatt, 22–26 September, 2003); S. Pfalzner, C. Kramer, C. Straubmeier, A. Heithausen (Eds.); Springer Proc. Physics: Vol. 91, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, pp. 69-82, 2004.
A. Belloche, R. T. Garrod, H. S. P. Müller, K. M. Menten, C. Comito, P. Schilke, "Increased complexity in interstellar chemistry: Detection and chemical modeling of ethyl formate and n-propyl cyanide in Sagittarius B2(N)," Astronomy & Astrophysics 2009, 499, 215-232 (DOI:10.1051/0004-6361/200811550).
M. H. Ordu, H. S. P. Müller, A. Walters, M. Nuñez, F. Lewen, A. Belloche, K. M. Menten, S. Schlemmer, "The quest for complex molecules in space: laboratory spectroscopy of n-butyl cyanide, $\ce{n-C4H9CN}$, in the millimeter wave region and its astronomical search in Sagittarius B2(N)," Astronomy & Astrophysics 2012, 541, A121 (8 pages) (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201118738).
"Complex" is a relative term and I would say the situation in Astronomy is more complicated than that alluded to by JavaScriptCoder, who states that methanol (amongst others) is considered complex in Astronomy.
A distinction can be made between the Interstellar Medium, where it is indeed reasonably remarkable to find a substance as complex as methanol, a Nebula (which contains a greater concentration of matter but is still by Earth standards a hard vacuum) and a Condensed Body such as a planet, moon or comet, where it is not particularly remarkable to find substances with a molecular weight several times that of methanol.
The definition of "complex" on lifeless condensed bodies seems to be at a molecular weight a little over 100. Even more complex organic molecules called tholins are responsible for the colour of some planets. The first image in the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tholin lists "complex organics" as having a molecular weight of 100-350 (Daltons), but then lists "negative organic ions" (and presumably tholins) as having higher molecular weights still. This article makes a distinction between "simple" organic molecules with molecular weights below 50 and "complex" organic molecules with molecular weights above 200.
Astronomers are also interested in the function of "complex molecules" in the origin of life. There is a lot of interest in the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (which have been detected in nebulae and condensed bodies) and their potential role in mediating the synthesis of RNA / DNA type substances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAH_world_hypothesis
People who study planets are called planetary scientists. Perhaps they are not astronomers, or perhaps they are a type of astronomer. What is clear, though, is that "complex" means "at least fairly complex for that particular environment or context" so there is no fixed lower limit for what is considered complex. It is also clear that what astronomers consider "complex" is nowhere near as complex as what chemists consider "complex."
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Bounded rationality and parameters’ uncertainty in a simple monetary policy model
Working Papers - Mathematical Economics, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa
Information revelation in procurement auctions: an equivalence result
Preferential treatment in procurement auctions through information revelation
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See also Journal Article in Economics Letters (2012)
Adaptive expectations and cobweb phenomena: does heterogeneity matter?
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Can endogenous participation explain price volatility? Evidence from an agent-based cobweb model
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Good bargains and reputable sellers - An experimental investigation of electronic feedback systems
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East Bay board agrees to ask taxpayers to vote in March to approve $575 million bond measure
New funds would be for facilities. No help to close district's $48 million deficit.
The West Contra Costa Unified school board listens to a budget presentation by Superintendent Matthew Duffy, right, and Tony Wold, associate superintendent of business services, on Nov. 20, 2019.
This story was updated at 3:05 p.m. Nov. 22 to add a link to the ballot measure, which includes potential projects to be funded through the bond measure.
A San Francisco Bay Area district has decided to go to the voters in March asking them to approve a $575 million construction bond measure so it can build and upgrade school facilities.
Supporters urge board to keep East Bay superintendent despite budget crisis
If voters approve the measure, West Contra Costa Unified — which includes Richmond and surrounding communities — could only use the money for construction, renovation, technology or other facilities upgrades.
The new funds would not help offset the district’s $48 million operating deficit, which caused the school board last week to consider firing its superintendent. In the end the board agreed to work with Superintendent Matthew Duffy to find ways to close its budget gap.
West Contra Costa is considering spending cuts and the use of budget reserves to close its budget gap, which surfaced since last spring, in part to fund a 17 percent cumulative raise for the district’s teachers from July 2017 to July 2020 in order to attract and retain high quality educators. Officials said the district may return to the voters next November to ask for a new parcel tax to restore any programs, services and staffing that it cuts to balance its 2020-21 budget.
The district bond measure is different from the statewide $15 billion construction bond measure that will also appear on the March ballot, because the West Contra Costa measure only applies to residents in the district and would require them to pay additional property taxes to fund it. The statewide measure, on the other hand, would be funded as part of the state budget and could provide matching funds to districts such as West Contra Costa, if they have their own local funding. The state measure requires a district match in most cases, but the percentage varies based on the type of project and the demographic makeup of students. The state bond may cover up to the entire project cost for some districts that qualify for financial hardship. The state measure requires a majority vote to pass, while district measures require 55 percent voter approval.
The school board on Wednesday voted 4-1 to place the measure on the March 3, 2020 ballot to be used to rebuild and renovate 21 schools considered priorities based on the district’s facilities master plan, while also providing air conditioning and technology districtwide.
Board president Tom Panas voted against the bond. He said he opposed asking voters to approve another district tax, adding that he preferred to wait until November because there isn’t much time to drum up support for the March measure with holidays coming up. He said he was also concerned that the project list was too broad and vague.
The bond measure would require property owners to pay $60 per $100,000 in assessed value through 2052-53. That would increase the property tax rate from nearly $238 to almost $300 per $100,000 of assessed valuation. The rate would drop every year as other measures are paid off.
Board member Consuelo Lara said she was “excited” about the planned projects, including air conditioning, career technical education, arts facilities and health centers.
“Everybody’s going to benefit,” she said. “These are things I’m passionate about.”
Board member Mister Phillips said some of his neighbors have told him they are experiencing financial hardships and have to choose between feeding their families and heating their homes.
“I want us to realize when we talk about putting a bond or a parcel tax on the ballot, this money we’re trying to get is not free money,” he said. “It’s coming from our neighbors and some of those folks are struggling.”
Tony Wold, associate superintendent of business services, said the district recognizes that even without the new tax, “our community is feeling the burden of taxes.” But he said the district has identified more than $1 billion in facilities needs “and that is only going to go up” if the district waits.
The school board has not yet identified which specific projects among all of those listed in the ballot measure would be funded with the money. The bond measure states that the final costs have not yet been determined and that based on these costs, some projects “may be delayed or may not be completed.”
The district plans to pay for placing the bond measure on the ballot, estimated at $256,700 to $385,000, from revenue in its operating budget set aside for legal fees, which won’t be needed this year, Wold said.
Elections and EducationEast BayEast BayFeaturedMatthew DuffySchool Construction BondsTony WoldWest Contra Costa Unified School District
Leave a Reply to Jeff Camp
John Irminger 2 months ago2 months ago
The report refers to only one type of WCCUSD expenditure - teacher salary ('teacher' includes counselors, librarians, nurses, etc - all non-admin certificated employees) as causing the budget problem. But teacher salary in WCCUSD is not the cause - because teacher salary has been flat, as a percentage of expenditures. In 2010-2011, 36.8% of expenditures was on teacher salary. In the projected (July) budget for 2019-2020, the teacher salary is 36.6%. In 2018-2019, the percentage … Read More
The report refers to only one type of WCCUSD expenditure – teacher salary (‘teacher’ includes counselors, librarians, nurses, etc – all non-admin certificated employees) as causing the budget problem. But teacher salary in WCCUSD is not the cause – because teacher salary has been flat, as a percentage of expenditures.
In 2010-2011, 36.8% of expenditures was on teacher salary. In the projected (July) budget for 2019-2020, the teacher salary is 36.6%. In 2018-2019, the percentage was 35.0%, and in 2017-2018, the year the raise was negotiated, 33.5% went to teachers. CTA recommends that 38% to 43% of a district’s budget go to teacher salary – and in similar size, but high performing districts like San Ramon Valley USD, that is what we find. SRVUSD spends $143 mil out of its $356 mil total expenditures – or about 41%. WCCUSD spends $132 mil out of $360 mil total expenditures – or about 35.6%. Given that there are still unfilled teaching positions in WCCUSD, market theory would hold that salary isn’t high enough in WCCUSD – as would the stronger academic performance of districts that pay relatively well.
Jeff Camp 2 months ago2 months ago
Local property tax-funded school bonds (like the one discussed here) are the biggest contributor to school construction and upkeep. State school bonds (like Prop 13 on the upcoming March ballot) provide crucial matching funds. For an up-to-date explainer about how all this works visit https://ed100.org/blog/school-facilities-in-california-who-pays (available in Spanish, too).
M 2 months ago2 months ago
That is ridiculous! Increased in taxpayer property tax? Does the board recognize some folks live pay check to pay check? I am why the district push to have students take for PSAT/AP test, and guess what kids don’t care! Guess what the district pays for it. How much does that cost? The district also needs to look at some teachers who are burned out, or don’t want to teach anymore … these cost district so much money.
Raul 2 months ago2 months ago
They held this vote at midnight! So no one was there to counter! So many things wrong here: 1. Dr. Wold made many inaccurate statements. Charter schools do not have access to bonds. Given the animosity against parent school choice, I have a feeling they will mobilize against this measure. 2. There is no money in the budget for legal. One of the members even said that nigh that there was only 9k left in that line … Read More
They held this vote at midnight! So no one was there to counter! So many things wrong here:
1. Dr. Wold made many inaccurate statements. Charter schools do not have access to bonds. Given the animosity against parent school choice, I have a feeling they will mobilize against this measure.
2. There is no money in the budget for legal. One of the members even said that nigh that there was only 9k left in that line item.
3. They are taking the 15 million of dollars to pay this years debt from the stashed monies for retirees. This is where the union cannibalizes itself because of there is no bailout, the district will be short another 15 million plus interest!
The irony here is that the State Superintendent of Schools was a former WCCUSD board member not too long ago. Now, he will have to oversee this broken school district when it fails in 2020 and then the skeletons will surely come out!
Meanwhile, poor kids of color in Richmond and San Pablo have the Fearless Five Bunch of board members who look more and more angry, unhealthy and bitter from one meeting to the next. Ay Dios! Buckle up!
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CY19 December Journal
Donate & Download the December 2019 Journal PDF
Immutability as a Service
Debunking Bitcoin’s natural long-term power-law corridor of growth
Bitcoin Operating System
Could Bitcoin’s privacy benefit from Litecoin’s EB MimbleWimble proposal?
A Look at Innovation in Bitcoin’s Technology Stack
Bitcoin’s Missionaries vs Wall Street’s Mercenaries
Tweetstorm: A Decade in Bitcoin
Ignorance about Bitcoin Disguised as Caution
Cryptocurrency Is Most Useful for Breaking Laws and Social Constructs
Bitcoin Energy-Value Equivalence
Bitcoin’s Production Cost
Bitcoin and the Tyranny of Time Scarcity
The Passion of the Believers
Tweetstorm: A Decade of Bitcoin Technology
Bitcoin is a information channel
Bitcoin’s Eternal Struggle
Proof-of-Work, The Fundamental Laws of Physics And Nature
Information Theory of Money
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #78: 2019 Year-in-Review Special
Bitcoin As a Startup
The cat is out of the bag
Bending Bitcoin — The Principle of Hard Money
The rise of the individual
By Aleksander Svetski
Bitcoin network = “IaaS” (not SaaS)
“Bitcoin provides immutability as a service”
There are not many applications in the world that need immutability, and perhaps only a couple that need to build immutability as part of their core stack. It’s just too expensive!
Now…If we view immutability as a service — one that any application in the world can “anchor” or connect to, then we begin to reframe how we view Bitcoin, i.e.; as a broader network that settles transactions or states with value associated to them.
An example here will help.
There is NO reason (or very little reason) that any company (tech or otherwise) today needs to buy, host and maintain its own server infrastructure. It’s costly and it makes up only a fraction of what matters in their actual business. So they use a cloud-based service such as AWS.
You’ll also note that because of the economies of scale; there are only three real options:
They got in early and they poured billions upon billions into it.
Immutability is similar (but also different).
Similar because the infrastructure required to make something truly digitally immutable is extraordinary (perhaps even more than all of the combined infrastructure that AMZN, MSFT and GOOG operate), and it only makes sense that people will anchor to it as and when they need to.
Different because it’s not something that can be run by one or a few parties. A concept like immutability (and things that inherently need it, i.e.; money) are only so if broadly owned. In other words; the more distributed and decentralized the architecture and higher the number the owners, validators and nodes, the more robust, costly and therefore immutable it is. Should one (or a few) entities manage all of it; it then undermines the value proposition and defeats the entire purpose.
The Immutable Network
Immutability as a service is what will bring more economic activity to the Bitcoin network in the long run, again; similar to the internet. The internet started off as a way to connect computers at a distance, and over time (as more people used and trusted it) it evolved into this new communication network that provides data / packet routing as a service. We built everything on top — and the innovation has been extraordinary.
The next step is baking monetary value into a protocol owned by the collective, whose core tenet is absolute digital immutability. A network where you can’t turn back time (like in the real world).
All of the economic value from applications that require this feature, along with any broader monetary / banking / capital or financial applications that require an absolute guarantee of the following key functions:
Will accrue on it.
And as I’ve stated ad-nauseum, the more economic activity that occurs on and on top of the Bitcoin network, the more immutable and secure it will become. It’s compounding, it is self reinforcing, it has already hit a critical mass, and it’s now a runaway train.
Bitcoin is the autonomous digital network with the highest possible guarantee of the three core functions of money & finance.
Other consensus mechanisms
There are, and there will continue to be lots of other consensus mechanisms created. Some that might work; most that definitely won’t.
They may be used on their own networks, for applications that are either private, proprietary; or for applications that don’t require an absolute guarantee of immutability and security.
I personally don’t believe any money- related or high value applications will run on their own networks (except in vain over the next as this space evolves) because networks, especially those where the broad population participate, generally converge to unity.
It’s why we largely have one internet; one set of protocols for email; why we all use AC power; why, within a particular jurisdiction; the network of language converges to one, and similarly so with money (there is one USD in USA, likewise one AUD in AUS).
In fact — we see this as the world’s become more “global”.
English hit it’s critical mass, attained the primary network effect and it’s now more functional to speak English in most places around the world.
Aside from converging to unity due to efficiency and practicality, the world can probably only sustain ONE absolute, immutable, uncensorable, secure proof of work chain — because it’s expensive!
This chain is likely (at this stage at least) to be Bitcoin.
If we had to run proof of work for everything; we’d destroy the planet (plus it assumes nobody trusts each other for anything, which is a bigger problem anyway), and;
a) If someone wants to use it as a service; they’re going to go to the one that’s got the highest guarantee. That in itself will increase that network’s guarantee; leading to that self-reinforcing recursive effect I described earlier.
b) Furthermore; if you do have a novel, “light” consensus mechanism, that’s fast — you could in future anchor it to something like Bitcoin as and when you need to substantiate any claim or make a final judgement.
It’s this line of logic that leads me to believe most of the economic value will be swallowed up by the Bitcoin Network over the long term, not to mention the new concepts and innovations that will emerge using the ingredients of immutability and verification — like how facebook and instagram emerged from the internet.
In the next chapter, we’re going to explore the idea of Bitcoin as a new “Monetary Operating System”. Think of it like a computer operating system, eg; MacOS.
We can call it the BoS (very fitting).
Download the full guide at:
https://bitcointimes.news
By Marcel Burger
Some models are useful, some fail to meet required underlying assumptions.
After PlanB wrote his (by now) famous piece on the relation between Bitcoin’s stock-to-flow ratio, a lot of people tried to debunk his model, including the author of this piece. It also inspired a lot of people to develop a competing model. But to my knowledge until today no-one succeeded in either a successful academically valid rejection of the model, or to come with a better model. One person in particular keeps coming back saying his model does a better job. Harold Christopher Burger’s idea was to build a comparable model, but instead of taking the natural logarithm of the stock to flow ratio as an independent variable, he thought the natural logarithm of time would be a better input. He reasoned that stock-to-flow is a function of time, so time itself must perform better. Even though Nick has demonstrated repeatedly (here for instance) how PlanB’s model is just better, Harold keeps claiming his work is superior. Time to take a closer look at his model and either applaud him for doing a fantastic job, or just send it (=his model) to the graveyard where it can take a rest with other failed attempts.
Regression again
Just like PlanB’s work, Harold’s work is also based on Ordinary Least Squares Regression. So, we check to see whether all the required assumptions are met. I have mentioned those assumptions as well in the first piece in which I reviewed PlanB’s model. Here they are listed once more.
(1) The expected value of the error term is zero (which means that on average the regression should be correct)
(2) The error and the independent variables should be independent.
(3) The error term should be homoskedastic (i.e. error terms have the same variance)
(4) There should be zero correlation between different error terms (i.e. autocorrelation is excluded)
After checking whether these hold, I’ll also take a look if cointegration applies here even though cointegration with time doesn’t make much sense. I’ll follow the same procedure as followed when reviewing PlanB’s work.
Data and Model
To build the model I used the CoinMetrics dataset which can be found here. All data before a price tag for bitcoin was known is discarded. The first day of the dataset is presented as day 1, the second day as day 2 and so on. So we’re counting the days as of day the first price tag is available. We take natural logarithms of both the price tags and the day counts. So our data starts like this:
Start of the dataset with time as days counted since start of the set
Start of the dataset with time as days counted since Jan 1st 1970 (UNIX)
Start of the dataset with time as days counted since bitcoin’s Genesis block (Jan 3rd 2009)
Building the model and testing assumptions
Before we start checking whether the assumptions hold up, we’ll start with some visual inspections of the data. Let’s see how the log-log chart looks like in case we work with time as days past since first measure. Time is a relative concept, so the performance of the model will be dependent of the point in time we consider as point 0.
Relation between ln time and ln price as time is days since first available price tag for bitcoin
Another logical starting point would be January 1st 1970 as day 1, we’ll go with that and look how the relation changes.
Relation between ln time and ln price as time is days since 1–1–1970
Relation between ln time and ln price as time is days since January 3rd 2009
Starting to count the days as of the 3rd of Jan 2009 while first prices are not available seems a bit strange to me. It feels a bit like cherry picking the most suitable relative time series. This is what Harold used in his model, so we go with it as well here. Taking the first two would not return meaningful results as there would be too much non-linearity in those relations anyway. I would like to remark that this is where the model already starts to become shaky.
After running the regression, it’s time to take a closer look at the regression results and to research the model residuals. Here’s the regression result:
Regression results for ln time vs ln price
Even though R-squared is quite high, R-squared is not a very meaningful metric when we evaluate the regression of two non-stationary time series. It often turns out to be quite high when we’re using trending series and we should be aware of spurious regression. Further, the coefficients seem to be both significant, but the main question is whether the underlying model assumptions are met.
Residual analysis
We’ll take a look at the residuals to check for possible issues with the model.
Plots of the residuals that follow from the regression
There’s a very clear pattern observable in both plots, which tells us that the residuals are likely to be autocorrelated, which would mean that the 4th assumption is not met. Next to that, we can also clearly see that the variance differs over time, which would indicate that the 3th assumption is violated as well. Both violations would lead to a falsification of the model.
We will test for autocorrelation to make sure that this is an issue. The Durbin Watson statistic turns out to be 0.005 (check OLS results above) which is much smaller than the allowed lower bound value (see DW table in the Appendix).
Sofar, I would conclude the model’s fundamentals are no good, and the only reason to not reject it, would be in case we can show the variables are cointegrated.
Cointegration and Order of Integration
In order for two time series to be possibly cointegrated, those time series have to be integrated of the same order. Time to check how the both series are integrated, as they are both clearly non-stationary (both series trend up). Let’s have a look at the original series and their first differenced series. (Differencing means taking the difference of two consecutive values in the same time series.)
Variables over time and their first differenced series
The charts above show that both time series are not stationary. Ln(price) is integrated of the first order as it shows to be stationary after differencing the series once. For log(time) we have to look further, as differencing once didn’t result in a stationary series. We keep on differencing to find the integration order for log(time), which resulted in the following:
Log(time) seems to be 6th order integrated.
Log(time) seems to be integrated of the 6ht order. This tells us that both variables are integrated of a different order and therefore cointegration is off the table. No need to run any further checks or statistical tests, as this requirement is not met.
EDIT: The 6th order integration as mentioned above is not proven by any test. In fact I learned that it even might not be reaching stationarity at all. The graph showing the sixth order difference, illustrates that we reach the limitations of the computer, as we witness floating point noise. For the conclusion it doesn’t matter. Special thanks to Hmatejx for pointing this out.
The model as developed by Harold Christopher Burger (more detail here: https://medium.com/coinmonks/bitcoins-natural-long-term-power-law-corridor-of-growth-649d0e9b3c94) is falsified. Since the model is falsified there is no need to compare it to any other model and PlanB’s stock to flow model in particular. A first threshold to compare a model to other models is that it should meet the fundamental assumptions.
Durbin Watson table
https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25
https://medium.com/coinmonks/bitcoins-natural-long-term-power-law-corridor-of-growth-649d0e9b3c94
CoinMetrics Datasets, https://coinmetrics.io/data-downloads/
M. Verbeek, A Guide To Modern Econometrics
http://www.real-statistics.com/statistics-tables/durbin-watson-table/
Bitcoin is a new “Monetary Network”, not a “Payments Technology”.
Bitcoin is the first time we’ve combined Money as a unit, with Money as a Network, into one thing.
More on this here:
“Why Bitcoin Matters”
And because it’s so different, it’s hard to wrap our heads around it.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that nobody really understands money, but most people get payments. Payments are easy: move money, and because it’s been handled digitally for the last 20–30yrs now, it’s even easier to grasp.
But money, that’s a much broader, more foundational concept, and to understand Bitcoin better; we’ll need to understand its real innovation, and in the process separate ‘money’ from ‘payments’.
As we’ve established, Immutability is derivative of cost. It’s this cost of validating transactions and maintaining the network of distributed but consistent ledgers that gives something like Bitcoin its immutability.
Bitcoin’s true innovation was an autonomous network that can establish the authenticity and validity of the state of the broadly distributed ledger.
The ONLY advantage of using this type of costly infrastructure is for actions that require a large degree of trust and assurance, those that should never fail and those that should not be easily reversed. There are a limited set of these, i.e. every transaction / or state change that happens in the world does NOT need this.
The world works pretty fine right now.
Could we make it better by stamping a “net state” to something immutable once a week / once a month?
Yes — definitely. But every transaction? No way. It’s just overkill.
Bitcoin is the most secure / immutable network that exists, NOT because of its “blockchain”, but because of its elaborate and expensive authentication mechanism. Your laptop has the ability to process hundreds of thousands of transactions a minute. That process is trivial. Payments is trivial.
Autonomous, distributed validation is the innovation.
And this is where people go astray.
People don’t ‘get’ bitcoin because they perceive it as some form of payments technology, or some “blockchain” mechanism (which they don’t really understand) for moving funny internet money (which they also don’t understand). That’s not what Bitcoin is.
Bitcoin is a complete reinvention of “money” — the world’s oldest social contract and society’s most foundational layer.
To understand its impact, you need to have a broad understanding of both networks and money. The problem is, most people don’t. In fact, nobody really understands what money is, because it’s not taught anywhere. Few can define it, whether they’re in banking, finance, technology, fintech, capital markets, and especially payments — so they apply their biases to it, and completely miss the point.
It’s like discussing the structure of the egyptian pyramids with your pet goldfish. The goldfish simply lacks the context.
Money requires an understanding of our evolution as a species, anthropology, biology, social engineering, psychology, game theory and what I like to call “the societal stack.” Discussing this is well outside the scope of this section, but I’ll touch on an area which I hope will give you a reference point, the societal stack, in a subsequent section of this edition of The Bitcoin Times.
The complexity of network dynamics doesn’t make the job of understanding Bitcoin any easier. I will touch on this further in a dedicated section — but suffice it to say networks are just as foreign to our intuitive understanding of the world as the pyramids are to the goldfish — the track record of the experts adds weight to this.
Back to payments VS money.
Bitcoin is not a “payments technology”. It’s fundamentally a reinvention if money. Like the motor vehicle was a reinvention of transport — not a better horse and cart. Same as the internet. It reinvented the fabric upon which we communicate. It reinvented the way information is transported. It did not push more, richer or smarter “data” through the phone networks infrastructure.
It used that infrastructure as physical onramps; but the internet is not the cables, or the hardware — it’s so much larger.
That’s why it swallowed them up and is the foundation upon which the majority of today’s society operates. And what’s more, the internet is only picking up speed. Bitcoin is where the internet was in the late 80s. Still largely misunderstood. People are still arguing about speed of payments! They don’t realise that “payments” as we know them today will completely transform.
The same way we’re no longer talking about the quality of the phone call and number of phone calls this “internet thing” will support, we will see new conversations emerge for what can be done on Bitcoin.
The world is changing. The internet was only the beginning….Bitcoin is the next chapter.
Speaking of next chapters, as we near the end of the Medium series for the first edition of The Bitcoin Times, we’re going to begin exploring networks, how the function and dig into where there are some high level conceptual similarities to the internet.
By Pieter Wuille
It’s not that simple.
I would personally very much like to see Confidential Transactions in Bitcoin. Hiding transaction amounts by default - while not a silver bullet for privacy on its own - would make CoinJoin a lot more powerful (right now you need to use matching amounts because you’d leak linkage otherwise anyway). I think it’s fair to say that it may help achieve a level of privacy that is very hard to reach with existing on-chain techniques.
Confidential Transactions however very fundamentally change how transactions work, as cleartext amounts are currently expected in transactions. Without (extremely invasive) hard fork, this cannot be changed. Even if they’re suddenly permitted, nobody can force existing wallets to suddenly adopt them. Doing so would break compatibility, and go against very basic expectations of not invalidating existing non-broadcast transactions. Such a change being successful probably implies Bitcoin lost some of its most valuable properties to begin with. Thus: CT (or any form of amount hiding) has to be opt-in.
But opt-in doesn’t need to imply opt-in on a per-transaction basis. An extension block effectively does that: by having two clearly delineated sides and a need for explicit, possibly slow/expensive, operations to transfer between them, you create a world where CT is the default, and possibly even cheaper than the other side. Sure, people still have the option to use the legacy side, and for a long time they probably will due to compatibility reasons, but in the long term it probably means much better privacy than any solution with per-transaction choice for CT or not. It turns out that CT-in-an-EB is also far simpler and more efficient than trying to hack it into the existing transaction structure.
So, I believe that Extension Blocks are the only (somewhat) practical way of introducing CT to Bitcoin.
That said, there are many caveats:
CT transactions are far more computationally expensive and larger than current transactions, and it would be very unfortunate if the more private choice ends up being more expensive to use.
CT introduces a much stronger assumption on cryptography than we currently have. You can’t just run through the UTXO set, sum up the values, and see that it doesn’t exceed the expected subsidy.
In fact, CT inherently either must make privacy condition on cryptographic assumptions, or soundness (=printing of money). Bitcoin currently relies on the ECDLP assumption for theft, but this can (in the long term) be upgraded to another assumption if necessary (e.g. because we believe ECDLP is on shaky grounds, quantum computing, …). With CT this is not so easy anymore, as this assumption will now cover amounts as well.
It’s a pretty damn big change that would need a huge demand from the ecosystem to be successful.
All the same issues apply to MW, and more. MW is a more advanced form of CT that has an even more invasive impact on basic data structures, and probably simply cannot be done without an EB at all, as it is so fundamentally different from Bitcoin’s current blockchain (the MW blockchain can shrink over time!). It also removes Script or even the ability to have something Script-like.
Let me come back to point (3) above. There is a very fundamental result in zero-knowledge proof techniques that you cannot have both unconditional privacy and unconditional soundness. We however do know of ways to have either unconditional privacy or unconditional soundness, so there is a design choice between them.
CT with unconditional privacy but computational soundness is the most common choice. This means that if somehow ECDLP breaks (math breakthrough, unexpected structure in secp256k1, quantum computer), someone could undetectably print coins, but the privacy of past (and future) transactions would be unaffected. To the best of my knowledge, Monero, ZCash, Grin, all use this model.
CT with unconditional soundness but computational privacy is also possible. This means that an ECDLP break would not let anyone print coins, but the privacy of future (and past) transactions would be at risk. Unfortunately, this choice is much less efficient, and pretty much no systems use it.
Given Bitcoin’s design focus on controlled inflation, I expect that many people would prefer the second model over the first if a choice needs to be made. There is however also a point to be made that if ECDLP is broken, the future of the system is inherently at risk, but we may not want to give up the privacy of the past when that happens - a point in favor of the first model.
The nice (or scary…) thing about an Extension Block based CT design is that we could have either, or both, and without actually directly affecting the value of the legacy chain. You’d need to move coins explicitly to the CT side, and if unexpected inflation would happen there, simply not all of it would be able to move back to the legacy side. Unexpectedly, this may actually mean a different exchange rate for coins on both sides, if the public’s trust in the security for one is seriously affected.
By Lucas Nuzzi
Bitcoin has come a long way over the past ten years. Relative to the first iteration of its software, the quality and reliability of current implementations has remarkably improved. Rapidly and organically, Bitcoin was able to lure a legion of developers to dedicate thousands of hours to improve, and at times revamp, most of its underlying codebase.
Nevertheless, Bitcoin is still the same. Much like a constitution, the core set of consensus rules that define its monetary properties, such as its algorithmic inflation and hard-coded supply, remain unchanged. Time and time again, factions have attempted to change these core properties, but all hostile takeovers thus far have failed. It’s often a painful process, but one that highlights and solidifies two of Bitcoin’s biggest virtues:
No single party can dictate how Bitcoin evolves
The lack of centralized control protects Bitcoin’s monetary properties
Interestingly, these are the rules that attract cypherpunks and institutional investors alike. These are the rules that make bitcoin an unprecedented type of money. However, these are also the rules that make developing software atop Bitcoin more challenging than any other digital asset. In essence, Bitcoin’s constitution awards developers a limited toolkit so that they can’t infringe upon its monetary policy. There’s too much at stake to move fast and break things.
That means innovation in Bitcoin requires creativity, patience, and perhaps most importantly, ego-minimization. After all, the fundamental rules embedded in Bitcoin’s constitution ultimately supersede technology. This is why Silicon Valley has had a hard time understanding Bitcoin’s value proposition, it’s not just a technology, financial instrument, or consumer application; it’s an entire monetary system supported by technology. Changing Bitcoin’s constitution requires a quasi-political process that can infringe upon its monetary properties, therefore, technological innovation is implemented as modules.
As often pointed out, Bitcoin’s modular approach to innovation is analogous to the evolution of the Internet’s protocol suite, whereby layers of different protocols specialized in specific functions. Emails were handled by SMTP, files by FTP, web pages by HTTP, user addressing by IP and packet routing by TCP. Over the years, each of these protocols evolved to provide the full experience you’re having this very second.
In Spencer Bogart’s excellent post on the emerging Bitcoin technology stack, he makes the case that we are now witnessing the beginning of Bitcoin’s own protocol suite. As it turned out, the inflexibility of Bitcoin’s core layer gave birth to several additional protocols that specialize in various applications, like Lightning’s BOLT standard for payment channels. Innovation is both vibrant and (relatively) safe, as this modular approach minimizes systemic monetary risks.
So much is happening at the many layers of Bitcoin’s technology stack, it can be incredibly difficult to keep track of emerging solutions. The diagram below is an attempt to map all relatively new initiatives and showcase a more complete picture of Bitcoin’s technology stack. It is not exhaustive, and it does not signal any endorsement for specific initiatives. It is, nevertheless, impressive to see that innovation is being pushed on all fronts; from layer 2 technologies, to emerging smart contract solutions:
There has been a lot of talk lately about the rate of adoption of the Lightning Network; Bitcoin’s most prominent layer 2 technology. Critics often point at an apparent decline in the number of channels and total BTC locked in Lightning; two metrics frequently used to evaluate user adoption. Although the community has converged on such metrics, it is important to point out that they are fundamentally flawed given the way Lightning works under the hood.
One of the most underrated virtues of the Lightning Network is its straightforward privacy properties. Since Lightning does not rely on global validation of all state changes (i.e. its own blockchain), users can transact privately over using additional techniques and network overlays, like Tor. At this point, we can estimate the percentage of private usage of the Lightning network by analyzing the number of channel opening transactions on-chain, and comparing that to the number of public channels off-chain. Christian Decker estimates that 41% of Lightning channels are private:
Source: Christian Decker
Activity happening within these channels is not captured by popular Lightning explorers. As such, an increase in private usage of Lightning results in a decrease in what can be publicly measured, leading observers to erroneously conclude that adoption is down. While it is true that Lightning must overcome substantial usability barriers before it can enjoy wide adoption, we must stop using misleading metrics to make assertions about the current state of the network. As Decker pointed out in his talk at the latest Lightning Conference in Berlin, even the above estimate of private vs. public channels is flawed, as the adoption of Schnorr signatures will make channel-opening transactions indistinguishable from regular transactions.
Another interesting recent development in the field of layer 2 privacy was the creation of WhatSat, a private messaging system atop Lightning. This project is a modification of the Lightning deamon which allows for relayers of private messages (the messengers that connect the entities communicating) to be compensated for their services via micropayments. This decentralized, censorship-and-spam-resistant chat was enabled by innovations in LND itself, such as recent improvements in the lightning-onion, Lightning’s own onion routing protocol.
The growth of Lapps, or Lightning Applications, demonstrate the wide applicability of these innovations when it comes to consumer applications, from a Lightning-powered cloud computing VPS to an image hosting service that shares ad revenue via microtransactions. And that’s just layer 2 innovation within Lightning. More generally, we define Layer 2 as a suite of applications that use Bitcoin’s base layer as a court where exogenous events are reconciled and disputes are settled. As such, the theme of data anchoring on Bitcoin’s blockchain is much broader, with companies like Microsoft pioneering a decentralized ID system atop Bitcoin. Such initiatives increase the demand for on-chain reconciliation and are instrumental for the long-term development of a Bitcoin fee market.
There are also a number of projects attempting to bring back expressive smart contract functionality to Bitcoin in a safe and responsible way. This is a significant development, because starting in 2010, several of the original Bitcoin opcodes (the operations that determine what Bitcoin is able to compute) were removed from the protocol. This came after a series of terrifying bugs were unveiled, which led Satoshi himself to disable some of the functionality of Script, Bitcoin’s programming language.
Over the years, it became crystal clear that there are non-trivial security risks that accompany highly-expressive smart contract functionality. The common rule of thumb is that the more functionality is introduced to a virtual machine (the collective verification mechanism that processes opcodes), the more unpredictable its programs will be. More recently, however, we have seen new approaches to smart contract architecture in Bitcoin that can minimize unpredictability, but also provide vast functionality.
The devise of a new approach to Bitcoin smart contracts called Merkleized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST) has ignited a new wave of supporting technologies that attempt to optimize the trade-offs between security and functionality. Most prominently is Taproot, an elegant implementation of the MAST structure that enables an entire application to be expressed as a Merkle Tree, whereby each branch of the tree represents a different execution outcome. Along with Taproot will come a programming language called Tapscript, which can be used to more easily express the spend conditions associated with each branch of the Merkle Tree.
Another interesting innovation that has recently resurfaced is a new architecture for the implementation of covenants, or spend conditions, on Bitcoin transactions. Originally proposed as a thought experiment by Greg Maxwell back in 2013, covenants are an approach to limit the way balances can be spent, even as their custody changes. Although the idea has existed for nearly seven years, covenants were impractical to be implemented before the advent of Taproot. Now, a new opcode called OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (formerly known as OP_SECURETHEBAG) is leveraging this new technology to potentially enable covenants to be safely implemented in Bitcoin.
At first glance, covenants are incredibly useful in the context of lending (and perhaps bitcoin-based derivatives) as they enable the creation of policies like clawbacks to be attached to specific BTC balances. But their potential impact on the usability of Bitcoin goes vastly beyond lending. Covenants can allow for the implementation of things like Bitcoin Vaults, which, in the context of custody, provide the equivalent of a second private key that allows a party that has been hacked to “freeze” stolen funds. There are so many other applications of this technology, like Non-Interactive Payment Channels, Congestion Controlled Transactions, CoinJoins, it truly deserves a standalone post. For more on this, check out Jeremy Rubin’s BIP draft.
It is important to note that Schnorr signatures are the technological primitive that make all of these new approaches to smart contracts possible. After Schnorr activates, even edgier techniques being can be theorized, such as Scriptless Scripts, which could enable fully private and scalable Bitcoin smart contracts to be represented as digital signatures (as opposed to opcodes). Similarly, Discreet Log Contracts also employ the idea of representing a smart contract’s execution outcome as a digital signature for better privacy and scalability. Together, these new approaches may enable novel smart contract applications to be built atop Bitcoin and Schnorr is the basis of it.
There have also been some interesting developments in mining protocols, especially those used by mining pool constituents. Even though the issue of centralization in Bitcoin mining is often wildly exaggerated, it is true that there are power structures retained by mining pool operators that can be further decentralized. Namely, pool operators can decide which transactions will be mined by all pool constituents, which grants them considerable power. Over time, some operators have abused this power by censoring transactions, mining empty blocks and reallocating hashing output to other networks without the authorization of constituents.
Thankfully, there are technologies that are attempting to flip that power structure upside down. One of the most substantial changes coming to Bitcoin mining is the second version of Stratum, the most popular protocol used in mining pools. Stratum V2 is a complete overhaul that implements BetterHash, a secondary protocol that enables mining pool constituents to decide the composition of the block they will mine and not the other way around. Stratum V2 also implements several optimizations, and allows mining pool constituents to better communicate and coordinate.
Another interesting development in the mining industry that should contribute to more stability is reignited interest in hashrate and difficulty derivatives. These can be particularly useful for mining operations that wish to hedge against hashrate fluctuations and difficulty readjustments. While these derivatives have yet to be productized, this marks an interesting evolution in the industrialization of Bitcoin mining.
After our report on Schnorr signatures, some privacy-coin advocates were outraged by the suggestion that sufficient privacy may be optionally achieved in Bitcoin at some point. Although this suggestion may challenge theses around the long-term value proposition of privacy assets, there are a host of emerging protocols that can bring better privacy into Bitcoin. Although it is likely that privacy in Bitcoin will continue to be more of an art than a science, there have been interesting innovations on this front that are worth highlighting.
Before we delve into specific privacy innovations, it’s important to highlight that the biggest impediment to private transactions across digital assets is the fact that most solutions are half-baked. Privacy assets that focus on transaction-graph privacy often neglect network-level privacy, and vice versa. Both vectors suffer from a lack of maturity and usage, which makes transactions easier to de-anonymize via statistical traceability analysis at either the P2P network layer or the blockchain layer.
Thankfully, there are several projects pushing boundaries on both fronts.
When it comes to transaction-graph privacy, solutions like P2EP and CheckTemplateVerify are interesting because privacy becomes a by-product of efficiency. As novel approaches to CoinJoin, these solutions can increase the adoption of private transactions by users that are solely motivated by lower transaction fees. Although privacy guarantees are still suboptimal under a CoinJoin model, unshielded sent amounts can still be beneficial, as they preserve the auditability of Bitcoin’s supply and free float.
If lower transaction fees become a motivator and lead to an increase in Bitcoin’s anonymity set (the % of UTXOs that are CoinJoin outputs), de-anonymization via statistical clustering analysis will become even more subjective than it already is. Some blockchain analysis companies have been able to trick law enforcement agencies into believing an assigned probability that a UTXO belongs to a specific user, but the underlying model is already extremely nuanced and fragile. If the majority of UTXOs become CoinJoin outputs, that might break existing approaches to clustering.
Before that can happen, there’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done on the usability front so that all Bitcoin users, tech savy or not, have equal access to privacy mechanisms. Beyond P2EP and CheckTemplateVerify, a recent development in usability was the proposal of SNICKER (Simple Non-Interactive CoinJoin with Keys for Encryption Reused), a novel way to generate CoinJoins with untrusted peers. SNICKER combines several technologies to grant users access to CoinJoin transactions without having to trust or interact with their peers.
Progress is also noticeable in protocols that aim to improve the privacy and efficiency of P2P communications. Over the course of 2019, the privacy-preserving network protocol Dandelion was successfully tested across multiple cryptonetworks. Even though privacy in transaction propagation is not a silver bullet when it comes to the full spectrum of P2P communication, protocols like Dandelion can still meaningfully increase user privacy by hiding the originating IP address of a nodes broadcasting a transaction.
A final development in Bitcoin’s networking stack worth highlighting is a new transaction relay protocol called Erlay. Although still at a very early development stage, Erlay is an important innovation because it can considerably reduce the bandwidth requirements of running a Bitcoin full node. If implemented, Erlay’s efficiency gains can enable users to participate in transaction relay, which is bandwidth intensive, and continuously validate the chain, especially in countries where Internet Service Providers impose caps on bandwidth.
The Tip of the Iceberg
It is incredibly difficult to track all the innovation happening in Bitcoin, and this post is just a scratch on the surface. This brings us to the key takeaway of this piece: Bitcoin, in its totality, is a constantly evolving suite of protocols. The modular approach to innovation described here is important, as it plays a key role in minimizing politicism in the evolution of Bitcoin and protects its fundamental monetary properties. Remember this article the next time someone claims Bitcoin is a static technology.
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By Anthony Pompliano
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To investors, There are a lot of common misconceptions surrounding Bitcoin. These usually revolve around cybersecurity, energy consumption, monetary competition, or some other nuanced element of the digital currency and the tertiary impact on the world. But one misconception is rarely spoken of — the difference between mercenaries and missionaries. This framework was developed by John Doerr, the famous venture capitalist who led Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for many years, and was first presented publicly when he said “we need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”
The Harvard Business Review did a great job explaining what Doerr meant by this in an April 2016 article:
As Doerr explained to an audience at Stanford Business School, mercenaries are “opportunistic.” They’re “all about the pitch and the deal” and are eager to sprint for short-term payoffs. Missionaries, on the other hand, are “strategic.” They’re all about “the big idea” and partnerships that last, and they understand that “this business of innovation is something that takes a long time” — it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Mercenaries have “a lust for making money,” while missionaries have “a lust for making meaning.” Mercenaries obsess about the competition and fret over “financial statements,” while missionaries obsess about customers and fret over “values statements.” Mercenaries display an attitude of entitlement and revel in the “aristocracy of the founders,” while missionaries exude an attitude of contribution and welcome good ideas wherever they originate. Mercenaries strive for success; missionaries aspire to “success and significance.”
John Doerr used the framework to talk about entrepreneurial teams, so what exactly does this have to do with Bitcoin and finance?
More than you would think. Generally, Wall Street is full of mercenaries. These individuals are focused on profits. They operate in a cutthroat environment where everyone in a deal is trying to screw over everyone else. Employees will leave in a heartbeat for bigger bonuses or more opportunity. There is very little loyalty and most people make decisions optimized around personal gain.
This is almost the complete opposite of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Rather than mercenaries, Bitcoin has benefited from a long list of missionaries. Whether it is Wences Casares teaching Silicon Valley luminaries one after the other about Bitcoin in the early days or Andreas Antonopoulos traveling around the world to educate millions of people for free, Bitcoiners believe in something much more important than profits. They believe in a better world. They see Bitcoin as a way to break the current systematic issues plaguing society. Simply, they believe that Bitcoin can change the world.
When mercenaries and missionaries compete with each other, the missionaries usually prevail. They believe in what they are doing on a much deeper level. They are willing to go to greater lengths to succeed. They can endure more pain. They refuse to give up. The mission is so important that the missionary is willing to dedicate their lives to seeing it come to fruition.
This fanaticism is what has driven Bitcoin from non-existence to one of the most popular currencies in the world in only one decade. People are drawn into the Bitcoin ecosystem for many reasons initially — some for profits, some for the technology, some for the polymath-like complexity — but almost anyone who stays around through the bull and bear market cycles has a belief in something much more important than profits.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when we evaluate what people are doing with their Bitcoin. Twitter analyst @Rhythmtrader recently looked at how many people have moved their Bitcoin in the last year and found that more than 11,500,000 haven’t moved at all.
These people don’t care about the USD exchange value of Bitcoin. They believe in Bitcoin. They won’t be shaken out by price movements. In their mind, 1 BTC equals 1 BTC. We aren’t building a new trading asset, we are building a new financial system that decentralizes power from a corrupt and rigged system.
For Bitcoiners, this isn’t an investment. It is a protest. A peaceful protest against the system. Better yet, Bitcoin is a revolution. A revolution that stands to change the world in ways that most people can’t even comprehend yet. If successful, Bitcoin will usher in a new era where there is a separation of state and money. One where people are asked to trust transparent software systems over humans.
Quite literally, Bitcoin will disrupt the power structure of the world by simply surviving. For some, this is a scary world. For others, it is a necessary world.
And this is the largest misconception in the institutional investment world. The decision to allocate capital is not about today’s price and where it may go in the future. It is much more simple than that. Most institutional investors have 100% of their portfolio exposure in the dollar-denominated, fiat financial system.
There is now a new financial system being built. An alternative. Plan B. By choosing not to allocate any capital to this new financial system, institutional investors are claiming 100% confidence that the legacy system will survive. That the legacy system will prevail.
But if an institution thinks there is even a 1% chance that this new financial system will thrive, they must allocate capital to that system or risk missing one of the most disruptive events of our lifetime. The allocation percentages of the new and old system should mirror the confidence level that an institution has in each financial system winning over the long run.
But institutions aren’t missionaries. They are mercenaries. They play games of probability. They underwrite risk. They are unemotional about their investments. So we shouldn’t expect them to have more than 1-5% exposure to the new world.
But Bitcoiners are the exact opposite. Bitcoin isn’t risky to them, not owning Bitcoin is risky. These missionaries believe in something that seems irrational to most. But if Bitcoiners are successful, the mission will seem obvious in hindsight.
Whenever I see missionaries competing with mercenaries, the choice is obvious. And to say that I believe in the future potential of what we are all building would be an understatement. The current system is broken for most people. They can’t get ahead. They have no way to fight back. The issues are systemic. And there won’t be a solution until we change the system.
Bitcoin is doing just that. As Rhythmtrader said so eloquently, “Hodlers of last resort are insane.” But in the future, the nocoiners will be seen as having been the insane ones.
-Pomp
2010 - Satoshi decentralizes Bitcoin by leaving his leadership role as its creator, and never again commenting on its development.
The Bitcoin community self-organizes, and begins to grow into new type of global institution.
2011 - The Silk Road showcases one of the biggest virtues of Bitcoin; it can’t be censored or confiscated. A drawback? It’s not private.
The Mt. Gox fiasco highlights infrastructural deficiencies; the lack of secure custody standards and the systemic risks imposed by exchanges.
2012 - BIP23 formalizes the concept of mining pools, an emerging structure that further decentralizes the power structures within Bitcoin.
BIP32 introduces HD keys & sets a new standard for Bitcoin custody and user onboarding via safer wallets.
2013 - BIP39 introduces mnemonic keys to Bitcoin.
➡️➡️For the first time in human history, you can store your wealth in your brain by memorizing 12 words. No centralized intermediaries needed. ⬅️⬅️
2014 - BIP42 makes it impossible for Bitcoin’s 21M cap to be infringed upon via continuous mining.
Mining industrializes and hashrate surpasses 100 PH/s for the first time.
Meanwhile, pundits claim Bitcoin is dead and that the future is “blockchain, the miraculous database”
2015 - On-chain volume hits an all time high and tensions are visible. The power structures in Bitcoin are tested with 9 competing block-size-increase BIPs.
We faced the question: Who controls Bitcoin?
Miners?❌ Developers?❌ Personalities? ❌ Users ✅
2016 - “The Bitcoin Lightning Network” is published.
As the risks of on-chain scaling become clear, promising alternatives like Lightning show that a layered, backwards-compatible approach to technological innovation is possible.
BIP114 introduces MAST and minds are blown. 🤯
2017 (a) - The global speculative bubble brings Bitcoin to the masses. Orange Bs can be seen everywhere.
Infrastructure is being pushed on all fronts; custody, markets, wallets, education.
Bitcoin becomes a liquid asset on a global scale. 🌎
2017 (b) - One of the most important events in Bitcoin history also takes place in ‘17: the SegWit2X fork.
There’s an attempt to highjack Bitcoin with plenty of enterprise support: the ultimate stress test of Bitcoin governance
USAF reinforces that users are the ones in charge
2018 - “Enterprise Blockchain” is now a sad meme.
The ecosystem outside of Bitcoin faces a series of hard realizations:
Scaling is hard, on-chain governance is flawed, deployment takes time, and you might have broken the law.
Institutions converge on BTC.
2019 - Bitcoin is now a movement with representatives everywhere; in media, government, traditional finance, tech. It’s like Fight Club, but rule #1 to only talk about it.
Bitcoin started this decade on the fringes.
We now have a bitcoiner in a US state senate.
Bitcoin had everything to die in multiple occasions over the course of this decade… it didn’t.
Its power structures were tested over and over again. Yet, here we are.
Who would’ve thought a leaderless system that converts electricity into money would’ve lasted this long?
As we approach a new decade of social anxieties, geopolitical tension and crazy monetary policy, you can be sure Bitcoin will still be here. There’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
I think Hal would’ve been proud. You too should start:
By Rollo McFloogle
Bitcoin has done a lot in its 11 years of existence. Perhaps one surprising role of Bitcoin has been exposing economic ignorance—namely the economics of money—of many people. I humbly include myself in that category of people (fortunately, it can also be an invaluable tool for helping you to learn the subject as well). Bitcoin is a nebulous and mysterious amalgam of technical computer science and economics to the newcomer. Very few people, even experts in one field or the other, can instantly grasp all that is Bitcoin. It takes even the best of minds some time to sort through and figure out.
We all can identify money. We use it a lot and think about it even more. It is absolutely instrumental in our ability to perform economic calculation, which is what we do when we use the information that prices provide to help us best direct resources to their most efficient uses. But while we can talk about any number of things about money, few people are actually able to explain what money truly is and how any given thing that is used as money came about.
This confusion is one of the things that pulls people into many incorrect conclusions about Bitcoin, including plenty of well-respected people. This includes, Jeffrey Tucker, who recently penned a piece on the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER) called “A Cautious Retrospective on Bitcoin.”
Tucker was an early enthusiastic proponent of Bitcoin, then got sucked into the Bitcoin Cash and altcoin hype, and now I’m not exactly sure how to categorize him.
In his AIER piece, Tucker lays out five reasons why he’s feeling a little bit more on the bearish side of Bitcoin and by doing so shows that he has some key misunderstandings of Bitcoin.
Let’s dive into his piece.
Before his list of five cautions, Tucker starts by showing two charts, one of transactions per day and the other of the USD exchange trade volume. He points out that transactions are at 2016 levels and exchange volumes are at 2017 levels. He then shows a third chart of wallet usage, which is steadily rising at an increasing rate, but that metric “belies the hope of a disintermediated money.”
Has Bitcoin taken a step backwards and is it on the decline? It’s ironic that Tucker, a man who like the rest of us scoffs at all the announcements that “Bitcoin is dead” during a bear market, would get so easily rattled in the latest lull following the by far biggest bull run to date. To be fair, he hasn’t bought the casket yet, but it is surprising that Tucker apparently believes that trading activity during a surge to almost $20,000 per bitcoin would sustain itself after the price correction. We all saw what was going on in late 2017. Everyone and their mother were trying to buy and sell Bitcoin. Once the price fell back down, did anyone really expect the people trying to get rich quickly to stay in the market?
Regardless of whether or not 2016 and 2017 were cherrypicked to compare metrics, Tucker’s problems are predicated from his idea that the health of Bitcoin’s adoption is based on how much it is transacted with. Since money’s primary use is as a medium of exchange, Tucker and many other critics of Bitcoin make the mistake of believing that money is only useful for spending in the present. They ignore that the delay of exchange, also known as saving, is also a perfectly valid—and not to mention absolutely critical—use of money. After all, what is money but a tool that transports current value across time and space for future uncertainty?
This describes money’s ability to function as a store of value, which as Michael Goldstein put it is “a metaphor for using a medium of exchange for exchange in the long term.” Bitcoin is still in its very early stages and those of us who see it as a way to shore up the attack surfaces that destroyed the gold standard believe that it will have a much greater value in the future as it monetizes around the world in the winner-take-all game of money. Meanwhile, fiat bolstered by legal tender laws is continuously inflated by central banks, pillaging the purchasing power of money. And we’ve seen the results of this: when money is expected to be worth less tomorrow than it is today, there is a strong incentive to get all the stuff you can exchange it for in the present. Everyone thinks about gratification today without regard for tomorrow. Prices are corrupted and economies have to absorb huge amounts of waste.
Thank goodness for sound money, the only medicine for this disease. When someone has both Bitcoin and fiat, he expects the value of the former to appreciate while he expects the latter to lose its value over time. Any rational economic actor will choose to spend his fiat while holding his Bitcoin whenever he can. This is Thiers’ law. He will also begin to demand payment in Bitcoin while charging a premium if someone must pay him in fiat. Eventually, everyone dumps their fiat on the greatest fools and it becomes so valueless that no one will accept it as payment even at great premiums. Since Bitcoin is now the only acceptable means of payment, it has become the common medium of exchange.
But since Tucker brought up numbers and charts as metrics for his proof that Bitcoin’s adoption is waning, let’s consider some of our own. It’s tough to point to a metric to show that people are using Bitcoin as a savings vehicle, but there certainly are things we can look at to check its health.
The first one is price in USD. Putting the y-axis on a logarithmic scale helps show the value appreciation of Bitcoin much more clearly.
Source: https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgMzm1g10zm2g25zl
What cannot be ignored is that while new bitcoins are being added to the supply through the mining process, if demand remained the same throughout this process, then the price would drop. Despite the local peaks and valleys, the overall trend of Bitcoin is a rising price, so demand must be increasing. Even if it’s only the current people in Bitcoin contributing to that demand, increases in price is a powerful signal to others that they should probably get in.
The other interesting metric to observe is Bitcoin’s hash rate, which is the number of hashes (guesses to solve a block) per second that the aggregate of miners makes across the network. In order to contribute hashes to the network, a miner must run software on specialized hardware. This hardware requires electricity, so mining Bitcoin with any chance of solving a block requires a significant commitment of expenditures for electricity. Miners want the block reward and transaction fees when they are the first to solve a block, so they’re careful not to break any rules (i.e. create an invalid block) that would cause all the validating nodes in the network to reject their block. If they submitted an invalid block, it would mean all the money they spent to solve it would be wasted, so miners tend to remain honest. This arrangement is what is referred to as “proof of work.” Using proof of work also means that any miner who wants to reverse transactions and rewrite history would have to spend enormous amounts of time and electricity to resolve previous blocks to submit a chain with the most proof of work to the network.
Miners add hash rate to increase their chances of solving a block and receiving the reward. More hash rate for the network means more proof of work, making it more expensive to attack, but it also makes it more difficult to solve blocks. Miners, being rational economic actors just like anyone else, are not interested in losing money on their operations.
*Source: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html
The chart above shows that the hash rate is the highest it has ever been. If the overall value of Bitcoin were diminishing, then why would miners be spending so many resources on it? Certainly it could mean that miners are finding cheaper sources of electricity (they are), but that search for cheap electricity is a good signal that participation is in high demand since they must seek an advantage to stay competitive.
All of this shows that Tucker doesn’t have a good approach in either the economic or technical basics for viewing Bitcoin. This will help inform us to understand his perception of Bitcoin as we address each of his five considerations.
Underpriced market assets are grounded in information asymmetries. Profits come from possessing valuable insight that others do not share, and acting on that insight. These asymmetries can be large or small. They were very large in Bitcoin from 2009 to 2015 or so. Some of us were convinced while vast numbers of even highly sophisticated people were sure that it could not, and the results were impressive for those who took the risk.
We are now eleven years into this, and the skeptics are now in a small minority. That blockchain technology is awesome is a given. If there were vast asymmetries in knowledge in the past, those have dissipated over time. The process of price discovery might have settled into a confident equilibrium: this stuff is cool, and useful for some purposes, but it cannot be a money for the world. It’s a given that there is no “true price” for Bitcoin but it is also true that the days of astonishment that it worked at all are now settling into the widespread awareness of why it works today.
With the full hindsight at our disposal, imagine being 11 or so years into the start of the internet and saying, “You know what, we’ve had the internet for awhile and plenty of people know about it, but it hasn’t been all that world changing, so I’m not sure this is really going to work out.” (We’re looking at you, Paul Krugman.) The success of the internet doesn’t guarantee the success of Bitcoin, but it does give us some insight on how global protocols take time to be fully implemented.
While much of the world’s population has had enough exposure to Bitcoin to at least know what it is, that doesn’t mean that knowledge about Bitcoin has settled equally among all these people. Knowing of and knowing about are two very different things. How many people simply aware of Bitcoin understand how it works or what its value proposition is? How many people even understand the economics of money well enough to act on the information they get about Bitcoin? How many people are aware of second layer solutions like the Lightning Network and sidechains that can massively scale Bitcoin?
These questions matter because money is for everyone. Everyone doesn’t need to know why or how it works (look at the internet again), but their ignorance about its usefulness explains why they’re not using it. And in fairness to these people, even if they weren’t too happy with the inflationary fiat system but didn’t worry much about censorship, they wouldn’t necessarily be drawn to use Bitcoin because the on-chain layer is not a superior substitute to the services they use for their day to day transactions in terms of cost and speed. Those who understand that the on-chain layer provides the security for the soundest money in the history of the world will compete for the bitcoins that are available for sale as they speculate that future layers built on top of this first layer will be the infrastructure that makes transitioning to Bitcoin the only play for even the ignorant.
At the same time Bitcoin was launched, so too were released some other impressive payment technologies designed to reduce the price of transactions and make accepting credit cards vastly easier. Back in the day, small merchants had a very hard time accepting credit cards. Thanks to technologies like Square, even a lemonade stand can accept them using a smartphone, which was also launched around the same time. The near-universal use case for Bitcoin was once obvious; apart from specific demographics and interests, the case for broad public adoption is no longer clear. To be sure, there remain vast and important uses for crypto for permissionless remittances and for allowing the unbanked to move money (one of the booming facets of the crypto-asset sector are ATMs), but that will remain true regardless of market valuations.
It is truly a shame that Jeffrey Tucker puts censorship-resistant digital scarcity as a secondary value proposition for Bitcoin. Governments coopted central banks to use seigniorage to fund their massive expansions in size and scope, which has allowed them to wage endless warfare since. They removed the gold standard and constantly inflate the money supply, which further inflate bubbles of malinvestment. These bubbles, as part of the business cycle, have destroyed massive amounts of wealth and have prevented people from directing resources to their most efficient uses. Humanity is years behind in production and overall quality of life because governments can censor and create money on a whim. Bitcoin gives anyone with a computer and an internet connection the ability to remove the need for a trusted third party to send and receive money and to validate that the money they’re receiving isn’t counterfeit. This final settlement that once took large amounts of time and money now takes minutes and maybe a few dollars.
Bitcoin strikes at the root of the ability of governments to hold power. This innovation is world-changing. It is the zero-to-one event that can lead to a flourishing that humanity has never seen before. That was the hard part. Compared to that, it will be easy to build services for making fast and cheap payments on top of that.
The old pitch for Bitcoin – that it made payments fast, cheap, and permissionless – had been dramatically changed as adoption increased and the portals couldn’t keep up. Permissionlessness still survives but that is not true of fast and cheap. By 2017 it became very obvious to the world that though Bitcoin is wonderful, it is not very practical for payments as compared with legacy systems that had vastly improved. Forks emerged to fix that problem but because the crypto sector is so vast, none could develop the network that Bitcoin obtained as the first mover in the space. Among those crypto innovations have been stable coins that operate as settlement banks. Those in the market for stability will find these more useful than old-fashioned crypto. And let us not forget the greatest lesson of monetary history: it’s the use value of a currency that is its value (there is no such thing as “storing” value).
Tucker, and many like him, first entered the Bitcoin space when some people were selling it as a fast and cheap payments processor. The reality, however, is that Bitcoin allows anyone to run a fast and cheap money validator. Consider what the last sound money system, the gold standard, involved. We tend to take for granted all the trust and centralization that had to occur simply for someone to use stamped gold coins. Imagine the cost—no wonder that work got entrusted for someone else to do. It is totally impractical for an individual accepting gold payments to test that the gold he is receiving is the gold that he is expecting for every single payment.
Bitcoin fixes this. Running a full node allows the user to trace any bitcoins that he is receiving all the way back to when they were first mined. This happens nearly instantly. Once the transaction is signed with a modest transaction fee, final settlement (the transfer of custody over the bitcoins) occurs in minutes (although your time depends on how many confirmations you want before you’re comfortable).
Bitcoin was the first mover in the space, but that’s not the reason it dominates its industry. It is by far the most secure in its ability to provide final settlement and maintain its monetary properties. Altcoin competitors are often centralized and at best only offer a small fraction of the security provided by Bitcoin’s network of nodes and proof of work. It is the most liquid out of all the cryptocurrencies and will continue to gain in liquidity and market share as its competitors of all kinds approach values of zero. So-called stablecoins pegged to the dollar don’t solve any of the problems that Bitcoin sets out to and will be absorbed by Bitcoin’s dominance just like all the others.
Bitcoin came into a banking world that was dilapidated and anachronistic. But banks and processors felt the heat and adapted in an unusually quick period of time. Now we have peer-to-peer payment systems working within the regular banking systems. We have Venmo, Zelle, Apple, and Google, and many other systems, and, for all their limitations, they are getting better by the day. For that matter, the Fed itself has announced its own plans for a blockchain-like P2P payment system. Competition works. Bitcoin made a major contribution to lighting a fire under the mainstream industry. But that innovation necessarily affects Bitcoin’s prospects.
Services like Venmo, Zelle, etc. may be nice because they add a layer for transferring money that is fast and cheap, but they are still controlled by gatekeepers who are at the mercy of the governments that operate where they are located. They offer no censorship resistance and do nothing to harden the money they’re built on top of.
Let the Fed make their own “blockchain-like P2P” payment system. I am astonished that Tucker found it at all interesting to mention them as competition against Bitcoin.
Let’s just say – as many industry experts say to me in private – that the days of endless price increases of Bitcoin are over, and that it settles into a stable price and even gradually falls to 2014 or 2013 levels. That is not beyond the realm of possibility. Nothing about markets are perfectly predictable, and there is nothing baked into the nature of Bitcoin that guarantees any particular future. A major problem hits the essence of money itself: the use case is everything and adoption is the path toward making any money mainstream. The trends here do not look brilliant for Bitcoin.
Ah, the “experts” are saying that Bitcoin won’t see increases in price against the dollar. And while Tucker correctly points out that markets are not perfectly predictable, economics tell us that the hardest money wins. Can events happen in the future that prevent Bitcoin from fully monetizing? Of course, they can, but nothing Tucker has said in his article has convinced me to step back from my bullishness.
Tucker ends the piece by taking an agnostic stance on the future of money although he seems fairly confident that Bitcoin will flourish in the immediate future “to service a special type of need.” He leaves the possibility for anything to happen, from Bitcoin going “to the moon” to “something else entirely—an Amazon coin, for example.” He just wants people to have some humility in the process.
Humility is a good trait to have, but let’s not mistake a bearish outlook on Bitcoin because of ignorance as humility. Tucker’s suggestion of a completely centralized “Amazon coin” demonstrates his failure to understand the ultimate purpose of Bitcoin. The sun may not rise tomorrow. Am I being humble for not being so sure that it will? Obviously, the future of Bitcoin is harder to predict than the rising and setting of the sun, but you should see the point of my hyperbole. Bitcoin is on its path and it doesn’t care what either Jeffrey Tucker or I say about it. But Bitcoin is not cold and vengeful. It’s chugging along, happy to welcome anyone, no matter who they are, to its network. I look forward to the day when Jeffrey Tucker welcomes Bitcoin back.
By Jill Carlson
This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world.
Jill Carlson is co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a non-profit research organization working to guarantee the right to a free and open financial system, and co-host of the What Grinds My Gears podcast. She also works as an advisor and consultant for startups including Algorand, Risk Labs, dYdX, CoinList, and Tezos.
Why hasn’t cryptocurrency gone mainstream?
“It doesn’t scale.”
“It’s slow.”
“It’s expensive.”
“It’s volatile.”
“It’s hard to use.”
Or maybe it was never supposed to go mainstream.
This is not to say cryptocurrency is any less important, meaningful, or useful. Rather, I think perhaps we have been judging cryptocurrencies’ success (or lack thereof) according to a false metric. We would not judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
By design, cryptocurrency does not solve mainstream problems.
Scale, speed, and cost are all examples of mainstream problems within finance, from main street to Wall Street. Credit card networks go down. Stock trades take days to clear. Wire transfers are expensive. In some situations, cryptocurrencies may offer marginal improvements on any of these issues, but more often blockchain-based systems will fail when compared to more conventional, centralized solutions.
This does not represent a design flaw. In fact, this is an intentional trade off. Decentralized systems forsake scale, speed, and cost in favor of one key feature: censorship resistance. Cryptocurrency solves problems faced by the censored who, by definition, are not the mainstream.
In particular, cryptocurrency enables individuals and organizations to make censored transactions. Procuring drugs on the internet. That’s an example of a censored transaction. Buying US dollars in Argentina is another example. Paying a sex worker. Sending money to a friend in Iran. Making an online purchase as an unbanked individual. Selling cannabis as a dispensary. Getting money out of Venezuela. Supporting dissidents in Hong Kong. The primary utility of cryptocurrency lies in engaging in financial activity that is otherwise suppressed or prohibited.
This is the stated intent of cryptocurrency. Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin, described cryptocurrency as a tool of freedom. He compared it to other peer to peer networks like Tor which are similarly resilient to censorship. If we look at the anecdotal evidence, we can see that this is indeed how bitcoin is being used from China to Palestine. Furthermore, what little quantitative data we have also suggests that cryptocurrency use is higher in countries with financial restrictions. These results line up with predictions around cryptocurrency adoption that have existed for years. It is time to face this potentially uncomfortable reality: cryptocurrency is most useful when breaking laws and social constructs.
I, FOR ONE, DO NOT WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE CRYPTOCURRENCY HAS FOUND MAINSTREAM USE.
There exists a long history of censorship resistant and privacy preserving technologies: Signal for messaging, Bittorrent for file-sharing, Tor for web browsing. Like bitcoin, these tools are not built for the mainstream. Most people would rather use faster, slicker, glossier centralized alternatives like Facebook Message, Dropbox, and Google Chrome. But for censored people and organizations, decentralized technologies have always provided an escape hatch. For as long as they have existed, these tools have brought with them a certain level of societal discomfort. This discomfort stems not from these platforms being lawless domains – regulations exist on the dark web as much as they do in any jurisdiction – but rather from the difficulty these platforms present in enforcing these government policies and social norms. These technologies render censored activities more difficult to stop.
Decentralized technologies can be used for good, for evil, and for everything in between. From Hammurabi’s Code through to the Patriot Act, the morality of laws has been a matter of debate for as long as they have existed. The laws of one jurisdiction are often deemed unethical and unacceptable by its citizens and those of other geographies. To say that cryptocurrency is used primarily to engage in illegal or socially unacceptable activities is not a normative statement. It is used by freedom fighters and terrorists, by journalists and dissidents, by scammers and black market dealers, by revolutionaries and government officials. It is used by civilians to break unjust laws and escape humanitarian crisis, and it is used by the policymakers who write those very same laws. And of course, the same statements can all be made regarding the original decentralized payment system: cash.
As an industry, we spend a lot of time considering how to drive mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency. I, for one, do not want to live in a world where cryptocurrency has found mainstream use. For if it has, that world is a very scary place indeed.
This is not to discourage or devalue any of the work that is being done to improve decentralized technologies. Many projects in the industry are working toward optimizing away shortcomings in the technology. Layer 2 protocols promise to speed things up. New consensus mechanisms and forms of sybil resistance expect to improve scalability and reduce infrastructure costs. A myriad of applications are building more user-friendly wallets, on-ramps, exchanges, and other tools. All of these developments are important but they may never result in mass adoption. Improvements in scalability, speed, cost, volatility, and user experience may, however, make the critical difference for those who are users, no matter how fringe: the young woman in Venezuela surviving on bitcoin or the Chinese businessman using Tether for cross-border trade.
To judge cryptocurrency based on mainstream adoption is to judge it on a metric it was never designed to achieve.
The Intrinsic Value of Bitcoin as Determined by Energy Spent
By Charles Edwards
Energy, raw Joules alone, can be used to estimate Bitcoin’s fair value
Increased energy input increases the fair value of a Bitcoin (and vice versa for decreases)
Bitcoin’s price is mean reverting to its Energy Value
The Energy Value model states that if all miners were to stop mining Bitcoin tomorrow, the power input would be zero and Bitcoin would be worthless
The Energy Value formula says that Bitcoin has a fair value of approximately $11,500 today (12 December 2019), 50% higher than the current trading price.
In Bitcoin’s Production Cost we observed the relationship between Bitcoin’s Price and Bitcoin Mining expenditure. Variations in Bitcoin’s Production Cost were found to be primarily driven by the level of electrical energy input and energy efficiency of mining hardware, with many other factors assumed constant.
Can the fundamental value of Bitcoin be accounted for by raw energy alone?
A Fair Value for Bitcoin
The hypothesis:
Bitcoin’s fair value is a function of energy input, supply growth rate and a constant representing the fiat dollar value of energy.
These variables can be combined into the following equation, termed Bitcoin’s Energy Value (V):
The Energy Value Formula
Energy Input (unit: Watts) = Hash Rate (GH/s) * Mining Energy Efficiency (J/GH)
Supply Growth Rate (unit: s-1) = Annual increase in circulating Bitcoins, equivalent to the inverse of Stock-to-Flow. Calculated as the annual rate (unit: year-1) of change in circulating Bitcoins and then converted to seconds
Fiat Factor ($USD/Joule) = A constant conversion factor to allow for the fiat USD value of energy
As all units of hash rate and supply rate cancel out, this equation suggests that the fair value of Bitcoin (V) can be represented as a function of the Joules of energy spent to produce it:
The Energy Value Formula: Bitcoin’s fair value is a function of Joules
Building Bitcoin’s Energy Value
To test the theory all input data, except for mining Energy Efficiency, was sourced from Blockchain.info.
The challenging piece of the puzzle is obtaining a good estimate for Bitcoin’s Energy Efficiency through time.
Estimating Bitcoin Mining Energy Efficiency (J/GH)
The power required to fuel Bitcoin mining is driven by two parts, the hash rate to solve the SHA-256 algorithm and the energy efficiency of the mining hardware itself. In its early years, Bitcoin was mined on very electrically inefficient CPUs and GPUs.
The current era ASICs have energy efficiencies over 100,000 times greater than the average Bitcoin mining hardware of 2009. This means that a higher relative portion of the average miner’s electrical bill today is efficiently converted into hashing power.
To estimate a historic profile of Bitcoin mining hardware Energy Efficiency, the efficiency rates for 150 Bitcoin hardware models from Cambridge (ASICs only), BitcoinWiki (FPGAs) and Bitcoin.it (ASICs, CPUs and GPUs) were collated. All ASICs, FPGAs and Intel, AMD and Nvidia hardware were considered where Energy Efficiency (J/GH) was provided and where an estimated hardware release date was found. Common models were grouped and the average energy efficiency for that model calculated on an equal weight basis.
The daily energy efficiency of the Bitcoin network was then calculated as the equally weighted average of all hardware which was within 2 years of its release for CPUs/GPUs/FPGAs and within 1.5 years of its release for ASICs. This difference in depreciable lifespan was chosen because:
The hardware within model groups for CPUs and GPUs generally span several years
Bitcoin mining was generally less competitive in its early years
Other research also suggests a 1.5 year depreciation lifespan is typical for ASICs in more recent years
Finally, a 1 month moving average of Energy Efficiency was calculated to allow for the phase-in and phase-out of model types.
In reality, some hardware models had wider usage and some longer lifespans. However, at risk of increasing the historical error in the Energy Value model and in attempt to produce an unbiased outcome, no other hardware exclusion logic, data cleansing or data manipulation was conducted.
The above process yields the following Bitcoin energy efficiency profile (Joules / Giga Hash) over time.
The S-curve of increasing Bitcoin Energy Efficiency (represented by a falling J/GH over time). Note the sharp increase in efficiency from the introduction of ASICs through 2013 and 2014.
Fiat Factor Constant ($/J)
The Fiat Factor is a necessary constant to convert the units of energy input (Joules) to fiat currency US Dollars. It is simply a representation of how much “we” value energy.
Based on the Energy Efficiency profile above, the resulting Fiat Factor is:
2.0E-15
The Fiat Factor value is dependent on the accuracy of the Energy Efficiency profile and therefore the value provided here should be considered a close estimate. In the long term, a declining US Dollar, hyperinflation or fiat currency collapse would result in the Fiat Factor increasing in a 1-for-1 relative manner.
Plotting the result shows a visually strong fit for the Bitcoin Energy Value to historic price.
10 Years of Bitcoin’s Energy Value
The plunge in Bitcoin’s energy value in 2013/14 is largely driven by the transition from GPU/FPGA to ASIC hardware. While it is likely there was a substantial drop during this period, it may be somewhat exaggerated here due to the hardware usage and depreciation model assumptions outlined above.
Market Forces — Bridging Supply and Demand
The first question is, does a Bitcoin Energy Value make logical sense?
In “Modeling Bitcoin’s Value with Scarcity”, Plan B found a strong relationship between market price and the scarcity of Bitcoin and other hard assets. We can posit that this represents the fundamental relationship of human “demand” for hard, value preserving assets over time.
But there’s a catch.
Not all scarce assets have nor preserve wide-spread market value. For example, there are approximately 3,000 cryptocurrencies with market caps under $500. Many of these coins have “constrained” supply models, but they have been assessed by the market as having no fundamental value. Scarce, but not valuable. The same can be said for bad art, bananas stuck to walls and many other rare and unique throw-away assets. This makes sense, as scarce assets which are easy to acquire or replicate typically have low market value.
Consistent, high levels of human effort are generally linked with demand.
When Energy is dedicated to a task, the supplier of energy (the worker) expects there to be a demand for their effort. When a supplier sees growing demand for the fruits of their labour, they will work harder in attempt to reap greater benefits. Others will likely also contribute to capture some reward. However, should demand for a supplier’s labour fall, or should the opportunity decline to a point at which they can achieve a better return elsewhere, the supplier will likely cease committing energy to that task.
This is exactly how the war for Bitcoin’s hash rate has been fought, and this is the argument for Bitcoin’s Energy Value.
Consistent energy input represents a balance between supply and demand. Rising market prices incentivize increased energy input via hash power growth and technology improvements which result in greater energy efficiencies. For this reason, great increases in market price typically result in long-term increases in committed energy and therefore increases in Bitcoin’s Energy Value. However, when speculation causes skyrocketing prices, without a corresponding increase in energy input, price has historically collapsed back to the Energy Value.
It is mean reverting phenomenon. As would be expected with any intrinsic value estimate driven from fundamentals.
Bitcoin’s price and Energy Value tend towards each other, they are like magnets. While deviations between the two can and do exist, they have always closed. Despite being mathematically independent to Bitcoin’s trading price and volume, Energy Value is connected by the invisible hand of the market.
By capturing long-term demand for scarce assets based on supply growth rate (stock-to-flow) and energy input, Energy Value represents the symbiotic relationship between Bitcoin supply and demand.
On daily data from January 2010, the Energy Value formula has a R2 to the actual Bitcoin price of 80% (the higher the R2, the better the model fits reality). By comparison, the stock-to-flow model has a R2 of 88% on the same data. While 8% less than the stock-to-flow model, there are a few things to consider:
Bitcoin’s Energy Value is highly dependent on the estimated Energy Efficiency. For this analysis, 150 Bitcoin hardware details were manually collated, there is possibility of data or omission error. The depreciation periods are approximations of reality. Efficiency can also vary depending on operating conditions and overclocking. It is not possible to get a perfect representation of what hardware every Bitcoin miner is using at every point in time through history. Hence, some error here is expected.
If all Bitcoin miners were to suddenly cease mining Bitcoin, stock-to-flow would predict a Bitcoin price of infinity. The Energy Value predicts zero. Should all miners abandon Bitcoin — which could occur via a catastrophic event (such as the breaking of the SHA-256 algorithm), through the creation of a “better” money / store of wealth — no new blocks would be created, no transactions would be sent and the network would be defunct. Under such a circumstance, the stock-to-flow model alone (0.4*SF³) would assess Bitcoin as having infinite value. The Energy Value model states that if all miners were to stop mining Bitcoin tomorrow, the power input would be zero and Bitcoin would be worthless.
The stock-to-flow model is a fitted power law. Bitcoin’s price has had exponential performance and the stock-to-flow model’s power law was chosen specifically to match this. By optimising the parameters, a good accuracy is achieved to fit Bitcoins price. The Energy Value has no curve fitting parameters, just one fixed constant to allow for the conversion of pure energy to dollars. In fact, it is likely that the exponential increase in mining hardware power efficiency coupled with the growth in hash rates explains the stock-to-flow’s exponential relationship.
With consideration of the above, an 80% R2 is considered a strong result for the Energy Value.
Bitcoin’s Energy Value and Stock-to-Flow
From the above figure we can see that turning points and wide gaps between Bitcoin’s price and the fair value can signify great times to buy and sell Bitcoin.
Sharp declines in energy input often signify good times to exit the market and strong energy input growth has represented great times to buy
This suggests Bitcoin has a great risk-reward in early December 2019. A positive picture is also presented when looking at the below Energy Value Oscillator.
However, energy input can fall at any time.
Historically buying into falling hash rates has been inadvisable, far better risk-reward outcomes are achieved on hash rate recovery.
Energy Value Oscillator Price as a Percentage of Energy Value. 2019 looks very similar to prior bull run starting characteristics.
By considering energy and supply growth, we have found an intrinsic link between Bitcoin’s price and its value.
The value of Bitcoin is a function of its energy input in Joules.
Following are some of the implications of the Energy Value formula:
The health of the mining network is intrinsically linked to Bitcoin’s value
Increases in electrical energy input will increase the fundamental value of Bitcoin (and vice versa for decreases)
Higher hash rates (with unchanged energy efficiency) mean each Bitcoin is worth more
Major improvements in hashing technology (such as the introduction in ASICs) cause considerable volatility in the short-term intrinsic value of Bitcoin due to significant increases in energy efficiency which are not compensated for by equal increases in hash rate growth
Should quantum computing (or other major technological advancement) require less total network energy to solve the SHA-256 algorithm, the Energy Value formula says Bitcoin’s intrinsic value will fall
A change to the Bitcoin code which increases Bitcoin’s supply growth rate would decrease the fundamental value of each circulating coin
In 2140, if Bitcoin is still being hashed, its supply growth rate will be zero. The Energy Value formula, like stock-to-flow, predicts an infinite value for Bitcoin (in USD terms) at that point. However, unlike stock-to-flow, this hinges on the criteria that mining activity is ongoing
If Bitcoin is successfully mass adopted as a store of wealth and/or global currency we may have financial market evidence that value is intrinsically linked to effort, the Joules of energy spent in work.
As humans, our time is limited — it’s our most valuable resource. What we choose to put our energy into, and therefore our time into, is our most valuable choice.
Bitcoin values energy.
Just as mass can be represented by energy, so can Bitcoin’s Price.
All data and calculations behind this article is freely available to support validation & potential refinement here.
Chinese Translation: https://my.first.vip/shareNews?id=2605&uid=5066
An Estimate of Bitcoin’s Production and Electrical Cost — a Historic Floor in Bitcoin’s Price.
Bitcoin’s electricity consumption can be used to estimate Bitcoin’s Production Cost
Bitcoin’s Production Cost can be used to estimate Miner profitability
Bitcoin Mining has historically been a very profitable business
2019 has been the worst year for Bitcoin Miners in all of the last 5 years
Bitcoin Miners are currently taking on losses from the 4th quarter price drop
The Bitcoin Electrical Cost has been a concrete price floor in the Bitcoin market price
A pessimistic price floor for mid-2020 is estimated at $8,000
However, miner influence on supply and demand is dropping, with Bitcoin’s inflation rate at 3.8% and falling
This article links Bitcoin’s electrical consumption to the cost of Bitcoin production. In doing so we gain insight into the historical profitability of Bitcoin mining and an indication to when Bitcoin mining businesses are struggling. Over the last 5 years, Bitcoin’s Electrical Cost has been a floor in Bitcoin’s exchange traded market price, proving Satoshi’s theory that price gravitates to the cost of production.
Commodity Prices and Production Costs
The relationship between Bitcoin miner production costs and the price of Bitcoin is summarised best by no other than Satoshi himself:
“The price of any commodity tends to gravitate toward the production cost. If the price is below cost, then production slows down. If the price is above cost, profit can be made by generating and selling more. At the same time, the increased production would increase the difficulty, pushing the cost of generating towards the price.
In later years, when new coin generation is a small percentage of the existing supply, market price will dictate the cost of production more than the other way around.”
- Satoshi Nakomoto, 2010
Knowing this relationship and drawing on detailed investigations into the electrical consumption of Bitcoin, we can estimate the cost of mining Bitcoin.
The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI)
In 2019, Cambridge University published a detailed study estimating Bitcoin’s energy consumption from November 2014 to present.
This study is likely the most detailed bottom-up calculation of Bitcoin’s global electricity consumption to date.
Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (Dec 2019)
Cambridge estimates Bitcoin’s electrical usage based on the assumption that miners will run the mining hardware as long as it remains profitable in electricity terms. Other key assumptions behind their calculations include:
The global average Bitcoin miner electricity price is $0.05 USD per kWh. Based on interviews with miners globally and consistent with other research, including CoinShares
The energy efficiency of over 60 mining hardware models since 2014. Per manufacturer specifications and refined based on expert advice (to account for actual usage and overclocking)
The global average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of Bitcoin Miners is 1.1. PUE is a measure of the total energy required to operate mining facilities (including cooling) relative to the energy required for server operation. Cambridge came to this figure based on interviews with miners globally. It is also in-line with Google’s average PUE of 1.11
Cambridge’s calculation assumes an equally weighted basket of profitable mining equipment which is perhaps the most thorough approach to assessing mining hardware utilisation, depreciation and therefore energy consumption globally today.
All references to Bitcoin’s electrical consumption in this article refer to Cambridge’s “Best-guess” estimate of Bitcoin’s electricity consumption.
Bitcoin’s Production Cost is an estimate of the global average US dollar cost of producing one Bitcoin per day.
Every study into Bitcoin’s mining costs to date has found electricity to be the primary cost of operations, and it is used here as a base from which to estimate the Bitcoin Production Cost.
From Cambridge’s electricity consumption, Bitcoin’s Production Cost can be estimated by:
Calculating number of Bitcoin Mined Per Day (based on Bitcoin’s Block Reward and block frequency)
Calculating the Bitcoin Electrical Cost = daily electricity cost to mine a Bitcoin
Estimating the global average “Elec-to-Total Cost Ratio” = (Bitcoin Electrical Cost) / (Daily Cost of running a Bitcoin Mining Business)
Bitcoin Production Cost is then found as (Daily Electrical Cost) / (Elec-to-Total Cost Ratio)
From Cambridge’s data one additional assumption is required — an estimate of the global average Bitcoin mining Elec-to-Total Cost Ratio (Item 3 above).While electricity is the major factor in Bitcoin mining operations, other costs in operating a Bitcoin mining business include:
Hardware Capital Expenditure
Varying estimates have been made for the Elec-to-Total Cost Ratio and include:
Estimates of Bitcoin’s Electrical Cost to Total Mining Cost
Well-funded businesses in a low-cost country such as China likely have low and negligible wages, rent, insurance and capital costs relative to the total cost of mining. China, for example, accounts for approximately 60% of Global Bitcoin mining in 2019.
Based on the research available to date and noting that a number of the above estimates appear not to consider the general costs of business (rent, wages, etc) outside of electrical operating expenditure (OPEX) and hardware capital expenditure (CAPEX), the Elec-to-Total Cost ratio is estimated here as 60%.
Using Cambridge’s electricity data, this gives 5 years of the Bitcoin Production Cost.
Bitcoin Production Cost
Bitcoin Miner Price
While it is interesting to compare Bitcoin’s price to the Bitcoin Production Cost, as each coin mined can be sold at the prevailing market price, this approach misses on another piece of miner revenue — transaction fees.
As well as each block reward’s freshly mined bitcoins, miners also receive transaction fees in each block. Transaction fees are determined by senders based on supply and demand. Additionally, with time transaction fees will represent a greater portion of miner revenue as block rewards reduce with each halving.
As a result, the Bitcoin Production Cost should be compared to the revenue one Bitcoin provides (Bitcoin’s market price) and the transaction fee revenue.
We term this the Bitcoin Miner Price and it is calculated here as the Bitcoin Price + (Daily Transaction Fees) / (Daily Bitcoin’s mined).
The Bitcoin Miner Price varies with demand for on-chain transactions
Putting Bitcoin’s Production Cost and Miner Prices together, we can see when Bitcoin Miners are struggling in recent times and potentially taking on short-term loses.
Bitcoin Production Cost versus Bitcoin Miner Price
Bitcoin Electrical Cost — A Bitcoin Price Floor
Bitcoin Production Cost provides insight into the profitability of Bitcoin mining businesses. Price drops below the Bitcoin Production Cost tend to be short lived. This makes sense as high-cost miners go out of business, the hash rate plateaus and falls and miners in general are less inclined to sell at a loss.
However, the Bitcoin Electrical Cost offers a stronger price floor.
Over short periods, a number of miner business costs are “sunk” (e.g. already paid for hardware), contractually locked-in (e.g. rent) or can be deferred (e.g. hardware upgrades). This means that Bitcoin miners can operate at a loss over short periods.
This makes sense provided the Bitcoin Miner Price is above the Bitcoin Electrical Cost. If the cost of running your mining hardware is less than or equal to the revenue it generates, you may as well leave it turned on, until such a point that general business losses make this wasted effort unbearable and the opportunity cost too high. However, this scenario cannot continue indefinitely. Losing miner would not have any revenue left over for re-investment in the business (continual capex is required to keep up with generally growing hash rates), ability to pay rental contracts, wages and other business costs.
Using Cambridge’s data from 2014 alone, with no further assumptions, we can see that Bitcoin’s price never quite reaches the Electrical cost to produce a Bitcoin, despite coming very close in November 2018.
Historically, the electrical cost to produce a Bitcoin has represented a price floor in the Bitcoin market price.
In more recent years, the introduction of Bitcoin Futures has also potentially allowed Bitcoin Miners to lock in profits earlier, for example, by shorting when the Bitcoin Price is significantly greater than production cost. However, the effectiveness of such strategies is debateable. The introduction of Bitcoin Options in 2019 will also likely aid Bitcoin miners by providing certainty in their cash flows and the ability to effectively lock in a Bitcoin sale price floor.
Miner Profitability Oscillator
All of the above suggests Bitcoin Miners are struggling at present. Most are operating at a business loss in the short term, with an average daily profitability of 10% for 2019.
Even if the 60% Elec-to-Total Cost Ratio assumption is off by a wide margin, based on Cambridge’s electrical consumption data, 2019 is the least profitable year for Bitcoin Mining in all of the last 5 years.
Bitcoin Miner Profitability Oscillator — Bitcoin mining has historically been a very profitable business
It is worth noting that the Bitcoin Production Cost will double at the next Bitcoin halving (currently estimated for May 2020). When the Block Reward halves, the daily cost of Bitcoin Production is spread across half as many Bitcoins.
Bitcoin Production Cost doubling at 2016 Halving. Estimated Production cost increase was tempered by the phase in of the significantly more energy efficiency Antminer S9
From this figure, if Bitcoin’s Hash Rate and mining hardware efficiency were to remain unchanged from today, the Bitcoin Production price at Halving would be $17,800.
Although Hash Rates can fluctuate widely, they are historically much more stable than Bitcoin’s price. The weekly average Hash Rate has never dropped more than 47% from its peak (in 2011). The second largest drop was 37% in December 2018.
The second most varying input into Bitcoins Electrical Price is mining hardware efficiency, which has historically improved every year.
Even if Hash Rates were to drop 40% below todays levels, and mining hardware efficiency were to improve 25% in the next 6 months, Bitcoin’s Electrical Cost would be approximately $8,000. Suggesting a pessimistic case price floor of for mid-2020 of $8,000. 8% higher than today’s Bitcoin price of $7350.
Limitations to this model also include the reducing share of total Bitcoin supply which miners hold. Bitcoin’s inflation rate, and therefore the relative portion of incremental Bitcoins that miners gain control of each year, is currently 3.8% and decreasing exponentially. The influence of each new Bitcoin in 2020 onwards will drop significantly with the Halving. Therefore, as alluded to by Satoshi above, the reliability of the Bitcoin Electrical Cost as a price floor may reduce with time.
The tyranny of time scarcity is ubiquitous in life; here we will explore how mankind cooperates to resist this immortal tyrant using one of our most ancient social technologies, money, and why Bitcoin is bound to achieve global monetary dominance.
A Tyrant of Time Immemorial
All human action inescapably occurs within the bounds of time. As the universally shared element of experience, time is the grand paradox of nature; it heals all wounds, yet ultimately ravages all things. Each of us feels a current of time that is totally impersonal; in a ruthlessly egalitarian manner, time flows equally for rich and poor, sick and healthy, young and old alike. The temporal flows we experience cannot be reproduced, reversed, or stopped. At an intrapersonal level, our allotment of time is as scarce as our lifespan is limited. Interpersonally, time scarcity manifests as the total time we can collectively allocate towards serving one another; whether we are making goods, providing services, or gaining knowledge — we have but a finite quantity of hours to commit towards our efforts. In this sense, time scarcity is the immortal tyrant subjugating all of us mortals. Only through cooperative action can we break free of the restraints time scarcity clasps upon us.
Society is the sum total of cooperative actions taken, a social order that is, paradoxically, shaped by competition among its constituents — free people. Actions intent on improving our relationship with nature, which enhance our quality of life by saving us time, necessarily involve the use of natural resources. If one seeks to dig ditches faster, he will first need to construct a shovel — a tool that requires wood from a felled tree, refined metal ore, and expertly shaped screws to hold the (earth-shattering) device together. Since the Earth we share is physically finite its natural resources are inherently scarce, and we must each compete to earn our own fair share. In a world that is as physically abundant as our ingenuity will allow, it is ultimately only our finite time that constrains us from producing more of anything we want.
Existing under the ubiquitous tyranny of time scarcity, it’s natural for animals to adopt more energy efficient means of satisfying their wants. The “Law of Conservation of Energy-Mass” is the 1st Law of Thermodynamics; an inviolable principle of the universe that organisms (lazily and cleverly) follow to the letter. Predators in the wild frequently make expected-value calculations when deciding whether or not the anticipated energy expenditure in pursuit of a particular prey is worth the caloric value of the meal, should the hunt be successful (most hunts have low chances of success). Even herbivores like koala bears economize their physical movements to maximize their consumption of eucalyptus leaves per exertion. Of course, these decisions are not (likely) based on any mathematical knowledge, but rather on instinct.
Similarly, driven by an instinct to overcome the oppression of time scarcity, us humans have always found ways to uncover and extract ever-more natural resources as we “hunt” for satisfactions to our wants. We have literally “just scratched the surface,” as our efforts haven’t even taken us halfway into the Earth’s crust, its thinnest and outermost layer. Through generations of trial and error, with our collective learnings accumulated in heuristics, written knowledge, and methodologies, mankind has steadily economized his productive efforts, gradually making more and more use of his time. The fruits of our labor are evident: the price of all natural resources, in terms of time necessary to produce them, has steadily decreased over the long-run as technological advancements continually increase our productivity — our capacity to produce the greatest results with the least effort. Metal prices over the past two centuries are a testament to this:
Evincing the simple truth of mankind’s ever-rising productivity is gold: as the annual new supply flow of this extremely rare metal remains steady, it makes no sense to consider other natural resources (which are less rare than gold) as scarce in any practical sense[1] . Indeed, only time scarcity truly constrains our creative output. In this sense, time — both individually and collectively — is our most precious and scarce resource. Each of us seek to extend and savor our time on Earth. As a population, we strive to economize our actions and increase our productivity to attain the greatest results possible with minimal use of time and effort. Indeed, the purpose of the world economy is to accelerate our collective productivity gains through innovation and trade; in a term, to gain energy efficiency — our sole emancipator from the hardships imposed by time scarcity.
Trade Interconnects Us
Acts of trade (or interpersonal exchange) interconnect us into economic networks which increase our productivity by virtue of our inherent comparative advantages: a diversity of skills, experience, and know-how that arises naturally among us. Trade allows us to focus on our comparative advantages and become ever-more specialized in our skills over time. This positive-sum game undergirds all economic activity; by working as a cooperative ensemble we become more productive than we would be working as isolated individuals. Our economic interdependence makes us collectively more productive and prosperous. This cooperative dynamic is commonly called the “division of labor” and the general purpose of society is to foster an environment which favors its proliferation.
The division of labor enables each of us to concentrate on what we do best and increases our collective productivity: meaning it lets us produce the same amount in less time or a greater amount in the same time. Alternatively, we can choose to use these newfound time savings to innovate. Innovation involves the creation of tools and technologies to help us do even more in less time (i.e. digging with a shovel instead of by hand). As innovative new tools and ideas become diffused into society through trade, more time savings are generated, and this process becomes recursive into a self-reinforcing, virtuous cycle with no known natural limit:
By specializing, trading, and innovating societies create a (literal) wealth of time savings that can be spent productively or leisurely. By spending time savings productively, societies create wealth — the accumulation of time saved in the form of capital. Anything that economizes human action — tools, knowledge, or even relationships — is considered capital, as it provides a way for us to more quickly satisfy our wants. Said simply, as we become more productive, we accumulate more capital — a form of frozen time savings. In this respect, we have come a long way over the past two centuries:
Money: Mankind’s Masterwork
Money is the most marketable (or readily exchangeable) capital in an economy; it is the most liquid measure of time savings — a social chronometer of sorts. Money is the technology we use to measure and move the value of our time savings across time and space. The primary function of money is to store value, meaning that it must (at a minimum) retain its own exchange value across time. Naturally, as our collective productivity increases, the value of money rises in tandem, and prices expressed in it decline. The secondary function of money is to mediate exchange, meaning that it can be exchanged for anything in the marketplace — goods, services, or knowledge. Money is sought by all seeking to trade their way into satisfying personal wants[3] (this includes everyone that isn’t entirely self-sufficient). The tertiary function of money is to quantify exchange ratios, meaning it is used to denominate prices across the minds of market participants. Consider how we think in dollars, or in our local currency, when deciding whether and how much to buy or sell of anything in the marketplace. Interestingly, this “unit of account” function of money is so deeply etched into our mental machinery that it actually changes how we think and perceive the world.
Besides these three functions, monetary technologies generally exhibit the following traits:
Scarcity: resistance to money supply manipulations and, thus, dilutions to its monetary unit value (difficult to produce)
Divisibility: ease of accounting and transacting at various scales (separable and combinable units)
Portability: ease of moving value across space (high value to weight ratio)
Durability: ease of moving value across time (resilient to deterioration)
Recognizability: ease of identifying and verifying the monetary value by other parties in a transaction (universally identifiable and verifiable)
Whatever good is most impervious to the depredations of time, transference, and greed is naturally selected as “money”. The monetary technology selected freely in a marketplace is referred to as “hard money”; a haven for liquid value (exchangeable time savings) that resists the ravages of time, damages related to transference across space, and intentional misappropriations by those vicious two-legged apes (people). In these respects, monetary metals have been historically superior due to their durability and portability, making them ideal for storing value across time and space, respectively. With the advent of coinage, which standardized each monetary unit, the divisibility and recognizability traits of these metals were greatly enhanced. Critically, the scarcity of monetary metals is governed by natural laws that are beyond the control of man, making their supplies (mostly) resistant to greedy manipulations. Gold became, and remains, the prime monetary metal of the world precisely because of its superior relative scarcity — historically, it has been the best reflector of absolutely scarce time.
Gold is the hardest monetary metal to produce and nearly every ounce ever mined remains part of its extant supply today, as it is chemically an ultra-stable element. Taken in combination, these properties made gold the best medium for storing value across time, as its supply is the most resistant to change, and therefore the most inflation-resistant. By providing sufficient monetary characteristics (divisibility, portability, durability, recognizability) coupled with superior physical scarcity, gold was naturally selected as money on the free market (hard money). With a (low) reproducibility and physical scarcity most closely aligned with the absolute irreproducibility and scarcity of time, gold has been the most credible store of value historically — which explains why freely acting individuals have hoarded it for centuries. More technically, gold’s superior stock-to-flow ratio makes it more resistant to supply inflation (and, its corollary, monetary value dilution) than all other monetary technologies (prior to the invention of Bitcoin).
To understand gold’s ascent, we must realize the actions of people in free markets are driven by game theory. In game-theoretic terms, a “game” is any situation in which people can win or lose — as is the case in markets. A “strategy” is just process for making decisions. Game theory is applicable in any domain where people must decide whether to cooperate or compete. For instance, if you and I are being chased by a bear, my decision to run or fight is not based on how fast I am, but rather how fast I think you are. Game-theoretically, I only need to be faster than you, not the bear, to ensure my survival. Such assessments of interpersonal dynamics are also closely related to economics and monetary evolution.
In the context of monetary evolution’s relationship with time: free market participants choose hard money over all other monetary technologies because its resistance to supply increases most closely reflects the immutable flow of time. No matter how much time was allocated to gold production, its supply resisted inflation more than any other monetary metal, causing people to coalesce around its use as a superiorly sound store of value. In game theory terms, gold production became the “Nash Equilibrium”, a game state in which everyone follows the same strategy because there is no advantage to be gained by switching to any other strategy. So long as people sought to maximize their freedom from time scarcity by accumulating capital, collectively produced more than they consumed, and accomplished these goals through trade, gold remained the best proxy for the scarcest economic resource — time.
Unicity of Time and Money
Time is the only irreversible element in existence. Its directionality is imparted by the ever-growing entropy of the universe — as defined by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This “Thermodynamic Arrow of Time” which points us into an increasingly chaotic universe is, in fact, the only irreversible aspect of reality; every other natural process is symmetrical, making it impossible to discern whether an event is unfolding forward or backward in time. As such, this universally objective and unidirectional flow of time provides our purest reference point for all values (of the seven key metrics maintained by the Systeme Internationale of Units and Measures, six are rooted in the time it takes light to move through a vacuum). Gold, then, as the most difficult commodity to produce no matter how much time was allocated towards its extraction, served as the best market proxy for the objective purity of ever-flowing time. It is commonly said that time is money, but few realize that the reciprocal is also true — money is time.
Beyond relative irreproducibility, hard money exhibits other properties akin to the natural flow of time. Markets naturally optimize for a hard money that is as impersonal, irreversible, and unstoppable as the flow of time to which it is anchored, and which it is intended to epitomize in the marketplace. As hard money arises naturally as the result of countless market interactions in which individuals seek to trade their goods for steadily more exchangeable goods, it is inherently beyond the control of any single individual, nation, or central bank. This makes hard money apolitical and impersonal; it cannot be used to benefit any one group over another. In other words, hard money tends to be politically neutral, like time.
Hard money is also equity-based, meaning that physically possessing gold as an asset, for instance, is 100% equity and 0% debt (a bearer asset). This makes payments in gold immune to reversal, unlike those made with monopolistically imposed debt-based monies, called fiat currencies, which are liable to the whims of bureaucrats, who can choose to confiscate, censor, or deauthorize fiat currencies at any time, for any reason. Finally, hard money is unstoppable, in the sense that if I flip you a gold coin, there is no single authority on Earth that can block or devalue that transaction. Hard money, like gold, derives its value from freely acting individuals choosing the best monetary technology available to them.
Sacred Sovereignty
Bearer assets, like gold, offer another significant advantage — each individual unit is self-sovereign. Sovereignty refers to the freedom to take action as one sees fit. As Rosseau said: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” The struggle of history has been the need for flexible coordination of human action on a large scale against the usurpation of individual sovereignty that the institutions built for this purpose typically impose. Paradoxically, as mankind pursued large scale mobilization of his efforts to overcome the natural tyranny of time scarcity, he gave birth to an artificial tyrant that engorges itself by consuming our individual sovereignty — the government and, its apparatus of thievery, central banking. True sovereignty originates at the individual level; it naturally reigns when our individual expressions, whether verbal or financial, are unmanipulable by others. When a government censors your speech or a central bank devalues your dollar, it is a violation of your individual sovereignty. Let no one prevent you from speaking your mind or spending your time and money as you see fit. We are each our own supreme ruler:
Gold is a self-sovereign bearer asset whose credibility and value as money is derived from the combined sovereignty of countless self-interested individuals exercising free choice in the marketplace. When a good gains value on the free market, it is a result of market participants finding it useful, making sacrifices for it, and, thereby, imbuing it with part of their individual sovereignty. Since gold achieved dominance on the free market as a result of countless “votes” in the form of self-interested trade decisions by a faceless multitude across history, it can be considered the monetary materialization of popular sovereignty — the founding principle of Western Civilization:
Although it’s an ancient monetary technology, gold still forms the prime monetary sovereignty layer of Earth, as it underpins all governmental sovereignty. In turn, governments use this power to monopolize the market for money (via their central bank henchmen) and insulate fiat currencies from direct monetary competition. Such insulation is the only way debt-based monies can survive alongside hard money. Gold and other bearer assets are final extinguishers of debt, as payments in them carry no associated liability. Modern central banks still perform final settlement exclusively in gold and actively engage in market machinations to suppress its price (see Gata.org); a testament to the primacy of this ancient monetary metal.
Despite this misappropriation of gold’s sovereignty by government for its own self-seeking purposes, fiat currency is no longer anchored to gold, making it highly reproducible at near-zero cost. Indeed, fiat currency is the softest form of money in history; it can (and in virtually all cases does) suffer from counterparty risks such as censorship, deauthorization, or hyperinflation. Hard money is anchored in the reality of time to secure the time savings of its holders; fiat currency is a political tool that facilitates the institutionalized system of time-theft known as “expansionary monetary policy” perpetrated by central banks globally.
Although governments legally compel us to use fiat currencies today, these rules are only enforceable due to their vampirism — the sucking of sovereignty out of gold holdings. Ironically, this stolen power is used to monopolize violence and silence dissent. Government sovereignty, then, is derived from the agglomerated self-sovereignty of its gold hoards; which, in combination with the anticompetitive artifices it erects (legal tender laws, capital controls, capital gains taxes, etc.) in the sphere of money, explains why gold has been confiscated and its private ownership outlawed repeatedly throughout history:
There is only one reason for such confiscatory acts: governments grasping for more power; a means to usurp gold’s self-sovereignty, an embezzlement of power which itself originates in the actions of free people selecting a monetary technology in the marketplace; a tragedy at the heart of all modern economies. As the axiom says: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.”:
Prime Money
In this sense, gold is prime money: as its physical possession underpins the sovereignty of governments, which misappropriate it to enforce central bank money production monopolies on free people. Paradoxically, it was the actions of free people that generated the sovereignty that is now wielded against them by governments and central banks. This “duopoly of monopolists” has proclaimed time and time again that gold is irrelevant, a mere monetary artifact, and that they alone will lead the world economy to a brighter future. Ignore anti-gold propaganda; just watch their actions:
Although gold resisted supply manipulation in many ways, it is far from perfect. Through the London Gold Pool and other machinations (seriously, see Gata.org) central banks cornered the market on gold, enabling them to surreptitiously suppress its price and better insulate fiat currency (soft money) from direct competition with gold (hard money). Market manipulation like this is only possible because of our passivity. In surrendering our sovereignty to unaccountable institutions like central banks, we cede conscious control over most aspects of our lives. Remember: central banks engaged in “expansionary monetary policy” are actively stealing time from free people; as they increase money supplies, they reallocate claims on productive capital from the majority to a politically favored few. This parasitism on the savings of society extends the working lives for most of the citizenry. In this way, monetary inflation is a direct violation of private property rights and individual sovereignty. It is worth repeating: human action is the essence of sovereignty; it is our actions that instill institutions with this divine quality intrinsic to free people. Let us all exercise the utmost vigilance in deciding which institutions to empower with our sacred sovereign energies:
Hard Money Renaissance
Against this usurpation of our individual sovereignty by government, we find hope in the emergence of a modern innovation called the internet — the universal exchange engine for knowledge. The internet has already democratized and disintermediated many aspects of our lives — from lodging and transportation, to media distribution and commerce. Compositionally, the internet is a set of open-source protocols (known as the internet protocol suite) for permissionlessly moving information worldwide in an instant. Constructed in a free market manner, through years of cooperation and standardization efforts, the internet is the greatest knowledge network in history. Today, we all benefit from this readily-accessible library of human knowledge:
As Milton Friedman so aptly pointed out in 1999, about ten years before the invention of Bitcoin, the one thing the internet lacked was a secure, private “e-cash”:
“The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A.”
Friedman’s prescience proved astonishingly accurate. Coming into the 21st century, we had two key inceptors for digital hard money: gold, the ancient and prevailing monetary sovereignty layer (representing an unmanipulable money supply), and the internet, the ultimate engine of exchange (representing global interconnectivity or liquidity). By combining and building upon the economic properties of both, Bitcoin is a momentous monetary innovation that has achieved the divisibility, portability, durability, and recognizability of pure information infused with the absolute scarcity of time. As the internet gives us freedom to express and absorb ideas without obstruction, Bitcoin gives us the freedom to express and receive value in a hard money that cannot be stopped. In this sense, Bitcoin is the latest evolutionary layer of the internet protocol suite; a quantum leap over the monetary “Nash Equilibrium” gold represented.
Historically, gold has become more difficult to extract with the passage of time due to chemistry, physical rarity, and game theory. Gold is the ancient anchor to the prime economic reality of time scarcity, precisely why it remains the prime money of modernity. Time is the most objective measure for our intersubjective (opinion-based) valuations, as it is the one unarguable aspect of existence. In a society run on hard money, price levels naturally decline over time as our productivity grows in tandem with the division of labor. Put another way, hard money tends to appreciate over time as human knowledge becomes more specialized. In this way, increases in the value of hard money reflect how far humanity has liberated itself from time scarcity.
Liquidity of Time and Information
Conceptually then, money is both frozen time (as a means of storing time savings) and liquid time (as a means of exchanging time savings). We earn money by sacrificing our intrapersonal time and can trade it for commensurate sacrifices from others. As such, anyone that gains control over a money supply, and can manipulate it at will, can steal time savings directly from the users of its money via the shadow tax of inflation. To shed light on the true nature of fiat currency in one line, let’s call it like it is: a pyramid scheme built atop gold that is subject to unlimited supply inflation. Since it bears repeating: inflation is intrapersonal time theft — a legally enforced injustice.
Manipulation of money supplies has other consequences. Money is an economy’s main informational utility; a touchstone to measure the value of the time savings (or spending) expected to be made possible by an economic good in the future. When a money supply is manipulated, the objectivity of its measurement ability is compromised. This breakdown of money’s informational utility is called price signal distortion. Such manipulation makes economic calculation less reliable and causes entrepreneurs to overborrow, misallocate capital, and, ultimately, degenerates time savings as capital is consumed instead of being compounded through reinvestment. Price signals provide a system for “market participant telecommunications” and can be explained as follows:
Price signals are the navigational instruments for entrepreneurs sailing the tempestuous seas of markets, and money is the medium through which these signals propagate. Said another way: money is a measurement system for value (a temporal quality) in the same way a ruler is for length (a spatial quality). The less elastic the supply of money is, the better it fulfills this mensural purpose. If you are measuring a table with a ruler that you cannot trust, then you can’t be sure whether you’re measuring the table or the ruler; you cannot distinguish the signal (the actual length) from the noise (changes in unit of measurement). [4] Gold outcompeted historically because of its relative supply inelasticity, which made it both the best store of value and conveyor of price signals. Uniquely, Bitcoin is a money with perfect supply inelasticity; it is the most uncompromising measurement system for value the world has ever known. In this sense, Bitcoin is like an inviolable ruler: a perfectly objective unit of measurement for the endless variations of market values.
Therefore, the more closely a money supply is credibly congruent with the absolutely scarcity of time, the better it communicates the time savings generated by our collective productivity gains. In this way, both gold and Bitcoin share the same principal attractiveness: they are more closely reflective of the impersonal, irreproducible, irreversible, unstoppable, and absolutely scarce nature of the experiential element money is intended to symbolize in the marketplace — time.
Temporal Anchorage
When money is disconnected from time scarcity (as fiat currency is), its “skin in the game” is compromised and the economies it facilitates start suffering from distorted price signals, malinvestments, recessions, and an exacerbated boom-and-bust business cycle. As with most systems, money requires skin in the game to function properly — meaning that money must be costly to produce,[5] otherwise those who can produce it cheaply will do so to steal the value of time savings stored therein (as central banks do).
For gold, the costs associated with mining provide this critical skin in the game characteristic. For Bitcoin, an ingenious composite of proof-of-work energy expenditure (skin in the game) and economic incentives (game theory) enabled it to digitize scarcity. In this sense, Bitcoin’s blockchain is like a bridge between physical and digital reality — the first incarnation of a digital asset with provable scarcity. An innovative amalgamation of open-source software and behavioral economics, Bitcoin was designed to be a monetary network that reproduces itself relentlessly:
From this perspective, the value of mining both gold and Bitcoin is the “unforgeable costliness” that each represents — a measure of the time sacrificed in production, which is redeemable for the time of others. Imbued with digital scarcity, Bitcoin preserves the advantages offered by gold’s physicality (self-sovereignty, irreversible transactions, final settlement) while eliminating its disadvantages (ease of confiscation, expensive safeguarding, high settlement costs). Digitization also makes Bitcoin a weightless, intangible, and (potentially) everlasting monetary technology. As a totally impersonal and self-sovereign monetary network capable of adopting market-proven features from competitors over time, while simultaneously resisting changes that negatively impact its users, Bitcoin may be the last evolution we ever see in global prime money. Gold is the “pristine collateral” which underpins the entirety of the highly-levered fiat currency financial complex; Bitcoin is poised to become the foundation for an entirely new economic order.
Monetary Horizons
In the near future and for the first time in history, the world will have a money that is harder to produce than gold. A fixed supply of 21 million units makes Bitcoin absolutely scarce — a property never before achieved by anything other than time itself. In the same way that Galelio’s invention of the telescope led to discoveries that reoriented our relationship with space, so too has the invention of Bitcoin led to the discovery of absolute scarcity; a bewildering breakthrough that perfectly parallels and will forever change mankind’s relationship with time. Soon, in accordance with its perfectly predictable issuance schedule, Bitcoin will become the scarcest liquid asset in human history. At this point, Bitcoin will become the monetary technology most closely aligned with the absolutely scarce nature of time. From there, every block produced will (asymptotically) further perfect this alignment until the last Bitcoin in mined in the mid-22nd century:
The supreme divisibility, portability, durability, recognizability, and scarcity characteristics of Bitcoin constantly increase the likelihood (via the Lindy Effect) that it will continue to outcompete gold and fiat currencies in its long climb toward becoming global prime money. Bitcoin, with a supply more closely aligned with the prime economic reality of time scarcity, is slowly but surely *undermining* gold’s role as prime money. The word *undermine* literally means “to dig under fortifications to collapse them”. In this sense, Satoshi designed Bitcoin to “dig deeper” into reality than gold and, in doing so, undermine its role as prime money by more closely mirroring the fundamental nature of time. As a result, the value of fiat currencies will also diminish as gold slips from its position of primacy.
Temporal Metaphor
Time is the ultimate experiential element we all share. It is ruthlessly egalitarian, flowing equally for all alike. Time is our objective anchor in a world of ceaselessly shifting intersubjective valuations. Abstractly, money is our metaphor for time. As a tool, it best serves mankind when its supply is as inelastic as the absolute scarcity of time. Here, gold does well; yet Bitcoin, the first money with a supply that is absolutely scarce, reflects time perfectly.
Money is the medium through which many minds become one; it is the coordinating mechanism of human action. Money matters because only through cooperation and innovation do we mortals gain ground in our struggle against the immortal tyrant of time scarcity. Perhaps one day to be regarded as the most impactful technology ever invented, Bitcoin is simply a tool for saving time; it stores the value created from our time spent serving one another, reduces the time needed to establish trustful coordination, and it protects our mutually generated time savings from confiscation. Furthermore, Bitcoin promises to reduce the money, capital, and life wasted in warfare. Bitcoin accomplishes this by transcending laws and outcompeting money production monopolies, which use taxation via inflation to stealthily fund perpetual warfare. As Ron Paul said: “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”:
Bitcoin also promises to help generate even more time savings by deepening the division of labor, a direct result of financial disintermediation, the benefits of which flow to everyone. Finally, Bitcoin encourages us to adopt lower time preferences and think long-term. Hard money incentivizes us to save and invest, and disincentivizes excessive debt and spending, since it naturally appreciates over time as our collective productivity grows. Fiat currency is the reverse: it pushes up our time preferences and disintegrates societies. As the repeated fall of ancient civilizations shows, monetary integrity and social cohesion are inexorably linked.
Bitcoin belongs in a certain class of momentous innovations — like antiseptics, electricity, or the internet — that either extend our lifespans individually or enhance our productivity and, therefore, our time savings collectively. These innovations expand our relationship with time in one or more ways: extending life expectancies, lowering time preferences, or enhancing productivity. Bitcoin promises to contribute to all three by being the best self-sovereign savings technology in history: reducing death tolls and capital destruction from warfare by financially starving governments, incentivizing savings and investment in innovation, and accelerating our productivity gains by reducing artificial and arbitrary trade frictions.
Bitcoin has the potential to bend the grand arc of human history back towards a free market paradigm. Bitcoin is doing this in the market for money, and its underlying technology may one day be applied to other markets like equities, bonds, and real estate. Going forward, Bitcoin promises to further liberate us from the clutches of time scarcity, eliminate time theft via inflation, reinvigorate individual sovereignty, and, as a cumulative result, radically increase social scalability worldwide. As Alfred North Whitehead said:
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they’re making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we’re doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
As we continue our endless contentions with time scarcity, government-authorized money monopolies remain a scourge on our humanity. Central banking, an institution of monetary socialism and systemized time theft, has repeatedly wounded our individual sovereignty, time preferences, and freedoms throughout history. We mortals must break the shackles of this oppressive institution and focus our energies on innovating against time scarcity — the immortal tyrant. In doing so, we will create a world in which our children, their children, and all future generations are born able to live totally self-sovereign lives — forever free from the chains of governmental tyranny.
By Robert Breedlove Oct, 2019
Thank you for reading “Bitcoin and the Tyranny of Time Scarcity” My sincerest gratitude to these amazing minds:
The Bitcoin Times Ed 2 is the collaborative work of 8 writers & 1 designer with the intent to educate, inspire and spread ideas on bitcoin.
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The Bitcoin Times
(Soon to be updated to: https://bitcointimes.news)
By Hass McCook
As always, we commence by sending thanks and good tidings to Satoshi Nakamoto — The Creator and First of the Believers, General of the Byzantines, Breaker of Banks and Fighter of Fiat — and to Hal Finney and The Apostles and The Disciples thereafter, and to The Stoic and Patient True Believers, who keep their tithe holy, and stack sats for their salvation. Oh you who believe, fear the day of economic reckoning, and do not face the Angel of Hyperbitcoinization as a nocoiner, for punishment awaits them in the hereafter.
Religion has always been a touchy subject, with tens of millions of people even recoiling at the word. These demographics are reflected in the observable Bitcoin Twitter / Social Media communities, with the Recoilers being observably over-represented. When Bitcoiners are referred to as cult members, should they really be that upset? In this piece, I argue that they should not be, and instead, that they come home to The Hard-Money-Monastery. I will commence with dictionary definitions of religion and where Bitcoin fits into it. From there, I will introduce the mythology, memes, and laws that drive the commitment, attitudes, beliefs and practices of True Believers, and demonstrate the parallels between Bitcoin and “Traditional” religions. Perhaps you will find that a little religion may be good for all of us.
So how is religion defined? The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “A pursuit or interest followed with great devotion.” Mirriam-Webster defines it as “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices” and “commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance”. I think this is a suitable secular definition moving forward. I will also define the term “hereafter” as “At some time in the future”, but also “After Death.” The concept of Death, or perhaps more specifically, Judgement Day, is viewed by many Bitcoiners as a devastating economic event, the death of Fiat. Ultimately, this will lead to total civilizational collapse, or, the phenomenon of “hyperbitcoinization”, effectively, when all global trade is conducted in Bitcoin, and its market capitalization is in the dozens of trillions, if not hundreds. A tenet of the Bitcoin faith is belief in this Day and the need to prepare well for it. With definitions out of the way, we can get to the epic memes.
Bitcoin mythology is legendary in its potential reach. Satoshi as a real, yet mythical, being, concept, or meme, would deserve a full book in their own right. The Bitcoin Network is omnipresent — beamed everywhere, even from the heavens above. There is decentralization of everything — from the mechanical process of mining, to the human process of building and hodling, thought, and religious, or non-religious, ideology. The Nodes are omnipotent, and only through their good graces can changes be made to Bitcoin. Running a full node is a practice that is incumbent on the True Believer. The Timechain is the unforgeable eternal ledger, secured by the practice of mining, of which True Believers are encouraged to do if able. Through the process of Proof-of-Work, the pulse of the network is the literal monetization and digital embodiment of energy. “Capital-E” Energy is thermodynamically finite, yet infinitely divisible into units of energy — just like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a simple digital reflection of Energy, and is irrevocably tied to it. Energy is everything in the universe, and everything around us is simply a materialisation of this energy in one state or another. Energy is Nature. Energy is Life. We now finally have a monetary approximation of this through Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, then, is simply Energy, and by extension, Nature and Life itself. Nature demands submission. The Nature of Bitcoin is open and permissionless, and since Bitcoin is rooted in Nature (i.e. Energy), the will of Bitcoin must be submitted to.
Lao Tzu said:
One of great virtue is one who follows the Natural Way of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is vague and intangible. Yet, in the vague and void, there is image, there is substance.
Within the profound intangible, there is essence. This essence is genuine. In It lies the great faith.
Since the beginning of 2009, Bitcoin has been in existence.
Only through It can one understand the origin of all beings
How do I know that this is the true essence?
It is through this Natural Way.
- The Tao of The Coin, Chapter 21
Bitcoin is the Essence of Money. The True Believer is content in their submission to the will of Bitcoin, and they will be greatly rewarded in the hereafter. I will discuss the hereafter, and several other parallels Bitcoin has with “traditional religions”, next.
There are several common themes across the world’s major religions, spanning monotheistic, polytheistic and philosophical ones. Bitcoin embodies bits and pieces of all of them and can even share conflicting religious beliefs! Such is the beauty of Bitcoin, it is compatible and flows through Nature, with anyone free to ride its waves and integrate it into their own “religion”.
Take for example the contrast of Bitcoin and the Christian concept of Original Sin. The Bitcoin Observant see mankind’s fall from grace as the movement to fiat currency, and we are all born default Keynesians, and need to stack sats to cleanse ourselves for a pleasant hereafter.
Islam takes an opposite view, whereby all people are born Muslim and with a clean spiritual slate, and non-Mulsims can “revert” to Islam if they choose. The Bitcoin analogy in this case would be that we are born free, with a clear mental slate that accepts the will of nature, but gets forced into the fiat machine. We can revert to our state of freedom by declaring our faith in Bitcoin; best done by stacking sats.
There are also elements of both free will and divine pre-ordainment at play in traditional religions, and this is also apparent in Bitcoin. We all participate based on our free will, with a major reason being the Divine Preordainment of the Bitcoin Supply.
One cannot mention bitcoin and religious reverence without the mentioning of Satoshi. In one way, he presents as a Saviour, who so loved us, that he sacrificed almost 5% of Bitcoin’s supply so that he may complete his favour upon us. As a messenger, he created the perfect money for us, and brought to us this Code called Bitcoin Core. Within its own ecosystem, The Code is a deity in its own right; it sets fixed boundaries of what is and isn’t allowed, and enforces these rules without fear or favour, beholden to no-one, only to the Greater Law of Mathematics. Although enforcement mechanisms differ across religions, the same points apply. Therefore, every node running The Code is a deity in its own right too. An MMOPG, a Massively Multi-peer Online Polyumvirate God, engaged in Financial Warcraft.
In all religions, there is always some struggle of good versus evil in one way or another, with suffering being a theme across the majority. It is the ultimate display of low Time Preference — struggle now for victory and rewards in the future. Many religious people struggle for a future that may not even exist! Struggles can be internal or external. Internal struggles are the hardest, as “sin” can be easily fallen into. Bitcoin has no struggles, it just is. The Believers must struggle externally in what will be biggest mythological Good versus Evil war in history, the battle of Hard, Pure Money versus Evil-Facilitating Fiat. Internally, they need to avoid particular “deadly sins.” The original 7-deadly sins were Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride. Religions encourage staying away from sin and following the straight and narrow path. Staying away from sin and doing good deeds grants you rewards for a heavenly hereafter. After all, everything in Nature is incentive driven.
Some say that If you indulge in these sins often enough, the regret and heavy conscience would be enough to make the final minutes on your death-bed feel like hell on Earth, regardless of what afterlife you believe in. More importantly, chances are you will likely lose a lot of sats taking that approach, and based on what you believe, a fiery eternity would await you too. Either way, losing sats may be the difference between a heaven-like or hell-like experience in the Bitcoin Hereafter. In light of these 7 sins, The Observant maximise their health and live long lives by fighting gluttony and sloth, fight greed and pride by staying humble and stacking sats, and show no envy by voluntarily giving away your source for people to benefit from as they wish. Lust is a discretionary one, and wrath is allowable and encouraged against nocoiners and shitcoiners alike. The jurisprudence remains unclear though, with some sects, such as the Temple of Toxicity, arguing that wrath against shitcoiners and nocoiners is incumbent upon The Believer.
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in The Blockchain, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your Trezor is, there your heart will be also.
- Book of Satoshi 6:15
While many newcoiners come into the ecosystem at the prospect of financial returns, their education and involvement lead them to The Natural Way — stacking sats. From there, The Believer reaps several rewards, both spiritual fulfilment for their souls, as well as a much higher chance for a rapture on Economic Judgement Day and thereafter. Through the act of religiously regular sat stacking, The Believers provide an uphill-sloping bedrock and stability to the price. Some even refer to this ritual as a “tithe”, as every single sat stacked furthers the cause of Bitcoin — yet another parallel!
As we move up the natural logarithmic price slope, we get increases in “energy-level” to help in our fight. From a literal point of view, energy used to power Bitcoin will increase as a function of price. From a figurative point of view, the “energy level” is the size of the weaponry available to us in our contest against central banks. This means an enclosed Bitcoin ecosystem that is capable of delivering financial sovereignty to the masses. Indeed, victory has been granted to the patient and those who keep their tithe holy. Of course, there will be some vanity rewards to those who hold 6.15 BTC, with promises of Citadel living, endless riches, and well-endowed partners.
Having laid out the case above, we can see that Bitcoin facilitates most attitudes and beliefs; especially those related to freedom and sovereignty. The True Believer’s involvement in the ecosystem involves many different religious practices, whether it’s contributing code, running a node, learning and educating, or simply stacking sats. They carry out these practices with great devotion. Not only does Bitcoin fit the dictionary definition, we have seen that Bitcoin as a religion shares many underlying tones with both the ancient & modern religions.
At the end of the day, everyone has to believe in something; might as well believe in something verifiable and unforgeable.
In closing, we will recite a brief Bitcoin prayer:
Oh Bitcoin! Do not punish us if we forget our DCA or we fall into error with fiat and shitcoins; Oh Bitcoin! And lay not on us a bear market like that which You did lay on those before us; Oh Bitcoin! And put not on us bags greater than we have the strength to bear. And enlighten us and humble us and grant sovereignty to us. You are our bulwark, so grant us patience between this halving and the next.
By Hass McCook, The Friar, Sept, 2019
By John Newbery
The end of the decade is a good time to look back and marvel at the giant strides that Bitcoin has made since Satoshi gave us the whitepaper in 2008. It’s also a natural point to look forward to what the upcoming years might hold in store.
This is where I think Bitcoin is headed over the next few years. Tell me why I’m wrong and what I’ve missed!
The lightning protocol teams working on c-lightning (@Blockstream), eclair (@acinq_co), LND (@lightning) and rust lightning will continue to iterate rapidly on the lightning protocol.
All implementations now support basic multi-path payments (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/multipath-payments/ …). We’ll get better support of that as well as dual-funding, splice-in and splice-out (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/splicing/ …).
Taken together, those technologies will make channel and liquidity management much easier. They’ll be automated, fade into the background and user experience will improve drastically.
Lightning infrastructure will improve. @bitfinex recently added lightning deposits and withdrawals. All other exchanges, merchant service providers, custodians and wallets will follow suit or become obsolete.
We’ll see more lightning wallets: a mix of non-custodial; self-custodied with outsourced routing; and fully-self-managed wallets. This is a brand new space and there’ll be lots of experimentation. Different teams will find different niches to fill.
Already, wallets like @MuunWallet, @Breez_Tech, @PhoenixWallet, @ln_zap and @bluewalletio are experimenting with different models.
Tooling for lightning developers will improve. When we ran the lightning apps residency just over a year ago, the attendees spent a lot of time setting up their lightning dev environments.
Now, with Polar (https://github.com/jamaljsr/polar) by @jamaljsr, lightning app developers can set up a test environment with a few clicks. More and better tools will continue to appear.
With better tooling, we’ll see faster innovation on the application layer. Teams at @zebedeeio, @SatoshisGames, and others we haven’t heard of yet will delight us with new and unexpected lightning experiences.
The schnorr/taproot softfork (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/taproot/ …) will be activated in 2020 or 2021. That’ll provide a huge improvement in fungibility, privacy, scalability and functionality. For an overview of the benefits, watch the Optech exec briefing here: https://bitcoinops.org/en/2019-exec-briefing/#the-next-softfork ….
That’ll allow lightning to upgrade from HTLCs to Payment Points. That’s a big improvement for privacy and payment decorrelation, and allows ‘Stuckless payments’ with proofs-of-payment – another huge boost in LN usablity.
See the @suredbits series of blog posts here https://suredbits.com/payment-points-part-1/ … for more details on Payment Points.
Even better, lightning channel opens and closes will look identical to payments to single pubkeys. The same is true for payments to k-of-n pubkey thresholds. That’s good for fungibility, privacy and scalability.
In fact, with schnorr/taproot, there’s almost no downside to encumbering UTXOs with advanced scripts instead of single pubkey outputs.
Cold storage UTXOs will be k-of-n multisig keytrees, and all hot wallet UTXOs will be stored in channels (with splicing-out used to make on-chain payments). When transactions hit the chain, they’ll look like any other single pubkey/signature payment.
Payments into wallets will pay directly into channel open outputs (thanks to @esneider for pointing this out to me). There’ll be no concept of an on-chain balance and an in-channel balance. Just a single, unified balance that can be used for lightning or on-chain payments.
Wallet teams will collaborate on a PayJoin payment protocol (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/payjoin/ …). A large number of on-chain transactions will be 2-input-2-ouput transactions, vastly improving fungibility and privacy, and foiling chain analysis.
The inputs to those PayJoin transactions may be channel splice-outs, and the outputs may be channel opens, but there’ll be no way to tell from observing the chain.
Eventually we’ll have cross-input signature aggregation (https://bitcoincore.org/en/2017/03/23/schnorr-signature-aggregation/#signature-aggregation …), which means those PayJoin transactions will only have a single signature, and will be *cheaper* than regular change-producing transactions.
Larger coinjoins will be cheaper still. An advanced PayJoin payment protocol could even batch multiple payments to the same merchant/exchange and use only a single signature.
We’ll get SIGHASH_NOINPUT or SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/sighash_noinput/ …), making eltoo (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/eltoo/ …) possible, and blurring the lines between layer 1 and layer 2 (https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2019-September/002136.html …).
That’ll make lightning even more usable and allow more advanced layer 2 contracts like channel factories (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/channel-factories/ …).
All these advanced features will require greater wallet interoperability. That’s where miniscript (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/miniscript/ …) comes in.
With miniscript, wallets will eventually be able to enter contracts with each other that don’t require pre-templated scripts (as lightning currently does). This wallet interoperability will allow faster innovation in layer 2 contracts.
OP_CTV (https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2019/12/04/#op-checktemplateverify-ctv …) or some other covenant-enabling opcode will be activated, allowing richer layer 2 constructions like joinpools (https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/bitcoin-wizards/2019-05-21#1558427254-1558427441 …;).
Taken together with taproot and SIGHASH_NOINPUT, we’ll get extremely rich and private off-chain contracts will be made possible.
Some of these things will happen in 2020, and some will take a bit longer, but they’re all heading in the same direction: using the chain for what the chain’s good for (h/t Andrew Poesltra).
That’s to say: the block chain allows nodes to arrive at an agreed ledger state, while contracting and functionality move up onto layer two. Doing so is cheaper, more secure, more private and allows for more rapid innovation.
None of this is inevitable, and none can happen without the industry of many hands and the creativity of many minds. There are years of work ahead for developers, researchers, businesses and users.
If you run a Bitcoin business, you can help by supporting, sponsoring or hiring open source developers. If you’re a Bitcoin user, you can help by *demanding* that any service you use supports the open source ecosystem.
If you’re a developer, you can help by reviewing and testing PRs and releases. https://bitcoincore.reviews/ is a great place to start.
2020 is going to be a great year for Bitcoin and Lightning protocol development! /fin
After my article about “Volatility as information” a few readers asked me what did I mean by “low entropy carrier”. As I was writing about George Gilder’s book “Knowledge and power” applied to Bitcoin, I didn’t feel at the time the need to explain what these fancy words mean.
But let me try to do so as it is for me a very interesting exercise:
For example the realm of physics is a very low entropy carrier of information, what do I mean by that? It means that once you figure out the laws and relations between your measurements and observations, you can infer more laws and then create models that explain the reality. There are little inter-dependencies between observable facts compared to for example what happens in a high entropy carrier such as the human body.
As Gilder says, killing a virus within a human body without destroying healthy tissues is very complex compared to doing certain experiments within the realm of physics because of these inter-dependencies. Consequently, when we take a blood test, from the measurements we can conclude several correlations but hardly ever causation. Trying to do so, we frequently need many more tests. In fact, the more I learn about them, the more I conclude we are absolutely clueless about the human body.
With regards to the economy, the same applies to what Gilder calls the low entropy carrier of capitalism, which are the rule of law, the maintenance of order, the defense of property rights, reliability and restrain of regulation, stability of money, etc…
A low entropy carrier is therefore a channel that carries itself very little information, producing little distortion or external interference in the transmitted message and also allowing the entire message itself to be what Gilder calls “surprise”, entropy, or unexpected information. For Gilder, surprise is the entire point of entrepreneurial activity.
Therefore making the rule of law, maintenance of order, defense of property rights, etc… more predictable, allows to really receive the signal at the other end. In other words, by decreasing the noise in the channel, we are able to get the information that truly matters, by decreasing the “noise” that the powers that be produce via distortion and interference in things like money, regulation, property rights, etc…
Note: All this fancy writing by Gilder (and me) is well supported by an actual theory, the information theory of Shannon (1948), so neither him nor me are making this up!
In the USA economy surprise (crazy start-ups, crazy inventions and improvements of any process within economic activity) is arguably possible even likely. OTOH, the North Korean regime could be argued to be the exact opposite, where the only surprise possible is the last eccentricity of its dictatorial leader thanks to its completely lack of transparency.
Given that money is the information system of the economy, you could say that the USD is currently among the lowest entropy carriers in the world and the North Korean currency likely the highest.
Bitcoin is currently a very high entropy carrier yet for economic activity, because it is presently full of surprise for most of the world. It is not its lack of transparency but the fact it is hard to figure out. As I argued in my previous post, volatility, mining or its blockchain are some of its interesting features for many, and given that everything about it is mostly surprise, it can’t be a proper information channel of capitalism just yet.
But every podcast, book, every tweet, every article about it increasing its understanding, decreases this entropy Gilder writes about and it is in the process of becoming the lowest entropy carrier of the economy within the next few decades. In other words, in 10 to 30 years time, thanks to its transparency, we will find as many surprising things about Bitcoin as we currently do about the alphabet!
With regards to the current debate on scarcity being Bitcoin’s first price driver, I disagree, I believe the main driver is its understanding, which drives demand, which thanks to the limited supply increases the price.
Keep learning and explaining, it is the best way to decrease Bitcoin’s entropy and to end up turning Bitcoin in the best form of money we have ever seen!
How Bitcoin Thrives on the Edge between Order and Chaos
Posted Dacember 22, 2019
Bitcoin works. No matter what other opinions you hold about this strange phenomenon, it undoubtedly works, marches on, or, as I (and others) have previously argued, is alive. Even if most of the world would grind to a halt, the Bitcoin network would continue to produce valid blocks every 10 minutes or so.
Bitcoin works because of many things: game theory, economic incentives, cryptography, ingenious engineering, resilience on a network level, and so on and so forth. Killing Bitcoin is hard. Really hard. Killing Bitcoin is like killing an idea. An idea that is stuck in the heads of hundreds of thousands of zealous individuals.
First of all, it is quite hard to shut down the internet globally; and secondly, Bitcoin can transcend the internet. Everything which can transmit data can be used to transmit bitcoin transactions, and everything which can hold data can store a copy of Bitcoin’s block chain. It’s just a ledger; the whole thing is just information.
Curiously, the Bitcoin network is embodying the eternal struggle of life: the struggle against entropy; a battle on the edge between order and chaos.
To understand this chaotic struggle — and how Bitcoin thrives because of it — it is helpful to briefly discuss the following concepts: entropy, randomness, and information. I hope to convince you that these concepts are related and that they are essential in Bitcoin’s ongoing struggle for survival.
Let’s dive in.
In computing, entropy can be used to measure the randomness of a data source. In cryptography in general, and in Bitcoin in particular, a good source of entropy is essential to keep you secure. Mess up the entropy of your private key (aka your seed phrase) and your bitcoins will be my bitcoins soon.
Note: the technical term for this unwanted transfer of coins is rekt. You don’t need to know what “getting rekt” means in detail, or the many ways in which you can get rekt; it is enough to know that you should avoid such a situation at all costs.
Entropy is quite a complicated concept, but in general terms, it describes how random or how compressible something is.
High entropy: randomness.
Low entropy: orderliness.
Or, in other words, with a nod to Tsachy Weissman:
High entropy: not very compressible.
Low entropy: very compressible.
There are complicated formulas and quite a few disambiguous definitions of entropy. The concept finds applications in classical thermodynamics, statistical thermodynamics, quantum statistical physics, order and disorder, life, astrophysics, and more. It is also a measure of irreversibility.
In Bitcoin, reversibility and irreversibility are probabilistic. If enough people with enough hash power collude transactions could be reversed. Absolute irreversibility does not exist in Bitcoin. Final settlement is never final, but always probabilistic. Yes, the chances of reversal might be beyond astronomical, but nevertheless, final settlement does not and should not exist in Bitcoin. Nakamoto consensus forbids it.
“The first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. The second law states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases, and the third law states that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero.”
— Knut Svanholm
In Bitcoin, entropy is important for multiple reasons:
Secret information should be generated by high-entropy data sources
New blocks reverse entropy locally, i.e. create order out of chaos
Bitcoin’s security model relies upon chaotic processes
Validation relies on deterministic processes
Everyone can validate structured data
Nobody can guess random data
While the above speaks in absolutes (everyone and nobody), the truth is more nuanced: Again, Bitcoin is probabilistic in nature, thus, in theory, one could guess a private key just like in theory you could find a billion valid blocks in one millisecond.
Details aside, we will try to keep it simple here. In general, if you have two coins, the entropy of this system is two. As in: you can describe the whole system with two bits: 00, 01, 10, 11.
2 bits of entropy
Flip both coins at the same time, and you will end up with either tail-tail, tail-heads, heads-tail, or tail-tail. If you are a fair coin flipper, the chance of each combination will be 25%. Imagine a system that flips hundreds of coins at once, and you have something which could be used to generate a private key.
Randomness is essential to cryptography. At the root of all secret communication is some form of information asymmetry: you know something a potential eavesdropper does not.
A good secret is like a good password: randomly generated, i.e. coming from a data source that has a high degree of entropy.
Random noise. How much information is contained in this image?
If something is “perfectly” encrypted, an eavesdropper can not distinguish what was said from random data. This is the purpose of proper encryption: you want to hide what was said, and, if possible, even hide the fact that something meaningful was said at all.
“Good” randomness: not compressible / high entropy / secret / secure.
“Bad” randomness: compressible / low entropy / guessable / insecure.
Bitcoin doesn’t use encryption per se. The ledger is public and transparent by design, enabling anyone to audit the whole system with the will to do so. Bitcoin uses cryptographic signatures and cryptographic hashes, both of which produce quasi-random outcomes. And if you know the secret, you can unlock some coins (using your private key), add new blocks to the block chain (using the nonce you found), or prove that you are who you say you are (by signing a message, which at least proves that you are in control of one or multiple keys).
Only you know your private key. Nobody else should know your private key. Only you, the successful miner, found the nonce for the next block. That is information asymmetry. That is what makes Bitcoin work.
All cryptographic systems work because of information asymmetry. And curiously, properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data. Otherwise, an eavesdropper could make some sense of the encrypted message, which in turn would mean that the encryption used isn’t very good.
What is information, anyway?
People often say that Bitcoin is thermodynamically secured. While this is true, I’d like to dig a little deeper. What does thermodynamically secured mean, exactly?
It means that — as far as we know —changing things in our universe requires energy. When I say “changing things” I mean it: change anything at all in our universe, and you will need to “use” energy — put in some work — to change that thing.
Move a chair? You have to put in some work. Grow a tree? You’ll need the energy of the sun to turn CO2 into wood. Do a calculation? Energy is required to manipulate whatever is holding the data. Store the outcome? You’ll need energy to arrange (and protect) the atoms for storage, no matter what medium is used.
Bitcoin lives mostly in the informational realm, and just like all other information systems, it needs to store and process the information via a physical medium. Thus, if you change information _in Bitcoin, you effectively change a _thing in the real world. Whether that thing is a solid-state disk, USB stick, hard drive, optical storage medium, or something else doesn’t matter.
The fact that changing things — or, in other words: flipping bits — requires energy, is the root conundrum of all computation. It is the reason why your computer makes a bunch of noise and gets hot if it does a lot of “thinking.” It is the reason that computer science students have to study the Big O notation and software companies love to ask questions about it. Changing a zero into a one requires work, and no matter how fast you are working, you still need to expend _some _amount of energy. According to physics, there literally is no such thing as a free lunch. Flipping bits is work, which requires energy.
And here is the thing: Bitcoin utilizes the fact that the difference between hard computational problems and exponentially hard computational problems is big. Mind-bogglingly big.
Alright. Back to our original question: What is information, anyway?
Sorted colors. How much information is contained in this image?
Information relates to both knowledge and meaning. It is the opposite of not knowing, and the opposite of information in data is randomness. In other words: if you are not able to make sense of some data, it might appear random to you.
Sensible information: quite compressible.
Nonsense information: not very compressible.
Pi might help to clear up what I’m trying to say: 3.141592653589793… can be “compressed” into π, or the circumference of a circle with the diameter of one.
As a computer programmer, you could think of this concept as follows: can I write a computer program that generates the information I’m trying to convey, which is actually shorter than the information itself? (That’s what I mean when I say “compressible”.)
In short: sense and nonsense, order and chaos, or information and randomness are intricately linked. One could say that they are two sides of the same coin, and both concepts are related via something we call entropy.
Information implies structure and structure benefits from redundancy. The most ancient structures in nature have been adapted for survival by evolution. At the root of it is DNA, two chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. Symmetric, redundant information. The properties which allow DNA to survive and thrive are embedded in its processes: redundant structure, a copying mechanism that relies on this structure, the baked-in error correction which leads to four bases instead of two, etc.
Bitcoin, in comparison, is simpler: one chain, two bits, no error correction (information is copied perfectly). However, as with DNA, the properties which allow Bitcoin to survive (and thrive) are embedded in the replication process: a chaotic race to find new blocks, replication of blocks in the network, and replication of the software (and the ledger) on as many nodes as possible. Further, when we talk about the Bitcoin organism, error correction is equivalent to being alive. The network self-validates with every beat of the heart, every ten minutes or so. This is what makes the bitcoin organism extremely robust as well. It is designed for survival.
In Bitcoin, high entropy information is usually kept secret. Your private key should, as the name implies, be kept private. It is for your eyes only. Which particular nonce you just tried, i.e. the work you already did when mining a new block, is usually kept private as well. You don’t want your competitors to know which numbers produce invalid blocks and can be skipped.
Chaos on the left, Order on the right.
Bitcoin utilizes both order and chaos to create a system that grows — and even thrives — between these extremes. It utilizes information asymmetry and an ingenious incentive structure which leads to a global competition to find Bitcoin’s secrets.
Which processes are orderly, which are chaotic, and how Bitcoin is able to grow on the edge between order and chaos will be explored in the next section.
Growth between Order and Chaos
What makes the Bitcoin network tick? Again, there might be many answers to this question, but the only thing that is truly ticking in the Bitcoin network is the global clock: a block clock, where every block is one unit of time.
Currently, we call this process mining because new bitcoins are generated for every valid block that is mined (read: found). We call this the block subsidy, and it is an incentive structure to bootstrap the network.
In a sense, the Bitcoin organism “grows” on the edge between order and chaos: finding new blocks is a chaotic process, and its result is a very orderly list of transactions: the Bitcoin block chain, also known as the ledger.
From a “finding new blocks” point of view, we are still extremely early. Only ~10 years in. The block reward era will go on until the year 2140 or so, which means we are about 13% into the bootstrapping phase of Bitcoin: the reward era.
Satoshi undoubtedly knew that this was a long game. The era where fresh blocks are associated with a reward is only one phase of the Bitcoin game. Note that this phase is 6930000 blocks long. With an average block time of ~10 minutes, the reward era turns out to be 131 years long.
2019: Early days of the Bitcoin Reward Era
There will be a time where those who are tasked with finding new blocks are rewarded mostly via the networks’ fee market, as Dan Held brilliantly argued in Bitcoin’s Security is Fine. The point in time where the fee market takes over will be somewhere between the year 2020 and 2140. Either that, or Bitcoin will die, or some museum computers will try to find new blocks at an economic loss.
After this point in time, we will probably still talk about “mining” bitcoin, even though all the “miners” won’t be producing any new bitcoins. All 21 million BTC — or 2,099,999,997,690,000 sats, to be precise — will have been mined. No new bitcoin will be added to the pool of existing coins in circulation.
Miners — if we still call them that —will still try to find new blocks, mind you. But the bitcoin moved by these blocks will have a long economic history. Gone are the days where miners award themselves new bitcoin in the coinbase transaction, to be spent after 100 blocks.
Will bitcoin still exist in 5000 years, and eventually beat gold as the de-facto money of humanity? I don’t know, but important information is extremely hard to kill. I expect bitcoin to live for a very long time, just like ancient scriptures and religious texts survive to this day. It is just information, all of it, and it can transcend the medium it is printed on.
Of course, I expect something approximating hyperbitcoinization to have happened until this point. We will have a circular bitcoin economy, and bitcoin banks will globally settle vast amounts of value between them. What private citizens — or sovereign individuals, to use a more fitting term — will use is yet to be seen. I doubt that the bitcoin base layer will be used by persons like you and me. And that’s perfectly fine.
With the stage set, and concepts like order, information, randomness, and entropy in mind, let’s take a look at some bitcoin concepts. We will distinguish them visually: from chaotic (left) to orderly (right).
Bitcoin grows between order and chaos.
While the framing of order and chaos is useful, it is neither precise nor universally applicable. However, I believe that thinking about the parts which make Bitcoin tick in this way is a helpful exercise, and I believe that the core point — that bitcoin lives, grows, and thrives on the edge between order and chaos — is profoundly true.
Let’s ponder on these concepts for a bit.
Private key: Chaotic information, very high randomness. Secret information which is best kept private. Maximum entropy for maximum security. If your private key is not random, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Nonce: Chaotic information, high randomness. A nonce is a specific number. Miners are in constant competition to find the next nonce which produces a valid block. Multiple numbers might fit the criteria, but the mining process is very much like finding one random number.
Fresh block (before broadcast): Newly found blocks are the outcome of the chaotic process which is finding a nonce. Before blocks are broadcast, blocks can be understood as secret information. Fresh blocks can be ambiguous, since multiple blocks can form a valid chain tip at the same time. It is in your best interest to broadcast a fresh block immediately to everyone to reap the reward. Fresh blocks are only held back if you are an attacker, or very stupid, or both.
Chain tip: Forming the chain tip is a process which is mostly orderly, but again, it is generated by a chaotic process. As mentioned above, the chain tip can be ambiguous. One version of the chain tip will survive, the losing versions will become orphan blocks. You can validate the correctness of all information in all blocks up to the chain tip. The chain tip reflects the current time in Bitcoin.
Orphan blocks: Orphan blocks are part of the orderly, natural growth process of the Bitcoin block chain. Valid blocks are discarded on a regular basis. If two valid blocks are found at roughly the same time, they fight a probabilistic battle for survival. In the long run, only one block can win this race. The losing block will become an orphan block and die a lonely death.
Unconfirmed transactions: Orderly structure which can be easily validated. An unconfirmed transaction can be valid or invalid. Valid transactions are included in blocks based on economic incentives, which is — again — a probabilistic, market-driven process. Invalid transactions are discarded.
Buried blocks: Orderly structure generated by a chaotic process, some time ago. The possibility of a reorg (re-organization of buried blocks) becomes exponentially unlikely because the probabilities against it multiply. Example: if every block has a 50% chance to reorg, the chance of a 6 block reorg would be 1.5%. Actual numbers are closer to 0.31% per block and 0.0000000000008875% for a 6 block reorg.
Confirmed transactions: Orderly structure which can be validated very easily. Irreversibility is probabilistic and dependent on block height. Once a transaction is confirmed, it becomes more final the deeper it is buried in the block chain.
Public keys: extended public keys (xpub, ypub, zpub) are generated by a deterministic process from a random seed — your private key.
Block time: Valid blocks are found, on average, every 10 minutes. This is what makes the Bitcoin network tick. Bitcoin’s heartbeat is extremely regular when measured in blocks. While still regular when measured in human time, mining is a fundamentally probabilistic process, and thus there is a real possibility that some blocks are found very quickly or comparably late.
Difficulty adjustment: While the difficulty adjustment is a very orderly process, it can be a bit chaotic if hash power changes drastically (as it did in August 2017, because of the contentious bcash hard fork). Difficulty adjustment is based on block time, which is only probabilistically linked to human time.
Bitcoin supply: Bitcoin’s supply is fixed since its inception. The issuance of new bitcoin is embedded in Bitcoin’s consensus code and is thus virtually impossible to change.
Whole ledger, deeply buried blocks (aka the Bitcoin block chain): Orderly, sequential, structure which is pretty much unambiguous up to the chain tip and can be validated by everyone.
Ledger validation: Validation is an orderly, sequential process. The outcome of this process is a simple boolean value for each block: true or false, valid or invalid. Every node arrives at the same block height independently, which is what forms Nakamoto consensus.
The fact that all of the above, the whole machinery, works in concert to provide a yes or no answer to the question “Is this what actually happened?” will never cease to amaze me.
Let me repeat the above. The whole purpose of the Bitcoin organism is to decide what happened when to whom. How much does everyone have, and how did this come to be? The how is important, because it allows everyone to audit everything, and come to the same conclusion.
In short, Bitcoin utilizes chaotic processes (mining, private key generation) and information asymmetry (public information which is widely shared, secret information which is not shared at all) to build up a structured, orderly, and permanent record, that can be audited and verified by everyone.
This is Bitcoin. This is Nakamoto consensus. This is the innovation, and this is also what makes bitcoin the best and hardest money that ever existed on planet earth.
You might call it open, permissionless, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, public, sound, antifragile, and a couple of other adjectives.
I call it Life. And we all call it Bitcoin.
By Rory Highside
Almost since the dawn of Bitcoin, there has been a hot debate over the value of Proof-of-Work in cryptocurrency systems, and whereby the apparent wasteful use of energy by Bitcoin to secure its system will one day destroy the Earth. Unfortunately, there still remains a basic misunderstanding of the value of this Proof-of-Work, and the fundamental relationship to energy and work that makes up any and every system in the known universe.
One of the least understood and oft-cited technologies of this crazy universe is the emergent complex system called Bitcoin, and thus by extension, the intrinsically linked Proof-of-Work that drives the engine under its hood, metabolising raw energy as its life force.
There are many ways to describe Bitcoin the system, bitcoin the product, and the relationship to the underlying Proof-of-Work, but an overview of how the Bitcoin system functions at a high level is;
“The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.”
Satoshi Nakamoto, The Bitcoin Whitepaper
The idea of Bitcoin was to create a reliable, decentralised network, upon which all transactions could be recorded & stored, that was able to be validated by anyone. The issue was: how do you manage a ledger of transactions amongst a globally distributed database, entirely without a central point of failure, with a set of users who may or may not be known to each other, in a potentially adversarial environment, all the while ensuring that consensus is practically always achieved?
The answer to this equation fundamentally lies in a unique method of solving the “Byzantine Generals Problem”, a thought experiment proposed while designing fault-tolerant consensus systems to accurately replicate the state of systems in aircraft.
Consensus & The Byzantine Generals Problem
Fundamentally, reliable computer systems must be able to handle malfunctioning components that can give conflicting information to different parts of the system.
This is exponentially harder when you begin to network multiple computer systems, across a distributed network, particularly when there is no “lead” or “authority”.
“This situation can be expressed abstractly in terms of a group of generals of the Byzantine army camped with their troops around an enemy city. Communicating only by messenger, the generals must agree upon a common battle plan. However, one or more of them may be traitors who will try to confuse the others. The problem is to find an algorithm to ensure that the loyal generals will reach agreement.”
The Byzantine Generals Problem, Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease
In distributed computing, consensus protocols are used to achieve accurate state machine replication. A state machine simply being a mathematical model of computation, and state machine replication is the general method of implementing a fault-tolerant process to replicate these computing ‘states’ globally in a distributed system.
The Bitcoin blockchain is simply a time-stamped record of all state transitions, and the network itself is a decentralised time-stamp server, stamping the first transaction to spend a coin to solve the issue of double-spending in a system without a central coordinator.
Nakamoto consensus,the protocol created by Satoshi Nakamoto, achieves its solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem by utilising Proof-of-Work to provide an economic cost to becoming the leader i.e. the network participant that may, providing all rules are followed and consensus is achieved, update the state of the Bitcoin blockchain.
To update the state of Bitcoin, miners must first compete via Proof-of-Work to find the solution to a cryptographic puzzle that abides by the rules of the system, with the winner of this race becoming the newly appointed leader. Once found, the leader must then update the state in a way that conforms to all of the consensus rules of the system, or else it will merely be rejected by all other participants.
Proof-of-Work and Competition
Proof-of-Work ultimately makes this process cost-intensive, and makes the mathematical odds of becoming the chosen leader _completely _random and indeterminable. Nakamoto Consensus follows the chain of work with the most accumulated Proof-of-Work as a key consensus rule, aiding in the self-organisation of the Bitcoin system. Participants are economically incentivised to be honest, as adversaries who attempt to create inaccurate states merely waste resources attempting to defraud the system.
Proof-of-Work economically incentivises Bitcoin to become the ultimate arbiter of truth.
By utilising Proof-of-Work for both the security and the issuance mechanism, the Bitcoin system leverages the “selfish gene” that all living species have, in order to create a system that comes to collective agreement, whilst still working competitively. Bitcoin is the sum of its many subsystems, united to create a combinatory system; one that is led by Darwinian fitness in an elegant energy transforming race to secure its network, whereby in return for participation, miners are rewarded with (₿) bitcoin.
The product of this work, (₿) bitcoin, is exchanged for the trust and security that these miners deliver to the overall Bitcoin system, which becomes increasingly antifragile (and thus increasingly fitter) as these security network effects compound.
Miners, the warriors at the front line of Bitcoin’s defence system are evolutionarily fit to protect its value. They work hard securing the network, the state of its ledger, and the distributed timestamp server via an energy intensive exercise, hence they deserve to be paid accordingly for providing this impenetrable wall of thermodynamic potential. That this work is increasingly hard makes it unlikely that an adversary could outcompete the cumulative work provided by the honest, cooperative majority.
The symbiotic relationship miners have with Bitcoin forms a system that’s whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the apex Proof-of-Work collective.
Why Proof is Important
Work exists in every and all systems known to man, and the fundamental constant of the universe is that this work always requires energy. Energy is merely the ability to bring about change i.e. perform work. The more energy that exists in a system, the more thermodynamic potential, or simply put, the more useful work we can perform, hence the more value it can provide.
It is therefore a universal truth that all work has a measurable cost of energy transformation due to the very nature of the universe, and the laws of thermodynamics. It is with these laws that we underpin Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work.
Proof-of-Work is the unforgeable record of expended time and resources, therefore we can define Proof-of-Work as merely demonstrated proof-of-time-and-resources. This expenditure of time and resources subsequently give us a simple mechanism to measure production cost by, and whereby to secure and distribute the product of this work. It is through this procedure that we enact what we can describe as unforgeable costliness:
(1) find or create a class of objects that is highly improbable, takes much effort to make, or both, and such that the measure of their costliness can be verified by other parties. (2) use the objects to enable a protocol or institution to cross trust boundaries”
Nick Szabo, Antiques, Time, Gold, and Bit Gold
Providing proof of this work creates an unforgeable record of expended energy utilised to secure, and to remove entropy from within the Bitcoin accounting system. Bitcoin metabolises this provided energy to make its heart beat roughly every ten minutes. Upon this beat, that is, the finding of a new block, Bitcoin broadcasts its latest state to all nodes in the network, flooding the system with the latest block like a virus, until all nodes reflect its current state.
The result of Bitcoin’s redundancy in state being duplicated tens of thousands of times across the entire planet, is to make an almost completely impervious, and indestructible system. One that could survive even a nuclear holocaust. Bitcoin is the unkillable cockroach that may outsurvive mankind itself in some form. Wherever even a single copy of Bitcoin exists, the network can yet again be bootstrapped, however difficult the process may be.
Bitcoin: a self-expanding, self-replicating, self-organising, nuclear-proof, distributed accounting system for the digital-age.
Energy is the unit of all life, the constant that is utilised within all systems to perform useful work, it is the fundamental currency that all life transacts with. This energy is a necessary tool utilised in the act of rearranging matter and information. All energy is bound by the unflinching laws of thermodynamics, meaning energy can never be destroyed, merely transformed.
That work must have a measurable energy cost is due to these inherent laws of the universe, physics, and the laws of thermodynamics. These absolute, universal laws mean there is no such thing as a free lunch…ever. Therefore, we can demonstrate Bitcoin is secured via proof of the undeniable laws of thermodynamics that bind our universe, eating energy to sustain its metabolism, transforming information, proliferating, and self-organising its system.
“Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life…It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. It lives because all the running copies are constantly talking to each other. It lives because if any one copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any fuss or muss.”
Ralph Merkle
World Kilowatt Dollars
The great futurist and scientist Buckminster Fuller wrote of an energy backed currency in his novel Critical Path in 1981, with a prophetically accurate description of the DNA within the Bitcoin system.
“In this cosmically uniform, common energy-value system for all humanity, costing will be expressed in kilowatt hours, watt-hours, and watt-seconds of work. Kilowatt-hours will become the prime criteria of costing the production of the complex of metabolic involvements per each function or item. These uniform energy valuations will replace all the world’s wildly intervarying, opinion-gambled-upon, top-power-system-manipulatable monetary systems. The time-energy world accounting system will do away with all the inequities now occurring in regard to the arbitrarily maneuverable banker-invented, international balance-of-trade accounting”
Bitcoin Time-Energy Accounting and Thermodynamics
The Proof-of-Work under the hood of the Bitcoin security and rewards system provides one of the most powerful, albeit novel uses of modern cryptographic and computing technology; utilising modern silicon and consuming vast sums of energy to find a cryptographic needle in the haystack that can never be forged or simulated.
Miners race to find this exponentially difficult and unforgeable hash collision that is less than, or equal to the current target of the network. The subsequent rate of this computation effort we can define and measure is known as hashrate.
Hashrate (Hash per second, H/s) in Bitcoin is an SI-derived unit (i.e. derived from the base units specified by the International System of Units) representing the number of double SHA-256 computations performed in one second. The H/s unit is also part of a common measure of a Bitcoin miner’s electric efficiency in the term watts/TH/s, denoted as W/TH/s. One watt being exactly equal to one joule/s (more on this later), a measure that can also be expressed as J/TH i.e. joules per trillion hashes.
As of 2019, a current-generation Antminer S17 Pro has an efficiency of 49.5J/TH, and this efficiency will likely continue to increase with time as technology progresses — although note that we are currently entering a maturation stage of ASIC design, whereby we begin to approach the law of diminishing returns, and the physical limitations of chip design due to electrical resistance approaching smaller nanometer scales.
In October 2019, the Bitcoin system was secured by a seven-day-average of 98 Exahash of computation, that is a combined global hashrate of 98 Quintillion H/s, or 98,000,000,000,000,000,000 H/s. Although constructed for a very specific task, to put this in comparison to modern supercomputers, the fastest computer in the world is currently the IBM Summit at 200 Petaflops, while the Bitcoin network is currently hashing at a speed of 80,704,290 Petaflops, more than four hundred thousand (400,000) times faster.
SHA-256 hash results are pseudo-random, meaning they give the same result for the same input, but by changing the input even slightly, we will get a completely different and unpredictable (pseudorandom) result. Only by miners finding a low enough hashed value in the pseudorandomness, and constructing a valid block meeting all consensus protocol rules, will your block be accepted by the Bitcoin system and net the product of the block reward; the sum of the current block subsidy (nSubsidy) and transaction fees(nFees).
The result is a new block containing transactions that are mined roughly every ten minutes, updating the global Bitcoin state, thereby returning the state to zero (or as close to) entropy. The artefact of this state change is the Bitcoin blockchain (time-energy-chain) and bitcoin(time-energy).
The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, the self-reinforcing Bitcoin system of rewards is a conglomerate of subsystems ultimately responsible for creating and securing a self-replicating, self-organising, sovereign, time-energy world-accounting-system.
We can describe the complex self-organising Bitcoin system as such;
Bitcoin’s network is secured by a process called Proof-of-Work more commonly known as mining. Mining is merely the computation of cryptographic hashes by specialised mining hardware to solve an unforgeable puzzle. The double SHA-256 hashing utilised for this function also underpins the Bitcoin block structure, with each transaction having a corresponding hash that is itself hashed (sometimes several times) together to form the Merkle root contained inside the block header. This header is utilised within the cryptographic computational puzzle they seek to solve, and contains the header of the previous block, therefore linking each block together cryptographically, making forgery probabilistically impossible without employing the energy required to perform a full rewrite.
The produced hashrate results in the transformation of energy and time,or work, at which cost we can measure in joules. Energy is transformed in Bitcoin’s perpetual quest to remove entropy from, secure, and replicate its state in perpetuum.
In this entirely decentralised system there is no central-authority, instead the nodes form a decentralised agreement (consensus) through a protocol that hinges upon Proof-of-Work to secure it. The Proof-of-work functions as Sybil resistance for the network by making changes to the ledger artificially expensive, and creating a scenario where attackers would have to irrationally spend excessive amounts of time and resources to compete against the honest majority of miners.
Sybil Attack: is where an entity creates false identities (or nodes) within a system in an attempt to gain influence over the network. A network’s vulnerability to sybil is determined by how cheaply you can create these identities.
Proof-of-Work secures and provides the energy to fuel the self-organising, self-replicating energy metabolising network, creating part of a feedback loop of network effects that sustains its proliferation.
The cumulative work process progressively hardens the system’s security, building a digitally represented, impenetrable fortress of thermodynamic potential, that not only thwarts would-be adversaries, but converts them into supporters of the bitcoin time-energy accounting system.
As each successive block is found, the proof of this work compounds and crystallises into time, resulting in the artefact called the Bitcoin blockchain, the product of the miner’s hash computations and the network’s consensus rules; a secure, verifiably accurate, cryptographically-linked chain of blocks, transactions, and accumulated work dating back to the genesis block.
You can visualise this as a cryptographically linked time-energy-chain stretching back to genesis i.e. time zero, the creation of the first block. The Bitcoin system self-organises by determining that the correct chain is the one with the most cumulative Proof-of-Work meeting its inherent consensus rules, making a successful attack’s requirement to meet this cumulative work, and thereby becoming increasingly difficult as the network effects grow in mass and value.
Emission Schedule
The Bitcoin system from its inception at the genesis on 2009–01–03 was given an emission rate of exactly 50 bitcoins per block subsidy, delivered at roughly once every 10 minutes to miners via the block reward; the product of the block subsidy and transaction fees(block reward = nFees + nSubsidy).
The half-life cycle of the nSubsidy is once every 210,000 blocks (roughly 4 years), at which time nSubsidy emission rate is reduced by a factor of one half. This emission decay process continues each half-life cycle until no more bitcoin are produced at the absolute limit of 21,000,000 units.
At this point of maturation in the Bitcoin life-cycle, only nFees remain as the economic incentive to mine, and thus Bitcoin’s gravity must increase accordingly to sustain this economic system, with only transaction fees subsidising hashrate by roughly 2140. This monetary policy is intrinsic to Bitcoin and hardcoded into the system to remain entirely immutable, and impenetrable to top-down control.
The Bitcoin Metabolism
The thermodynamic potential and the subsequenthashratesecuring the systemhas a direct relationship with the Bitcoin mining difficulty; as the hashrate rises or falls, thus does the security and difficulty to mine a block. This mechanism produces a stabilisation effect on block times, and creates a network that self regulates its metabolism i.e. the rate of which it produces blocks and consumes energy.
Every 2016 blocks (roughly two weeks) the difficulty adjustment algorithm regulates based on the average hashrate of the prior 2016 mined blocks. This results in Bitcoin creating a predictable issuance of roughly ten minutes per metabolic cycle, or six cycles per hour i.e. when each subsequent Proof-of-Work puzzle is solved. The subsystem controlling this cycle could therefore be considered the internal Bitcoin metabolism, keeping its metabolic rate, or heartbeat, ticking along to roughly every ten minutes, regulating its production in perpetuum.
This halflife and metabolic rate creates a stock-to-flow of bitcoin that is entirely predictable, and with the subsequent hard limit to production, the bitcoin produced is the most verifiably scarce commodity to ever come into existence. The requirement of ever additional energy and timeto produce the same result as competition increases bolsters both the systems security, and its hardness_ i.e. _the difficulty at which it is to produce.
The sum of Bitcoin’s mining difficulty system and its hardcoded monetary policy giving it an absolute scarcity combine to produce unforgeable-costliness.The culmination of this security and incentives model is Bitcoin, a cryptographically secured system of rewards that gives us an ability to abstract time and energy_, _thereby store, trade, or transport it through time and space securely in the digital-realm, forever along the Bitcoin system’s time-energy-chain.
The product of this unforgeable thermodynamic energy transformation(or work performed) to secure the Bitcoin network is bitcoin(₿): a digital commodity that is granularly divisible, fungible, incorruptible, transportable, and counterfeit-proof, with an absolute scarcity of 21,000,000 ₿ units.
Why Thermodynamics Matter and Matter’s Thermodynamic
In the first half we covered the scientific processes in the Bitcoin system and its energy use, in this half we will relate this to physics, thermodynamics, and the universe around us…
Energy Of The Gods
Energy is the currency of life, the fundamental key to everything, at all scales of the universe. The macro progress of civilisation, the Kardashev scale, is merely a scale to measure a civilisations total potential energycapture. Therefore, it makes logical sense that the monetary system of a technologically evolved type I civilisation is fundamentally based on the construct of codifying energy, time, and cooperation. We cannot begin to approach a Type I civilisation without shifting our collective thinking to a universe of post-scarcity.
It’s evolution baby…
Bitcoin, the apolitical time-energy-chain is the next logical step in human civilisations progression and social self-ordering, uniting the human race with self-interest and economic incentives by codifying time, energy, and cooperation, hardening Earth’s resolve to act as one Spaceship. United we stand, divided we fall, destroying the earth with wanton destruction caused by burning fossil fuels.
Type I Civilisation: Is a civilization that can harness the entirety of the energy that falls on its planet from the parent star (for Earth-Sun system, this value is close to 7x1017 watts), which is more than five orders of magnitude higher than the amount presently attained on earth, with energy consumption at ≈4×1019 erg/sec (4 × 1012 watts)
What the hell has thermodynamics got to do with anything, especially Bitcoin…
To understand how these abstract concepts of thermodynamics, physics, Bitcoin, and Proof-of-Work gel together at the very genetic level, you need at least a cursory understanding of arm-chair physics and thermodynamics.
First, We Must Define Work
Work is merely the transfer of energy from one place to another, or from one form to another. To picture this, imagine that the universe is constantly at workaround us at the quantum, atomic, and even at macro scale. Energyis everywhere, and we can tap into this and harness ittoproduce useful work, products, information, or electrical energy (electricity).
The Joule of The Crown
One way we can measure the magnitude of this workis in joules_, which is a derived unit of energy used in the International System of Units. _1 kilowatt being 1000 watts _and _1 hour being 3600 seconds, therefore 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity is equal to _3,600,000 joules _of energy.
1 joule is the energy dissipated as heat when an electric current of 1 ampere_passes through a resistance of _1 ohm _for _1 second. This transformation of energy is can be described simply as the laws of physics and by extension thermodynamics.
First law of thermodynamics, or the law of conservation.
(Energy of a Closed System ΔU) = (Q / Heat) — (W/ Work)
ΔU = Q — W
The first law of thermodynamics states the change in the internal energy ΔU of a closed system is equal to the amount of heat ‘Q’ supplied to the system, minus the amount of work ‘W’ done by the system on its surroundings.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
In essence the second law states that all closed systems gravitate towards maximization of entropy (therefore is ever-increasing), energy mustbe added to a system to overcome this natural tendency towards entropy.
Entropy = order and disorder
Entropy is simply the measure of the distribution of matter and/or energy, information, or, how spread out and disorganised it is. Energy is really only useful when it’s ordered and clumped together, so the more concentrated and ordered(or the lower the entropy), the higher the potential energy output, therefore increasing its ultimate usefulness to perform potential work.
Yeah, Science!
Essentially thermodynamics means you can only ever get as much out as what you put in, and you can never get as much out as much as you put in.
One of the principles that guides the entire world around us is the law of conservation. This simply means the unflinching law of the universe is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, and that it is always conserved and transformed. If workis performed, energy is needed and heat is an obvious and necessary side effect (just think of friction), while the total energyof a closed system is always conserved.
One way to think about how these laws apply to our natural reality is; the universe is a closed system, and that the entropy of the universe is always increasing. The heat of the universe is dissipating, so the total energy stays constant. Therefore there is no such thing as waste in the universe system, only transformation.
We are all always in a constant fight with entropy, and the ultimate boss battle ends in the heat death of the universe. Heat is merely a form of kinetic energy we can measure in kelvins (K), or, heat is merely energy in transit. Absolute-zero (0 K, or −273.15 °C) is the lowest theoretically possible temperature on the thermodynamic temperature scale, where all thermal motion ceases, thus no heat energy remains.
The heat death of the universe is just such high entropy, that the energy is spread so far apart and is no longer useful for anything. It’s not absolute zero, but no more work, no more movement, no more life. Don’t worry it’s 10¹⁰⁰ years away, but at this point in time there no longer remains enough heat energy to increase entropy. Time, the arrow that is the natural artefact of the universe’s entropy stands utterly still. Finito.
Chaos And Order
Both energy and information are both infinitely more useful when neat and ordered ie. when it has low observed entropy. This is why the conversion of energy from sources such as fossil fuels has radically advanced our society, enabling the exponential expansion in networks of cities and economies.
Fossil fuels are burnt, transforming them into heat, this thermodynamic transformation of energy then powers giant mechanical steam turbines, the product of this mechanical work is in turn converted into electricity, and finally this electricity is delivered to your home as a useful product for your myriad of electronic devices. Science!
As this energy travels over long distances there is substantial amounts of entropy_, _this is due to the resistance and conductivity of metal creating heat and energy loss resulting in thermodynamic transformation. Electric energy (electricity) is merely useful energy that is transportable over _somewhat _long-distances.
Smashing The Coulomb barrier
Entropyis all around us and it requires vast energyto fight against its natural inclination to continually increase. This insane human fight against entropy to unlock thermodynamic potentialis what will catapult us into the future, as humanity begins to not only harvest vast ambient energy, but eventually also mass-produce fusion reactors.
In order to achieve nuclear fusion, particles must first be able to overcome the electric repulsion labelled “The Coulumb Barrier”, named after physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb. In order for a nuclear strong force to take over and undergo nuclear fusion, particles must first break this barrier. This new frontier of energy production will provide the required energyto smash the Coulomb barrier en masse, capturing the Earth system’s abundant stored clean thermodynamic potential, and scaling our energy production exponentially.
Spaceship Earth must work together as one if we are ever going to overcome the devastating pollution that we have created in the Earth’s system, and to solve the immediate engineering challenges clean energyproductionposes. Scarce resource-based energy creates a vast number of security and scarcity issues plaguing the dove and hawk geopolitics of the world, not to mention the burning of these resources threatens our very long term existence.
We have to believe in a world of abundance and not one of scarcity. Earth needs to band together to tackle the socio-economic challenges our shared world is facing, and cooperate in the race to clean up a damaged planet that we have needlessly abused with fossil fuels and wanton destruction.
Energy use is not the root of the systemic problem, energy is the currency of life that fuels the advancement of all civilisation. The current unscalable, destructive, pollutant paradigm of scarce fossil fuel burning for energy creation is the multi-trillion dollar problem plaguing mankind. We must cooperate to solve it.
Energy + Time + Cooperation
Bitcoin is an apolitical monetary system that codifies time, energy and cooperation, incentivising the human race towards maximal efficiency of the potential capture and conversion of energy into usable forms. The act of harnessing the abundance of our universe, fusion energy, the power of the stars and the gods. Fusion energy harnessed will catapult us towards the heavens as a civilisation, aiding as humankind begins our rapid ascent to interstellar demigods.
There Is No Such Thing As Scarcity, Only Thermodynamic Potential and The Arrangement Of Matter And Information
In theory, all states and distribution of matter are replicable, at the atomic and subatomic level, all matter is merely information and energy distribution. The deconstruction and reconstruction of matter is a technological problem, once solved (we’re working on it), there _will be _no longer a scientific absolute scarcity of any element in the universe. Through technological advancement, all matter will be able to be rearranged, therefore all matter and energy is abundant.
Only unforgeable digital scarcity can be absolute, therefore, only time and energy and the sum of their product have any quantitative value. Digital scarcity, the ability to remain unforgeable is the only scarce product of creation known to man.
Cambrian Abundance
The competitive need forefficient energyconversion_, _and the markets insatiable demand to trade will create a Cambrian explosion of abundance and creativity. An apolitical ‘energy renaissance’ driven by the free market demand to unlock thermodynamic potential.
Post-scarcity will bring about the cooperation of humankind as Spaceship Earth. The entire world should be radically increasing the efficiency of energy capture, and total consumption of energy to produce useful work, not seeking the reduction of total energy consumption per capita through draconian taxation measures. We can lean into a Type I civilisation and beyond without destroying ourselves in the process.
Advance humanity to the next level by cooperating, or burn the earth to the ground around us with fossil fuels.
The Self-Replicating, Self-Organising Bitcoin System
The Bitcoin system mechanisms are designed to self-replicate and self-organise, while its consensus protocol ensures replication is accurate, and that it’s perpetually trying to remove entropy from the state of Bitcoin; the artefact being the resulting blockchain and the product bitcoin.
The essence of the complex systems singular role is to be an arbiter of trust and truth in the face of adversity, to create a singular distributed current and historic state and orderthat all nodes can reach consensus upon. Zero entropyis the ideal state of the system. This entropy is instead moving to the growing unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) stored in the blockchain.
In the digital realm, the cost to rearrange information generally trends toward decreasing on the macro scale as compute becomes more efficient, thus this process to remove informational entropy will become increasingly more efficient over time. The gravity of bitcoin is increasing over time, increasing its economic mass and density leading to an upwards trending efficiency in its system.
Much has been studied about Bitcoin’s sustainability, though much is yet to be uncovered, but as Bitcoin’s heartbeat rings out every 10 minutes from now until eternity, we will all be its students.
Satoshi Nakamoto in his infinite wisdom codified trustlessness, cooperation, energy, time, commoditised it, democratised its access, and made it transportable through space and time in perpetuum. The sovereign self-organising system is designed in such a way as to provide its own governance away from any top-down influence or corruption.
Bitcoin is the peak product of evolution in technology, pure capitalism, economics, and the beauty of thermodynamics, all working together in a state of perfect synergy. Bitcoin can bring about the apolitical time-energy world accounting system Buckminster Fuller prophesied, steering Spaceship Earth to a post-scarcity reality.
By Rory Highside Oct, 2019
By Dan Held
Prices and the market are intricately intertwined
I recommend reading this article while listening to “Strix Aluco” by “Isan”
Prices reflect information
“In a free market economic system, prices are knowledge, and the signals that communicate information. Prices are not simply a tool to allow capitalists to profit; they are the information system of economic production, communicating knowledge across the world and coordinating the complex processes of production.”
— Saifedean Ammous
Prices are the coordinating force of a free market system. Each individual decision-maker can rely on the prices of goods and services to help with their decision making, as the prices themselves are a distillation of all known market information into a single metric. In other words, the compression of all relevant data is ultimately manifested as price (for the more technie minded, it’s a one-way hash function).
Each individual’s buy and sell decisions, in turn, further shape prices that carry this altered information back out into the market. Some of you may have heard of this from “Efficient market hypothesis” which is about how information in the market is reflected in the price of assets like equities.
Money is the measuring stick
“Money is the central information utility of the world economy. As a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account, money is the critical vessel of information about the conditions of markets.
Capitalist economies are not equilibrium systems but dynamic domains of entrepreneurial experiments. Money should be a standard of measure for the outcomes of entrepreneurial experiments.” — George Gilder
The essence of Capitalism is all about the efficient allocation of capital given the constraints of scarce resources and time. Companies are experiments on how to best allocate capital, and money is the standard measure for efficiency. Making money represents the efficient allocation of capital, losing money is not an efficient use of capital. And competition means decentralized planning by many separate companies and people to solve a problem in the market.
Capitalism, much like nature, is about experimentation
Information is Decentralized
“A centrally planned economy could never match the efficiency of the open market because what is known by a single agent is only a small fraction of the sum total of knowledge held by all members of society_” — Hayek (Hayek’s “Local Knowledge Problem”)
A decentralized economy thus complements the dispersed nature of information spread throughout society. Each company is an attempt to take the local knowledge that it has and create a good or service that ultimately is the correct capital allocation (aka profit).
To highlight how decentralized this information is, I’m going to give an example by Milton Friedman who made the statement: “There’s not a single person in the world who knows how to make a pencil:
The wood comes from a tree
To cut down that tree, it took a saw
To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore
Graphite, comes from some mines in South America
The eraser, which is rubber, probably comes from the tropics
Or the yellow paint
Or the glue that holds it together
There was no central planning office. It was the magic of the price system.”
Praxeology. The study of Human Action.
Central banks have an unsolvable data problem
Central banks inherently have a data problem. There’s an ingestion, processing, decision bottleneck — same as any electronic signal processing system. An economy cannot be planned by a central authority, because there is no way that a central authority can have all of the necessary knowledge to make the best decision at any single point in time, let alone all points in time.
“It is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality” — Hayek
To operate effectively, central banks would have to ingest trillions of data points daily, and ingest those data points in a perfect manner which is impossible. Every single uber taken, every single sandwich purchased, every single in-app purchase.
“We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.” — Philip Tetlock
We’ve created central banks because we want the world to make sense, and we want to feel that there is someone in charge. Even if we were able to ingest perfect data, it is hard to infer simple causality for this complex, chaotic system which involves billions of decision makers. While determining the relationship between weather and crops might seem easy, how do we determine the causality of burrito demand? Economics isn’t like the sciences, we are hamstrung by small or incomplete sample sizes. We can’t re-run the Dot com bubble with a different central bank or a different President.
This brings us to how central banks measure impact and make decisions. There is a classic product saying that goes “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” It’s hard to even measure a kilogram with extreme precision, so how could we possibly measure inflation properly? (ex: CPI excludes food and energy!)
“Since big events come out of nowhere, forecasts may do more harm than good, giving the illusion of predictability in a world where unforeseen events control most outcomes (Aka black swan events)” — Carl Richards
He goes on to say “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.” Daniel Kahneman also has a great take on the dangers of using history as our guide:
“Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.”
Here’s a useful analogy: Essentially the Fed is driving the car, which is the economy, only using the rearview mirror which is foggy, and the front windshield is opaque (you can’t see the future). How could the Fed possibly drive the car with any accuracy? What if we just let the car self adjust to the conditions of the road?
History cannot be interpreted without the aid of imagination and intuition. The sheer quantity of evidence is so overwhelming that selection is inevitable.
So what is our alternative?
Sound Money
“Sound money is the equivalent of scientific integrity: the system must not permit the manipulation of data after the experiment has taken place.” — Adam Taché
Sound money keeps the ruler settings fixed so results cannot be altered by a centralized planning mechanism.
And Bitcoin is the perfect iteration of sound money. Bitcoin has a hard cap for several reasons: being a precise measuring stick, reducing political attack vectors, and encouraging speculative bubbles which act as a viral loop.
But why 21M? Why not 100M?
Here’s the secret…It doesn’t matter!It’s precise length is irrelevant. What matters is just that there is a fixed amount. As economic activity moves from a primitive scale, it becomes harder for individuals to make decisions without having a fixed unit of account with which to compare value.
Regarding political attack vectors, Satoshi felt that setting a “proper” rate of inflation rate was impossible so he decided to remove human decision making from the process. Satoshi has two quotes regarding fixed supply that support this conclusion:
“Indeed there is nobody to act as central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value, because I don’t know a way for software to know the real world value of things.”
Satoshi also says
“If there was some clever way, or if we wanted to trust someone to actively manage the money supply to peg it to something, the rules could have been programmed for that.”
Finally, Satoshi hypothesized that a fixed supply might create speculative bubbles.
“As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.”
Implications of Sound Money
Bitcoin is the ultimate safe haven asset. As more and more people buy into Bitcoin and that narrative, it becomes the de facto risk off asset.
Post hyperbitcoiniation, when Bitcoin is the SoV, MoE, and UoA, Bitcoin will reflect the most accurate “risk free” rate of return that we’ve ever had, which enables the economy and market participants to most efficiently allocate resources. Each market participant, both individual investors and corporations, make the risk on/risk off decision which is then manifested in Bitcoin’s price.
And finally, when Bitcoin is the unit of account and used by every business, market participants can view the flow of funds of their suppliers and customers in real time via their publicly disclosed Bitcoin addresses. This transparency makes markets ultra efficient through the best processing of information.
Bitcoin rearchitects how capital is efficiently allocated in our economy, ultimately creating a world with more abundance and resources for all
By Dan Held, Nov, 2019
By Bitcoin Optech Newsletter
This special edition of the Optech Newsletter summarizes notable developments in Bitcoin during all of 2019. It’s the sequel to our 2018 summary. This summary is based heavily on our weekly newsletters from the past year for which we reviewed almost 9,000 commits (nearly 2,000 merges), over 1,500 mailing list posts, many thousands of lines of IRC logs, and numerous other public sources.
It took us 50 newsletter issues and over 200 printed pages worth of content to summarize all that amazing work originally. Even then, we missed many important contributions, especially from people fixing bugs, writing tests, performing reviews, and providing support—work that’s critical but not necessarily “newsworthy.” In summarizing even further and trying to compress the entire year into this article’s handful of pages, we’ve now also omitted a great many other important contributions. So, before we continue, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to Bitcoin in 2019.
Even if the following summary doesn’t mention you or one of your projects, please know that we at Optech—and probably all Bitcoin users—are more grateful than words can express for all that you’ve done to help Bitcoin.
BIP127 proof of reserves
Bitcoin Core compatible with HWI
Miniscript
Consensus cleanup soft fork proposal
Lightning Loop
AssumeUTXO
Trampoline payments
SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT
OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY
Erlay and other P2P relay improvements
Reproducible builds
Vaults without covenants
SNICKER
LN vulnerability
LN anchor outputs
Bech32 mutability
Bitcoin Core OpenSSL removal
Bitcoin Core BIP70 removal
Multipath payments
Featured summaries
Major releases of popular infrastructure projects
Notable technical conferences and other events
Bitcoin Optech
New open source infrastructure solutions
In January, Steven Roose proposed a standardized format for proof of reserves pseudo-transactions that bitcoin custodians can use to generate evidence that they control a certain number of bitcoins. No tool of this type can guarantee that depositors will be able to withdraw their coins from a custodian, but it can make it more difficult for a custodian to conceal the loss or theft of coins. Roose would go on to produce a tool based on Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs) for creating reserve proofs and would follow through to see the specification published as BIP127.
In February, Bitcoin Core’s master development branch saw the merge of the final set of PRs necessary for using it with the Hardware Wallet Interface (HWI) Python library and command-line tool. HWI would later see its first stable release in March, see Wasabi Wallet add support for it in April, and see BTCPay add support for it via a side package in November. HWI makes it easy for hardware wallets and software wallets to interact using a combination of output script descriptors and Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs). The increasing support in 2019 for standardized formats and APIs makes it easier for users to choose the right combination of hardware and software solutions for their needs rather than having to choose one solution or another.
Also in February, Pieter Wuille gave a presentation during the Stanford Blockchain Conference on miniscript, a spin-off from his work on output script descriptors. Miniscript provides a structured representation of Bitcoin scripts that simplifies automated analysis by software. The analysis can determine what data a wallet needs to supply in order to satisfy the script (e.g. a signature or a hash preimage), how much transaction data will be used by the script and the data that satisfies it, and whether or not the script passes known consensus rules and popular transaction relay policies. In addition to miniscript, Wuille, Andrew Poelstra, and Sanket Kanjalkar also provided a composable policy language that compiles down to miniscript (which itself converts to Bitcoin Script). With the policy language, users can easily describe the conditions they want to be fulfilled in order to spend their coins. When multiple users want to share control of a coin, the composability of the policy language makes it easy to combine each user’s own signing policies into a single script. If widely adopted, miniscript could make it easier for different Bitcoin systems to work together to sign a transaction, significantly reducing the amount of custom code that needs to be written in order to integrate wallet front-ends, LN nodes, coinjoin systems, multisig wallets, consumer hardware wallets, industrial Hardware Signing Modules (HSMs), and other software and hardware. Wuille and his collaborators continued working on miniscript through the year, subsequently requesting community feedback and opening a PR to add support to Bitcoin Core. Miniscript would also be used by LN developers in December to analyze and optimize several new scripts for upgraded versions of some of their onchain transactions.
In March, Matt Corallo proposed the consensus cleanup soft fork to eliminate potential problems in Bitcoin’s consensus code. If adopted, the fixes would eliminate the time warp attack, lower legacy Script’s worst case CPU usage, make caching transaction validation status more reliable, and eliminate a known (but expensive) attack against lightweight clients. Although parts of the proposal (such as the time-warp fix) seemed to interest a variety of people, other parts of the proposal (such as fixes for the worst case CPU usage and validity caching) received some criticism. Perhaps it was for that reason that the proposal didn’t make any obvious progress towards implementation in the second half of the year.
March also saw Kalle Alm request initial feedback on signet, which would eventually become BIP325. The signet protocol allows creating testnets where all valid new blocks must be signed by a centralized party. Although this centralization would be antithetical to Bitcoin, it’s ideal for a testnet where testers sometimes want to create a disruptive scenario (such as a chain reorganization) and other times just want a stable platform to use for testing software interoperation. On Bitcoin’s existing testnet, reorgs and other disruptions can occur frequently and for prolonged lengths of time, making regular testing impractical. Signet would mature throughout the year and eventually be integrated into software such as C-Lightning as well as used for a demonstration of eltoo. A pull request adding support to Bitcoin Core remains open.
Additionally in March, Lightning Labs announced Lightning Loop, providing a non-custodial solution for users who want to withdraw some of their funds from a LN channel to an onchain UTXO without closing the channel. In June, they would upgrade Loop to also allow users to spend a UTXO into an existing channel. Loop uses Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs) similar to those used by regular offchain LN transactions, ensuring that a user’s funds are either transferred as expected or that the user receives a refund of all costs except for any onchain transaction fees. This makes Loop almost completely trustless.
2019 summary Major releases of popular infrastructure projects
C-Lightning 0.7 released in March added a plugin system that would see heavy use by the end of the year. It was also the first C-Lightning release supporting reproducible builds for increased safety through improved auditability.
LND 0.6-beta released in April included support for Static Channel Backups (SCBs) that help users recover any funds settled in their LN channels even if they’ve lost their recent channel state. The release also featured an improved autopilot to help users open new channels, plus built-in compatibility with Lightning Loop for moving funds onchain without closing a channel or using a custodian.
Bitcoin Core 0.18 released in May improved Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT) support and added support for output script descriptors. The combination of those two features allowed it to be used with the first released version of the Hardware Wallet Interface (HWI).
Eclair 0.3 released in May improved backup safety, added support for plugins, and made it possible to run as a Tor hidden service.
LND 0.7-beta released in July added support for using a watchtower to guard your channels when you’re offline.
LND 0.8-beta released in October added support for a more extensible onion format, improved backup safety, and improved the watchtower support.
Bitcoin Core 0.19 released in November implemented the new CPFP carve-out mempool policy, added initial support for BIP158-style compact block filters (currently RPC only), improved security by disabling protocols such as BIP37 bloom filters and BIP70 payment requests by default. It also switches GUI users to bech32 addresses by default.
C-Lightning 0.8 released in December added support for multipath payments and switched its default network to mainnet from testnet. It was also the first major C-Lightning release to support alternative databases, with postgresql support available in addition to the default sqlite support.
In April, James O’Beirne proposed AssumeUTXO, a method for allowing full nodes to defer verification of old block chain history by downloading and temporarily using a trusted copy of the recent UTXO set. This would allow wallets and other software using the full node to start receiving and sending transactions within minutes of the node being started instead of having to wait hours or days, as is the case now for a newly started node. AssumeUTXO proposes that the node download and verify the old block chain history in the background until it eventually verified its initial UTXO state, allowing it to ultimately obtain the same trustless security as a node that doesn’t use AssumeUTXO. O’Beirne would continue working on the project throughout the year, incrementally adding new features and refactoring existing code on the path towards a goal of ultimately adding AssumeUTXO to Bitcoin Core.
Also in April, Pierre-Marie Padiou proposed the idea of trampoline payments, a method for allowing lightweight LN nodes to outsource pathfinding to heavyweight routing nodes. A lightweight node, such as a mobile app, might not keep track of the full LN routing graph, making it unable to find routes to other nodes. Padiou’s proposal would allow the lightweight node to route the payment to a nearby node and then have that node calculate the rest of the path. In essence, the payment would bounce off the trampoline node on the way to its destination. To add privacy, the original spender might require the payment bounce off several trampoline nodes in sequence so that none of them know whether or not it was routing the payment to the final recipient or just another trampoline node. A PR adding features for trampoline payments to the LN specification is currently open and the Eclair implementation of LN has added experimental support for relaying trampoline payments.
In May, Pieter Wuille proposed a taproot soft fork consisting of bip-taproot and bip-tapscript (which both depend on last year’s bip-schnorr proposal). If implemented, this change will allow single-sig, multisig, and many contracts to all use the same style of scriptPubKeys. Many spends from multisigs and complex contracts will also look identical to each other and single-sig spends. This can significantly improve user privacy and coin fungibility while also reducing the amount of block chain space used by multisig and contract use cases. Even in cases where multisig and contract spends can’t take full advantage of taproot’s privacy and space savings, they still may only need to put a subset of their code onchain, giving them more privacy and space savings than they have today. In addition to taproot, tapscript brings small refinements to Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities, mainly by making it easier and cleaner to add new opcodes in the future. The proposals received significant discussion and review throughout the rest of the year, including through a series of group review sessions organized by Anthony Towns that had more than 150 people sign up to help review.
Towns also proposed in May two new signature hashes to be used in combination with tapscript, SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT and SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUTANYSCRIPT. A signature hash (sighash) is the hash of a transaction’s fields and related data to which a signature commits. Different sighashes in Bitcoin commit to different parts of a transaction, allowing signers to optionally let other people make certain modifications to their transactions. The two new proposed sighashes function similar to BIP118’s SIGHASH_NOINPUT by deliberately not identifying which UTXO they spend, allowing the signature to spend any UTXO whose script it can fulfill (e.g. that uses the same pubkey). The primary suggested use for noinput-style sighashes is to enable the previously proposed eltoo update layer for LN. Eltoo can simplify several aspects of channel construction and management; it’s especially desirable for simplifying channels involving more than two participants that can significantly reduce onchain channel costs.
A third soft fork proposed this month came from Jeremy Rubin, who described a new opcode now called OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV). This would allow a limited form of covenant where an output of one transaction would require a subsequent transaction spending it to contain certain other outputs. A suggested use for this would be committed future payments where a spender pays a single small output that can only be spent using a transaction (or a tree of transactions) that later pays dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of different receivers. This could enable new techniques to enhance coinjoin-style privacy, support security-enhancing vaults, or manage spender costs when transaction feerates spike. Rubin would continue working on CTV for the remainder of the year, including opening PRs (1, 2) for improvements to parts of Bitcoin Core where optimizations could make a deployed version of CTV more effective.
2019 summary Notable technical conferences and other events
Stanford Blockchain Conference, January, Stanford University
MIT Bitcoin Expo, March, MIT
Optech Executive Briefing, May, New York City
Magical Crypto Friends (technical track), May, New York City
Breaking Bitcoin, June, Amsterdam
Bitcoin Core developers meetup, June, Amsterdam
Edge Dev++, September, Tel Aviv
Scaling Bitcoin, September, Tel Aviv
Cryptoeconomic Systems Summit, October, MIT
Gleb Naumenko, Pieter Wuille, Gregory Maxwell, Sasha Fedorova, and Ivan Beschastnikh published a paper about erlay, a protocol for relaying unconfirmed transaction announcements between nodes that makes use of libminisketch-based set reconciliation to produce an estimated 84% reduction in announcement bandwidth. The paper also demonstrates that erlay would make it much more practical to significantly increase the default number of outbound connections that nodes make. This could improve each node’s resistance to eclipse attacks that can trick it into accepting blocks not on the most proof-of-work block chain. More outbound connections also improves node resistance against other attacks that could be used to track or delay payments originating from the node. Work on erlay would continue through the year with additional research and the proposal of BIP330 for the set reconciliation protocol. Other improvements made in P2P relay this year included Bitcoin Core’s privacy improvements for transaction relay (eliminating a problem described in the TxProbe paper by Sergi Delgado-Segura and others) and the addition of two extra outbound connections used only for the relay of new blocks, improving resistance against eclipse attacks.
After a significant amount of prior work, June also saw the merge of altruist LN watchtowers into LND. Altruist watchtowers don’t receive any reward via the protocol for helping to secure their client’s channels, so a user needs to run their own watchtower or depend on the charity of a watchtower operator, but this is enough to demonstrate that watchtowers can reliably send penalty transactions on behalf of other users—ensuring that users who go offline for significant amounts of time don’t lose any money. Altruist watchtowers would eventually be released in LND 0.7.0-beta and would see additional development through the remainder of the year, including a proposed specification and discussion about how they could be combined with next-generation payment channels such as eltoo.
In July, the Bitcoin Core project merged Carl Dong’s PR adding support for reproducible builds of Bitcoin Core’s Linux binaries using GNU Guix (pronounced “geeks”). Although Bitcoin Core has long provided support for reproducible builds using the Gitian system, it can be difficult to set up and it depends on the security of several hundred Ubuntu packages. By comparison, Guix can be much easier to install and run, and builds of Bitcoin Core using it currently depend on a much smaller number of packages. In the long term, contributors to Guix are also working on eliminating the trusting trust problem to make it easy for users to verify that binaries such as bitcoind are derived solely from auditable source code. Work continued on Guix build support throughout the year, with some contributors hopeful that Guix will be used for the first major version of Bitcoin Core released in 2020 (perhaps in parallel with the older Gitian-based mechanism). Independently, documentation was added this year to both the C-Lightning and LND repositories describing how to create reproducible builds of their software using trusted compilers.
In August, Bryan Bishop described a method for implementing vaults on Bitcoin without using covenants. Vaults is a term used to describe a script that limits an attacker’s ability to steal funds even if they obtain a user’s normal private key. A covenant is a script that can only be spent to certain other scripts. There’s no known way to create covenants using the current Bitcoin Script language, but it turns out that they’re not necessary if users are willing to run code that performs a few extra steps when depositing their money into the vault contract. Perhaps more notably, Bishop described a new weakness in previous vault proposals as well as a mitigation for the weakness that would limit the maximum amount of funds that could be stolen from a vault by an attacker. The development of practical vaults could be useful for both individual users and large custodial organizations such as exchanges.
2019 summary Bitcoin Optech
In Optech’s second year, we signed up six new member companies, held an executive briefing during NYC block chain week, published a 24-week series promoting bech32 sending support, added a wallet and services compatibility matrix to our website, published 51 weekly newsletters, saw several of our newsletters and blog posts translated into languages such as Japanese and Spanish, created a topics index, added a chapter to our Scalability Workbook, hosted two schnorr/taproot workshops with publicly released jupyter notebooks, and published field reports from BTSE and BRD. We have big plans for 2020, so we hope you’ll continue to follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or track our RSS feed.
Adam Gibson proposed a novel form of non-interactive coinjoin for the existing Bitcoin system. The protocol, called SNICKER, involves a user selecting one of their UTXOs and a randomly-selected UTXO from the global UTXO set to both be spent in the same transaction. The proposing user signs their part of this transaction and uploads it in the Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT) format to a public server. If the other user checks the server and sees the PSBT, they can download it, sign it, and broadcast it—completing the coinjoin without both users needing to be online at the same time. The proposing user can create and upload as many PSBTs as they want using their same UTXO until some other user accepts the coinjoin. SNICKER’s major advantages over other coinjoin approaches are that it doesn’t require the users be online at the same time and that it should be easy to add support for it to any wallet that already has BIP174 PSBT support, which is an increasing number of wallets.
Also in September, the maintainers of C-Lightning, Eclair, and LND disclosed a vulnerability that affected previous versions of their software. It appeared that, in some cases, each of the implementations failed to confirm that channel funding transactions paid the correct script or the correct amount (or both). If exploited, this could result in channel payments being impossible to confirm onchain, making it possible for nodes to lose money by relaying payments from an invalid channel to a valid channel. Optech is unaware of any users who lost money before the first public announcements of the vulnerability. The LN specification was updated to help future implementers avoid this problem and there’s an expectation that other proposed changes to LN’s communication protocol will help avoid other failures of this type.
LN developers made significant progress in October and November towards addressing a long-standing concern about ensuring that users can always close their channels without excessive delays. If a user decides that they want to close one of their channels and they’re unable to contact their remote peer, they broadcast the latest commitment transaction for that channel—a pre-signed transaction that spends the channel’s funds onchain to each party according to the latest version of their offchain contract. A potential problem with this arrangement is that the commitment transaction was potentially created days or weeks earlier when transaction fees were lower, so it may not pay a high enough fee to confirm quickly before any security-essential time locks expire. It’s always been known that the solution to this problem is to make it possible to fee bump commitment transactions. Unfortunately, nodes such as Bitcoin Core have to limit the use of fee bumping in order to prevent Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that waste their bandwidth and CPU. In trustless multi-user protocols like LN, your counterparty might be an attacker who could deliberately trigger the anti-DoS policy in order to delay the confirmation of your LN commitment transaction, an attack sometimes called transaction pinning. A pinned transaction may not confirm before its time locks expire, allowing an attacking counterparty to steal funds from you. Last year, Matt Corallo suggested carving out a special exemption from the part of Bitcoin Core’s transaction relay policy related to Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP) fee bumping. This limited exemption ensures that two-party contract protocols (such as current-generation LN) can guarantee each party the ability to create their own fee bump. Corallo’s idea was named CPFP carve-out and his implementation of it was released as part of Bitcoin Core 0.19. Even before that release, other LN developers worked on the revisions to the LN scripts and protocol messages necessary to start using the change. As of this writing, those specification changes are awaiting final implementation and acceptance before seeing deployment on the network.
2019 summary New open source infrastructure solutions
Proof of reserves tool released in February allows exchanges and other bitcoin custodians to prove they have control over a certain set of UTXOs using BIP127 reserve proofs.
Hardware Wallet Interface released in March makes it easy for a wallet already compatible with Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs) and output script descriptors to use several different models of hardware wallets for secure key storage and signing.
Lightning Loop released in March (with loop-in support added in June) provides a non-custodial service that allows users to add or remove funds from their LN channels without closing existing channels or opening new channels.
Discussion in November about using bech32 addresses for taproot payments brought additional attention to an issue discovered in May. According to BIP173, mis-copied bech32 strings are supposed to have a worst-case failure rate of about 1-in-a-billion. However, it was discovered that bech32 strings ending with a p could have any number of preceding q characters added or removed. This doesn’t practically affect bech32 addresses for segwit P2WPKH or P2WSH addresses, as at least 19 consecutive q characters would need to be added or removed in order to transform one address type into another—and any other length change for v0 segwit addresses would be invalid. But that’s not the case for v1+ segwit addresses, such as those proposed for taproot, where a single added or removed q character in a vulnerable address could lead to a loss of funds. BIP173 co-author Pieter Wuille performed additional analysis and found that this was the only deviation from bech32’s expected error correction ability, so he proposed limiting the use of BIP173 addresses in Bitcoin to only 20 byte or 32 byte witness programs. This will ensure that v1 and subsequent segwit address versions provide the same reliable error correction as v0 segwit addresses. He also described a small tweak to the bech32 algorithm that will allow other applications using bech32, as well as next-generation Bitcoin address formats, to use BCH error detection without this problem.
Also in November, Bitcoin Core removed its dependency on OpenSSL, which had been part of its codebase since the original 2009 release of Bitcoin 0.1. OpenSSL was the cause of consensus vulnerabilities, remote memory leaks (potential private key leaks), other bugs, and poor performance. It’s hoped that its removal will reduce the frequency of future vulnerabilities.
As part of the OpenSSL removal, Bitcoin Core deprecated its support for the BIP70 payment protocol in version 0.18, and later disabled support by default in version 0.19. This decision was supported by the CEO of one of the few companies that continued to use BIP70 in 2019.
In December, LN developers achieved one of their major goals from last year’s planning meeting: the implementation of basic multipath payments. These are payments that can be split into several parts, with each part being routed separately through different channels. This allows users to spend or receive money using more than one of their channels at a time, making it possible to spend their full offchain balance or receive up to their full capacity in a single payment (within the limitations of certain safety restrictions). It’s expected that this will make LN significantly more user-friendly by eliminating the need for spenders to worry about the balances of specific channels.
In the summary above, we see no revolutionary proposals or improvements. Instead, we see a flurry of incremental improvements—solutions that take cases where Bitcoin and LN are already successful and build on them to make the system even better. We see developers working to make hardware wallets more accessible (HWI), generalize communication between wallets for multisig and contract use cases (descriptors, PSBTs, miniscript), strengthen consensus security (cleanup soft fork), simplify testing (signet), eliminate unnecessary custody (loop), make it easier to start running a node (assumeutxo), improve privacy and save block space (taproot), simplify LN enforcement (anyprevout), better manage feerate spikes (CTV), reduce node bandwidth (erlay), keep LN users safe when offline (watchtowers), reduce the need for trust (reproducible builds), prevent thefts (vaults), make privacy more accessible (SNICKER), better manage onchain fees for LN users (anchor outputs), and make LN payments automatically work more often (multipath payments). (And those are just the highlights for the year!) We can only guess what Bitcoin contributors will accomplish next year, but we suspect it will be more of the same—dozens of modest changes that each make the system better without breaking it for anyone who’s already satisfied. The Optech newsletter will return to its regular Wednesday publication schedule on January 8th.
Original Presentation of Framework from November 2019
People hate Bitcoin analogies. But Bitcoin is so hard to understand for so many, concessions need to be made.
VCs are a group of people demonized in the Bitcoin industry for not understanding Bitcoin’s value proposition. Well, how do you expect a VC to value Bitcoin if they’re only used to valuing startups?
Here is a framework that will hopefully help. It tracks the development and evolution of the Bitcoin ecosystem in discreet “fundraising rounds”, which coincide with Bitcoin’s Reward Eras. An organization is defined as “an organized group of people with a particular purpose”. If that’s the case, then Bitcoin is a well-oiled “un-organisation” with founders but no CEOs, many volunteers but no employees, and provably non-diluting equity, available to anyone who is willing to trade their energy for it.
I will be borrowing heavily from Nathan Reiff’s piece “Series A, B, C Funding: How It Works”
Pre-seed Round (1st Reward Era, 3/1/2009–28/11/2012)
The earliest stage of funding a new company comes so early in the process that it is not generally included among rounds of funding at all. Known as “pre-seed” funding, this stage typically refers to the period in which a company’s founders are first getting their operations off the ground. The most common “pre-seed” funders are the founders themselves, as well as close friends, supporters, and family (Reiff, 2019)
The “Bitcoin Company” was founded by Satoshi Nakamoto, with its single product offering being an open-source monetary system project, known as Bitcoin. 2,100,000,000,000,000 shares were to be issued on a predetermined schedule, and anyone was free to buy or sell these shares. The founders initially held no initial equity, but equity was easy to build in those days, and rightly so. Just like any startup, it is the founding team and initial bootstrappers who should get the biggest rewards down the line for putting the most skin in the game.
Due to the nature of Bitcoin’s incentive mechanisms, many early “equity holders” were encouraged to use their time, skills and money to evangelise or develop the product, and hence increase the value of their equity. The company manages itself, in a zero-overhead environment.
During the first stage of “the company’s” life, traditionally the “the first bugs appeared and were ironed out, and this was an iterative process for many months. After proving to be robust and reliable, a market developed, and the first exchanges started to emerge. User experience, both from a software point of view, and a financial point of view, were a disaster. Bitcoin was virtually unusable without a PhD in Computer Science, and when you could use it, you’d be robbed by an exchange that had been “hacked”. Volatility was extreme, and the risk was unpalatable for the majority of onlookers. Whether or not “The Bitcoin Company” would remain “in business” was still a very dubious proposition.
This Era, the early equity holders were blessed with a parabolic bubble, and many divested some equity to give themselves runway to work on Bitcoin full time. It’s just like a fund-raise: get a big cash injection, and then burn it relentlessly until the next funding round. Coincidently, each round has exhibited at least one of these massive injections and equally massive drawn-out draw-downs.
During this Era, miners were rewarded with USD$13.5m in total block rewards and transaction fees. Assuming that, on average, cost to mine a bitcoin is equal to the market price, we can consider the mining reward to be miners buying bitcoin at-spot. Therefore, we can take the “money-in” for the round to be the cumulative miner’s revenue. Money-in is never consistent, and even a small injection is enough to make the price fly and form a bubble.
With all the above said, fortune favours the bold, and Bitcoin entered its seed round at a $1bn pre-money valuation (i.e. Bitcoin’s Market Cap was $1bn at the end of the first reward era).
Seed Round (2nd Reward Era, 28/11/2012–9/7/2016)
You can think of the “seed” funding as part of an analogy for planting a tree. This early financial support is ideally the “seed” which will help to grow the business. Given enough revenue and a successful business strategy, as well as the perseverance and dedication of investors, the company will hopefully eventually grow into a “tree.” (Reiff, 2019)
Risk of short-term ecosystem death did not substantially decrease until the end of the Secord Reward Era. You could say that the risk profile dropped from “Extreme” to “Very High”. In terms of PR/Optics, this was arguably the worst and most dubious “round” of Bitcoin’s existence. In the face of these FUD-inspiring superficial problems, Bitcoin did what it does best — got on with it.
This era saw the first Bitcoin bubble to be featured in Mainstream Media in some way shape or form. Going from catastrophe to catastrophe; from the numerous exchange hacks, scams, asset seizures, 51% attacks (GHash.io) and China bans, those who invested in the mania of 2013 would not break even until the Third Reward Era. Inflation made things worse, with the market having to absorb the 5.25 million Bitcoin producing during the Era. However, those who divested during the mania provided themselves with many years of runway to give back to Bitcoin and make their equity more valuable.
In this Era, we started to see the emergence of user-friendly plug-and-play hardware wallets; the age of ASIC mining was in full swing, with miner fabrication done at a huge scale. The gamblers had a field day — with the majority of “fiat-onramps” providing toys for the traders, but not for the savers. For better or worse though, this added much needed liquidity and means for price-discovery. That said, liquidity was quite low, and for the first half of the era when the exchanges were just so sketchy, you couldn’t even really trust what the advertised market price was.
The first VCs entered the game; some investing in Bitcoin companies, and others, like Tim Draper, investing directly in the underlying.
Miners were not put off by the prolonged bear market, with the network hashrate growing by orders of magnitude mostly due to competition-driven innovation among ASIC fabricators. In the Second Reward Era, miners earned a total of USD$600m for their efforts. This USD$600m “investment” resulted in an $11bn post-money valuation at the end of the Round.
Despite failing to reclaim the heights of 2013, Bitcoin closed this round on the upswing — one that wouldn’t end for another year and a half.
Series A — Optimise (3rd (and Current) Reward Era, 9/7/2016 — May 2020)
Once a business has developed a track record (an established user base, consistent revenue figures, or some other key performance indicator), that company may opt for Series A funding in order to further optimize its user base and product offerings. (Reiff, 2019)
With “traditional” startups, their Series A round is used to fund the optimization of the offering, and to lay a solid platform to build further during the next round. Several experts and industry stakeholders were split on how to best optimize Bitcoin to increase transaction throughput. The Establishment took the view that achieving this through an increase in block size was the answer, The People took the view that this was a slippery slope, and that scaling be achieved with protocol optimisations, i.e., Segregated Witness (SegWit). The People were victorious, which was a huge positive indicator that centralizing Bitcoin would be a Sisyphean task. As a result, and in combination with a supply halving, the money flowed in, and Bitcoin achieved a valuation in the hundreds of billions at its all-time-high.
The Third Era also featured “The Scambrian Explosion”, with thousands of cryptocurrencies being spawned, sending Bitcoin’s dominance of the cryptocurrency to a paltry 35% at one point in time. While most of these altcoins now having lost over 95% of their value (hundreds have lost >99% of their value), the only result was the wasting of hundreds of thousands of hours of development time and hundreds of millions of dollars which should have been directed at Bitcoin. The fact that Bitcoin now accounts for 75% of the cryptocurrency market (and rising) is a testament to why people should have just stuck to Bitcoin.
The huge influx of money in this Era allowed early equity holders to further divest to focus on development — and my oh my, was there a lot of development. In terms of scalability, The Lightning Network successfully came out of beta and is being extensively used. Privacy and coin-joining solutions emerged and became easier to use. There are literal satellites in space broadcasting the network. The rise of the “run your own node” movement gathered serious momentum and was bolstered by a host of companies offering “plug-and-play” nodes. With your own node, you can also be your own payments provider through BTCPayServer. Multi-signature security has never been easier. This paragraph could go on for pages — so if you want a full technical recap of just 2019, the Bitcoin Optech Newsletter will give you everything you need to know.
At time of writing, Era miner revenue is USD$4.6bn, and the valuation has risen from $11bn to over $125bn.
Despite all the progress made, Bitcoin is still a high-to-very-high risk investment at this stage, as the market price can still move in excess of 30%, in either direction, in one week, regularly. This will ultimately remain the case until both the liquidity pool grows, and the mining reward (inflation) shrinks.
Series B — Build (4th Reward Era, May 2020 — Apr 2024)
Series B rounds are all about taking businesses to the next level, past the development stage. Investors help startups get there by expanding market reach. Companies that have gone through seed and Series A funding rounds have already developed substantial user bases and have proven to investors that they are prepared for success on a larger scale. Series B funding is used to grow the company so that it can meet these levels of demand
With the necessary protocol upgrades happening during Series A and early in Series B, the focus will shift to the building of products and services on top of the slowly ossifying Bitcoin base layer. This Era will see the replacement of the “Old Guard” by a newer generation of more business-savvy Bitcoin entrepreneurs and through merger and acquisition activity.
There will also be a lot of vertical and horizontal integration, as companies aim to achieve a “full-stack”. One example of all this is Layer1 mining, in what is effectively an electricity utility that also mines, and designs and fabricates ASIC miners.
It is impossible to predict what’s specifically going to happen during this 4 year era, let alone in the first year of it, but if the past 18 months are anything to go by, security, privacy, and most importantly going forward, UI/UX, will improve dramatically. I’d expect that running a full-sovereignty stack (your own VPN, node, electrum & BTCPay servers, multi-sig setup, etc.) will be easy enough for almost anyone to do at the end of The Era. Effectively, Bitcoin’s infrastructure will be developed enough to handle some proper scale.
What will be most interesting thing to see will be the technological, economic and political developments during this Era. In this regard, everything is “Good for Bitcoin”. Internet access, computers and smartphones become cheaper and more accessible? This is good for Bitcoin. Never ending quantitative easing and negative interest rates? This is good for Bitcoin. Increased political turmoil, censorship, or surveillance? This is good for Bitcoin.
Should Bitcoin “stay in business”, risk level at this point would be medium-to-high, and you could expect to be exposed to weekly swings of +/-15%, but maybe not as regularly as in Series A.
When looked at in conjunction with some economic models like the Stock-to-Flow model, there is little reason to think a 10x growth in market cap will not be seen in this series, as per the 3 series preceding it. This would mean a series-end market cap of about USD$1 trillion, or, around USD$50k per bitcoin. Chances are that the All-time-high price achieved during this series will be dramatically higher than the end price, as this is the main driver of the “investment-to-utility” loop.
Series C — Scale (5th Reward Era, Apr 2024 — Mar 2028)
Businesses that make it to Series C funding sessions are already quite successful. Series C funding is focused on scaling the company, growing as quickly and as successfully as possible. (Reiff, 2019)
Inflation is finally starting to drop, with only ~650,000 BTC needing to be absorbed by the market over the 4-year period — the inflation rate is now lower than that of Gold. Scarcity is becoming a more dominant element of Bitcoin’s value proposition.
With basically all the infrastructure largely built, and UI/UX continuing to improve, this Era is “The Era of The Evangelist”. Bitcoin is ready for prime time; somebody just has to go out and tell everybody. This Series’ fund raising round made all the right people very wealthy (if they weren’t already wealthy from the Series B raise), and these people will begin to use their influence (i.e. money) to promote Bitcoin, and increase the “saver-base”, i.e., the number of people who buy bitcoin on a weekly basis, or, earn their living in Bitcoin.
At this stage, to maintain a USD$500k price, about 10 million people are each saving USD$150/wk in Bitcoin. This represents 0.2% of the world’s adult population. Considering the level of utility and the seamlessness of the UI/UX in the late stages of this series, only 10 million active savers may even feel like a failure of sorts! From here, it is simply an exercise of marketing.
Discussion of The Framework on The Total Connector Podcast with Keyvan Davani
IPO (6th Reward Era, Mar 2028 — Feb 2032), and beyond…
At this point, if Bitcoin is still alive, it is effectively unkillable. Major banks have now made big acquisitions, and are offering bitcoin services to their customers. Most power utilities have skin in the Bitcoin game. People won’t know that they’re using Bitcoin — and we’ll probably have 4 (or even 5) layers on top of Bitcoin now. On-chain base-layer transactions are reserved for high value transactions, all people adopting Bitcoin going forward won’t be onboarded via the base layer. The Bitcoin ETF has FINALLY been approved after an 18 year effort. Price per coin is in the millions, and fairly stable (to the downside, at least). Number still go up — just as designed.
It’s improper to say that it is “zero risk” in 2032, but the risk is extremely low. That said, if it gets to a 7th Era, I’d be comfortable enough to say that Bitcoin may become the first ever truly risk-free asset, with inflation rapidly approaching zero. I’ll be 50 years old by the end of Era 7, so I’m literally betting my career that this will be the case. Talk about skin in the game!
By Nic Carter
Bitcoin is everyone’s problem now
Evey: Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot… But what of the man? I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But who was he really? What was he like? We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of ideas, I’ve seen people kill in the name of them, and die defending them… but you cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it. Ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love… – Evey Hammond, V for Vendetta
An exorbitant privilege
Bitcoin is first and foremost a monetary phenomenon. The social climbers and false prophets who proclaimed it is a payments revolution have either come around or been repudiated by the market and washed out, embittered. Most who understood it that way are now moving on to new things. The world did not need another Paypal. The world needed a new monetary institution.
As Bitcoin went from a proof of concept, to a toy, to a joke, to a collectible, and then to a movement, a few policymakers came to realize that it posed a threat to the established system. Not because of its present form, but because what it represented: a profane insult to the carefully calibrated monetary system. All done in a mocking, insouciant fashion — a band of nerds and ne’er-do-wells insolently challenging the state’s monopoly on seigniorage. Satire is what despots fear most, and the rise of Bitcoin made our present monetary system look patently absurd.
Critic: Nothing backs Bitcoin.
Bitcoiner: What backs the dollar?
Critic: Nothing intrinsically — our ability to compel foreign nations to accept our currency as the numeraire of international trade, our ability to force citizens to pay taxes in dollars, and our military assets required to enforce both conditions.
Bitcoiner: How persuasive!
The visceral hatred elites feel about Bitcoin? Perfectly justified. How else would you react to a upstart aimed at usurping your sacred monetary privilege?
Such is the potency of Bitcoin that it compels the high priests of U.S. imperialism to reveal the unwritten rules about the role the dollar plays in power projection abroad. In May of this year, U.S. Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA) spoke out against cryptocurrency on the floor of the house. His statement laid bare the normally veiled post-Bretton Woods doctrine in which the dollar is employed not only a monetary tool but a strategic one, too.
An awful lot of our international power comes from the fact that the dollar is the standard unit of international finance […] and it is the announced purpose of the supporters of cryptocurrency to take that power away from us […]. Whether it is to disempower our foreign policy, our tax collection, or our traditional law enforcement […]. the purpose of cryptocurrency […] is solely to aid in the disempowerment of the United States and the rule of law.
Representative Sherman is practically a soothsayer. He understands precisely where the world is going.
His mistake is not in the diagnosis, but in the cure. He mistakenly believes that Bitcoin can be reckoned with. But Bitcoin is an idea, not a product. The notion of a weightless, virtual commodity was productized for good in 2009 (although the idea long predated Bitcoin), and it has been eroding the state’s monetary monopoly ever since.
It could not have been created at a better time; one wonders how Bitcoin would have fared if it had been created in the 1980s or 90s when the US economy was fairer, the monetary system was totally unquestioned, and the US was the sole dominant global superpower. Against today’s backdrop, Bitcoin insists on itself. It has urgency. In the halcyon days of Pax Americana, Bitcoin would have mattered much less. In the twilight of the American empire, however, it is more relevant than ever.
Our monetary system is disastrously redistributive
The wealth of political elites derives primarily from privileged access to the monetary spigot. This is no longer a secret. The heavenly mana of seigniorage has opened, first a trickle and now a flood. The world is grappling with inequality, and the dozens of populist revolts active in the world today are patent evidence of this. Yet the resurgent socialist parties misdiagnose the situation. The enemy is not a nebulous form of capitalism, but rather a form of socialism itself — a low-rates fueled perma-bailout to the owners of financial assets. It’s no coincidence that asset prices have steadfastly risen in the last decade, as the Fed has embarked on a ludicrously unshackled period of money creation.
Many ask: against the backdrop of monetary issuance, where did the inflation go? It went of course into financial assets. But this benefits the paltry few. Did you know that the decade-long rally in the S&P500 has been characterized by historically low participation from retail investors? The riotous gains in asset prices have sidelined mom and pop. They accrue instead to institutional investors and corporate insiders who returned capital to themselves through buybacks. In the 90s, Wharton MBAs convinced investors that the ideal mode of corporate governance was making large equity and options grants to corporate directors to create incentive alignment. Well, the grants were made, and the directors rewarded the shareholders by spending corporate earnings on buying back the stock, thus juicing earnings per share and triggering options payouts for directors. They just so happened to forgot to generate corporate value along the way. That pesky real economy… that was secondary.
Why are politicians so rich? Why do they become rich after leaving office? Why do regulators go work in industry? Why is the Secretary of the Treasury a former Goldman banker and hedge fund manager?
The Cantillon effect pictured
Why are renters historically disempowered, whereas landowners are historically privileged? Why has the cost of higher education and healthcare outpaced inflation by orders of magnitude? Why is the CPI a sad, pathetic joke? Do consumer goods account for most of your expenditures, or does rent, healthcare, and education?
What are you more exposed to? The cost of a TV, or property values?
Even if you didn’t know what the Cantillon effect was, you felt it vividly in the last decade. The hopelessness felt by many in today’s society is the consequence of this monetary misalignment; the introduction of eye-watering money into the economy, but an uneven distribution. Who benefited from historically low rates? Normal folks dealing with predatory credit card loans, or owners of financial assets who were able to put historically cheap capital to work? And no, cheap financing didn’t help the middle and lower class get a foothold in property… because property values were horrendously inflated in the first place! Property, treated as a store of value for the rich, is precisely where so many of the Fed’s newly-minted dollars settled. Reflect on those hollowed-out city centers in Vancouver, New York, and London — full of empty homes used as capital warehouses for absentee millionaires.
If there’s a single graph that evidences the impact of a decade of freewheeling monetary stimulus on the economy, it is the following:
Monetary velocity in the U.S. is at its lowest since modern records began. If you think about the equation of exchange (MV = PQ), a decline in V is sufficient to offset an increasing money supply (M) to keep prices (P) stable. And that’s just about what happened: the purchasing power of the dollar has remained relatively stable even as supply has expanded dramatically. “Where is the inflation?” is the common refrain, but the question should instead be “where has the new money supply gone?” It is clear that it has settled, inert and unproductive, in financial assets mostly owned by the ultra-rich, bidding them up to century highs in relative valuation terms.
This is why our perverse form of zombie capitalism is often referred to as socialism for the rich. If you can position yourself close enough to the money spigot and arrange to share in the spoils of the monetary redistribution, you can profit handsomely. If you have access to financial assets and can benefit from a low cost of capital (whether you are an investor or a corporate director with discretion over buybacks), you can make low rates and quantitative easing work for you. If you cannot, you are utterly frozen out of the system, and indeed disadvantaged, as pricier capital assets immiserate the non rentier class.
Bitcoin is a system that explicitly rejects identity
Critics often ask who, exactly, Bitcoin is for. This perhaps a misspecified question. Bitcoin does not serve a “who,” or a subset of whos. It just serves, indifferent its end users. Bitcoin, by design, does not require identity data to work. Your counterparty could be on the OFAC sanctions list, they could be a sentient toad, or a few lines of code. Bitcoin has no way of knowing, nor does it care. The only requirement to send a payment is to provide a valid signature which meets the criteria sufficient to unencumber a UTXO.
Traditional payment and credit relationships, on the other hand, enshrine identity. My credit card company is very _interested in knowing that it is me who is using the card. If I inform them that a stranger has absconded with my card, they consider all the spends post-theft _totally invalid. The call with the fraud department goes like this:
‘Can you vouch for the $10.51 purchase on 2/24 at Chipotle?’ Yes, that was me. Extra guac.
‘Can you vouch for the $463.39 purchase on 2/29 at Lululemon?’ No, I don’t habitually buy athleisure gear.
Identity data is inextricable from traditional payment networks. This is because they are many layers between payments and final settlement. An incredibly large and profitable business exists to assess the credibility of transactors and facilitate deferred-settlement transactions between them. This is because credibility and mutual trust enables massive efficiencies. You can lend your neighbor a lawnmower without demanding he provide a bond to cover its value because you trust him. Credit card networks just scale this up: they are trust underwriters, determining quantitatively how trustworthy I am, and passing along those assurances to merchants with whom I transact.
If they get it wrong, and it turns out I’m the kind of person who racks up a $10,000 credit card bill with no intention of ever paying, they swallow the cost! It was their bad. They should have done a better job assessing my trustworthiness.
The compact you implicitly agree to when you use Bitcoin is between you and the protocol, not between you and all the other users of Bitcoin. The only trust required is users trusting that the cryptographic and economic assumptions hold. So far, they have.
It has become trendy to denounce popular Bitcoiners as uncompromising, unreasonable assholes, and imply that there is something wrong with Bitcoin as a consequence, too. But Bitcoin is indifferent to this. It is a protocol for encoding and conveying value through a communications medium. Bitcoin isn’t even aware of what the price of Bitcoin is, let alone the political trends of the day. It knows very, very little about itself.
As stated above, Bitcoin is attractive and useful precisely because it rejects any identity data from the conditions required for a spend. The only thing that has to be furnished is knowledge of a private key corresponding to a public key. When you receive Bitcoin, you do not need to be aware of the identity of the sender, because Bitcoin settles probabilistically. You can simply define your own threshold for finality — say, requiring $500,000 of work to be done before you consider a transaction final. That would correspond to waiting, at current rates, for 4–5 blocks under which your transaction should be buried.
This is what allows me to accept funds from people that I mistrust, and why Bitcoin is carving out a niche in these frontier transactions. Think of a ransomware hacker and his victim. These people mutually mistrust each other. They victim has been wounded and attacked. But the hacker still trusts that the $500 sent to them for the ransom in the form of BTC is a valid, unlikely-to-be-reversed payment. You may not like this. But Bitcoin flourishes on the margins of society. These are increasingly widening, as banking becomes politicized and used as a political tool, as the U.S.-driven settlement system is coopted for strategic objectives, and as identity requirements for payments networks become ever more rapacious.
Transacting with people you have no reason to trust is precisely why Bitcoin exists. The internet allowed us to transact with people on the other side of the globe, but internet commerce is beset by fraud. The reason credit cards are expensive is because the costs of remediating fraud and chargebacks are socialized.
If you aren’t comfortable with evil people using Bitcoin, you should abandon it now
Of course, the jettisoning of counterparty trust (and risk) comes with some perceived drawbacks. Principal among them, you cannot evict someone from your network. This is very uncomfortable to people who believe that money ought to be a political tool, to be exploited to disempower political foes of the day.
There is a particular paradox in demanding that the members of a network you have inserted yourself into adhere to a certain moral code of conduct. As stated above, Bitcoin, and fast-settling hard money more generally, exists to facilitate commerce between individuals that do not have a pre-existing bond of trust. What did inter-continental traders use to transact in the 17th century? They certainly didn’t use IOUs, wampum, collectibles, or credit relationships. They knew that they might never see each other again, so they used the hardest money they had available — gold and silver. Monetary metals speak for themselves; they are no one’s liability.
In this same way, Bitcoin is a means to transfer wealth between individuals who both have an interest in final settlement. It is not a means to establish a credit relationship (although Lightning is an early move in this direction). Bitcoin is deliberately amoral, it has no requirements to entry and asks nothing of the user aside from a valid signature. It facilitates commerce between people who explicitly disagree with each other. Thus trying to impose a moral code on Bitcoin is contrary to its very nature. If everyone who used Bitcoin agreed with each other, then no one would need Bitcoin — they could all exchange IOUs backed by their mutual trust in each other. But because the world is messy, and people disagree with each other, hard money is warranted. Our chaotic world practically demands it.
So if you are the kind of person that rejects a useful transactional medium because someone you dislike is using it as well, it wasn’t suited for you in the first place. Bitcoin is edgy precisely because the world needs a payment and savings system which cannot be interfered with on moral or political grounds. To repudiate these transactional constraints is to violate the carefully poised moral setting that has seized the West. If stepping out of line isn’t for you, stick to Paypal instead.
Bitcoin is an apocalyptic death cult…
As Bitcoin hater-in-chief David Gerard so elegantly puts it, Bitcoin is in fact an apocalyptic death cult. Apocalyptic, because Bitcoiners recognize the futility of the current monetary system, and appreciate that it is likely to end in tears. Death, because States won’t give up their monetary privilege easily. Bitcoin is veiled in eschatological overtones. Cult, because you have to be somewhat deranged to take a pill this black.
Freedom is not “Free”.
So spare a thought for the Bitcoiners. They are fully awakened to the pending grief and strife that await us, Cassandras warning governments and citizens alike to the disruptive effects of truly sovereign currency (sovereign, as in free, not as in State-owned). But unable, most of the time, to convince their fellow man that the State’s monetary machinations may not be sound. Most people are content to surrender all freedom and autonomy to the Leviathan, as long as the pot they are in boils slowly.
… but it’s open to all
The exact reason that Bitcoin is despised by so many— identity, creditworthiness, and trust are irrelevant in this system, making it a fertile ground for criminals — is the exact reason why it’s so inclusive. Unlike Paypal, Venmo, or traditional payment processors, it cannot deplatform you for wrongthink, holding subversive political views, being a sex worker, or legally selling cannabis. Ours is the biggest possible tent. Don’t be distracted by the online discourse. Bitcoin is utterly indifferent to the political views of its users. Its core developers, the high priests of the protocol, can barely change it: (implementing a fairly routine upgrade, SegWit, took them _years _of cajoling and pleading). Getting it to do anything other than produce blocks, accept valid spends, resolve forks, and relentlessly march onward is virtually impossible.
Whether Bitcoin will challenge the State, or whether that task will be left up to a successor, is yet to be determined. That the State’s monetary privilege has been permanently eroded is evident though.
It died a little that day in January 2009 when the Chancellor [was] On the Brink, and it has been shrinking ever since.
By Nic Carter, Oct, 2019
By Ben Kaufman
Hard money is one of the most well-known monetary terms used in practical discussions. From political discourses on policy decisions to the commentary debates of the financial sector, the term can be heard often enough to make even the ordinary citizens familiar with it. However, and despite its substantial use, while the concept of hard money has a very clear connotation to traditional fiscal responsibility with the monetary system, its exact definition is still quite vague. While for many, it is merely a practical term almost synonymous to a gold-backed system, its conceptual meaning clearly goes beyond that. For theoretical discussions then, it should be evident that, despite gold being for centuries the most accurate practical representation of the concept, it cannot be its very definition. Until today, in spite of the theoretical merits of adequately defining the term, such exact definition seems to have been quite unnecessary. For a long time, it has been established that assuming it as simply meaning a gold system is sufficient for all practical purposes.
In recent years, however, the term has started being applied to the newly emergent system of cryptocurrencies, and most notably, to Bitcoin. The new employment of the term to describe the new-born monetary system causes an evident confusion as to its exact meaning, and the question of what it is that makes money “hard” has become of practical significance. This current state of affairs has left us with multiple questions. First, what indeed, would be a satisfactory definition for the “hardness” of a monetary system. Then secondly, whether this term could be appropriate to describe Bitcoin. And lastly, if other cryptocurrencies also merit such classification. The rest of this article is thus an attempt to deal with the problems just presented above. As a last note, this article will solely deal with the question of what hard money is. The broader question of whether a hard money system is even desirable in the first place is out of scope for this piece. On that matter, interested readers may find my answer in my previous article.
What is hard money?
While, as said above, no precise and consistent definition seems to be prevalent in discussions on the subject, we must first provide such a definition if we are to investigate the matter seriously. The definition we shall use from this point forward is as follows:
The hardness of money is in reverse relation to the monetary inflation, and the consequent dilution of the value of the existing stock, which can economically be inflicted on it.
Now, there are a few notable points to clarify in order to avoid common misunderstandings regarding the above definition. First and foremost, we shall note that, like many economic terms, the hardness of money is a subjectively perceived factor, subjected to constant changes by various events (such as technological improvement in production, effective counterfeiting, etc.). In this sense, it is similar to discussing the purchasing power of money, which, while can be generally understood, is a rather subjective and ever-changing metric. While this consideration certainly does not invalidate its importance and usefulness, we shall keep in mind these limitations and uncertainties which necessarily accompany its use.
The second point to notice is with regards to what exactly does “can economically be inflicted” mean, and what are the subsequent implications. In simple words, the question is how much of the money can be produced until its value drops (or production costs rise, or both) to such an extent where production is no longer profitable. Here we can notice a sharp distinction between “commodity money”, of which the market determines the supply, and fiat money, of which legislation determines it. As the supply of commodity money is determined by the market demand for it (its price), the costs of its production will always tend to match its market price, as producers will quickly rush to produce more if the margin is larger, and stop production even faster if that becomes unprofitable. On the other hand, the supply of fiat money, such as the government paper we have today, is regulated not by the demand for it, but rather by bureaucratic processes of arbitrary decisions. The main difference concerning us here between the two monetary systems is that, with the former, the risk of dilution of wealth is to be found mostly with technological progress in the production process. While for the latter, there always exists a risk of massive dilution for any arbitrary cause. Thus, while money from the former category is worth the extra effort of looking into its hardness, the latter leaves us no doubt as for its “easiness”. It might be worth mentioning that this monetary easiness is not at all accidental, but rather the intended result of conscious policies aimed mainly at government financing through seigniorage — the monopolistic profits made by the issuer of a currency which is protected by law from market competition. A discussion on the economic and ethical issues of fiat money in general, and seigniorage in particular, is out of the scope of this article. However, interested readers can find such discussions in “The Ethics of Money Production” by Jörg Guido Hülsmann.
A (Very) Brief History of Hard Money
So far, we provided an exact definition for the concept of hard money and saw why it must be commodity money produced through open competition on the market. Now, we will continue investigating the principles of hard money by looking into some historical monetary systems, and the gradual shift from easier monies to a harder one.
The history of money, including such notable examples as salt, seashells and glass beads, is full of cases where the advancement of production processes or even the improvement in trade connections for a certain money, along with its inferior monetary properties (durability, divisibility, etc.) compared to another money, caused it to depreciate quickly and eventually to lose its monetary role altogether. Such a process is perhaps best illustrated through the famous case of the Rai stones of Yap island. These stones, ranging in size (and value) from small beads to some massive 3.6 meters tall ones, were for hundreds, if not thousands, of years used by the native population as money. As the methods for producing them did not improve much for the long time of their monetary use, their production remained quite stable for many years, establishing their local status as hard money. However, with the arrival of Europeans around the end of the 19th century, and with the advanced tools and production methods they brought with them, production became increasingly cheaper and the stones started depreciating rapidly until they eventually lost their monetary role to the Western money system. Similar cases were witnessed at many times and places throughout history, such as glass beads and cowry shells in Africa and America, salt in Europe, and so on.
Since the beginning of their use as money from about 1000 BC, precious metals were probably the most prominent money of all. Used mostly through Europe and Asia as the most common monetary system and later spreading rapidly to all other continents after the discovery of America and under the strong influence of European colonization efforts, the entire world started converging towards a unified monetary system of precious metals, namely copper, silver and gold. The growth in the use of such metallic monetary systems was much due to their relatively excellent physical monetary properties, such as their durability, portability, and divisibility. No less influential, or even more so, was the monetary hardness they demonstrated in comparison to all other monetary goods throughout history. This age-long trend towards the use of metal currency arguably reached its peak around the middle of the nineteenth century. Flourishing as the Gold Standard, which prevailed during La Belle Époque, it has declined since the end of this period around the beginning of WWI. Since then, there has been a strong tendency in the direction of irredeemable fiat money, mainly in the form of paper, “token” coins, and later also its digital representations of today.
This transition from metallic to a purely fiat standard has its origin with the Chinese invention of banknotes, a paper (or similar material) note which the bearer could redeem for specie, on-demand, from a reserve maintained by the producer of the note. The use of such banknotes as a circulating media of exchange began around the 11th century, with the Jiaozi paper currency, and has continually spread around the world ever since. The peculiarity of the practice was of course not with the new physical form which the instrument of payment has taken, but the fact that, although all notes were redeemable on demand, the reserve maintained only a fraction of the funds needed for the redemption of all notes — what is commonly known today as fractional reserve banking. While these paper forms of money were initially privately issued and used mostly for their easier portability (as carrying metal coins became heavy), they were quickly nationalized and served as a new form of a government financing scheme, namely seigniorage, enabled by their cheap production costs and the use of such fractional reserve techniques. A full examination of the history of banking is out of scope for this article. For our purposes the important thing to note is that while the physical form of money started shifting towards paper long ago, today’s concept of permanently irredeemable paper money constitutes a purely modern “invention”. While it is similar in form and probably owes its existence to such ancient practices as described above, it lacks any historical precedent.
It is true that the global convergence towards metallic money, and especially the later transition from metallic to a gold standard, owes a significant part of its emergence to the political influence of governments. However, the massive scale of interventionist measures taken to implement this latest transition to a completely irredeemable fiat standard is entirely unprecedented. Arguably starting with WWI, consolidating with the end of WWII, and ripening with Executive Order 11615 of President Nixon in 1971, the transition from a metallic to a pure fiat money has nationalized and politicized the global monetary system in any conceivable aspect. The consequence is a regression in the evolutionary tendencies of money from that of international convergence on the hardest money to a degradation towards the cheapest production methods, which will generate the highest seigniorage profits possible to extract for each national government. Thus, we are not surprised to find out that the last hundred years have experienced over 50 cases of hyperinflationary economic collapses. What used to be an extremely rare event has become an epidemic of modern economies, and is now virtually the only check which deters governments from excessive money production.
To briefly summarize, the history of money shows us a tendency for international convergence of monetary standards towards the hardest money. This tendency likely reached its peak with the nineteenth-century gold standard, and has been suppressed for the last hundred years by political forces compelling the use of the easiest money — that which can be infinitely created at their whim. While the trend towards hard money seems to have completely reversed, the great economic distress and instability arguably caused by this reverse in trend may indicate its mere temporary nature. Thus, there appears to be a strong reason to believe that these last hundred years will be but a short regression in the long trend towards harder money.
Nevertheless, this last century left us little hope that such a return to progression could manifest itself as a return to a gold standard. With the transition to global online payments, the need for a centralized trusted reserve for the smooth operation of such a system has grown more evident than ever. Yet this very need for a centralized reserve system is precisely the flaw that allowed the political capture and eventual demise of gold in the first place. Also, taking into account the immense expansion in the power of governments worldwide during the last few decades, the risks inherent in such a centralized reserve system make a return to gold seem like an impractical option, however theoretically desirable it may be. Despite the obstacle posed by the closing of this past option, the advancement of technology has opened up a new alternative in the form of Bitcoin, a digital adaptation of hard money. If it indeed provides a secure alternative, such a system has a true potential for becoming the next evolution in monetary standards, continuing the old trend towards harder forms of money. It is investigating this premise to which we will now turn.
Bitcoin as Hard Money
In a nutshell, Bitcoin was built to have a final and limited supply, produced by open competition for expending computational power. It is by design limited to a total supply of roughly 21M bitcoins to be produced according to an estimated time schedule. The production of new Bitcoin requires solving a cryptographic puzzle, with each competitor having the probability of solving it in direct relation to its expended computing resources. We see that, by theoretical design, Bitcoin was designed to be hard money, with an eventual hardness allowing for no further production, in a sense, creating absolute scarcity. While we now have the basic understanding needed of the theoretical guarantees of Bitcoin in regards to its monetary hardness, we must proceed to look at how those guarantees are to be secured in practice, and what possible threats may arise for them.
The monetary hardness of Bitcoin is guaranteed by its consensus rules — the code that either accepts or rejects transaction history (in the form of blocks) according to their validity with this predetermined set of rules. These rules include, among other things, the requirement for a solution to the cryptographic challenge (the proof of work), a verification ensuring no transaction spends more bitcoin than its sender has, and a check that no bitcoins were issues over the supply limit or before the predetermined schedule. Every machine which has verified all the transaction history up to the present, and which maintains as the result of this verification the present UTXO set (the current set of owners of bitcoins), is called a full node. The entire “Bitcoin network” is the sum of all full nodes communicating by the same protocol rules and propagating information about new data (mainly blocks and transactions). By following identical rules of verification, and by passing all data between themselves, all nodes are expected to reach the same view of the current state — a consensus.
There are two possible ways by which nodes may reach a disagreement over the present state — by having different (or partial) data or by verifying according to different consensus rules. The former case is usually not an issue. It includes mostly nodes in the process of joining the network (in IBD), nodes which have not yet received a new block, and on rare occasions, the case where two conflicting blocks are solved independently of one another and are propagated at the same time. This area of data propagation, while being highly critical, does not concern the monetary hardness of Bitcoin per se, and thus we’ll ignore it for the present discussion. The second possible case — the establishment of different consensus rules — is where the risk of inflation lies and is what we will now examine.
Strictly speaking, there are no “definitive” rules for Bitcoin. There are, for example, the original rules of the first version of the Bitcoin software, and the rules of the current Bitcoin Core software, but since Bitcoin is an entirely decentralized project, there are no rules one has to follow. This essentially means that (for convenience, taking the most unlikely yet still technically possible case) if all participants in the Bitcoin network were to unanimously modify their rules, for example, as to have permanent inflation, these would become the new rules. There exists no controlling authority which could stop users from running whatever version of the software they desire. This characteristic of Bitcoin, which is inherent in its nature as a man-made digital asset, is probably its most significant difference from the natural commodities, such as gold, and thus requires great attention in assessing the practical hardness of Bitcoin.
To understand what guarantees the hardness of the monetary policy and other consensus rules of Bitcoin, we should start by analyzing the network, not as a whole, but starting from the very individual nodes comprising it. As far as a full node is concerned, its control over the rules — the “definition” of Bitcoin — is absolute, there is no procedure to compel a node to use a particular set of rules. On the same token, it is also the case that no node can force another to accept its rules. Thus we arrive at a situation where, starting with the initial consensus rules laid out in the first Bitcoin software as base guidance, all nodes in the network must either converge on the same set of rules or lose the ability to transact with the rest of the network. If a node decides, for example, to mint itself new bitcoins “out of thin air”, he may change his own rules as to allow that, but at the cost of losing the ability to transact his “Bitcoin” with the rest of the network. If we assume two people have modified their rules in that way, they give up the ability to transact with all but one another. The same thing happens if we now imagine that 10% of the participants changed their nodes to the new rules, the network can be said to have split into two distinct networks, each defining Bitcoin in a different way.
While such cases as described above are of little interest, they beget the question of what happens if 50%, or even say 99% modify their rules. In other words, what happens if the majority changes the rules, and what would define a majority in the first place. With Bitcoin, being essentially a communication network, the most appropriate manner to determine a “majority” is to consider the extent to which participants can communicate (transact) with others. Contrary to common fallacies, it does not matter how much hash rate, market cap or total transaction volume a network may have and even less so does it matter how many nodes run its rules (as anyone can deploy as many nodes as he wishes). The only metric which is relevant for the determination of which rules a node joining the network “should” run is to what extent it can transact with others. In simpler terms, how many of those with which he wishes (or expects) to transact with will accept his bitcoins as valid.
The threat of being unable to transact with others (running incompatible rules) is what deters participants (both other nodes and miners) from arbitrarily modifying the rules. The need for such extensive coordination is what makes changes to Bitcoin, from trivial bug fixes to the most controversial changes, so difficult to implement. Any modification means risking losing the ability to transact with the rest of the network (or part of it). Thus the theoretical ability to exercise such modifications is rarely used. To get back to our subject of monetary hardness, what is most important to understand is that the hardness of Bitcoin for each participant depends on the ability and likelihood of a sufficiently large portion of the network to coordinate and successfully perform a consensus rule change which will inflate the supply of Bitcoin. It is important to emphasize that “sufficiently large” means such a large portion with which losing the ability to transact would render Bitcoin useless. This measure, like the rules of Bitcoin themselves, is by necessity subjective, but it should not be hard to have a rough agreement on what such a case would look like.
Bitcoin’s Soft Spot
As we have seen by now, since each user of Bitcoin can run his own node, the power of a participant in the influence over the enforcement of the consensus rules is solely with regard to the transactions he is personally involved in. A node must verify all transactions not for the sake of enforcing the rules for others on the network, but for being able to determine whether a payment he receives himself is valid or not — this is the economic activity of a participant, and it is the only manner by which he may influence the decision of others to use certain rules. Whenever one accepts payment in Bitcoin, it’s akin to asserting what the definition of Bitcoin is by enforcing the consensus rules under which the payment is accepted.
However, while in our analysis until now we have (intentionally and implicitly) assumed that every participant is actively setting his own rules by running certain code with his full node, and using it to verify the validity of incoming payments, this is not necessarily (and indeed is often not) the case. It is completely possible for anyone to delegate the responsibility of this active rule setting by passively trusting another entity with validating transactions for him. By doing so, the receiver of payment in a sense delegates his economic activity on the network, thus the influence over the consensus rules, to another which in turn may use it with whatever rules he likes. For example, assuming I am using an online Block Explorer to verify that I have received a transaction, whenever I accept a transaction in such a manner, I delegate the influence my economic activity may have over the rules to the operator of that service. If, for example, the operator would decide to use rules allowing larger blocks, new signature schemes or (more worrisome) changing the rate of inflation, I am not only susceptible to passively accept these changes against my consent, I am in fact actively endorsing them by signaling my willingness to accept transactions using these specific rules.
In the previous section, we have concluded that in order to impair the monetary hardness of Bitcoin, it is necessary to coordinate (convince others to perform) a consensus rules modification causing such a change with a sufficiently substantial portion of the active economic participants of the network, a task we can consider quite impractical in light of both theoretical considerations and practical (although short and insufficient) experience. This difficulty in coordination is not merely due to the decentralized structure of the Bitcoin network, but specifically due to the decentralized, or more correctly self-sovereign, enforcement of rules over individual economic activity. When each participant is actively validating his transaction, it is necessary to convince a very considerable part (if not almost all) of them to accept the new set of rules modifying the hardness of Bitcoin. However, the fewer participants actively validating their transactions, the more centralized does the verification of economic activity becomes, and thus the easier it is to carry out such a change.
Although, in theory, nothing prevents the use of a full node by each participant, there are various practical obstacles for running and using a full node. Probably the most significant of these obstacles is the technical complexity of operating such a node, which for many is still a very non-trivial task. Moreover, there are the issues posed by the size of the transaction history data, which when increased affects both the initial time needed to join the network, while also raising the hardware requirements needed for an active node, making it increasingly more expensive to maintain. These issues (and potentially various others), while probably manageable, can, if left unhandled, lead to such dangerously large centralization of payment verification which could potentially nullify the monetary hardness guaranteed by the theoretical design of Bitcoin.
The greatest risk to the hardness of Bitcoin lies therefore in the centralization of payment verification. We see that in theory, if a sufficiently large part of the network is using just a few service providers for validating their transactions, there is a chance that these service providers will coordinate a change to the supply of Bitcoin while having the unaware but nonetheless economically active support of everyone using them to accept Bitcoin payments. It is true that as long as you run your own full node you are able to stick to the present “hard money rules”, but if such a large part of the network has moved (aware of the change or not) to an inflationary set of rules, you will lose the ability to transact with them and thus the utility of using Bitcoin. Before reaching our conclusions on the hardness of Bitcoin, we should address the question of whether other cryptocurrencies may be termed hard money, and what differentiates Bitcoin from all of them.
What about “Shitcoins”?
Contrary to constant claims from almost any “blockchain-based” shitcoin, none of them can be considered as hard money. While there are many different implementations for how a decentralized blockchain may work (PoW/ PoS, etc.), they must all rely on the same client-side payment verification model discussed above. However, unlike Bitcoin, they all either merely pay lip service or even disregard completely the importance of self-sovereignty in determining the consensus rules. That is, they all tend towards centralizing the formation and enforcement of the consensus rules. Some projects have some sort of central authority, to which, with little exception, most decisions on the rules are delegated (whatever explicitly or implicitly). Others disregard the necessity of keeping the ability to run a full node as accessible as possible and thus lead to centralization in payment verification. And yet others which try to set up a “governance” process — making arbitrary changes to the consensus a matter of formality.
I should emphasize that I’m not speaking of all “blockchain projects” or projects with decentralized governance. What I’m speaking against is the often-heard claim of various tokens that they should be considered as hard money, while in practice, their supply can and regularly is arbitrarily altered. As defined above, the hardness of money is in reverse relation to the monetary inflation which can economically be inflicted on its holders. With such digital assets that either rely on a centralized (or semi-centralized) payment verification or have some clear and simple process for modifying the consensus rules, there cannot be even the pretense of being hard money. The potential inflation which could be inflicted upon them is infinite — once you can modify the “monetary policy” of a digital asset, there is virtually no limit to how much you can create from it, and it cannot be considered a harder money any more than any of the fiat monetary systems.
There is no claim here that the current state of Bitcoin is perfect, or anywhere near that. There is of course much undesirable centralization of verification in the space of Bitcoin as well, and even more concerningly, there is a great sentiment of ignorance of the importance of such self-sovereign verification. However, the main difference is the insistence of Bitcoin “activists” on promoting the use of full nodes, such examples being the Core developers’ efforts on keeping nodes usable on even such weak and affordable machines as a Raspberry Pi, and the many projects which provide various options for running a full node, from a plug and play machines to a completely DIY solutions. The ecosystem dedicated to promoting and simplifying the use of Bitcoin full nodes is both very significant and rapidly growing, and the community’s emphasis on this subject is unmatched by any other project.
Furthermore, and no less important, is the fact that, being the “first of its kind”, Bitcoin serves as the base consensus rules not only of a single asset but of general digital value transmission. As Bitcoin is in principle a protocol, or even (in its most basic sense) an idea, for “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, and since its rules are, as we have seen, determined individually and independently by its users, it means that in some sense, all other implementations of such a system could be seen as versions of Bitcoin, but with a completely modified set of rules. With that taken into account, the mere fact that these other “Bitcoins” have such a different set of rules and a substantially different monetary policy, signals the relative malleability of their rules — which have disconverged from the original base rules in a very incompatible manner and for no real (monetary) reason (such as an emergency change due to a bug). We may say that these other coins, being a mere replication of Bitcoin’s model, at least in the monetary field, have already proven their lack of hardness by their mere creation as an arbitrary divergent from the main Bitcoin protocol. All those coins might very well have significant differences from Bitcoin and various other “use-cases”, but with regards to being a hard money system, they have all started at a loss against “The Bitcoin Standard”.
On Bugs
Before concluding our discussion, there are few remarks which still need to be made. First, while until now we have discussed the hardness of Bitcoin as derived from enforcing its coded rules, we must note another caveat. Bitcoin is a software, and like any software, it can and did (and possibly still does) have bugs. While it’s true that such bugs could cause unexpected inflation, they are unlikely to have any serious impact on the hardness of Bitcoin.
To understand why, we may divide the possible inflationary bugs into minor (1, 10 or even 100,000 bitcoin — like could happen with CVE-2018–17144) and major ones (like a 184 billion coins inflation). Minor bugs may indeed introduce some inflation, which technically would undermine the core tenet of limited supply, but since they can be quickly fixed, their effect on the total supply will be effectively inconsequential in the long run. In more popular terms, they may increase the stock of Bitcoin to a small extent, but they do not undermine its guarantees as for the upcoming expected flow of new coins.
As for major bugs, while potentially undermining the interim confidence in the success of Bitcoin, the retroactive countermeasures which could be implemented to nullify the effects of such a clear violation of the constitutional precedent of limited supply would be successful in preserving Bitcoin’s creed. Such measures would be absolutely necessary to preserve the value of the coin-holders and the utility of the network itself. In fact, this is precisely the course of events that transpired in the wake of such a catastrophic bug in 2010. As we have concluded previously, the lack of malleability of the rules of the network contributes to its hardness as a monetary medium. However, here, it is apparent that the literal opposite is true as well; it is the ability of the network to evolve to protect users by way of them each acting individually in their own self-interest that defends the 21 million hard cap.
Throughout the article, we have discussed the basic principle of hard money and how it relates to Bitcoin. We saw that from the theoretical aspect, the usual description of Bitcoin as “the hardest money ever” is well deserved, but from the practical perspective, the soundness of this statement is to a large extent dependent on the exercise of their self-sovereignty by its users — the use of full nodes for validating and accepting transactions.
Run a Full Node!
For the hardness of Bitcoin, it is necessary that as many economic participants as possible use their own full node. However, far more important than this “collective” necessity of self-sovereignty, there are the “individual” reasons to run a full node.
As said above, when you don’t verify your own transactions but trust another party to do so, you blindly accept whatever definition that party may use for what Bitcoin is. It may very well be that they verify transactions by rules incompatible with most other network participants. Furthermore, they might not be truly verifying anything at all, and just arbitrarily present to you fake data. It is of course very unlikely, at least at this stage of Bitcoin, for established service providers to risk losing their customers by providing them with incorrect or misleading data (although we have already seen such cases, mostly with the Bitcoin Cash and Segwit2X cases). It may very well be fine to occasionally use the assistance of such services, especially for small payments.
The main thing to remember is that by delegating verification of payments, you open yourself to significant risks, while also potentially weakening the hardness of the rules of Bitcoin. I would not discourage the use of such services altogether, but for those using Bitcoin either frequently or with large amounts, as well as for anyone who cares about their privacy and wants strong security, I would highly recommend to make this effort and find a self-sovereign full node solution which suits their needs. (See below for guidance for that).
Although commonly heard, the advice to use a full node cannot be stressed strongly enough, it is a crucial part of using Bitcoin — as without using a full node, you cannot even know if you’re really using Bitcoin.
How to Run a Bitcoin Full Node
Up to this point, we dealt with the fundamental question of why _run a full node. Now, it is time for us to move to the no less important question of _how to run a full node. But first, let’s start by clearing a few popular misconceptions as to the requirements needed for running a full node. As for today, the minimum disk space required to operate a Bitcoin full node is no more than 10GB. For an illustration of how small that is, you can find a 16GB SD card for less than 4$. Most smartphones today already come with at least 32GB, and for many, it is possible to add more with such SD cards. It is true that storing the entire history (~300GB as for today) is much preferable, but this is not necessary for running a secure and fully verifying full node, and should not be an excuse not to use one.
Another important misconception is an alleged need for strong computing power, this misunderstanding usually comes from the confusion between a Bitcoin miner and a full node. It is true that in order to run a (profitable) Bitcoin mining operation, it is necessary to have some expensive specialized hardware, but this is not necessary at all for running a full node. To run a full node you can use as little as a mere Raspberry Pi, or simply your personal computer or smartphone.
The last thing to note here is the alleged complexity of running a full node. It must be admitted that for now, running a full node is probably not something your grandma will be able to do, but so wasn’t, and still isn’t for many, using a smartphone or a web browser. While in the present time it is certainly easier to use a web browser than running a full node, we should remember that for now Bitcoin is a not only new, but brings a completely new paradigm for using money. The invention of implementing Bitcoin itself was for decades considered an impractical challenge. Compared to that, the challenge of building an ecosystem of user friendly full node solutions is exceedingly minor. The fact that we’ve gotten so far makes me quite confident that the challenge of creating a user-friendly full node will not be a true obstacle. It is also conducive to look at how greatly the simplicity of using a full node has already improved during these last 10 years. Without having any budget whatsoever, depending on the voluntary contributions of people alone, dozens of solutions have already been created for various different audiences.
Here, I will list a few of the present options. As I cannot guarantee otherwise, I must note that this list might contain imperfect options, and does not substitute for doing your own research in regards to the quality and integrity of the services.
Probably the simplest solution for anyone familiar with the basic use of a computer is to use the Bitcoin Core software. While its interface is not the best, it is simple to install and use, and is the most common Bitcoin software. For more information see the links below:
Bitcoin Core official Download page
bitcoin.org Full Node Guide
Another option is to use Bitcoin Core through another app. There are few such services which will install and set up Bitcoin Core for you. These might not necessarily be simpler than the normal Bitcoin Core install, but they all offer more features, such as Tor support/ Lightning Network setup/ Coin mixing and other useful features.
Node Launcher — Bitcoin and Lightning one-click setup tool, including useful Lightning tools and guides.
Wasabi Wallet — Bitcoin wallet with built in Bitcoin Core automatic installation, CoinJoin mixing, and hardware wallet integration.
Bitcoin-Standup (warning: still in early beta) — MacOS (possibly Linux soon) tool for setting up Bitcoin full node and includes tools for remotely connecting through a mobile app over Tor.
For the less tech savvy users, a “plug and play” full node might be the best solution. These cost generally between 200$ to 500$, but they come with all the hardware, many great features, and generally much more user-friendly design.
Nodl — Includes a Bitcoin full node and one-click support for various features such as Lightning node, Tor and BTCPay server (also available with Samourai Dojo support here).
Casa Node — Bitcoin full node which comes with a user-friendly UI, full Lightning support and built in integration with other Casa products (such as a lightning mobile wallet and membership for their multi-sig wallet).
RaspiBlitz — Raspberry Pi based Bitcoin full node with Lightning integration.
MyNode — Similar to the Raspiblitz with a slightly more user-friendly interface and integrated features like a Blockexplorer and Electrum Server for Hardware Wallet support.
Lightning In A Box — Bitcoin and Lightning node with BTCPayServer pre-installed and configured.
BTCPi — A cheaper version similar to and sold by Lightning In A Box.
BitBoxBase (not yet released) — Bitcoin full node includes a hardware wallet secure element, user friendly wallet, a Lightning node and Tor support.
For those technical users who likes to get their hands dirty (or just want to save money building their own node):
RaspiBolt — A step-by-step guide for creating a Bitcoin full node with Lightning support using low-cost components.
RaspiBlitz — The DIY version of the RaspiBlitz. Should cost about ~150$ for the hardware parts while giving the same results as the pre-built option.
MyNode — Similar to the RaspiBlitz again which lets you build your own node from ordered parts. The basic software is provided for free but can be upgraded to paid premium with one-click upgrades for more features.
RoninDojo — DIY Samourai Dojo with Bitcoin full node, Tor, and Whirlpool coinjoin support.
There are also several mobile Bitcoin full node options:
ABCore — Android app with a Bitcoin full node, uses Bitcoin Core and provides an interface for using it as an Android app.
HTC Exodus — An HTC Android phone with a built in Bitcoin full node, a hardware wallet TEE element and more related features.
As for today, there is no iOS compatible way to run a full node Bitcoin. However, the app Fully Noded allows you to connect to your node remotely and use it on iOS.
A note on key management:
It is important to note that while many of the solutions presented here provide the user with a Bitcoin wallet, many are using (either only or by default) a “hot” wallet, i.e. a wallet stored on a machine connected to the internet. This is considered a relatively insecure practice. Many users therefore opt to use hardware wallets (such as Trezor, Ledger, and ColdCard). Though (at least considered) much more secure for key management, the benefit derived from using such hardware wallets is significantly impaired if they are not used along with a full node. While most hardware wallets don’t provide a (simple) integration with a user’s full node, there are complementary solutions developed to provide such support.
Bitcoin-Core HWI — A UI for interacting with many types of hardware wallets while connecting them to Bitcoin Core for verification.
Electrum Personal Server — Allows the integration of Electrum wallet with a Bitcoin full node. Supports various features including hardware wallet integration, multisig wallets etc.
YetiCold — (warning: still in beta) A self-sovereign, easy to use, multisig setup protocol aimed at minimizing trust and various attack vectors.
Special thanks to Ben Prentice (mrcoolbp), Bezant Denier (bezantdenier), Daniel Wingen (danielwingen), The Bitcoin Observer (festina_lente_2), Thib (thibm_), Simon Lutz (simonlutz21), and Stefanie von Jan (stefanievjan) for all the feedback I received from their reviews, comments, and suggestions which helped me shape this article.
The Fall of the State
“The greatest danger to the state is independent, intellectual criticism”
Dedicated to those who stood up to Tyranny. Today the people of HongKong, tomorrow, all of us.
Why does Bitcoin matter?
I wrote an article on Hacker Noon about a year ago now, which is entitled “Why Bitcoin Matters”.
I explored Bitcoin from first principles, starting with an examination of the societal stack, money’s role in society, how it evolved over time, it’s fundamental attributes & functions, and finally culminating into an analysis of why Bitcoin is superior both as a monetary unit & a monetary network (aka; a monetary operating system).
For this piece, I’d like to take a more, perhaps, ‘revolutionary’ approach to why Bitcoin matters.
Winston Smith’s sub-conscious cry
It’s that “thing” which the protagonist (Winston Smith) of Orwell’s seminal piece, 1984, was unknowingly calling out for, and inherently describing, whilst O’Brien was torturing him.
The “force” of good that exists in all humans, and the desire for Freedom was and always will be there, but a tool via which it could manifest in spite of the oppressive power of an authoritarian state, just did not, and could not exist at the time.
But it’s no longer 1984. Times have changed.
Bitcoin matters, because Bitcoin is that tool. It’s what we, the revolutionaries have been missing this entire time.
We had the human spirit, we had the will, we knew there was something wrong, but we lacked the tool with which to stand up to Big Brother.
Bitcoin is that tool.
Whilst getting rich because you’re in the game early is cool and all (greed drives me as much as it does the next person), it’s this revolutionary aspect of Bitcoin that should get you most excited about it’s prospects.
Not since the gunpowder revolution were ordinary men & women able to stand up to those who chose to oppress or rule them unjustly. Only this time, it can be done in a non-violent method, whereby one can peacefully opt out — as John Galt and the ‘men of the mind’ did in Atlas Shrugged.
This, above all else, is why Bitcoin matters, and why the legend of Satoshi will go down in history as the most profound story since the beginning of time (or whichever significant religious event / story you’d like to reference instead).
This fact also just reinforces why megalomaniacs like Craig Wright, and his band of deranged cool-aid drinking followers are simply the antithesis to Satoshi and Bitcoin.
Revolutionaries & Renegades
Bitcoin is the stand we take, this decade, this century, this millennium. Bitcoin is the tool we use to separate money & state. Bitcoin is the lightning rod that will bring together the renegades & the revolutionaries.
Bitcoin is of and for the liberators, the missionaries & the visionaries.
The men & women who won’t accept suppression, oppression, or the dictates of a world in which we’re subjugated to the whims of central planners, bureaucrats, rent seekers, attention whores, corrupt politicians, crooked bankers, backdoor dealers, creeping socialism and crony capitalism.
There has never been a tool so incorruptible yet so inherently powerful & accessible.
With it we can reimagine the “state”. We will transform society.
We will redefine the very essence of what it means to be a modern, collaborative human.
Have I gone off the deep end? Of course.
But there’s an entirely new world over here — and at some point, I know you’ll join me.
May this essay be a start….
The separation of Money & State
Make no mistake about it, this century will be defined by the separation of money & state.
It has already started, and nothing can stop it.
It’s inevitable, assuming of course, we plan on surviving. The alternative is a parasitic dystopian future in which society feeds on itself until it collapses.
So…if we err on the side of humanity’s continuation, we must be honest with ourselves and realise a paradigm shift is nigh.
Even Ray Dalio is coming around. He’s just missing the word Bitcoin from his most recent articles — although I would guess that’s a wise move in his shoes, for if he mentions it in a positive light, it may cause a stampede and drive the god damn price up to $1m a coin prematurely and fuck up the S2F model!
Furthermore, it will mean my shitty fiat will buy less Bitcoin — and we can’t have that (yet).
So Ray, if you’re reading this, keep buying Bitcoin privately. Please.
_…._Back to separating money & state.
The Paradigm is shifting. Economically, politically, technologically, socially, ethically and in every other way imaginable.
Davidson & Rees-Mogg, in their seminal pre-2000 work, “The Sovereign Individual”, posited that this shift started in the 90s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism, and the beginning of the information age.
I would tend to agree with them.
Communism was the peak of the parasitic, centralised state, at least measured in terms of brute violence & broad incompetence.
The crony-capitalism & quasi socialism we in the West live with today are very much improvements on the communism of the USSR, and to some degree so is the Communism in China (thanks to the benefits of capitalism that helped enrich their rulers), but the inherent concentration of the unit through which society is measured (ie; money) has led us to a point of diminishing returns, where peak stupidity, peak stimulus, and peak economic distortion mean the government, aka; “the state” can no longer squeeze more out of the system and has begun to feed on itself.
Note that I omitted peak ‘outright’ violence — but I guess that depends on who you ask. The people of Hong Kong, or the Falun Gong would probably disagree with me.
This shift in “feeding on itself” is evident in the comments made by megalomaniacs such as Bernie Sanders or AOC, for example:
“The billionaire class is scared, and they should be”. Bernie Sanders
Comments as such can only come from parasites who have never produced anything, and can only subsist via the expropriation of the production of another.
This is only possible in a system where the instrument through which we measure economic value is the sole privilege of the state.
But this is now changing.
The separation of money & state is being driven by the individual who now has the technological capacity AND the monetary ability to become more autonomous, independent, sustainable and yes, more sovereign, than they have ever before been.
The period will mark the rise of the sovereign individual
Whilst the peak of the state may have come 20yrs ago, the shift is on-going.
It will not happen overnight.
Prior shifts have taken multiple generations, if not multiple centuries to occur, and although today, progress much faster, we still have a ways to go.
And it’s not going to a smooth ride.
Paradigm shifts happen in a tumultuous fashion. They are by definition both constructive AND destructive, simultaneously! Change, in the real world, is a complex process.
Whilst new structures are being built, old structures are coming down, and it will not be smooth. It will not be orderly. It will not be “fair”, and it will not be “equal”, that’s for damn sure.
Your bullshit Keynesian / neo-classical economic & social theories cannot forecast shit, and can do less to make for a “smooth landing” or “elegant deleveraging” (sorry Ray, not likely).
Those who will be most rewarded will, as always, include the lucky (the world abounds with fools of Randomness, eg; Roger Ver), along with the prepared, curious and those hungry for knowledge.
It’s those who get off their asses and dig deeper than the surface who will be best positioned to be on the constructive side of this shift, whilst the lazy, incompetent, ignorant, arrogant and of course, unlucky, will likely find themselves on the destructive.
“Something is Rotten in the state of Denmark”
The Romans experienced it. So did the Church. Shakespeare wrote a play about it, almost 500 years ago.
There comes a point when the “state”, or the “empire”, or the “collective” simply starts to rot.
When corruption, rent seeking, politics and all form of non-organic bureaucratic meddling begin to define the function of the very structure that was initially designed for its constituents’ prosperity, you know the end is nigh.
In modern times, the beacon of prosperity has been capitalism.
In fact, ruthless, free-market capitalism is the mechanism of human collaboration that most closely resembles nature.
Power laws, recursive network effects, complex inputs & outputs that are allowed to reach equilibrium of their own accord, rewards & punishment through inherently system-based incentives and of course; luck.
One can draw parallels to these attributes in all natural systems that have evolved over thousands, millions & billions of years.
So what went wrong with capitalism? How the hell did we wind up with a crony version of capitalism that has rot to the core?
I’ll explain below, but it can be summed up in the following quote by Michael Hopf.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” Michael Hopf
Over time, we humans seem to repeatedly stray from founding principles. Our forebears, growing up in better times, forget why some decisions were initially made.
It’s worse when those forebears realise they can also run a monopoly over the core resource of the time.
The Church had a monopoly on the written word & education (information). Capitalism & Science broke that.
The State today, has a monopoly on Money. Bitcoin is breaking that.
So….why the rot?
Productive or Parasitic
In life, likely on planet Earth & anywhere else there may be life, there are two ways to earn a “living”.
Production. To produce, one must trade their time & energy, in the form of effort, talent, skill and labour, and be rewarded with property, either in the form of currency (money) or in the form of another instrument you deem valuable & commensurate to your work.
Theft. To steal, you make someone else’s property your own, without their permission. You take what you want, whether through lying, cheating or most often (as evidenced throughout history), the act of violence.
German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer calls (1) the “economic means” by which we build wealth.
Economic because there is an additive & multiplicative effect that occurs as a result of the collaborative efforts of the constituents of a society who produce, and then trade their property, and thus both prosper.
Oppenheimer call the other, mutually exclusive method, the “political means”. Political because it is not concerned with the production of new goods or property, but exists and persists through the seizure, appropriation, taxation and theft of said goods & property in the “name” of the collective.
Once again, this fundamentally parasitic nature seems to come to a head every 500yrs if you accept the analysis of Davidson & Rees-Mogg’s work in “The sovereign individual”.
So where are we now?
Understanding which system is dominant in the paradigm within which we’re currently operating is important + useful.
The cycle of humanity
I recently had a conversation with a friend, who I would consider centrist, or moderately conservative in nature (if those labels even mean anything anymore).
She pointed out that centrally managed states such as the Scandinavian countries are the “happiest” in the world today, based on the latest statistics & surveys.
Now — whilst those surveys are laughable at best, let’s just assume that there is a grain of truth in there — the problem with this ‘fact’ is that the “happiness” is being measured during the largest monetary inflation in the history of humanity.
It’s a facade!
And those who are high on this fake happiness are going to feel it the worst as their world crumbles thanks to the bloated social structures that cannot subsist in a new economic reality that is fast approaching.
Furthermore, these ‘happy’ people sacrifice their liberty & personal Sovereignty for the illusion of peace via the benevolence of their leaders — who would very quickly justify behaving more like dictators should dire economic circumstances warrant such actions.
And don’t for a minute think “it will never happen”, because it is happening, NOW.
My decree thou shalt yield to, for thy savings are mine…
Former IMF Managing Director, and now head of the ECB, Christine Lagarde recently came out with the following gem:
“Isn’t it true that ultimately we have done the right thing to act in favour of jobs and of growth rather than the protection of savers?”
Implying that people should be grateful for their jobs, whether their savings protected or not.
“you should be grateful, for your master gives you the right to be a slave”
The very notion of paying an institution just to store your money (well, not really ‘your’ money), or being paid to borrow money is utterly absurd — but is slowly being pushed upon us in the west as not only necessary to “stimulate” the heroin-junkie of an economy we now have, but it’s being called “normal”.
Even Dalio is waking up:
“As a result rich capitalists will increasingly move to places in which the wealth gaps and conflicts are less severe and government officials in those losing these big tax payers will increasingly try to find ways to trap them.”
And it’s not just economic madness.
Bernie Sanders, whom I mentioned earlier, is a brilliant example of an old fool espousing a nice-sounding veneer of an ideology with incredibly dangerous roots.
Maybe he was inspired…..
“It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.”
Sounds nice right?
That same person went on to say:
“When we hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope we use”
Yep. That same person went on to rule the regime that gave us gulags, famine, deportations, massacres, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture and and was responsible for not only the deaths of millions of people, but the utter oppression of tens of millions more over the ensuing decades.
That person was Joseph Stalin. (although you may for a moment have thought it was Bernie)
Stalin was, in the early days, viewed as the man who would help the lower class & poor people fight back against the so-called ‘oppressive capitalists’.
Little did those poor people (pun very much intended) realise they would be accepting a modern form of serfdom. Little did they know how dire the ramifications of such an ideology would be.
And here we are, barely a generation since the god damn Berlin Wall came down, at it again.
This time, from the likes of Bernie Sanders, AOC and Elizabeth Warren — all who want to walk in the shoes of Chairman Mao, Lenin or Stalin himself.
This tweet came out just as I was finishing up this piece, and I had to include it:
Of course. Bernie would surely know how to deploy that capital…to his cronies, to the military, to bullshit social programs that don’t work and in every other non-functional, mal-invested, mis-appropriated fashion. Bernie’s next book: How to burn $100bn and achieve nothing.
Bernie Sanders is merely the modern day equivalent of prior socialist leaders, who embodies the political means of wealth [confiscation] via the power to rob whomever he deems as unworthy.
Welcome to the slippery slope that leads to communism & enslavement.
The only way to maintain such a system is via violence or the threat of said violence.
That’s not freedom. That’s slavery.
And no man, woman or child should have to live in a world like that.
This the path of collectivism
One of my favourite lines from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged surmises Hamlet’s quote (the headline of this section) perfectly:
Money is the barometer of a societies virtue. When you see that in order to produce you must seek permission from those who produce nothing. When you see money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favours, When you see that men get richer by graft & by pull, not by work, When your laws protect the looters more than the consumer, You will know, that your society is doomed.
Piercing the Veil
Bitcoin’s promise to help bank the unbanked was not to do so by giving them a payments technology. It was to do so by giving them a money via which they have property rights.
Those who live in nations that don’t respect, recognise or value personal property are those who have the most freedom to gain.
Those of us in the west, who are watching the state ever so slyly repeal our property rights have a two-fold motivation to participate in this revolution.
(a) We are able to escape the grip of a modern, technologically empowered iron fist which continues to squeeze, and
(b) We ride a rocket ship to the proverbial ‘moon’ because we had the balls, foresight, insight, vision or dumb luck to get in early.
It’s (a) that I’m personally more interested in though, perhaps due to my personal libertarian bent, or because it’s something I derive a greater sense of “meaning” from (likely both).
Now, you might say that:
“Hey, you’re exaggerating. We’re pretty good here in the West. We have stable social structures, good property rights, and yeah while taxes might be high, that money goes to use. We live a pretty good life”.
By & large I would agree. But I would urge you to look beyond the veil.
The central banking cartel & crony capitalist governments of the west have reached a point in history where they can no longer sustain their structure without squeezing their subjects harder. And they know it.
The signs are evident, as described above. Furthermore, look around!
These same “stable” governments continue to strip away our freedoms via absurdities such as the Anti-Encryption laws in Australia, anti-cash laws, draconian follow-you-everywhere tax laws, inability to travel freely, panopticon surveillance, increased ‘law enforcement’ powers, speeding ticket optimisation frameworks (you can’t drive around for 10min in Sydney without seeing a cop hiding around the corner ready to book you for blinking) and even new laws empowering their ‘agents’ to force you divulge your private information (eg; decrypting your drives coming into NZ).
It’s madness.
Ayn Rand was so poignant, once again:
Laws are designed to be broken, not observed. When you’re after power, There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. And when there isn’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law abiding citizens? There’s nothing in that for anyone. But pass the kind of laws that cannot be observed, followed or objectively interpreted and you create a nation of criminals & law breakers. Then you cash in on guilt. That’s the system.
Cogitos Ergo Sum
I think, therefore I am.
Descartes said this almost 500yrs ago, during the last major transformation in human history; the fall of the dominance of the church & the rise of the merchant-and-science-enabled state.
Much has been said about this recently, particularly in the Bitcoin circles.
I’m sure all the “crapto” people are going to try hijack this soon too, but let it be known here that Bitcoin has been about this from the beginning.
The parallels drawn between the events of the gunpowder revolution, the renaissance, early banking, the rise of the merchant and the fall of the prominence of the church to today’s technological revolution, private, self-sovereign banking, the rise of the sovereign individual and the fall of the state are eerie.
Descartes’ words have never been so profound.
The words “I think” and “I am” are the genesis of the self.
Yes we are all made of the same stuff, but it’s that unique combination of stuff that makes us who we are.
The sanctity of the individual is paramount. Tony Robbins has a profound quote:
“the most powerful force in the human spirit is the desire to stay consistent with its identity”.
To say “I am” is a claim to one’s identity & independence.
It’s a claim to one’s personal sovereignty — which we can now do so like never before, thanks in large part to Bitcoin.
How you may ask?
Our work is our labour. Our labour is our time & and our energy.
When we boil it down, they are all we we have, and all we are truly made up of.
To live, to love, to work, to travel, to experience, to remember, to plan, to do anything requires two things: Time & Energy.
We can only effectively measure these through a unit that we can all agree best represents time & energy.
As you’ll learn in this publication, “money” is that unit, and for the first time in history we have a version that can do the job, without being compromised.
It is why Bitcoin is the ultimate tool for personal sovereignty, and the catalyst that leads us to a future more like Star Trek, and less like Terminator.
Incorruptible Property Rights
Bitcoin provides a stable system of property rights without reliance on the State
With it, individuals can be truly self sovereign
The mathematical primitive of strong, open source, modern day cryptography gives us for the first time in history, a method whereby the sanctity of personal property and the act of sacrificing for the future can be maintained WITHOUT the requirement for the protection (or oppression) of the state, the church, the monarch, the feudal lord nor the tribal leader.
In modern times, and in the future that lay before us, Human beings (and potentially machines alike) will be able to save the product of their labour and delay gratification (the very building blocks of society) on their own terms.
As this multiplies, and we are collectively empowered to take back our personal sovereignty (via what is likely the greatest gift to humanity since we became conscious), we have the rare opportunity to define a new form of local & global cooperation that is voluntarist, and non-violent in nature.
Bitcoin’s core “opt in” or “opt out” nature, its open access & its absolute nonchalance / disregard of who or what you are is the basis of this new era we now embark on.
Bitcoin has chosen to not only forego the requirement of the state, but has chosen to do this via the irrefutable conversion of time & energy into a visible, verifiable network and unit.
Through Math, it will help us reinvent the notion of what we humans define as ‘state’.
Cash is the ultimate tool of the sovereign individual.
And in an increasingly digital world, the apogee is a peer to peer electronic cash.
Cash is the ability to transact freely. And by freely I mean “to do so in a manner uncensored, direct & final”.
That was traditionally only able to be done physically in the real world. Now it’s able to be done digitally.
Ineptitude on display in the crypto community, for example Roger Ver and his BCash cronies, think free means no cost. They’re unable to understand that costlessness can only mean one of two things:
It has no value. ie; the very definition of costlessness is something with no value.
It has value, in which case cheap & free means there is a cost elsewhere. A cost that is most likely draconian in nature.
They think trending toward a centralised payment system for free internet transactions is what was meant by cash. That’s not the freedom cash gives.
Roger clearly got lucky buying bitcoin. Dumb luck, for the ultimate fool of randomness.
Bitcoin, and banking the unbanked was never about cheap payments.
It was about giving everyone an incorruptible, uncensorable tool for economic prosperity.
Bitcoin was, is and always will be a tool for personal sovereignty.
That’s what was meant by “cash” — which of course Satoshi could not be so blatant & brazen about it back in 2008, lest Bitcoin be left in the dustbin of history alongside other crazy ideas.
He let the protocol and its inherent nature do the talking.
He then chose to walk away, and in doing so let loose something no amount of violence can destroy and no amount of tyranny can control.
The rest is history….and it’s in the making.
We live in a world where our rights are slowly being encroached upon, our privacy is slowly being repealed, and our freedom to truthfully express ourselves is being censored, whether due to deranged “political correctness” on one side or maniacal authoritarian rule on the other (eg; China).
May the brave people of Hong Kong continue to inspire us
Bernie, and those of his ilk, whether due to incompetence, stupidity, or just being a part of what Taleb calls the “intelligentsia”, believe in treating the symptoms by introducing more interventionist inputs into an already complex system that’s slowly spinning out of control.
This will never work, and will only serve to send society to a real-world hell.
The ONLY way to fix up the fuckery of the current system is to start again. We must embrace the essence of Kali, cut out the cancer & burn it all down.
The time for negotiations has come to an end.
Libertarians have tried this to no avail, for playing within the confines of the old paradigm is no way to bring about a new one.
The battle for the future is now, and the front lines are where Bitcoin meets the fiat denominated state.
This is a war, and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.
Money is the lifeblood of society. It is wealth, at the very core of what the word means. He who controls it, controls all of society.
The introduction of free markets was the catalyst for the separation of church & state. The creation of free money is the catalyst for the separation of money & state.
And more than that, it’s also a stake in the heart of today’s state, which has decayed to the point that it’s primary function is to leech, take, suck dry and confiscate your wealth.
Today, it exists no longer to protect you & serve you, but to subdue you. You are once again it’s subject.
You can see this just by looking at the language used for a group who are supposed to be protecting you: “Law Enforcers”.
When did I agree to pay someone to “enforce” laws upon me which I neither agreed to in the first place?
The state’s control of money is its locus of power. Through this tool, it is able to enforce its will over every facet of our lives.
We, the Bitcoiners of last resort, on the front line, are here to destroy that.
Freedom is not Free
Bitcoin is our chance.
It allows us to take the most important tool of human collaboration, ie; money, aka; the ultimate resource, and make it:
Un-inflatable
Un-censorable
Un-confiscatable
and all in all, un-fuck-with-able.
By removing it from the purview of the state, we:
Starve the state of its ability to perpetuate it’s parasitic existence
Get a chance to design a new form of collective collaboration in which personal sovereignty comes first, where the constituents of a society are treated like customers and the “state” or “social collective” is organised by means of POLA (principle of least authority).
I saw this excerpt a few weeks ago. Pretty sure it’s attributed to Nick Szabo
The cornerstone of all of this is personal sovereignty & liberty, and this is only possible with Bitcoin.
It’s only possible when the economic unit has personal, private property rights built into its very being.
To paraphrase Winston from 1984 once again, the only thing Big Brother didn’t have control over was what goes on in your head & your heart.
Bitcoin transforms money into a unit that is fundamentally information, and information is both nowhere & everywhere.
It’s both inside of us, and all around us — and when we ourselves know the combination that gives us personal access to that information (money), it’s ours, in the deepest sense of “private property”.
Libertarians, Austrian economists and the natural economists before them had it right — only it was never practical in a world in which the unit of economic measurement could be owned or managed by an organisation, government, collective or state of any kind.
Money has now become an unforgeable form of data, that nobody can control or manipulate — built on a network which nobody needs permission to build products & services on. This foundation allows us to build an entirely new world — not just a financial one, but a new form of society.
So…let us come together…
Bitcoin is now here.
Money is THE battlefront. This is where the battle lines are drawn. Not fucking “blockchain”. Money. It’s THE resource. And we’re all going to have to pick a side.
Join us, & we’ll show you how deep this rabbit hole goes….
This is the new counter culture. This is what it means to be yourself. To be who you are. To do what you were born for.
To be truly sovereign. It’s scary — but it’s liberation, in all its glory.
By Aleks Svetski Oct, 2019
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Dogs helped archaeologists discover a necropolis three thousand years old
by space · October 25, 2019
Archaeologists in Croatia attracted dogs to search for the tombs of the Iron Age, three thousand years old. A new method for detecting human burials with the help of specially trained dogs is described in the journal Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.
The ability of dogs to search for human remains by smell is widely used in forensics. Croatian archaeologists have decided to apply this quality of our four-legged friends to search for ancient graves.
During excavations near the ancient settlement of Drviszyca, dating back to the eighth century BC, archaeologists discovered three ancient burials on the Adriatic Sea.
The idea to use dogs for further research on the Iron Age necropolis came to the mind of a Croatian researcher from the University of Zadar, Vedrana Glavaš. She contacted Andrea Pintar, a trainer who trains dogs to search for human remains for criminal investigations, and suggested an experiment.
In 2015, Andrea Pintar brought four Belgian and German shepherds to the site. First they ran a test to find out if they could find the excavated graves. Dogs unmistakably found all three places, although bones and artifacts were removed from the graves a year ago, and excavated graves all this time were exposed to wind, sun and rain.
Thus, the researchers were convinced that it was enough for dogs to detect objects of those volatile organic compounds that are formed during the decomposition of human remains and penetrate into the pores of the rocks surrounding the grave.
“Dog’s noses clearly make no mistakes,” cites the assistant professor of archeology at Zadar University and the lead author of Vedran’s research, The Guardian.
Later, the dogs helped archaeologists discover six more graves. In each case, before starting to dig, the researchers used at least two dogs to confirm the site of the alleged burial.
Dogs searched for objects with very high accuracy, despite the fact that the tombs were rounded structures with stone walls, in the center of which was a small stone sarcophagus with small fragments of the skeleton, such as the fingers or toes of several people. According to archaeologists, these are the remains of representatives of several generations of the same family. In the sarcophagi, along with the bones, there were buckles and other artifacts.
Scientists believe that using dogs can be a good way to identify archaeological sites, as it is less destructive than excavation. It can be combined with ground penetrating radar (GPR), electrical resistance measurement, or remote sensing.
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the google drive api doesn't know about paths, and that's bad
Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on integrating remote filestores into FastMail. We've had our own online file storage facility for years (long before it was cool), and you've always been able to attach a file in your store to an email and save an email attachment to your store. We've been extending that to allow you to use a "cloud" file storage service in exactly the same way.
Our file storage facility is fairly simple in concept, and operates around the traditional files-and-folders model that we've used forever. For the first external service to integrate with we chose Dropbox, mostly because its by far the most widely used, but also because they use the same model and so it was very easy to create an abstraction and slot it behind it. For FastMail subscribers, you can try it out right now on beta. Once we've finished polishing and testing it we'll be releasing it to production. Should only be a couple of weeks away, but don't quote me on that!
When I developed our internal remote filestore abstraction I designed it with the idea that it would be fairly simple to integrate other remote filestores as well. Today I spent a good amount of time working on an integration for Google Drive. I'm mostly doing this to satisfy myself that I have a good abstraction in place, but of course Google is no small fish and I think that it would be wonderful if we could make this available to users as well.
This has not been a simple undertaking. To find out why, lets talk the architecture of our client a bit.
One of the features of our internal API (the AJAX stuff that our client uses) is that it is completely stateless. This has been done deliberately, as it makes it very easy to scale our backend servers. Obviously state can be held (there is a very nice database available all the time) but the API itself has no real concept of state, so it becomes tough to know what and when to store and expire data. So to build anything we start by assuming it will be stateless.
Our attachment system is very simple. There is a file picker that requests metadata for a given path (a standard /foo/bar/baz construction). It gets back name, full path, timestamp and type for the requested folder and its immediate children. When the user selects a folder, a new metadata request comes in for that folder. The server does not care what's gone on before, it just turns paths into lists of metadata. Later to actually attach a file, we call a different method with the wanted and path, and the file data comes back. Like I said, very simple.
So back to Drive. The major reason for it being an utter pain in the backside to integrate is that the API itself has no concept of folders or paths. Now anyone using the Drive web interface will know that it has folders. This is actually something of a lie. A Drive is just a giant pool of files with various properties that you can query on. A file can have "parent" and "child" pointers to other files, which allows a loose hierarchy of files to be constructed. A folder is simply a zero-size file with a special type (application/vnd.google-apps.folder) and appropriate parent and child pointers.
Every file has a unique and opaque ID, unrelated to the file's name. These IDs are what's used in the parent and child pointers. There's no way for us to construct the ID of a file from a path. To find the metadata for our file, we have to follow parent and child pointers around.
So lets say we want to get the metadata for the folder /foo/bar/baz and the files inside it. We start off by getting the metadata for the root "folder", helpfully called root (gotta start somewhere). Along with all the info about that root folder we get back its ID. Lets say its ID is 'root123456' (it won't be, its opaque and apparently random, but this will do for our purposes).
Now we have to find foo. We request the file list, with some search filters (normally all on one line, presented here with newlines for readability):
'root123456' in parents and
title = 'foo' and
mimeType = 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder'
Gotcha 1: deleted ("trashed") and hidden files are returned by default. We don't want those. So actually the filter is:
mimeType = 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder' and
trashed = false and
hidden = false
Gotcha 2: this query goes into the q= parameter of a GET request, however it needs to be form-encoded rather than the standard URI 'percent' encoding.
(Neither of these gotchas are documented. Good luck).
Assuming it exists, we'll get back a "list" containing one item. I'm not actually sure if two items with the same name and type can exist. Probably, so I return "not found" if I don't get exactly one result yet. That's an implementation detail though, and it might change.
So now we have our foo metadata, we can get its ID and then repeat the process for bar, and so on.
Each of these requests is a separate HTTP call. They're stateless, so various performance tricks can be utilised (keepalives, etc). My servers are on good networks so its not that slow, but its still a lot of round-trips.
Once we drill down that far, we do a final request for a file list with the same filter, this time leaving off the title and mimeType term (we want everything).
'baz123456' in parents and
Gotcha 3: this will return Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations and the like. These are identifiable by MIME type, and are not downloadable (because they're internal application magic). Their metadata has various URLs for converting to eg Word documents, but these aren't really appropriate for our use. We'd like to filter them out. Unfortunately that means filtering by excluding a specific set of MIME types in the filter:
mimeType != 'application/vnd.google-apps.document' and
mimeType != 'application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet' and
mimeType != '...' and
That sucks because you have encode the full list of exclusions right there in the query, so you have to update that when Google adds a new type of document. Instead I've opted to drop anything with a zero size, but there's no size search term available, so instead I've got to pull the lot and then filter.
Anyway, we now have the metadata for the requested path and all its children, so we can return this back to the caller. It takes N+2 HTTP requests to get all the data we need, where N is the number of "inner" path components. This is hardly ideal, but it works well enough, is probably fast enough for most cases (ie there aren't likely to be very very deep folder hierarchies) and isn't even a lot of code.
So next up is search. Our file picker has a "search within folder" option, which looks for a given file name (or name fragment) within a folder and its subfolders. The subfolders bit is actually a significant problem for us here. Finding matching files within a single folder is pretty easy - its just a repeat of the above but the last query gets an additional title contains filter.
Deep search is far more difficult. The obvious approach (and the one I started implementing) is to drill down to the given path, then do a search for files with title contains or subfolders. And then loop through the folders, repeating as we go. The slightly more refined version of that is to drill through the folders, collecting their IDs, then constructing a single filter for the files of the form:
title = 'bananas' and (
'root123456' in parents or
'foo123456' in parents or
'...' in parents
Gotcha 4: You can group terms with parentheses. This is not documented.
The trouble here is that this is potentially unbounded. We don't know how deep the the hierarchy goes, or how many branches it has. It wouldn't be a problem if each request was negligible (as it often is with a local filesystem with metadata hot in a memory cache), but here its hugely expensive in a deep hierarchy. As noted above, the regular metadata lookup suffers this but to a lesser degree, as it only ever goes down one branch of the tree.
This is where I got to when I left the office today. The approach I'm likely to take is to request a list of all folders (only), assemble an in-memory hierarchy, drill down to the folder I want, collect all the IDs and then perform the query. So it actually only becomes two requests, though potentially with a lot of metadata returned on the full folder list.
And from there I guess the metadata lookup becomes the same thing really.
And I suppose if I was in the mood to cache things I could cache the folder list by its etag, and do a freshness test instead of the full lookup.
But mostly I'm at the point of "why?". I recognise that around Google search is king, and explicit collections like folders are always implemented in tearms of search (see also tags in Gmail). But folder/path-based filesystems are the way most things work. We've been doing it that way forever. Not that we shouldn't be willing to change and try new things, but surely its not hard to see that an application might want to take a traditional path-based approach to accessing their files?
I'm doubly annoyed because Google is supposed to be far ahead of the pack in anything to do with search, yet I cannot construct a query that will do the equivalent of a subfolder search. Why can the API not know anything about paths, even a in light way? Its clearly not verboten, because parents and children pointers exist, which means a hierarchy is a valid thing. Why is there no method or even a pseudo-search term that does things with paths? Wouldn't it be lovely use a query like:
path = '/foo/bar/baz'
to get a file explicity? Or even cooler, to do a subfolder search:
path startswith '/foo/bar/baz' and title = 'bananas'
Instead though I'm left to get a list of all the files and do all the work myself. And that's dumb.
I'll finish this off, and I'll do whatever I have to do to make a great experience for our users, because that's who I'm serving here. It would just be nice to not have to jump through hoops to do it.
seven hours to go
gtug
Just a reminder that I'm speaking at the Melbourne chapter of the Google Technology Users Group tonight about the details of Monash's move to Google Apps. If you're in Melbourne and without plans you should come along!
Details: melbourne-gtug.org
Register: bit.ly/GoogleAppsAPIMonashUni
Well almost. I'm speaking at the Melbourne chapter of the Google Technology Users Group next week about the details of Monash's move to Google Apps. I don't have a lot of speaking experience so I'm a bit nervous but its all coming together nicely and I think its going to be a lot of fun. If you're in the area do come along and support me and learn some stuff too :)
Disclaimer: I work for Monash University, but I don't speak for them. Anything I write here is my own opinion and shouldn't be relied upon for anything.
So Google Wave has been put out to pasture. That makes it a good time for me to write a bit about what I've been working on in the last few months and what I think about the whole thing.
For those that don't know, I work for Monash University as a web developer and Google Apps specialist. We've spent the last ten months rolling out the Google Apps suite to our staff and students. We completed our rollout to some ~150K students last month, and so far have about 10% of our staff across. A big part of the reason we've been able to move that fast is that for the most part, people are extremely excited about Google technologies and how they might use them for education. That excitement goes to the highest levels of the University (one of our Deputy Vice-Chancellors was the first production user to go) and has seen Google Apps being included in our recently-announced strategy for online and technology-assisted learning and teaching, the Virtual Learning Environment.
The interest from our users in Google extends beyond the Apps suite of products to pretty much every product that Google offers, and perhaps none more so than Wave. Through the eEducation centre Monash has already been doing a lot of research into how teachers and students can teach and learn from each other (instead of the traditional top-down lecture style) and how technology can assist with that. Groups sharing and building information together is really what Wave excels at, so it wasn't long before we started seriously considering whether or not Wave was something we could deploy to all of our users.
There were three main issues that needed to be addressed before this could happen:
Wave doesn't have enough features to allow a lecturer or tutor to control access and guide the conversation flow.
The sharing model opens some potential legal issues surrounding exposure of confidential information, particularly to third-party robots.
The Wave UI does not meet the stringent accessibility requirements that University services must meet
Over the last few months we've been working with the Google Wave team to address these issues.
The first is simply a case of the Wave team writing more code. Its well known that they have been thinking and working on access control stuff. Plans exist for limiting access to a wave to a set group of users, allowing robots to better manage the participants in the wave, locking the conversation root down so that users can only reply, and so on. In many ways its the easiest thing to fix, and given the commitment from the Wave team to talk to us and do something to help with what we needed we were never particularly concerned about this stuff.
I won't comment much on the legal side of things, mostly because I don't understand most of it. I do know that its a serious issue (eg Victorian privacy law is perhaps the strictest in the world) but its something that our solicitors have been working on and it probably would have come out ok in the end, if for no other reason than if it didn't people would just use the public Wave service with no protection at all. Users are notoriously bad at looking after themselves :)
The accessibility issues are where my interest in Wave came from so I'll spend a little time there.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't really get accessibility. I am in the happy position of having my whole body working as designed and to my knowledge all my close friends and family are the same, so I really have very little exposure to the needs of those who are perhaps not so fortunate. What I do understand though is that its critically important that information be available to everyone equally and achieving that is far more complicated than the old tired lines of "add alt attributes to your images" and "don't use Javascript". So I'm very happy to follow the lead of those who do know what they're talking about.
Not far away from me in my building we have a wonderfully competent team of usability and accessibility experts. They were asked to do an accessibility review of the Wave client and perhaps not surprisingly, it failed hard. Most of it comes from the difficulty of expressing to assistive technologies (eg screen readers) that something in a page has changed, particularly with proper context. The Wave client builds a complex UI on the fly (eg as the wave is incrementally loaded) and of course has realtime updates. At a more basic level though the static parts of the interface are constructed without using semantically-correct markup. A user agent (eg a screen reader) that scans the page looking for interesting things like links pretty much comes up with nothing.
The accessibility team presented their findings to some people from the Wave team and the response from where I sat appeared to be equal parts of surprise and dismay. They were receptive to the issues raised though. I travelled to Sydney shortly afterwards for DevFest and had the opportunity to chat to some of the team and they all had seen or heard of the report, so it would appear that it was taken seriously.
For me though, I could see that this had the potential to be a real showstopper to our deployment and I didn't want that as I could see the potential for Wave to be a game-changer. Since at the time I knew very little about accessibility, I started work on answering more technical but somewhat related question: "can Wave work without Javascript?". The Wave team had just released a data access API so I set to work trying to build a client using it. That work grew into the (still unfinished) ripple which more or less answers the question in the affirmative. This type of client doesn't solve the accessibility issues but its definitely a step in the right direction.
The part of ripple that I'm most proud of is the renderer. Rendering a wave well is actually quite a complicated prospect. Styles and links are represented as ranges over the static textual content. Its possible for these ranges to overlap it complex ways that make it difficult to produce semantically-correct HTML. It took three rewrites to get it there, and there's still a couple of little nits that I would have addressed sometime if this code had a future, but I mostly got there and I was happy with it :)
Anyway, these problems were being addressed, a few areas around the university started doing research and small pilots usng Wave, and it all seemed to be only a matter of time. I started work on a robot/data API client library for Perl for two reasons, one being that ripple really needed its server comms stuff abstracted properly and two being that we're a Perl shop and we would soon want to host our own robots and integrate them properly into our environment.
This was a great opportunity for me to learn Moose and my suspicions have been confirmed - Moose is awesome and I'll use it for pretty much everything I do with Perl moving forward. A few of weeks later and we get to Wednesday night and I've got things to the point where you could have a nice conversation with a Perl robot. And then I got up Thursday morning and heard that Wave was going away and all my code just got obsoleted.
I was shocked initially, but I was surprised that I didn't feel angry or sad or anything. I can hardly call the time I spent on it a waste as I learned so much (Moose, tricky HTML, accessibility, operational transform) and met some incredibly smart an awesome people, both at Monash, at Google, and elsewhere. I think for the most part though I was ok with it because its probably the right decision.
We (as in the Wave users and developers everywhere) have been playing with Wave for over a year, and we still don't know what it is and what its for. Unless you have the ability to build your own extensions it doesn't really do much for you. The interface is painful, the concepts within don't match anything else we're used to and despite various mechanisms for exposing internal data, you're still pretty much confined to the Wave client if you want to get anything useful done.
The technical issues would have been addressed with time. We would have gotten enough functionality to write a full-blown replacement client. It would have gotten much easier to expose not only data but the structure of data in other applications. But if you take that to its conclusion, Wave becomes a backing store for whatever frontend applications you build on top of it.
But what of the interface? By having lots of different ways to structure and manipulate data Wave tries to let you focus on the task at hand rather than the structure of the data. Traditional applications (web-based or desktop) are tailored to their own specific data models, so we have seperate apps for email, calendars, spreadsheets, etc. Wave wanted to pull all that information together so you could work on all the pieces of your puzzle in the same space. You start a document then realise you need some help, so you bring in friends and talk about the doc as you build it together. You need to process some data, so you drag in a spreadsheet gadget. You embed images or videos or whatever else you need to add to the discussion. Robots can help out by mining external databases and manipulating in-wave data to present even more rich information and even allow feedback via forms. Its all a nice idea, but how do you represent the different kinds of data and structure effectively? Wave tried, and we tried, but I'm not convinced anyone really had a clear idea of how to build an interface that makes sense.
It might not have been an interface issue. It might be that people want to have seperate loosely-integrated applications, one for each of the different types of data they want to manipulate. I don't think thats the case, but I think that a clearer migration path from those other applications would have helped a lot. People first came to Wave wanting to do their email in it. What if from the outset they could have easily pulled mail into Wave and if there was a "mail mode" that allowed some manipulation of Wave data in a way that they were familiar with? What about doing similar things for other data types? I'm don't know how much difference that sort of thing would have made, but something, anything to answer the "what do I do with this" question that everyone had that the start couldn't have hurt.
Wave's failure may also just be a problem of timing and circumstance. The Wave team have regularly acknowledged that they were surprised by the response. The message was supposed to be "we made something different, what do you think?". Unfortunately it was painted in the tech media as an "email killer", which of course it wasn't, but of course that's going to get everyone interested. Being such an early preview Wave was naturally buggy and slow and couldn't accomodate the load caused by the droves of users that wanted to play. So you got swarms of people banging down the door to see what all the fuss is about, and the few that got in found that it wasn't what they'd been led to believe it was and none of their friends could get in so they couldn't try it for what it was. So naturally they disappeared, disappointed, and even later when the bugs were fixed and the system was stable the first impression stuck and those users couldn't be lured back. And although there was a bit of a second wind a couple of months ago after I/O 2010, the same "what to do I now?" question came up.
From what I've seen of Google in the past, they're willing to take a risks if they see a likely or even possible positive outcome. But looking at Wave, how much future did it really have? We loved it, and we saw that it could do things better than existing services (though with some effort), but was it really going to displace them for the casual user? Was it going to make any serious money for Google? Was it ever even going to break even (remember that it takes plenty of infrastructure and manpower to develop and maintain things like this).
Based on all of this, you can totally understand an executive saying "guys, I see what you're trying to do, and thanks for trying, but the numbers just don't add up". Its not like its been a complete waste - there's some awesome technology thats already finding its way into other Google applications (eg Docs now has live typing just like Wave).
So is Wave dead? The product is, but as a concept it lives on. We're fortunate that Google and others have given us plenty of docs and code and their pledge to open-source everything remains. Then there's the third-party protocol implementations that already exist, both open-source (eg PyGoWave, Ruby on Sails) and commercial (eg Novell Pulse, SAP StreamWork). It will take some work, but any one of us could build and deploy another Wave. The question is, would you want to? I think its more likely that we'll see people incorporating bits of the technologies and concepts into new products. And maybe, just maybe, in a few years time some of the work that Wave pioneered will be commonplace and people will be amazed and we'll be those old curmudgeons saying "eh, Wave did that years ago".
So for Monash, we'll continue working on our existing plans. We've mostly been looking at Wave as a delivery platform for what we wanted to do. Not having it available means we'll have to look elsewhere for the technology we need (whether thats buying or building), but our direction won't change.
And for me? I won't continue work on ripple and Google::Wave::Robot code but they'll live on in GitHub should anyone want to rip them off for anything. My next project is building an OpenSocial container in Perl with a view to integrating it into the Monash portal (my.monash, which is where my "Web Developer" duties lie); hopefully I'll write something about it! I will however be hanging around Wave until the bitter end and I would like to do something with operational transforms in the future as they look really cool and interesting. See, its not dead, really!
And to any Wave team reading this, thanks guys. You've kept my interest and my enthusiasm alive, you've put up with my incessant questioning and harassment and you've contributed more good ideas and happiness to me and my colleagues than you're probably aware of. For the few of you that I've met and worked with already, I really hope that this isn't the end and that we get to work together in the future. I'll probably stalk you for a while to see where you end up because frankly, people are far more interesting than technology and you've all proven yourselves. Cheers :)
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Life Half Wild
Donna Mulvenna
Junction, Utah by Rebecca Lawton
The Snow Leopard Road Less Travelled by Margi Prideaux
Off Grid and Free: My Path to the Wilderness by Ron Melchiore
Homecoming by Jessica Groenendijk
In Ending, a Beginning by L.G.Cullens
Excerpt 100 days of solitude by Daphne Kapsali
Stars upside down by Jennie Goutet
On bees, spiders and hornets by Robert Parker
A friend in need by John Cambridge
Flute player by Alice Woodrome
Trees and what they’re for by Robert Parker
Donna Mulvenna is the author of highly acclaimed memoir, Wild Roots—Coming Alive in the French Amazon. Excerpts from her book, along with several other works, have been published widely in various newspapers, magazines, and online publications.
In her ramblings, she hopes to offer a glimpse of the true wonder of the Amazon, reveal its profound effect on each of us, and inspire readers to build a connection with the natural world.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to people who aren’t her kind of wild, but Donna refuses to own a mobile phone, rarely wears shoes, and is passionate about living on a whole food, plant-based diet.
When not practicing horticulture, she writes from an office in the rainforest canopy, reads from her sea kayak off the Atlantic coast, or hurtles along one of the Amazon’s wild rivers in a sprint canoe.
“Happiness does find us,” she says. “We just have to slow down and lighten our load a little. Only then can we discover the wonder and awe in our world, and in the process gain a true sense of who we are, why we are here, and where we are heading.”
Find out more in an interview with Donna Mulvenna
Donna is proud to be a fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers.
You can also find Donna on Goodreads | Amazon | Smashwords
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Eivor Pedersen
Sounds of Migration
Ben Gottesman
YEAIKNOW has a long-standing collaboration with an environmental scientist, Benjamin Gottesman, who records and analyzes sounds by installing recorders in nature (i.e., coral reef, iceberg, jungle, etc.) to study the human impact to the wildlife in the environment. Our designs have been instrumental to Benjamin and his work in that it elevates what could be a dry subject matter with bold, eye-catching design. Most recently, in 2018, he reached out to YEAIKNOW to design the covers of an alternative nature sound album, of the sandhill crane of Nebraska, which was also funded and released by the Crane Trust in Nebraska. We aimed to not overwhelm the visual design by choosing to simply place cut-off of cranes on a white background and fading the presence of the text by outlining with thin strokes giving the visual excitement to the CD itself which features an abstract illustration of the sandhill cranes in its environment.
Eivor Pedersen © 2019
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What personal information do we collect from the people that visit our website?
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DHS lies and bigotry, and another strike on the Mexican Gun Lie
JustOneMinute has some details on debunked crap the DHS report bases some of the 'warnings' on, including:
At a May 1 bail hearing, ATF agent Adam Nesmith seemed to testify that the government had evidence of the five militia members plotting a machine-gun attack on Mexican immigrants in the nearby town of Remlap. Nesmith described a reconnaissance mission the militia allegedly conducted in Remlap and told the judge, "There was a plan to attack a group of Mexicans in the Remlap area with their machine guns." The judge denied bail, and the alleged backwoods militia machine-gun plot made news across the country. One typical headline the day after the bail hearing read, "Alabamians planned to machine gun Mexicans."
But there is no mention of any specific plan to kill Mexicans in the search warrant affidavits or any other court document related to the Alabama Free Militia defendants, and the ATF says Nesmith's testimony was misconstrued. [ATF regional director] Cavanaugh told the Intelligence Report that Nesmith did not mean to suggest that the defendants plotted to machine-gun Mexicans. What Nesmith meant to convey, Cavanaugh said, is that the militia members were planning to steal machine guns from Mexicans in Remlap — not to shoot the Mexicans with machine guns. "The purpose of the [reconnaissance] trip described by the agent in the testimony was to go to those Latinos and take their machine guns, which the militia believed them to possess," Cavanaugh said.
Yeah, he was 'misconstrued'; which, from an awful lot of these agents seems to mean "He lied to pump up the case, but we're trying to downplay that now." And so on.
On the Mexican Gun Lie, the Daily Mail has this picture of stuff seized in a raid in Mexico:
I'll put it bluntly: I defy anyone to show me one gun shop in the US where I can walk in and legally buy a 1919A4 Machine Gun by laying down cash, filling out a yellow sheet and going through the NICS check, and carrying it out. The semi-auto version, sure, because it's not a machine gun; but a real 1919A4? Not a chance, and the gun bigots know it. They just lie.
TXGunGeek said...
The NYT and PMSNBC are jumping on the bandwagon as usual.
http://gungeekrants.blogspot.com/2009/04/mexican-gun-canard-continues.html
Now they are getting "easily convertible" AR's and AK's from teh us and making machine guns. That's where they are coming from!!
You can buy one without any NICS check if you're a S.O.T. I can show you 3 gun shops local to me where you could be in and out with a NFA weapon in minutes provided you meet the above criteria :-) Would take a bit of preparatory work on your part before you walked in the shops.
Just saying...
I know the media is full of crap but once you jump the hurdles to be a NFA manufacturer and/or dealer, it's easier to transfer them around between dealers than it is for the average citizen in a gun friendly state to buy a single shot 12 gauge at walmart because you've already been previously subject to the full meal deal body cavity and background cheks.
Ok, I'll specify: if you're plain old Joe Citizen, NOT a licensed NFA dealer, you can't just walk in and buy one.
:-) was there on purpose as I know a lot of S.O.T.s. Many more manufacturers than just dealers even. It's a popular gunsmithing sideline around here. 'Tis why one of the local ranges has a weekly machine gun night.
No harm intended, just a bit of levity. Media are always asses when it comes to guns, that's a given.
Happy Shooting,
Oh, interesting thing about 1919s...because of the way the Cali Leg wrote their "assault weapon" ban...semi-auto 1919s aren't covered as they don't meet the legal requirements to be "assault weapons" on a number of cosmetic and functional levels. Magazines are sorta irrelevant to belt-feed people, aren't they?
Same reason they ended up getting the .50BMG improved into the .510DTC by being overly specific in their legislation when they don't know anything about guns. I find this HIGHLY amusing though I wouldn't live in KKKalifornia if my life depended on it, so it's kinda irrelevant to me.
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International Festival IN FONTE VERITAS @ Teatro La Fonte
home.events. Teatro La Fonte.International Festival IN FONTE VERITAS
International Festival IN FONTE VERITAS
Aperitif | Theater | Show - Event posted by cti
Location: Teatro La Fonte , 2015-2016 season hosts the exhibition of the International Theatre Center JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
Address: via Roma,368 , Bagno a Ripoli
Date: Saturday 28 April 2018
www.centroteatro.it
From April 22nd to the start the first edition of the Festival by the
International Theater Center
"In Fonte Veritas"
Scheduled performances between contemporary and tradition, children's theater and master classes with international masters.
On Sunday 22nd April the curtain rises on the first edition of the " In Fonte Veritas " International Theater Festival at the "La Fonte" Theater in Bagno a Ripoli.
The exhibition, which will continue until April 28 , has scheduled a rich calendar of events including free admission shows, workshops led by international masters and music. In fact, Italian and international companies will alternate on stage to offer the public the opportunity to open their eyes to other worlds.
The initiative with the patronage of the Tuscany Region, the Metropolitan Area and the Municipality of Bagno a Ripoli is under the artistic direction of Olga Melnik , director of the International Theater Center. "Our company has traveled for years in festivals all over the world, bringing back home suitcases full of valuable teachings. - explains Olga - The meeting with great Masters, the discovery of other cultures and the comparison with other companies have made us more curious and open and we realized that defining "foreign" has very little sense given the affection with which we we say goodbye every time!
The Theater is by its nature the son of different cultures, its richness lies in its contamination: this Festival is an opportunity to recreate this little miracle also in Bagno a Ripoli, so that our audience can enjoy it ".
So that's why this time the games will take place right here, at the Teatro "La Fonte" in Bagno a Ripoli , which has been the headquarters of the International Theater Center for a week, which will become a true theatrical pole of training and entertainment for a week.
Sunday, April 22, at 4.30 pm: " Vacanze al Saltino ", "Try and try again" company.
Monday, April 23, 9:30 pm: " What if the wolf will meet? ", International Theater Center.
Tuesday, April 24th, 9:30 pm: " Love or 33 misfortunes ", "Grotesk" Theater - Surgut (Russia).
Wednesday, April 25, 18:00: " Hanging by a thread ", Company "Di Filippo marionette".
Thursday, April 26th, 9:30 pm: " R & G Romeo & Giulietta ", "Scenica Frammenti" Company.
Friday, April 27th, 9:30 pm: " Hamlet ", "Arlekin" Theater - Vilnius (Lithuania).
Saturday, April 28th at 9:30 pm: music evening by Monica Santoro.
In addition, the Festival offers three limited-level masterclasses at a cost of 50 euros:
" Clown" curated by Tatiana Timko (23 - 24 April, 18.30 - 20.30): the working methods of the "Arlekin" theater company, winner of numerous International Awards.
Forms: The emotion of the clown; the Organicity; The image of the clown; Caricatural characters.
" Course of High Improvement for Actors" (April 25th, 10.00am - 1.00pm) by Olga Melnik , actress, director and theatrical pedagogue with thirty years of experience.
Modules: What distinguishes the mastery of the modern actor; The basic characteristics of an artist of modern theater; The dramaturgical base as a compass for artistic creation; Practical work on the dramaturgical material.
" The Body that speaks" (from 26 to 28 April, 18.30 - 20.30): non-verbal performance methodology directed by Viktor Proskurjakov.
Forms: Pantomime; Scenic movement; Body language.
La Fonte Theater, Via Roma, 368 - Bagno a Ripoli (FI),
Information and reservations: tel. 3475572347 or 055-418084,
e-mail: centroteatro@alice.it .
www.centroteatro.it .
Other events on Saturday 28 April :
Event's Gallery
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Thread: 2015 Subaru Forester
You can learn some important stuff about cars by taking note of who buys what - and how the cars are used.
And whether they stand up to the uses to which they're put.
Texans, for instance, know trucks. Forget the TV commercials and advertising flapdoodle. Check out which makes/models of pick-up are popular in Texas - especially rural Texas - and you'll have a good idea about which truck you ought to buy.
Shifting gears a little - you may have taken note of the fact that there are lots of Subarus (all kinds, including ancient Brats) running around places where it snows a lot and gets really cold a lot.
This is what they call in law enforcement a clue.
Subarus are not popular because they're sexy - not superficially sexy, anyhow. They are popular because they're almost as unstoppable as a King Tiger tank in the Ardennes in the winter of '44.
And it's not just because they're all-wheel-drive.
Lots of new cars have all-wheel-drive. But Subarus come standard with it. Most others don't. Also, Subaru has been selling AWD longer than pretty much everyone. And when you combine standard AWD with a low-slung flat four (as opposed to the common inline - and upright - four) which does for the car's center of gravity (and so, its traction and its balance) what steroids did for Mike Piazza - it's not hard to grok why these otherwise less-than-lookers nonetheless get taken home by lots of people.
The Forester is Subaru's entrant in the compact crossover segment. It's a two-row, medium-small five-door hatchback in the same general class as the Ford Escape (base price $23,450), Mazda CX5 (base price $21,795), Honda CR-V (base price $23,445) and Jeep Cherokee (base price $23,095), among others.
While it's similar in general shape/layout to those rivals, the Forester's the only one of the bunch that comes standard with all-wheel-drive and a horizontally opposed engine (cylinders laid flat, in pairs, "boxing" each other across a common crankshaft). This layout has a number of objective advantages over traditional (upright) engines - and Subaru's street cred as being one of the first major automakers to mass-market all-wheel-drive is another point of difference between the Forester and its competition.
Oh, and there's a third thing.
The Forester is one of an increasingly dwindling number of small crossover SUVs that's available with a manual transmission (the Mazda's one of the very few others that also still does).
MSRP is $22,195 for the base trim with the six-speed stickshift, 2.5 liter boxer engine and AWD. Opting for the same basic package with a continuously variable (CVT) automatic kicks the sticker price up to $25,095.
You can also replace the economy-minded 2.5 liter engine with an optionally available turbocharged 2.0 liter boxer engine. This more powerful mill is paired only with the CVT automatic and is available only with the higher-end Premium ($28,495) and top-of-the-line Touring ($33,095) trims.
A rearview back-up camera is now standard equipment and 2.5i Touring trims get larger 18 inch wheels.
Standard AWD (it's optional in competitors).
Lower starting price than FWD competitors.
Boxer engines - two of them, your choice (turbo'd or not). Several competitors offer just one engine (and none of them are boxer engines).
Available manual transmission (becoming extremely hard to find in this class of vehicle).
A veritable sled dog when it snows.
Class-leading cargo capacity.
WHAT'S NOT SO GOOD
Not much of a looker.
Some of the "safety" features are preemptively nannyish and their flashing dashboard lights and insistent chimes are annoying and distracting.
Luckily, these features are still optional.
Can't pull much (max trailer rating is just 1,500 lbs.)
Subarus are the only vehicles - other than Porsches - that feature boxer, or horizontally opposed (or "flat") engines. They are lighter, typically, than upright engines - because they don't need heavy balancers and they give the cars they're installed in a lower center of gravity, which helps with traction and handling.
In the Forester, you've got two to choose from.
Standard equipment is a 2.5 liter four (not turbocharged) that produces 170 hp. This is competitive with the Ford Escape's standard and also 2.5 liter (but upright and in-line) four-cylinder engine (168 hp) and the Honda CR-V's standard (and only) 2.4 liter (also upright) four (185 hp).
The Jeep Cherokee comes standard with a similar (184 hp) 2.4 liter four (again, upright).
However, none of the above - none of the others - offer a manual transmission to go with it. The Forester does - and it's standard.
Or, go with the optional continuously variable (CVT) automatic.
Either way, the Soobie comes standard with something else - all-wheel-drive. Not only is AWD optional in rival vehicles like the Escape, Cherokee and CR-V, you'll pay more for the FWD-equipped versions of those vehicles than you would for the AWD-equipped Forester.
Also worthy of mention - in the Subaru's favor - is the fact that the AWD-equipped Forester accelerates to 60 in roughly the same timeframe (8.8-8.9 seconds) as the FWD/base-engined versions of its rivals.
Fuel economy is pretty good, too: 24 city, 32 highway with the CVT (which is more efficient than the six-speed manual; mileage in that case droops a bit to 22 city, 29 highway). The Honda CR-V does slightly better - 27 city, 34 highway - but the Fun Factor is decidedly lower. And the FWD/base-engined Ford Escape does slightly worse: 22 city, 31 highway (same numbers for the base-engined/FWD Cherokee).
The Forester 's optional engine is a 2.0 liter turbo four carrying a 250 hp rating. Consider it a WRX on the down low.
Which it is.
So ordered, the 0-60 time declines to just over six seconds flat - almost three seconds quicker than the base/2.5 liter-equipped Forester and all of its optional-engined rivals. This includes the V6-equipped Cherokee, incidentally - which has a higher hp rating (271) but carries more curb weight: 4,016 lbs. vs. 3,624 lbs. for the turbo'd Soobie.
Gas mileage remains high, too: 23 city, 28 highway - slightly better than the AWD/V6-equipped Cherokee (21 city, 28 highway).
There's one hair in the soup, though.
The Forester's not much of a puller. Max tow rating - with either engine - is just 1,500 pounds. The Cherokee with the V6 can pull 3,500 pounds. The Escape with its optional turbo four can pull the same.
If you go with the 2.5 liter engine (and either transmission) the Forester is a superlative A to B appliance. It is not quick - but neither is it slow. Like any new vehicle - trade secret being revealed here - there's more power/performance than you can legally use anywhere in the United States. Meaning, you can rock it up to 80, 90 MPH and still have plenty more to go.
How often do you drive faster than 80? How about 90?
Ok, then.
And with the gearing advantages (steep overdrive gearing, to be precise) any new vehicle can comfortably hold 70-75 all day long. Meaning, without the engine buzzing like a run-amok chainsaw and sounding like it's going to spit parts all over the road at any moment.
What sets the Soobie apart is not speed but grip. Remember - standard AWD. Optional in the competition. And even when they've got it, they still don't have the traction advantages of that laying-flat engine, its weight split evenly down the car's longitudinal centerline.
The six-speed manual version is definitely the fun choice. Plus, you've got more control. In deep snow, for example, you can gear down to leverage (and modulate) the boxer engine's output through the AWD.
Unfortunately, Subaru is not willing to sell the six-speed with the optional WRX-on-the-down-low 2.0 turbo engine. Maybe because that would cannibalize WRX sales as people who want a hot rod but need a more practical hot rod turned the Forester's way. Still, CVT or not (and the 2.0-equipped Forester gets a more aggressive version of the CVT with eight "stepped" and driver controllable not-really-gears but kind of feels like you've got 'em) the turbo'd Forester is one hell of a sleeper. I'd almost (almost!) rather have it than the be-winged and air-scooped WRX, which is just a bit to obvious for serious wet work.
The ride (quiet/well-damped) is emphasized over rally car (WRX-esque) handling. But - again - the fulsome scurvy truth is that almost any modern car's threshold of traction - the point at which you begin to feel as though the car's getting close to the edge of adhesion, tires beginning to squeal, lunches on the verge of being lost - is now far higher than the average person will ever experience or even approach experiencing. We car journalist test driver types natter amongst ourselves about such things but only because we operate at felonious speeds, counting on luck and media credentials to get us out of trouble. Note that most road tests are done on test tracks. It's a party, but not reflective of street driving at all.
Here's something that is - close-quarters maneuvering.
The Forester excels at this real-world task because it has a much tighter turning circle than its rivals: 34.8 inches vs (wait for it) 38.8 for the Ford Escape, 37.6 for the Jeep Cherokee and 36.9 for the Honda CR-V.
The Subaru's ability to ford through deep snow, meanwhile, is much-assisted by its 8.7 inches of ground clearance - the same as the "rugged" Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk and more than the base Cherokee and both the Honda CR-V (6.8 inches) and the Ford Ecape (7.9 inches).
And, don't forget: all-wheel-drive is extra-cost in all of those models.
Normally, I use a truck to pick up and haul drywall. But circumstances left me truck-less during the week I had the Forester and I needed a sheet of it.
Subaru to the rescue!
Now, it did not fit all the way in there - a fourth or so was hanging out of the open tailgate. And it did not lay flat (I had to angle it in). But the take home point is I was able to take home a full-sized sheet of drywall in the Forester. And probably could not have done so in most of the Forester's competition.
Because the Forester has more room to work with than they do: 74.7 cubic feet with the second row down vs. a diminutive 54.9 for the Cherokee and 68.1 for the Escape (which is close in terms of volume but less usable because of the sexier-looking Ford's lower roof and thus, vertical space). The Soobie even has more cargo room than the vaunted Honda CR-V, which tops out at 70.9 cubic feet (and which does not offer either a manual transmission or a WRX-on-the-down-low turbo'd engine). The Forester's rear doors also open to 90 degrees, maximizing access and easing entry/exit.
One caveat: If you choose the available panorama sunroof, total capacity drops to 68.5 cubic feet and you'll lose some of that vertical space.
Touring models feature one-touch folding rear seats - and theater-style seating is standard on all trims. The Forester has very good - though not class-best - second row legroom: 38 inches vs. the Cherokee's exceptional 40.3 (and the Ford Escape's less-than-exceptional 36.8 inches).
The dash layout is simple and functional - big speedo and tach, a few secondary LCD readouts. Oversize rotary knobs for the AC, fan and outlet settings. Unless you choose the optional touchscreen, which complicates things.
A nice little bonus is that manual-equipped Foresters come standard with an All Weather Package that includes heaters front seats, windshield washer de-icer and heated outside mirrors; otherwise, these are extra cost (on the lower trims). Models with the turbo engine, meanwhile, get a performance exhaust upgrade, metal-trimmed pedals, sport instrument cluster, an 18-inch wheel/tire package and leather trim.
My only beef is with the (thankfully, optional) Driver Assist Technology Package, which bundles Land Departure Warning and Collision Mitigation. The former issues an annoying beep (and flashing yellow light) whenever the Forester crosses a painted line. In theory, it's supposed to help the driver avoid wandering into the opposing lane of traffic (or off the shoulder). In practice, it does that… and also beeps and blinks when you make a a routine lane change, or other maneuver that involves treading over a painted line.
The latter - Collison Mitigation - issues an annoying beep and a flashing red light when it detects an object in the Forester's path. Problem is, it also detects berms and trees by the side of the road - and will squawk and flash frantic warnings during normal/reasonable thread-the-needle passing (as in heavy traffic) if you get within a car length of another car... which is very distracting and thus, arguably, at cross purposes with the stated intent of this technology.
Luckily, they can both be skipped - and turned off. Though not easily. The "off" buttons must be depressed and held for several seconds before the computer - grudgingly, it feels like - turns the gizmos off. But they come right back on again the next time you start the car - and must be turned off manually again, each time you want to avoid being harassed by the chimes and lights.
Pop the hood and you'll find the oil filter's right there, on top of the engine. Completely accessible. It can be replaced by hand, with no tools necessary. Subaru deserves credit for making a real effort to ease the DIY-serviceability of its cars.
The Forester has beauty that is more than skin deep. It may not be a looker, like the Escape and Cherokee.
But it's the keeper - as opposed to a one-night-stand.
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Hm! some turning circle - my Mazda takes nearly as many FEET. (Thinks) - are you sure that should be 34.8 INCHES, Eric? Ken.
Last edited by Ken; 05-09-2015 at 01:39 PM.
ChevyMan
Originally Posted by Ken
I'm certain Eric meant "34'.8 inches".
Right, Eric ?
Originally Posted by ChevyMan
Well I'm not so sure, Larry. I was so impressed I went out and bought one. I have an aggravating neighbor who, as usual, was nosing around 'Oh, new car? What's it like? So I told him to try out the turning circle. That Forrester turned so tight it disappeared up its own exhaust pipe and I haven't seen car or neighbor since. Eric has a lot to answer for.
Quick Navigation New Car/Truck Reviews Top
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10 Memorable Movie Breakfast Scenes
To mark National Pancake Day, TIME takes a look back at our favorite morning meals from the movies
By Gary Susman Feb. 04, 2013
Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images
Director: Blake Edwards
Cast: Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal
Get This Movie
Of course, they don’t actually serve breakfast at Tiffany’s. Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly is forced to bring her own—a Danish and coffee, eaten out of a paper bag—while she gazes longingly in the jeweler’s window at a world of luxury and wealth that seem so close but forever out of reach. She’s still dressed to the nines from the night before, in that famous black Givenchy gown and silk gloves, as she steps out of a taxi at dawn to nibble on pastry while window shopping on a deserted Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
It’s one of the most iconic opening sequences in film, and while some accounts of the shoot say the scene was fraught with difficulties (hordes of looky-loos clamoring for a glimpse of the star, her revulsion toward Danishes, an electrical accident that zapped a crew member), director Blake Edwards claimed that the scene was easy to shoot, with the usually busy street clearing up as cameras rolled. “It was as if God said, ‘I’m going to give you a break now, but for the rest of your career you’re going to have to live off this one,’” he recalled. According to his widow, Julie Andrews, Edwards claimed he got the scene in one take.
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The Public Enemy
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Tag: storytelling
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — Breaking Convention
Hi, I’m Michael. This is Lessons from the Screenplay. It’s been over six years since “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was released, and it remains one of my favorite David Fincher films. It’s an intriguing murder mystery, as well as a story about two unfamiliar characters with a unique relationship. But the film is[…]
A Turtle By Any Other Name | Critical Role | Campaign 2, Episode 60
MATT: Hello, everyone! And welcome to tonight’s episode of Critical Role, where a bunch of us nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons. ALL: We play Dungeons & Dragons! LAURA: This gets worse and worse. MATT: It’s a slow descent into complete and utter madness. Before we jump into tonight’s game, we[…]
Race for the Dragonverse: Thank you Dragon Master, nature is blooming again! But…what is this?
Oh my goodness, Yggdrasil… We have to heal him immediately! Yggdrasil, my master… Once again, you did it, Dragon Master! Thanks to your effort, you successfully summoned Yggdrasil to Dragon City! Please, accept this Tree as a gesture of my gratitude to you and all the inhabitants of Dragon City. Because of you, nature will[…]
10 Extraordinary American Urban Legends
Number 10 Tombstone Thunderbird Born in a small Arizona town, the legend of the Tombstone Thunderbird has drawn the fascination of supernatural enthusiasts for over a century. In April 1890, a local newspaper ran a story about two ranchers who’d shot down a massive winged monster. They were on horseback in the desert, near the[…]
Jim vs. the Most Poisonous Snake in the World – The Jim Jefferies Show
This is my son’s favorite story. The most poisonous snake in the world is called a Brown Snake and it’s from Australia. And it’s just the most boring looking snake. It just looks like a log of shit. Anyway, so I had this cat growing up and I was in bed.I was about 11 years[…]
Spoken word | Apples and Snakes: Blackbox | Cobwebs by Jamie Thrasivoulou
The cobwebs mask the cracked ceiling. Dim the strip light invasion. Surround the seat-less metal toilet like Christmas tinsel around the fireplace. Our man reaches for the buzzer. The cobwebs christen his eyes with sleep dust. The hatch opens to a polystyrene cup He drinks the dry water tastes the cobwebs on his tongue like[…]
Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures – Joel Hates Snakes
Joel: This is why I hate snakes. Joel: We had like a 15 foot Burmese python.. Jack: We had a Chihuahua. Joel: And we were watching like the Nature channel,one day Joel: and there was like this giant Burmese python and Joel: It was swimming through the river. Joel: And we were like,wow,that looks really[…]
The Sea Snake
♪♪ [sigh]The situation is dire.I know I have enemies in the Senate.But which are friend and which are foe?I cannot say.I have been told of a certain sea snake which has a very unusual method of attracting its prey. It will lie at the bottom of the ocean as if wounded,then its enemies will approachand[…]
Duncan Trussell – Dying on Acid – This Is Not Happening – Uncensored
>>DUNCAN TRUSSELL: I’LL NEVER KNOW HOW MUCH ACID HE PUT ON MY TONGUE BUT I DO KNOW. THE LOOK ON MY FRIENDS’ FACES WAS THE LOOK THAT SOMEONE WOULD HAVE AS THEY WERE WATCHING A PERSON FALL BACKWARDS INTO THE GRAND CANYON. ♪♪ ♪♪>>ARI SHAFFIR: THANK YOU, EVERYBODY. IF YOU DON’T KNOW, HERE’S WHAT THE[…]
Causatum | Critical Role | Campaign 2, Episode 70
MATT: Hello everyone, and welcome to tonight’s episode of Critical Role, where a bunch of us nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons. TRAVIS: We play Dungeons & Dragons! LAURA: Dragons. TRAVIS: Come on! LAURA: Sorry, I was distracted by Sam’s– MATT: It’ll do that. We have a Liam O’Brien via internet[…]
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“As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him”
– Psalm 103:13
Controller & Staff Members
Autonomy was conferred on Fatima College in 1990. The system of evaluation has been systematically and periodically remodeled to make it highly credible and valid. There has been a parallel evolution of the evaluation system to match the changing trends in curricular innovations and teaching-learning methodologies.
The basis of changes incorporated in the question paper pattern and evaluation components are aimed at comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of the students. The evaluation pattern is designed to test the textual comprehension and practical application of knowledge gained in various areas of their chosen subjects. Hence credits and marks are allotted for projects, internships and training programmes.
The current system of evaluation is based on the CBCS (Choice Based Credit System) guidelines given by the Department of Higher Education, Tamil Nadu Government.
The two components of evaluation are:
CIA (Continuous Internal Assessment) = 25%
ESE (End Semester Examinations) = 75%
Continuous Internal Assessment (CIA)
The common requisites for CIA are as follows:
Two centralized mandatory tests – Test1 (T1) & Test2 (T2)
Assignment &
Retest is not offered as a rule. If a student is absent for either of the tests, the available marks will be divided by two and taken as the test mark for that paper.
A student who is absent for a test on medical grounds, has to apply to the Principal, through the Head of the department for special permission to write retest.
End Semester Examinations (ESE)
The date of the commencement of the End Semester Examinations is printed in the College Calendar. The detailed Time Table for regular and supplementary papers will be published in the College Website three weeks before the commencement of the examinations. A copy of the time table will be displayed on the notice board also.
External pass minimum
UG = 26/75 = 35%
PG and M.Phil. = 34/75 = 45%
Aggregate pass minimum
UG = 40/100 = 40%
PG and M.Phil. = 50/100 = 50%
Candidates who have passed with repeat attempts are not eligible for Distinction.
SUPPLEMENTARY EXAMINATION FOR CLEARING ARREARS
Current students and private candidates can appear.
The July supplementary examination will be only for the arrears in the final semester papers of the April end semester examination for outgoing students.
Contact the college administrative office regarding registration for the supplementary examinations.
Check the college website for the time table of these examinations.
Application forms for writing supplementary examination should be signed by the Head of the Department.
A Photocopy of the last received Mark Sheet should be attached to the application form.
Number of attempts allowed for Passing in the same syllabus: 1+4 chances are allowed for any paper in the same syllabus. After that, the candidates can write the examination only in the current syllabus.
Students who have exhausted the permissible chances, must contact the H.O.D. and register for the current equivalent paper only.
The date for registration of supplementary examinations is printed in the college calendar and ten working days are allowed for registering.
Late submission of application forms for registration will not be permitted.
For all examinations, the students’ Identity Card should be presented as Hall Ticket. If ID card is lost, the candidate must apply to the Principal for a replacement.
Students who have Failed and wish to apply for revaluation within 7 working days after the publication of results.
They should contact the college administrative office for
The application form &
Details of fee for revaluation.
The revaluation results will be forwarded to their home address within 10 days after the last day allowed for applying for revaluation.
PRIVATE CANDIDATES
Out gone students with arrears are considered as Private Candidates.
Supplementary examinations in July are conducted only for Private Candidates.
During the July supplementary examinations they can appear for any paper of the following semesters
I to VI – UG Courses
I to IV – PG Courses
They are expected to bring their ID cards for the supplementary exams and for all sorts of enquiries.
CIA IMPROVEMENT
Private candidates with scores lesser than the required aggregate pass minimum in the internals can improve the same by applying for CIA improvement.
They can apply in the college administrative office at the beginning of the respective semester.
They should attend Test1 and Test2 along with the regular students, of the respective semester.
Malpractice (possession of papers or any other material with hints / copying / insertion of prewritten answer paper, giving and receiving help) will be punished. If you find any incriminating material (bits of papers with hints) near your seat, report immediately to the Hall Supervisor.
Those who commit Malpractice will have to face an enquiry committee comprising the Principal Controller, Dean and HOD, with her Parents, who will be informed of the nature of punishment i.e..
End Semester Examinations
First time offence: Cancellation of examination taken in the particular paper. The candidate will be debarred from appearing for that paper for one subsequent examination.
Repeat offence: Cancellation of examination of all subjects registered for that session. The candidate will be debarred for these papers for one subsequent examination.
Centralized Tests
First time offence: If a student indulges in malpractice either during T1 or T2 for the first time in her period of study, the test will stand cancelled and no marks will be awarded for that paper. During consolidation of marks for that paper, the available mark will be divided by 2, and taken as test average.
Repeat offence: f a student indulges in malpractice either during T1 or T2 for the second time in her period of study, all the tests she had witten in that schedule will be cancelled and no marks will be awarded for any of the papers. During consolidation of marks for all papers, the available mark for one test will be divided by 2, and taken as test average.
She will be allowed to apply for CIA improvement after finishing the course as a private candidate in case of need.
WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT THROUGH EDUCATION To empower women by developing human capabilities through quality education based on Christian values, making them responsible citizens who can work for the advancement of the society and promote communal harmony in the multi-religious and multi-cultural reality of India eventually evolving into women of communion.
About Fatima
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Fatima College 2015, All rights reserved to © 2011 Fatima College, All Rights Reserved.
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FLC Business Search Labs Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) -...
Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) - Corona Division
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Tech Transfer Website:
http://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/WarfareCenters/NSWCCrane/Partnerships/Technology…
The Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Corona Division, is the Navy's only independent analysis and assessment center. Corona Division has engineers, mathematicians, technicians and support personnel working in Norco, as well as personnel located at Fleet concentration areas, Navy and Marine Corps tactical training ranges on the East Coast and western United States, along with a detachment at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach. Designated a federal laboratory in 2010, Corona Division is home to world-class facilities and has achieved an outstanding reputation for quality engineering and analytical capabilities.
Corona Division's mission is to serve warfighters and program managers as the Navy's independent performance assessment agent throughout systems' lifecycles by gauging the Navy's warfighting capability of weapons and integrated combat systems, from unit to force level, through assessment of those systems' performance, readiness, quality, supportability, and the adequacy of training.
Fluid-based orientation control system
A system includes a fluid reservoir containing a first fluid, a pair of fluidic channels in fluidic connection with the fluid reservoir, a counter-fluid reservoir having a second fluid that is non-miscible with the first fluid, and a pump connected to the fluid reservoir. The pump is configured to pump the first fluid from the fluid reservoir into the pair of fluidic channels. When contained in a vehicle, the system allows for control of the vehicle's orientation. The system may use sensor input to determine when to actuate the pump. Each fluidic channel may have a cross-section that varies along its length. The fluidic channels may be geometrically symmetric about the fluid reservoir. The system may be incorporated into a vehicle to control the vehicle's orientation.
Sub Title:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8965674
Stephen D. Russell
Patent Issue Date
FLUIDICS SYSTEM
A system and method of selectively drawing fluid from a reservoir (116) into a channel (110) using a negative pressure source (120) by opening a reservoir vent (120).
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO223167
WO223167
Mark J. Feldstein
Fluorescent nanoparticle test strips for heavy metal detection
A testing element, and methods of use therefor, for the detection of target analytes, for example metal ions and other environmental hazards, utilizing ligand functionalized fluorescent nanoparticles on a substrate. The non-toxic, air, and water stable fluorescent nanoparticles of the present invention are made from varying ratios of metals including zinc, silver, copper, and indium and sulfur. By varying the ratios of these metals nanoparticles can be synthesized that emit over a large range of the visible spectrum. Charge transfer between a target analyte and the nanoparticle is readily identified by a fluorescence change allowing for a fast, simple, visual detection system without the need for expensive analytical instrumentation. The test element can have more than one type of functionalized fluorescent nanoparticle which allows for the detection of multiple target analytes using a single test element.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10107787
Heather A. Meylemans
Lee R. Cambrea
Stephen Fallis
Alfred J. Baca
Fusion of multi-sensor information with operator-learned behavior for automatic and efficient recognition of objects and control of remote vehicles
Systems and methods are described for remotely controlled vehicles that hierarchically transform sensor-detected information into levels of increasing fidelity for highly efficient machine recognition of attributes and features of detected objects/events. Fusion of the feature space representations of the various levels allows correlation with the operator's attention to the respective objects for automated processing/controlling of the unmanned vehicle. High efficiencies in object/event recognition are attained with reduced memory and processor requirements, enabling near autonomous or fully autonomous operation of the vehicle.
Stuart Rubin
GPS microstrip antenna
A GPS microstrip antenna designed to receive satellite provided GPS position information for use by a fourteen inch diameter projectile. The GPS microstrip antenna is configured to wrap around the projectile's body without interfering with the aerodynamic design of the projectile. The GPS microstrip antenna operates at 1.575 GHz with a bandwidth of ±10 MHz. Eight microstrip antenna elements equally spaced around the projectile provide for right hand circular polarization and a quasi-omni directional radiation pattern.
Albert F. Davis, Marvin L. Ryken, Jr.
Handheld GPS jammer locator
A handheld GPS jammer locator for locating a GPS jamming signal generated by a jammer. The handheld GPS jammer locator has two modes of operation, a amplitude mode and a difference finding mode. The amplitude measures the strength of an incoming GPS jamming signal and the difference finding mode determines the direction of the incoming jamming signal.
Robert Lee Joy, Jr., Gregory Joseph Velicer
High Frequency Simultaneous Metrics Antenna (HF-SIMANT)
An antenna comprising: a loop made of conductive material; two baluns connected to, and intersecting, opposing sides of the loop, wherein each balun has an output; a 180° hybrid coupler having two input ports, a sum output port, and a delta output port, wherein the two input ports are connected to the outputs of the baluns; a first low noise amplifier (LNA) connected to the sum output port; a second LNA connected to the delta output port; first and second receivers connected to the first and second LNAs respectively; and wherein the antenna is electrically small and is designed to simultaneously receive wideband signals in real time from 3 to 30 MHz.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2018076523
High resolution imaging lidar for detecting submerged objects
An image lidar includes a laser for generating light beam pulses in a line scan to illuminate an area surrounding a target. A controller selects pulse width and pulse rate of the light beam pulses emitted by the laser. A photomultiplier tube detects energy from the light beam pulses scattered by the target and generates a series of pixels defined by the light beam pulses and the line scan. A display generates an image from the pixels that is representative of the target.
Richard Scheps
High velocity microbot
A microbot includes a spherical housing, first and second servomotors that are located internal to the housing and oriented horizontally and orthogonal to each other, and a plunger within the housing that selectively extends in the vertical direction. Castors are attached to each servomotor; and traction balls corresponding to each castor are placed so that each ball frictionally engages both a respective castor and the interior of the housing at the same time. As the servomotors rotate, the attached castors also rotate, which causes rotation of the traction balls and rolling of the housing, and results in translation of the microbot in the horizontal plane. As the plunger rapidly extends, it strikes the interior surface of the housing with sufficient force to cause a hopping motion of the microbot in the vertical direction.
Ryan P. Lu
Ayax D. Ramirez
High-speed polarimeter having a multi-wavelength source
A polarimeter includes a multi-wavelength source for generating electromagnetic waves having at least two different wavelengths, means for separating electromagnetic waves, the electromagnetic waves including electromagnetic waves generated by the multi-wavelength source and electromagnetic waves received from a sample contacted by the electromagnetic waves generated by the multi-wavelength source, a fixed waveplate, wherein the fixed waveplate is configured to convert one polarization state to multiple polarization states that allow for calculations of linear and circular polarization components of the electromagnetic waves, a free space coupler, a beam splitter, and more than one detector. The polarimeter may be used in a method for high-speed measurement of linear and circular polarization components of electromagnetic waves.
Michael G. Lovern, Peter M. Poirier
Daugherty Memorial Assessment Center (DMAC)
Security Clearance : Non Security Lab
Daugherty Memorial Assessment Center (DMAC) is a 39,000-square-foot facility that doubles the warfare center's high-secured performance assessment capabilities. DMAC has been the focal point for research on defeating the use of improvised explosive devices that killed its namesake on July 6, 2007. It also provides critical analysis for all Navy surface missile systems, and performance analysis of Aegis and Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense systems throughout their entire lifecycle. NSWC Corona can also centralize process and distribute the Navy's combat and weapon system data on one of the largest classified networks in the Department of Defense.
Joint Warfare Assessment Laboratory (JWAL)
Joint Warfare Assessment Laboratory (JWAL) is a high-tech 48,000 square-foot world-class facility that is highly secured and has satellite connectivity. It allows the integration and merging of Navy test exercise data needed to assess the performance of Navy ships, aircraft and combat systems.
Measurement Science and Technology Laboratory (MSTL)
Measurement Science and Technology Laboratory (MSTL) is a 39,000-square-foot building that contains sophisticated calibration equipment. Calibration and certification technicians provide the Navy and Marine Corps assurance that weapons and equipment will perform accurately and reliably. The MSTL also has a machine shop and a staff of highly trained machinists to produce unique tools and equipment designed by Corona engineers.
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Breaking news 10/1 10:30pm. Bomb at University of Oklahoma
Location: Bartertown due to it having a better economy than where I really live, Buffalo NY
Explosion Kills One at University of Oklahoma
NORMAN, Okla. — University of Oklahoma (search) police investigating a loud boom found one person dead outside a campus building and believe an explosive device was involved.
"It was an explosive device with one fatality," said Sgt. Gary Robinson of the OU police department.
Robinson didn't know the identity or sex of the person who was found dead outside the Botany-Microbiology building. He also didn't know if there were other injuries or if the building was occupied.
Law enforcement officers cordoned off an area west of a packed Oklahoma Memorial Stadium (search), where the Oklahoma Sooners were playing Kansas State (search). Spectators reported hearing a loud boom just before the end of the first half, but no smoke or fire was seen.
Officers were not allowing anyone to exit the stadium, but Robinson said the spectators were safe.
Additional details weren't immediately available.
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BigPete
Location: not CT
very odd
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Michael T Hudson
Location: Formerly known as "BigDaddy"/Austin, TX
NORMAN, Okla. — One person was killed in an explosion in a traffic circle about 100 yards from a packed football stadium at the University of Oklahoma (search) on Saturday night in what authorities were calling a suicide.
"We are apparently dealing with an individual suicide, which is under full investigation," OU President David Boren (search) said in a statement.
The loud noise of the explosion could be heard inside Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, where 84,000 people were watching the Oklahoma Sooners play Kansas State (search).
Officers cordoned off an area west the stadium after the explosion and nobody was allowed out of the stadium immediately after the blast, which occurred shortly before 8 p.m., about halftime of the game. People were allowed out about 30 minutes later.
About 9 p.m. a police bomb squad detonated explosives found at the site of the blast.
Jaclyn Hull, an OU freshman, said she was leaving the game shortly before the explosion.
"We saw a little bit of smoke, about as much as you would see coming up from a grill," she said.
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Joe Molotov
They're saying it looks like a suicide now.
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Damn. I know the Sooners aren't so hot this year but that's goin' overboard.
Judging from the bomber's picture on Drudge, he was a Muslim Tom Hanks.
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That pic actually looks a lot like my dad did in college.
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It will be really interesting to see what info comes out of this... odds are it could be a little while before we know, especially if there are any terrorist implications.
Location: Jayhawk Central, Kansas
This would not have happened if we were not in Iraq.
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This kid was more than likely a loner, and a wannabe member of some Islamic organization, and had some mental issues. Due to the information available on the net, he could have made the device himself. And more than likely, we'll see news reports of various materials on bomb-making strategies that he obtained from his surfing the net. This certainly isn't a professional attack. It's a loner who was a dumbass and thought Islam was his solution.
If it was authentically AQ or all other publically known evildoers, we'd have hundreds of people dead. This should be rather clear from previous events.
Originally Posted by DVD Polizei
Yup. And probably 2 other attacks at the time time in other places.
Most likely a loner. We'll see what the explosives were. Who knows if it will turn up a few leads on something though... but probably not Al Quaeda.
Originally Posted by Nazgul
When a group of smart and capable terrorists kill thousands of US civilians and refers to Iraq, you might not be as sarcastic.
Keep saying it and build up your "I told you so."
We all know it's coming some day. Even if we leave Iraq. Our presence in Iraq will not cause the next attack, but you can bet it will be mentioned.
It's reported that he may have "emotional difficulties".
Yeah, I'm also interested in how the explosives were made/obtained. This should be interesting.
I believe www.nofuckingshit.com broke that story.
JMLEWIS1
Location: Norman, OK
The crazy thing about it is that the guy blew himself up on a bench right outside of the stadium, but the game just played on. My brother was there and said it sounded like a sonic boom, but there were no announcements about what happened. The only clue that something strange had happened was an announcement at the end of the game that asked fans to stay clear of the west side of the stadium when exiting.
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Laser Movies
Location: Formerly known as (ahem) "LASERMOVIES"/California
I will just link the first one since it has a lot of information, and it is easier to get it directly from the web site.
http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/
http://www.channeloklahoma.com/news/5057494/detail.html
Hinrichs Tried To Buy Ammonium Nitrate
POSTED: 5:16 pm CDT October 4, 2005
UPDATED: 10:03 am CDT October 5, 2005
NORMAN, Okla. -- The general manager of a Norman feed store said Tuesday that Joel Henry Hinrichs III had inquired about purchasing ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the primary ingredient used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Dustin Ellison, the general manager of Ellison Feed & Seed on Porter Avenue, said that a man matching Hinrichs' description had come into the store days before he blew himself up on OU's campus. Ellison said the man asked about ammonium nitrate, but couldn't offer a reason why he needed it.
According to an AP report, Ellison said that Hinrichs acted strangely and was wearing a vest with what appeared to be wires in it when he asked for ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
After the bombing, Ellison said he thought nothing of it. However, when he saw Hinrichs' photo, it triggered his memory.
To this point, authorities still suggest Hinrichs' only motive for blowing himself up was suicide. The FBI released a statement Tuesday evening saying that "there is no known link between Hinrichs and any terrorist or extremist organization(s) or activities."
The release also indicated that the FBI believes there is "no known current threat posed by any additional explosive materials."
Ellison noted that his store doesn't carry ammonium nitrate any longer after recent legislation required new paperwork for stores to sell the product.
Stay tuned to Eyewitness News 5 for further details.
Last edited by Laser Movies; 10-05-05 at 01:05 PM.
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http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...n.dc55792.html
Dad: Politics had no role in death
Father says OU student who blew self up meant no harm to others
11:43 PM CDT on Monday, October 3, 2005
NORMAN, Okla. – A University of Oklahoma student who died when an explosive device he was carrying detonated near a packed football stadium wasn't politically motivated, his father said Monday.
Joel Henry Hinrichs III, 21, died Saturday when the device attached to his body exploded about 8 p.m. while he sat on a bench outside George Lynn Cross Hall, officials said. The blast could be heard inside the stadium less than 100 yards away, where more than 80,000 people attended OU's game against Kansas State.
Mr. Hinrichs' father, Joel Hinrichs Jr., said he's confident his son didn't intend to harm anyone and wasn't motivated by politics.
"He was pretty disengaged from politics," the father said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "And he took the care to select an open area where there was no one around."
His son also had an interest in explosives, he said.
"Every little boy does that," he said. "He went a little further than most."
Mr. Hinrichs said his son did not leave a suicide note and that FBI agents told him hydrogen peroxide was used to construct the bomb. On Sunday, FBI investigators searched the younger Mr. Hinrichs' Norman apartment and his family home in Colorado Springs, Colo.
As a father, Mr. Hinrichs said he would like to believe that the explosion was an accidental death, but he said the evidence points to suicide. "He was checking out," Mr. Hinrichs said.
FBI spokesman Gary Johnson said officials were not yet releasing any additional details about the incident.
Donald Hamilton, interim director of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City, said it appears the incident was not terrorism.
"Scholars of terrorism immediately and categorically exclude irrational acts from their definition of terrorism," Mr. Hamilton said. "Terrorists have purpose. They have motive. It's just as simple as that. ... And if that is not present, it's not terrorism."
On the OU campus Monday, students returned to classes and the south oval where the suicide took place was reopened. The bench where authorities say Mr. Hinrichs was sitting was removed, and a new one was installed.
There were no immediate plans to modify security operations at the stadium, but the possibility will probably be discussed at a regular briefing Wednesday, said Kenny Mossman, a spokesman for the OU athletic department.
I do have to wonder what's taking so long for lower scale suicide bombings in our country though.
Guess we can be very thankful for that.
So, he "thought nothing of" the strange acting person asking for ammonium nitrate with wires coming out of his vest?
His son also had an interest in explosives, he said. (Captain Obvious)
As a father, Mr. Hinrichs said he would like to believe that the explosion was an accidental death, but he said the evidence points to suicide.
Only in Oklahoma...
That's some fast turnaround. It's like a real-life Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Tommy Ceez
Location: Capitol of the Empire! Center of all Commerce and Culture! Crossroads of Civilization! NEW ROME!!!...aka New York City
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...o_koco/2977745
Apparently this kid used the same rare explosive that the Shoe Bomber tried to use.
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Originally Posted by Tommy Ceez
Finally, proof that there may be a link to idiocy.
Originally Posted by Turd Ferguson
I imagined it was Doogie Howser after losing a malpractice suit.
Cusm
Location: Moore, OK
Except the kid is from and his dad is in Colorado.
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Off-road race kills eight spectators
JumpCutz
Dumbasses!
LUCERNE VALLEY, Calif. -- An off-road truck sailed off a jump and hurtled into a crowd at a race in the California desert, pinning bodies beneath it and sending others flying into a chaotic cloud of dust in a crash that killed eight people, authorities and witnesses said Sunday.
Twelve people were injured in the crash that came shortly after the twilight start of the California 200 Saturday night in the Mojave Desert, said San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Bachman.
Witnesses said the driver took a jump known as "the rockpile" at high speed, hit his brakes on landing and rolled sideways into a crowd of hundreds of people standing with no barriers next to the course.
"He hit the rock and just lost control and tumbled," said Matt March, 24, of Wildomar, who was standing next to the jump. "Bodies went everywhere."
March said he and several other fans lifted the truck, which came to rest with its oversized wheels pointing toward the sky, and found four people lying unconscious underneath.
John Payne, 20, of Anaheim said he was among the first people to reach the truck. He said the victims included one person who was decapitated.
"It was complete chaos," Payne said.
It took rescue vehicles and helicopters more than half an hour to reach the remote location, and spectators including off-duty police and firefighters helped the injured and placed blankets over the dead.
Six people died at the scene and two others died after being taken to a hospital, authorities said. Seven ambulances and 10 emergency aircraft responded, airlifting most of the 12 injured people from the area to hospitals.
Paramedics brought six people -- five adults and a child -- to Loma Linda University Medical Center, spokesman Herbert Atienza said Sunday. He had no information on their condition.
Officials said the driver, whose name has not been released, wasn't hurt. It was not clear why he lost control of the truck. Phone and e-mail messages left for the organizer, South El Monte-based Mojave Desert racing, were not immediately returned.
The 200-mile race is part of a series held in the Mojave Desert's Soggy Dry Lake Bed near the city of Lucerne Valley, 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Tens of thousands of people attend the California 200, in which a variety of off-road vehicles take jumps and other obstacles and reach speeds of over 60 mph on the 50-mile off-road course. The race had been scheduled to last through the night.
The crowd, which included children, was standing within 10 feet of the track with no guard rails separating them from the speeding vehicles.
"There were no barriers at all," Jeff Talbott, inland division chief for the California Highway Patrol, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise.
He said that the driver was forced to run from the scene when the crowd grew unruly and some began throwing rocks at him. Several witnesses said they didn't see anyone throwing rocks at the driver.
Fans said there are rarely rails or any other safety guards at the races.
"That's desert racing for you," Payne said. "You're at your own risk out here. You are in the middle of the desert. People were way too close and they should have known. You can't really hold anyone at fault. It's just a horrible, horrible accident."
March said "that's just how everyone plays it, everyone gets real close in these desert races."
The CHP does not normally investigate crashes at organized events, but took the lead on this probe because of its scope and had set up a command center at the starting line of the race.
The federal Bureau of Land Management was assisting in the investigation.
The crash was the latest in a series of race accidents that have proved deadly to spectators.
A car plowed into a crowd that had gathered to watch an illegal drag race on a suburban road in Accokeek, Maryland, in February 2008, killing eight people and injuring five. The two racers were charged with vehicular manslaughter. Darren Bullock, 22, was sentenced to 15 years in prison; Tavon Taylor, 20, is awaiting trial.
In Chandler, Ariz., in February, a female spectator was killed by a tire that flew off a crashing dragster at Chandler's Firebird International Raceway for the NHRA Arizona Nationals.
In Selmer, Tennessee, a dragster went out of control and smashed into spectators during a fundraising festival in June 2007, killing six people and injuring 22. Driver Troy Critchley, 38, was convicted of misdemeanor reckless assault charges and sentenced to 18 months probation.
Derek Laogali, 22, of San Pedro, said Saturday night was the first time he'd ever been to an off-road race, and he witnessed the horror up close.
"I seen people on the floor with broken bones, people with blankets over them. I'm guessing they were dead," Laogali said. "People were crying and screaming. It was a nightmare."
http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/racing...ory?id=5465256
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Re: Off-road race kills eight spectators
I wish this would happen at a NASCAR event. It would be one of the greatest public displays of natural selection ever televised.
Was going to post this. The crowd are at their own risk when there is no barrier at the race.
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Originally Posted by NORML54601
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I'm fond of the last sentence.
glassdragon
Location: Somewhere out there... YES THERE!!!
You know, if there are no guard rails then it is your fault. I'm not going to go to a hockey game and stand on the ice with no wall between me and them. You are going to get your face eviscerated by a puck or one of the players teeth if you do that.
Makes me wonder though. How many people when that car was coming at them instinctively put their hands up in front of their face as if they were going to deflect the car. Not really funny, but still.
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jfoobar
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Giantrobo
Location: South Bay
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Troy Stiffler
Location: Under an I-10 Overpass
No, no, no. That would be the SECOND time it happens.
Visit Troy Stiffler's homepage!
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I'm continually amazed at how close people are willing to get to fast moving vehicles. Personally, I try to stay relatively far away, as I kind of like how my body is currently contained within itself.
Originally Posted by jfoobar
That was what I was originally going to reply with but got too lazy. "They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash."
cungar
You don't get a true appreciation for how stupid these spectators are until you see how close they're standing to these trucks going close to 100 mph. I love the YouTube poster's defense: "This is what people do"
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Last edited by cungar; 08-15-10 at 06:43 PM.
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Nick Danger
There are no guardrails on a 50 mile desert track. You guys are thinking of paved highways.
Visit Nick Danger's homepage!
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hippie68
Can't even imagine the driver having to deal with the fact that he killed eight people. What a burden to bear.
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Originally Posted by hippie68
Him and 4 of the dead are from this area. The local news said he knew 3 of the ones killed. One of the witnesses (whose friend was one of the dead) said he thinks the truck hit a rock after the jump and rolled into the crowd.
Ironically, the driver's name is Brett Sloppy.
He posted this on Facebook: Soo incredibly lost and devistated my thoughts and prayers go out to all the familys and friends involved.. Thank you too all my friends for sticking with me even thru these tragic times I love you all
Jeeden
Location: Northern VA
If you ever catch the rally races on TV it is amazing. You see the european ones when they are racing off road in the SNOW and people are smacking the cars as they go by. They also are known for building their own jumps and bumps on the track before the cars get there so they can watch them get air right in front of them. Of course, it's difficult for the drivers since they aren't official terrian of the track.
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Originally Posted by TomOpus
Way to early for this guy to be commenting on this. Especially with a post that sounds like it was written by Jeff Spicoli after a bong hit.
Originally Posted by cungar
I was going to post the same thing. He posts drivel on Facebook after killing 8 people? Really?
I see no problem with the Facebook post. Some people use it as a primary way of communicating with many friends and it's not like he wants to call them all in a time like this.
jonw9
Location: On the banks of the Red Cedar
Race Sponsor based in El Monte
Hmm, sounds like a cover-up for some recent panda slayings!
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Originally Posted by Thor Simpson
I see no problem with the Facebook post.
His punctuation could be better.
Mr. Salty
Location: Lower Beaver, Iowa
Originally Posted by JumpCutz
And spelling.
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Deep Web Roundup: Intelligence Official Charged With Selling Secrets, Disney Visits the Darknet
A French intelligence official has been charged with selling state secrets on the dark web for BTC. Also in this roundup, we look at a new threat analysis tool trawling deep web sites for certain keywords and detail a surprise namecheck in Disney’s latest movie.
Also read: Banks, Money Mules and Front Companies Aid Terrorists in Conflict Zones Launder Money
French Officer Charged With Selling State Secrets
There’s more to the deep web than criminality; like every part of the internet, the darknet can be used for good, bad, and the vast expanse of gray that lies between the two. But even when there is lawless behavior being perpetrated on the darknet, it isn’t always by the sort of criminals you might expect to be complicit.
When there’s illicitly obtained data to be sold, the deep web is the first place most thieves set up shop. Usually those criminals are fleeing the law, not acting as law enforcement officers themselves. French publication Le Parisien has detailed an officer with the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI) who’s been remanded after being indicted for selling state secrets. The charges allege that the unnamed officer was selling documents on the deep web in exchange for bitcoin.
France’s DGSI intelligence agency handles counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, cybercrime and surveillance of criminal groups, organizations, and social phenomena. Its officers are therefore privy to sensitive information that would naturally be of interest to suspects, not least those who are under investigation. After the French intelligence services discovered the leak, they succeeded in tracing the documents back to the officer who uploaded them and promptly arrested the individual before proceeding to dismantle the criminal network the officer had been investigating, presumably believing the case to be compromised.
It has been reported that the DGSI agent faces up to seven years in prison if convicted. Cases involving law enforcement agents going rogue in the context of the deep web are not unheard of. Most famously, during the Silk Road investigation DEA agents Shaun Bridges and Carl Force turned to theft and extortion. Controversially, however, their tainted evidence was permitted as part of the case that ultimately helped to convict Ross Ulbricht.
Using Keywords to Perform Deep Web Threat Analysis
A recent study proposes a threat intelligence tool to identify suspicious activities on darknet sites. The deep web, due to its design, is notoriously difficult to trawl for information in the same manner as the clearnet. The researchers’ tool, developed in Python, was used to trawl over 4,300 deep web sites known to be associated with criminal activity. It then grouped keywords according to high priority (typically weapons-related terms such as “FN SCAR 17S” or drugs such as heroine), medium, and low priority. The tool’s most obvious application is of course for law enforcement seeking to identify deep web domains responsible for the majority of the chatter surrounding proscribed topics.
<figure id="attachment_223929" style="width: 696px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">
<figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Disney’s interpretation of the deep web in Wreck It Ralph 2</figcaption>
Disney Visits the Darknet
The trailer for Wreck It Ralph 2 is out and its titular character is headed to some very dark places. Set on the internet, complete with a series of in-jokes about Rick Rolling, cats, and flossing, the movie takes a trip to somewhere Disney audiences probably never imagined they’d be led: the deep web. That’s right, the creators of such cutesy cartoon capers as Frozen are plunging their audience into a realm synonymous with hard drugs, assassination marketplaces, honeypots and hacks. “This is what’s called the darknet,” announces a voice (around 2:00 in the trailer below) before Ralph comes face-to-face with a two-headed monster. File this one under Things We Never Thought We’d See Happen. The next generation to visit the deep web are going to be in for a rude awakening.
What are your thoughts on Disney visiting the deep web in its latest movie? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Disney.
Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.
The post Deep Web Roundup: Intelligence Official Charged With Selling Secrets, Disney Visits the Darknet appeared first on Bitcoin News.
https://news.bitcoin.com/deep-web-roundup-intelligence-official-charged-with-selling-secrets-disney-visits-the-darknet/
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April 23, 2017 by fitchburghistory
We hope you will enjoy reading about Fitchburg, Wisconsin as it developed from a sparsely populated township to a group of small communities and finally to a vibrant and diversified city encompassing nearly all of the township of Fitchburg in Dane county.
The Pioneer Vroman Family Event cancelled due to weather
The Verona Area Historical Society will have a meeting Saturday, January 18 at 10 am in the Verona Senior Center (108 Paoli Street, Verona, WI) featuring members of the Vroman family. Joseph, George and William Vroman were first Fitchburg Township landowners and played important parts in early Fitchburg history. Joseph Vroman was the first Greenfield Town Chair before the name was changed to Fitchburg. Hiram Vroman served as Fitchburg Town Chair in 5 nonconsecutive terms between 1877 and 1912. The Vroman farmstead, a Sesquicentennial farm, is located at 2387 S Seminole Highway. Fitchburg Historical Society members are encouraged to attend.
Short Articles
To see past articles click here.
The Fitchburg Historical Society display case is located near the Fitchburg Room on the southeast corner on the second floor of the Fitchburg Public Library. The display case highlights a variety of historical items throughout the year. When the displays are changed, they focus on Fitchburg events and people and/or historical happenings of community interest
The FHS display case remembers the life and photographic work of Ida Wyman, master photo journalist. She started using a camera at an early age and photography became her life’s work. Ida was curious about people and things so she recorded her feelings with her camera. Through the camera lens, Ida would produce documentary photographs showing everyday events in the world around her. The pictures in this display present some of her cross country travels from New York to Los Angeles in the mid twentieth century to capture bits of Americana. Ms Wyman had photographs published in Life and Look magazines at a time when few women did that kind of work. She received more acclaim for her work in later years as people came to enjoy the gallery presentation talks that she gave during her photo exhibitions. Her photographs can be found in many galleries across the United States and around the world. We honor her memory as we reveal her interesting story by showing some of the pictures she cherished. THANK YOU IDA WYMAN – you will be sadly missed.
Wisconsin State Journal obituary
New York Times obituary
To see old Displays click here.
We will regularly update our website with new information and will highlight this new information here along with the date it was added. If you have suggestions for a topic of interest or would like to contribute an article please contact us.
Added info to Town Chairs
Added Eileen Kellor bio
Added Agribusiness history 1 to Video Presentations
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Gary Cokins
Listed document(s): 7
Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in business analytics enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) improvement methods (e.g., strategy map and its balanced scorecard; product, channel, customer profitability reporting usinf activity-based costing; driver-based rolling financial forecasts).
He is the founder of Analytics-Based Performance Management, an advisory firm located in Cary, North Carolina. Gary received a BS degree with honors in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from Cornell University in 1971. He received his MBA with honors from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in 1974.
Gary began his career as a strategic planner with FMC's Link-Belt Division and then served as Financial Controller and Operations Manager. In 1981 Gary began his management consulting career first with Deloitte consulting, and then in 1988 with KPMG consulting. In 1992 Gary headed the National Cost Management Consulting Services for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) now part of HP. From 1997 until 2013 Gary was a Principal Consultant with SAS, a leading provider of business analytics software.
His two most recent books are Performance Management: Integrating Strategy Execution, Methodologies, Risk, and Analytics, and Predictive Business Analytics. His books are published by John Wiley & Sons.
ALL DOCUMENTS (7)
Measuring and Managing Customer Profitability
Listed under: Corporate Finance Strategy, Marketing, & Sales
View more from: Gary Cokins
69-slide PowerPoint deck and supporting PDF. The only value a company will ever create for its shareholders and owners is the value that comes from its customers ? current ones and new ones acquired in the future. To remain competitive, companies must determine how to retain [read more]
Activity-Based Cost Management (ABC/M)
101-slide PowerPoint deck and supporting PDF. Critics have claimed that traditional managerial accounting is at best useless and at worst dysfunctional and misleading. Today's general ledger and budgeted spending systems support departmental and "stovepipe" managerial [read more]
Activity-Based Costing (ABC) Rapid Prototyping Toolkit
Listed under: Operations
19-slide PowerPoint deck and supporting ZIP. The Activity-Based Costing (ABC) Rapid Prototyping Toolkit allows you to implement an ABC system within your organization in weeks, instead of months or years. It includes a proven framework for ABC rapid prototyping, along with [read more]
Business Analytics for the CFO Function
Listed under: Corporate Finance
72-slide PowerPoint deck and supporting PDF. The CFO's finance and accounting function can leverage analytics, especially predictive ones, embedded in their financial reporting, planning, and decision making. Finance and accounting professional are typically considered to be very [read more]
Integrating Enterprise Performance and Risk Management
68-slide PowerPoint deck and supporting PDF. There is increasing attention regarding the "overlap" of enterprise risk management (ERM) and enterprise performance management (EPM). The former refers to key risk and control indicators (KRIs and KCIs) [read more]
Driver-Based Budgeting and Rolling Financial Forecasts
Listed under: Corporate Finance Operations
28-slide PowerPoint deck and supporting PDF. There is a shift in emphasis from historical reporting to predictive costing such as capacity-sensitive driver-based rolling financial forecasts, what-if analysis, and marginal cost analysis (e.g., pricing). The annual budgeting [read more]
Balanced Scorecard (BSC) Rapid Prototyping Toolkit
10-slide PowerPoint deck and supporting ZIP. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) Rapid Prototyping Toolkit allows you to implement a BSC management system within your organization in days, instead of weeks or months. It includes a proven framework for BSC rapid prototyping, along with [read more]
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Top 10 BEST Movies of 2016
On January 12, 2017 January 24, 2017 By ruthIn The Flix List
I always wait until at least the first week of January before I made my top 10 list of the year prior, and this year is no different. Now, last year I combined my top 10 best and worst in a single post. This year I will just focus on the BEST list and do a WORST (or I’d say disappointing) list in a separate post. Fortunately my worst list is far less extensive than the best one, as I can only count with one hand the worst movies I saw this past year.
Now, I selected films released between January – December 2016, including the limited releases (i.e. Hidden Figures) which opened in select cities in December. Some of these might’ve opened internationally prior to 2016, but I’m using the USA release dates or the fact that they opened at a local film festival. As customary, this list is a cross between a ‘best of and favorite’, so the criteria is that these films made an impression on me, combining the virtue of being entertaining, deeply-moving, thought-provoking, and indelible.
So without further ado, I present to you my TOP 10 list (in reverse order):
10. The Lobster (full review)
One of the strangest films I’ve seen last year and it’s also one of the most original concept I’ve ever seen. Greek writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos who co-wrote the script with Efthymis Filippou created an intriguing commentary on love and relationship that’ll make you ponder about it for days. I’ve loved sci-fi concepts that’s more grounded in its presentation and the world the characters inhabit in this movie certainly looks plausible. It’s not a perfect film, but still a brilliant one that earns top marks for originality and thought-provoking ideas.
9. Love & Friendship (full review)
Most of you already know I love Jane Austen’s work, though this one is unlike her most famous work like Pride & Prejudice or Sense & Sensibility. This one is based on Austen’s lesser-known work where we have a saucy protagonist who is as deviously-cunning as she is impeccably dressed. It’s the first film by writer/director Whit Stillman I’ve seen so far and it’s a delight! I really enjoyed Kate Beckinsale‘s in the title role and a delightfully-hilarious turn by Tom Bennett, one of my fave discoveries of 2016. Funny, witty, and so gorgeous to look at, this is another Austen movie I could watch over and over for years to come.
8. Captain Fantastic (full review)
When I saw the trailer for the first time I knew this is a role perfect for Viggo Mortensen who plays an intellectual free spirit, a Renaissance man who’s set in his ways. It’s a fascinating slice of an unorthodox family of seven, Viggo as the unconventional dad and his six kids, following the sudden death of his wife.Set in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, themes of parenting and coming-of-age blend seamlessly. Certainly a film that subscribe to the old adage that it’s the journey, not the destination, that really matters. Like The Lobster, it’s one of the most eccentric films I’ve seen this year, one that definitely left an indelible impression on me.
7. Hidden Figures
I haven’t got a chance to review this one as I just saw it last week. As soon as I’m done watching this historical drama, thought to myself that I’m glad I waited to post my top 10 list! Since this one had opened in limited release in December, it’s still technically a 2016 movie. Starring a trifecta of terrific Black actresses, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe (who was also great in Moonlight), it tells a pivotal moment in American history in a heartwarming yet poignant manner. There are moments throughout the women’s journey that made me angry and sad, but the film is brimming with such uplifting optimism and hope. La La Land isn’t the only film that spoke about dreaming big, but the difference is, the visionary trio crossed race and gender lines to achieve what’s seemingly impossible. The quintessential inspirational film that every person, young or old, should see. As some critics put it, it’s a cinematic nourishment for the soul.
6. La La Land (full review)
Ahhh, the critical darling of the year. It might’ve been around TIFF time last Fall when the buzz surrounds this modern musical started gaining steam. It never let up since that by the time I sat down to see it in mid December, I was a bit worried it won’t live up to such a potent hype. Well, thankfully it was indeed an enjoyable experience, with fun musical numbers, gorgeous cinematography and lively music. An unabashedly dreamy and stylish affair, I could see why it swept many off their feet. For me though, the romance wasn’t exactly swoon-worthy, but it’s the ‘fools who dream’ theme that resonated with me emotionally. It’s that key audition scene performed wonderfully by Emma Stone that I remember most about this film, the one that got me bawling as I felt as if the movie was speaking to me directly.
5. Zootopia (full review)
In a year full of animated features, Zootopia is the only one that deserves to be on my top 10 list (note: I haven’t seen MOANA yet). Disney is sort of catching up to Pixar in terms of storytelling. Its themes of overcoming prejudices feels as timely as ever, whilst still being an enjoyable ride from start to finish. I also love the fact that Zootopia is NOT an animated musical that occasionally burst into songs. The plot is more of an action mystery thriller that is as clever and quick-witted as the smart rabbit Judy Hopps, the movie’s adorable protagonist. It’s also chockfull of wonderful characters that are easy to root for, which made for a fun, enjoyable ride of a movie that’s also smart AND has a big heart. I always appreciate animated features that can cater to adults as well as kids, and Zootopia is certainly a great example of that.
4. Loving (full review)
There are few films that came out in 2016 that couldn’t have been more timely. One is my number 7 pick, and the other is this one. Unlike the more sensational Birth Of A Nation, which was plagued by rape allegations of its creator and star), the beauty of Loving is how personal it feels. It doesn’t come across as a ‘film with a message’, though it certainly contains a stinging commentary of race in America. The story is even more powerful because filmmaker Jeff Nichols focuses on the journey of Richard and Mildred Loving, instead of being concerned about making a political statement. Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton portrayed the Lovings with such quiet grace and sincerity. Theirs is a story that must be told, and the script, direction and performance all work beautifully to bring that to life.
3. Arrival (full review)
Jeff Nichols and Denis Villeneuve are two emerging filmmakers in the past decade who have continually churned out excellent work. So it’s no surprise their latest work end up on my top 10 list. With any great science-fiction, the best ones are those that remind us of our humanity, and that is the case with Arrival. It’s rare to see a film that treads a familiar ground, aliens visiting earth, yet still manages to be original and truly thought-provoking. The linguistic aspect is something I haven’t seen before in a sci-fi movie, and it’s even more compelling when the core of the story is a deeply personal one. Amy Adams ought to have swept every award this year, I think she deserved it more than Emma Stone in La La Land. Her quiet yet affecting performance is superb here, she is truly the heart and soul of the film. The contemplative nature of the film is far from boring, in fact it makes it even more haunting and enigmatic. It won’t be a hyperbole to call it one of the best sci-fi dramas ever produced, and I think it will stand the test of time.
2. Hunt For the Wilderpeople (full review)
One of the biggest travesties of this year’s Golden Globes, and there are many, is that this film was NOT nominated in the Best Comedy/Musical category. Boy, I’d be hard pressed to find a funnier film than this one, made by yet another emerging filmmaker who’s a force to be reckoned with. Written and directed by Taika Waititi, it’s a riotous adventure movie I could watch over and over. Pairing a veteran actor, Sam Neill, with 13-year-old newcomer Julian Dennison made for a brilliant duo, I’d welcome a sequel with those two in another zany journey through New Zealand wilderness! It’s uproariously funny but also has a huge heart, not relying on crude gags masquerading as *comedy* Hollywood churn out these days. This is the only one of two films I gave a 5/5 rating this year, and it’s destined to be a comedy classic.
1. Moonlight (full review)
This is the second movie of 2016 that I gave a full 5/5 rating to. A poignant coming-of-age story of a young boy living struggling with his identity and sexuality, this film is masterfully-directed by Barry Jenkins. I have no qualms calling it a masterpiece, considering the challenge of using three actors to portray a single character, Chiron, in three different stages of his life. The transition between the three time periods is handled well, it never feels abrupt or jarring. The combination of newbie actors and established ones make up one of the strongest ensemble cast of the year, led by the charismatic Mahershala Ali.
Few films hit me as hard as Moonlight did. I was so emotionally-invested in Chiron and I often have tears in my eyes when I think about his arduous life journey. The films also deftly broke stereotypes, challenging our perceptions of what we think of masculinity, especially amongst the Black community. I was also in awe by the poignant, elegant and graceful storytelling style of a subject matter rarely depicted on screen. A triumphant film through and through.
Pretty much every movie that made my BEST list of the first half of 2016 would count as honorable mentions. So combined with those that were released in the latter half of the year, here are the 20 films released last year that I was impressed with (in alphabetical order):
Anthropoid
Blood Stripe
The Eagle Huntress (doc)
The Fencer
Pride + Prejudice + Zombies
Prison Dogs (doc)
What I missed in 2016
There are still some highly-rated films that came out last year that I haven’t seen, yet… Elle, Manchester By The Sea, Fences, Jackie, Kubo and the Two Strings, 20th Century Women, Neruda, Silence, amongst others.
So that’s my BEST list of 2016. Thoughts on my picks here? I’d be happy to discuss ’em with you 😀
10 best films of 2016Amy AdamsArrival movieCaptain FantasticDenis VilleneuveHidden FiguresHunt for the WilderpeopleKate BeckinsaleLa La LandLove & FriendshipLoving movieMoonlight movieThe Lobstertop 10 films of 2016Zootopia
FlixChatter Review: SING (2016)
FlixChatter Review: Hidden Figures (2016)
51 thoughts on “Top 10 BEST Movies of 2016”
ninvoid99
That is a good list. I’m happy that Love & Friendship is getting some love. People need to see that film. I hope to see some of your other picks as I missed so many films last year.
Hi Steven! I knew Love & Friendship would make my final list. Definitely one of the best period dramas I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a ton of them 🙂
Really good list Ruth. Several that I absolutely love. Happy to see Love & Friendship make another list. And I’m nuts about Arrival. I saw it twice in the theater but I’m so anxious to see it again. La La Land, Captain Fantastic, etc. etc. I turned out to be a really good year.
Oh BTW, see The Innocents whoever you get a chance!
Hi there Keith! I knew we have a few in common, and I’m glad two of them are Love & Friendship and Arrival, we need more well-written female-driven films in Hollywood 🙂 I think 2016 has been a decent year from films, I mean looking at how diverse my list is this year made me smile.
P.S. I just saw the premise of The Innocents, oh my sounds harrowing.
Harrowing indeed but not a film without hope. Get this, the cast is predominantly female. It is written by a woman, edited by a woman, directed by a woman. And that female perspective is so powerful. Love it.
WOW! That’s very cool!! That is so rare to see a film w/ so many women in front of and behind the screen. Thanks for bringing that to my attention, Keith.
Ted Saydalavong (@TSayda)
I only saw 2 from your list there, Arrival and Hunt For The Wilderpeople and I enjoyed both quite a bit. I’ll for sure going to watch The Lobster, Moonlight and Loving.
Hey Ted, if I had seen ‘Silence’ I wonder if that film would end up in my list or not. But yes, do see The Lobster, Moonlight and Loving, I’m glad to see more racially-diverse films this year, and more talented emerging directors.
I used to seek out foreign films quite a bit, mostly from the Far East before they get any attention here in the States. But that’s when I had more time to seek out films outside of Hollywood, now I just wait for them to be available to stream or Bluray. I have a few films from the Far East that I want to see, especially Chan Wook Park’s new one The Handmaiden.
I think that’s your best bet of finding new talents and diverse films. As you know Hollywood don’t like to produce that kind of films much and many talented filmmakers tends to get corrupt or just can’t make their kind of films once they get to Hollyweed!
Hey Ted, my brother was really into kung-fu movies when we were young, but for some reason I was never into them. I always gravitated towards Western shows/films, but yeah now it seems foreign films are where the creativities are. I actually got a link screener to the Korean gangster film Age of Shadows but the quality wasn’t very good and so I’d rather wait to rent it properly as the visuals look fantastic.
yaykisspurr
I didn’t see many new movies last year! You gave me a great list to add 🙂
Hi there, glad to hear! I hope you do seek ’em out, especially my #1 pick 🙂
Shivani Yadav (@TheShivaniYadav)
A great list, Ruth. What I really like is the fact that you mentioned all the underrated ones too.
By the way, would love to read your reviews of Lion, Hidden Figures, Jackie and Manchester By The Sea 😀
Hi Shivani! It was tough to nail down the top 10 list but the Honorable Mentions are easier. I hope to work on Hidden Figures review this weekend, so we shall see. Lion had me bawling, that kid actor is too adorable! I might just rent Jackie and ‘Manchester’ later though.
I forgot about Anthrapoid and A Bigger Splash. I meant to make a note to rent them. Thanks for the reminder! Not too suprised by your list. I still have no theater around that is featuring Moonlight. I can’t wait to finally watch it. Nice post, Ruth. Here’s to 2017.
Hi Cindy! I think both Anthropoid and A Bigger Splash are now available to rent. I do think you will enjoy both of them. Very sad to hear that Moonlight isn’t playing anywhere near you 😦
Hi Ruth, I’ll rent them and wait to rent Moonlight. Stop on by today and join the discussion! 🙂
Ok, so long as you see it 🙂 Oh ok, it’s the 13th, I’ll definitely stop by later today.
Brittani
Great list! I have a lot of these on mine too, I’m currently stuck on #10 between La La Land and Hidden Figures lol
Hi Brittani! Hidden Figures is wonderful isn’t it? It should receive as much buzz as La La Land, if not more!
There are so many movies on this list that I still need to see, but in my defense they’re not in UK cinemas yet 😛
So happy to see Hunt for the Wilderpeople so high on your list though. And Captain Fantastic too!
Hi Allie, these international release dates are so bonkers. So which ones aren’t playing yet? I presume Hidden Figures? I hope you see that one as soon as it opens. ‘Wilderpeople’ is a hoot, LOVE Taika’s work… and Captain Fantastic is one of the most unique films in the past few years.
I know, right! La La Land came out last week (I’m seeing it on Wednesday – yay!), Hidden Figures, Loving and Moonlight are all February releases. It’s a painful wait!
70srichard
We only have two films in common but I still think you have a great list. I missed seeing five of your choices and hope to catch up in the new year. Loved Hidden Figures and Moonlight, I just found other films I need in my life more. Zootopia is solid but I thought Kubo and the Two Strings was the most beautiful film I saw last year, animated or otherwise. Happy new year.
Hi Richard! I haven’t seen ‘Kubo’ yet, missed that one but I heard it’s really a good one. Can you tell me at least one of the films on my list you haven’t seen yet?
The Lobster and Hunt for the Wilderpeople are two I want to see but have not.
Oh those two are a must-see!
Eddie@Jaccendo
So far I’ve seen 4 of your top ten. Solid choices Ruth. I’m pretty sure as I catch up on 2016 films many of the other picks like Arrival, I’ve become a big fan of the director’s past few movies, will end up on my list too (if I ever make one). 🙂
Yeah, Villevue is definitely one of the best ‘newish’ directors working today. I have high hopes w/ Blade Runner 2! Which other three from this list have you seen Eddie?
I’m excited for Blade Runner, the trailer looks promising (but can’t always trust the trailer). I’ve seen Captain Fantastic, Zooptopia, Hunt, and The Lobster (which I probably rank the lowest of the four I watched).
I still wished they cast someone else besides Ryan Gosling in BR 2 but well, I still have hope it’ll be good based on the director 🙂 Glad you’ve seen those four movies Eddie, they’re all well worthy I think.
I’ll be interested to read your thoughts about Elle when you see it,. The idea to make a comedy about that subject seems so gross to me I really don’t wanna see it at all…That is a great list right here I think I’ll see Hidden Figures soon but I need to see The Right Stuff first and see the proper depiction of John Glenn 😛
ELLE is a comedy?? I thought it’s more of a thriller. Can’t imagine anyone making that subject matter into a comedy or even taking it lightly. I love Hidden Figures, but hey, Ed Harris as John Glenn? I had missed that somehow, well then I too should check out The Right stuff 😉
Whoa whoa whoa, you’ve not seen the Right Stuff? You lucky girl. What a treat you have in front of you. My Wife’s favorite film and maybe top ten for me. It fits with Hidden Figures really well.
I definitely will see that soon Richard! Can’t believe I’ve missed it.
I just watched it yesterday, it’s a bit too long but it’s very well made and Ed is just so charming in it!
Cool! I hope to see it soon. No doubt Ed was awesome as John Glen!
Pingback: FlixChatter Review: Hidden Figures (2016)
Hey Ruth! Glad to see you still make blogging look easy. I, for one, have always struggled to keep it going, even though I did manage to post again after 10 months off!!
Very interesting list you’ve put together as expected. I’ve seen Moonlight, Arrival, Zootopia, The Lobster and La La Land (last week). I really did not think a film this year could have topped Moonlight as it was, like you say, a very touching and beautifully rendered piece of cinema. However, I must intercede in favor of La La Land which literally swept me off my feet. It wasn’t the most original, nor the most captivating story, and it certainly wasn’t the most timely of movies BUT, it was perfect in its execution. All of it was excellent. The sets, the acting, the cinematography, the music, the choreography and even the romance (I think Gosling and Stone have a lot of chemistry together). Sure it was an ode to old Hollywood, but it did so with complete confidence and brilliance.
Apart from that, I bet some of these will also end up in my personal best of 2016. Zootopia is still the best animated feature I saw. Arrival was probably the best sci-fi, and Moonlight the best drama. The Lobster may not make the top 10, but I do agree with you in saying it was a very thought-provoking and peculiar little film.
Hello there, well my blogging days are numbered though I’ll try to keep it up w/ the help of guest bloggers. I might share the reason why in a few days 😉
Glad you have seen Moonlight AND that you share my sentiment about it. I think I like La La Land more than I let on, but still doesn’t beat Moonlight in my mind. It is a unique film even if it’s not the most original.
Zootopia was great but I wish I had seen Kubo and The Two Strings before I made my list as that just beat Zootopia as my fave animated feature of 2016!!
Great list! There’s some you’ve mentioned that I’m yet to see, like Moonlight and La La Land. I loved Arrival, incredible film and Captain Fantastic was surprisingly really good too.
Hi Liam! Moonlight and La La Land are pretty great, but Moonlight is an absolute must-see. Hope you get to see those two soon. Glad you love Arrival and Captain Fantastic, which should get more love IMO.
Awesome list! I loved Arrival! It’s definitely one of my favorite sci-fi films I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to rewatch it. I’ve also been meaning to see Moonlight, just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Love the site, too!
Pingback: A quick blog update… and my first script reading session
Sorry, just got to this. Having watched Moonlight last night I find it hard to argue against your number one. It’s a truly fantastic film. Great list 🙂
Hey Mark! SO glad you had seen Moonlight AND that you agreed with me!! I know everyone is ga ga over La La Land but that is the one I’m still rooting for.
skilby22
I have seen Zootopia and La La Land and I absolutely loved both of them. I really want to see Loving and Hidden Figures. And how you talked about the review for Loving makes me want to see it even more, I was very pleased to see you write how it’s not a political view because we’ve obviously seen enough of political views.
February 13, 2017 at 12:28 Reply
Hello there, thanks for your comment! Loving is such a beautiful, heartfelt film. I love that the focus is truly about the love the Lovings had for each other, amidst the racial bigotry of the community they lived in.
gesreviewjp
That is a good list but if I may ask have you seen hacksaw ridge? because i think it is one of the best of 2016
No I have not seen Hacksaw Ridge yet, I’m not w/ bloody war violence, but my blog contributor who reviewed it liked it very much. I believe it is one of his faves of the year.
Pingback: Top 20 films of 2016 + my awards + links – movies and songs 365
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Some important articles. Mirrors in which we can see America.
By Larry Kummer, Editor / 9 Comments / 19 April 2012 29 August 2019
Summary: Every society has rationality tokens. Some have many; some few. In some they are held by people who become leaders of their society; in some they’re held by outcasts. As a nation evolves, its rationality tokens pass into new hands. Here we look at America, seeking to find their new holders.
A model American
The disk was made of an undistinguished alloy of common metals, a gray monotone. It looked like a Boston subway token, save for two words inlaid in silver. The words “Rationality Token” flashed against the dull metal background.
{Nathan explained …} “Years ago, a friend of mine noticed an odd thing about meetings with groups of bureaucrats. Only one bureaucrat in the room would have something rational and intelligent to say about the question under discussion; the rest would answer either with a magician’s verbal handwaving, with statements that were internally inconsistent, or with statements that had no apparent connection to the topic.
“Oddly, for each question, a different bureaucrat gave the rational response. It seemed as though a law of nature prevented more than one bureaucrat from being rational at a time. And you could never predict which bureaucrat could answer a particular question rationally. My friend developed a theory: a roomful of bureaucrats shares a single rationality token. Only the one holding the token can act intelligently. The bureaucrats pass the token around secretly during the meeting.”
— from Marc Stiegler’s David’s Sling (1988) — free e-book here
We can easily ignore the rapid decay of the American polity, as it will affect most people only when too late for reform. The media make this easier by distracting us with accounts of political class’ gibbering and capering, while in the shadows our leaders erase away our civil liberties. The news media do this because we prefer not to know. We cover our eyes to avoid seeing what we have become.
How our rulers see us. Art by Matt Truiano
The good news: as the news media decays into irrelevance, the rationality token passes to new sources of information and insight. Such as Reason magazine, Tom Engelhardt’s TomDispatch, and Glenn Greenwald’s column at Salon. These become the key places to look for those who seek to understand the new era now evolving. Lately Greenwald and his guest authors have been especially hot, showing us the face of the new America now under construction. Our legacy to our children.
“The real criminals in the Tarek Mehanna case“, Glenn Greenwald, 13 April 2012 — The government attacks a remaining scrap from the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech. It must go to make them more secure from us.
“Making politicians look bad: ‘A fireable offense’ “, Charles Davis (journalist, see his website), 13 April 2012 — An expose about the workings of our court stenographers (pretending to be journalists), and their jealousy of actual journalists.
“Drone activist denied visa“, Murtaza Hussain (Toronto-based writer; see his website), 13 April 2012 — The government defends our borders to keep out anti-government views. The truth wants to be free, but not if President Obama and his officials have their way.
“Feds ready whistleblower trial“, Jesselyn Radack (director of the Government Accountability Project; author of TRAITOR), 13 April 2012 — President Obama fulfills his promise to change the government, inflicting the full weight of government power on those who dare tell Americans the truth about its deeds — going to extremes that would have embarrassed Nixon.
“Personalizing civil liberties abuses“, Glenn Greenwald, 16 April 2012 — The human face of our “justice” system’s abuses.
“Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics“, Glenn Greenwald, 18 April 2012 — Our cout stenographers mock Assange, his new TV news show, and the new media that broadcast it. In doing so they demonstrate their decayed condition, their role as servile courtiers for our ruling elites, and the necessity of using these new sources.
A warning from the past about Mother Nature’s harsh justice
“Every nation gets the government it deserves.”
— Joseph de Maistre, from letter 76 dated 27 August 1811, published in Lettres et Opuscules
For more information: posts about new news media
A guide to sources of geopolitical insight on the Internet, 6 December 2008
The future, always in motion and therefore difficult to see, 18 March 2009 — About Clay Shirkey’s analysis.
A new news media emerges for our new world, unseen and unexpected, 9 July 2009
The Raymond Davis incident shows that we’re often ignorant because we rely on the US news media. There is a solution., 18 February 2011
9 thoughts on “Some important articles. Mirrors in which we can see America.”
The problem remains, dear FM, of exactly HOW to persuade more people than those already enrolled in the choir that the preacher has a message of far reaching relevance.For example, I already listen to the preacher, but after all, if my persuasive arguments do not stimulate others to listen and react, then I am again reduced to the single vote I have always had. What’s a body to do, other than to hope? However, as St Paul says, “If in this life, we have only hope . . . we are of all men most miserable.”
Yes, that is the question. Or part of the larger question: how to arouse America.
Perhaps only bad news will do so. Military defeat or economic decline. Yet neither of those seems likely, IMO. No other power plays the military game, except defensively. And the US economy remains vital if mismanaged; simple reforms after the election to our tax and health care system could produce powerful results.
epagbreton
“….how to arouse America.”
AMERICA is aroused. It is doing exactly what it has wanted to do and has done for many, many years. It is not doing what you think it should do….and so what? Even a near fatal meltdown of the entire Fin System in 2008 could not stop America from full ahead consumption and war mongering. Fraud, corruption, decay in many parts of the physical infrastructure, Rogue Soldiers featured on nightly news, faux Reform in their Presidency, Med System run amok by any numerical measure…..nothing stops America.
And you think that is not arousal of the deepest type? And you think this Country will stop doing exactly what it is now doing? There is delusion here but one wonders who are the delusional ones. A small minority of delusionals but still a ….you might consider giving it up and joining the March Forward as the majority of your fellow citizens are on.
Well, food for thought . . . but, the sedative of a slight economic recovery has taken the edge off the arousal. As long as people can afford the latest iToys, Mac Books, trips to McDonald’s and gas for their SUVs and big-ass pickup trucks, that’s sedative enough to go back to their routinely self-absorbed lives. With a society as completely self-centered as ours, the opiates are so much more important than improvement of the general welfare.
Face it; even the tea-baggers all shout slogand havin to do with only their own personal well-being without giving a rat’s ass about the good of society at large. “NO SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, but keep your hands off my MEDICARE,” indeed! What ignorance!
The MAJORITY of WHICH citizens? Sorry, I don’t buy that bridge. Find another sucker. I may have been born at night, but not LAST night!
Cathryn Mataga
Well I have to give Russia Today credit — Assange from his house arrest interviewing Nasralla. is a combination designed to maximally piss off err, the usual suspects, and the credits at the end all being blacked out. It is done with a tiny bit of humor. Assange isn’t a natural interviewer, I think, though the conditions of dealing with the simultaneous interpreters makes having a natural conversation difficult. I think he might grow into the job.
annanic
I’m sure you are right and I love the idea of the token.Except that what seems rational to people planning for the future , may not be the same as rational judged by those looking back with hindsight.Also , what appears irrational to an outsider , may be rational to someone with expert knowledge.
Also , there are problems with internet discussions such as this: links are to sites of a similar viewpoint , and dissenters are moderated or ridiculed out.
“‘Front Groups, Not Issues!’ Yes, the 99% Spring is a Fraud“, by CHARLES M. YOUNG, CounterPunch, 13-15 April 2012
This article is kind of an interesting data-point on something called the ‘99% Spring’ I think this hints at the current state of political organization among the big-D Democrats these days.
The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling..
So no diversity of ideas here. It’s a political party.
“What about May 1?” said a retired professor.
“What about it?” said Landis.
“I heard that Occupy Wall Street was calling for a general strike. They’re planning actions all around midtown and they’re saying that nobody should go to work that day.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Landis. “We’re talking about hypothetical situations here.”
It’s like this strange kind of discussion that claims to support some sort of protest, but then, no, apparently only hypothetical action is allowed to be discussed. It all sounds so boring and utterly tone-deaf. No ideas outside of the supposed mainstream are discussed — and no actual action can actually be planned. Only some kind of weird indirect discussion of one might be able to do, if only…. What a joke.
Is there a tag I can use for quotes? I tried ‘ ‘ but that didn’t seem to work
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Did the media forget Qassem Soleimani was a terrorist?
Posted By: Fox News January 5, 2020
This is a rush transcript from “The Ingraham Angle,” January 3, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Raymond Arroyo: I’m Raymond Arroyo in for Laura Ingraham. This is the Ingraham Angle from New York City tonight. We have the latest from Iraq and the breaking news from the region. What are the next steps in the wake of the U.S. strike on that Iranian terrorist mastermind? Should we be worried about retaliation from Iran and why are Democrats so outraged that Trump took out another bad guy? Congressman Matt Gaetz and Lee Zeldin are here along with Walid Phares. Also, was Soleimani a brutal murderer or revered leader? Some in the media seem confused. Tammy Bruce and Matt Schlapp will expose it all. And stay until the end of the show tonight. We have something special, Friday Follies, and I’m going to be joined by two incredible guests. Trump upsets liberal Hollywood by taking out a terrorist, and I hit the streets to discover if seniors are really playing more video games. Tom Shillue and actor Robert Davi join me right here in studio. You don’t want to miss this. But first, Iran is vowing revenge for the killing of its Revolutionary Guard leader in an airstrike yesterday. It’s not clear how they’ll retaliate, but U.S. troops and security officials are on high alert. And now there are reports of another deadly airstrike on Iranian backed militias in Iraq. For the latest details, we go to Fox’s Benjamin Hall, who is live in Amman, Jordan. Benjamin.
Benjamin Hall: Raymond, good evening from Jordan. Yes. All day we have been waiting for some possible retaliation from the Iranians, but actually out of nowhere came the surprise announcement that there may have been another U.S. strike just north of Baghdad. It is not yet confirmed yet, but early reports suggest that it may have targeted two cars, one of them carrying a key finance facilitator close to Qasem Soleimani. But, of course, the man everyone is still talking about is Qasem Soleimani, the notorious head of the Al Quds Force, the man who is considered the architect of Iran’s foreign aggression, as well as its terrorism. He also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. soldiers. That attack took place early this morning as he was leaving Baghdad Airport. He had just flown in from Lebanon, and his convoy was struck by a Reaper drone with him, with the head of the militia, which led the attack on the U.S. embassy earlier this week. Qasem Soleimani was said to be actively developing plans for further imminent attacks against Americans in the region. Iran has said it will retaliate, and the State Department has told Americans to leave Iraq immediately. The strike has also strained U.S. Iraqi relations. And tomorrow, the prime minister, Abdullah Maliki, will convene parliament because he says the attack violates the terms of the agreement under which U.S. troops are in Iraq. There is even a suggestion they might be asked to leave. But for now, instead, 4,000 more troops are being deployed to the region. The U.S. are saying that it is an appropriate and precautionary action. But despite this build up, President Trump has made it very clear the U.S. does not want war with Iran. He has said that the death of Qasem Soleimani should have come in previous administrations. It happened now because the opportunity was there and also because it saved lives. Raymond.
Raymond Arroyo: Benjamin, thank you and be safe out there. Iran may be threatening to retaliate, but President Trump today had a stern message for the Islamic Republic.
[start video clip]
President Trump: We do not seek war, we do not seek nation building, we do not seek regime change, but as president, I will never hesitate to defend the safety of the American people. You.
[cheers]
So, let this be a warning to terrorists, if you value your own life, you will not threaten the lives of our citizens.
[end video clip]
Raymond Arroyo: Joining me now with analysis is retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, senior fellow and military expert at Defense Properties. Also, Walid Phares, Fox News foreign analyst, and Congressman Mark Green of the House Homeland Security Committee and a former special operations flight surgeon. Thank you all for being here, gents. Colonel Davis, might harsh retaliation from Iran — what might that look like? Give me an idea of how they might retaliate when they say, “harsh retaliation.”
Mark Green: Yeah. They are going to probably go after as soft of targets as they can, or at least were targets of opportunity. And, you know, that’s primarily in the form of American military bases scattered throughout Syria in different parts of Iraq, because that’s where they have the greatest access to our troops. And that’s probably who’s at the greatest risk right now, which, of course, underscores what I’ve been saying for many months that we need to withdraw our troops in there to limit the strategic risk that we have. Because they’re not doing anything to protect our security right now, and their military mission that Trump sent them over there on was long since accomplished. And if we would draw those troops out there, then we’d significantly lower the risk and make it even harder for Iran to do anything in retaliation.
Raymond Arroyo: [affirmative] Walid, might they have the capability of reaching the homeland? That’s the big question here.
Walid Phares: Yes, they do have this capability. They have cells. Our national security agencies are aware of that. But the Iranians are rational in the way they aggress. So, they calculate the reactions and the strikes back. Iran is not an empire. It’s not a power that can sustain a direct clash with the United States, even if it can isolate a patrol or an individual, but at the end of the day, they’ve seen that for a one attack they’ve done against the embassy, they’ve lost their leadership. And that’s a major strategic lesson they’ve learned.
Raymond Arroyo: Okay. I have to play something for you. Obama’s former acting CIA director was glad to see Soleimani gone, but he also offered this dire warning on CBS. Watch.
Michael Morell: The world is a better place without him. The problem is that comes at a very high cost. Number one, there will be dead Americans, dead civilian Americans as a result of this, possibly over the next few days. At a time and place of their choosing, they’re going to conduct a terrorist strike that kills a senior American official and that could be anywhere in the world.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman Green, do you believe they have the capability to reach a U.S. senior official and kill them?
Mark Green: Thanks, Raymond, for having me on the show. And first, I want to give a shout out to the men and women of the U.S. military who took this murderous thug out.
Raymond Arroyo: [affirmative].
Mark Green: You know, I’ve served on these missions, did these kind of missions myself. Their bravery is what really needs to be getting a shout out here. But, yeah. Iran has considerable capability both to go kinetic — they can do rocket attacks on our military forces in the region. You know, we’re also at risk when those troops, you know, transfer or move on roads. Their improved IED and their, you know, armor piercing IEDs are very dangerous. And our southern border, I mean, we can’t get the Democrats to help us secure our southern border. So, yeah, absolutely. There’s an opportunity for them to come and hurt Americans.
Raymond Arroyo: Frightening. Former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice doesn’t think killing –.
Mark Green: Get out of here.
Raymond Arroyo: — Soleimani was quite worth it. I want you all to listen to this.
Susan Rice: It’s not clear that when you look at the strategic landscape and the costs and the consequences of such an action, whether the benefits outweigh the real risks.
Wolf Blitzer: Did the president, President Trump, do the right thing?
Susan Rice: I think, Wolf, that’s a very complicated question. And I am doubtful that ultimately it will prove to be the right thing.
Wolf Blitzer: Are Americans safer today than they were two days ago?
Susan Rice: I don’t think so.
Raymond Arroyo: Colonel Davis, this is the woman who claimed that Benghazi was caused by a movie. Is she right? Are we no safer after killing Soleimani?
Daniel Davis: Well, it may well be, at least in the near term, that some of our troops are at higher risk than they might have been. And other people in the region are at higher risk because of the actions that were taken here. But that’s part of the calculated risk that we take. You know, the question is, are they going to do that? Are they going to risk — as President Trump has made very clear today — that he would have even stronger retaliation were that to happen. But that also — we’ve got to be honest — that underscores the danger of, you know, cascading retaliation to where it could potentially spill into a war. And that would be absolutely the worst thing in our interests.
Raymond Arroyo: Walid Phares, in my reading, I discovered that two administrations, Obama and Bush, had the option of taking this guy out, this mastermind in Iran who spread such mischief and mayhem all across the Middle East. They decided not to do it. Why was now the right time?
Walid Phares: Well, first of all, why they decided not to do it is very important and relevant. The Obama administration was engaged in negotiating the Iran deal. And for that purpose, they let a lot of these militias operate from Hezbollah to the Hashid, of course, to the parts of Iran across the region. We lost basically four or five years of countering these militias because of the Iran deal, which was ended at the end of the day. The last two years of the Bush administration were difficult because of the sharp opposition when Congress has changed a majority. Now, the Trump administration has this opportunity, not just because we are superior on the military level, the peoples of the region are rising. And I am surprised that many U.S. analysts are not even factoring this in the analysis. We see millions of Iraqis demonstrating against these militias, burning their headquarters. Iraq is about to tip over. Iran is the same thing. There are protests in Lebanon against Hezbollah. That is not part of the analysis at all. We think that Iran is as strong as it was before.
Raymond Arroyo: Okay, we’re going to get to all of that. And gentlemen, I want to remind people how we got here. In Iraq the Baath Party came to power in the 1970s. Saddam Hussein became dictator in 1979. When he invaded Kuwait in 1990, the U.S. and its allies repelled him with Operation Desert Storm. Years later, fearing Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq in 2003. While ousting Saddam might have seemed a good idea at the time, it did unleash a string of unintended consequences that empowered Iran. The mullahs began to exercise control within the Iraqi government, supporting Shiite Islamic groups and militia groups. Nearly 5,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq over 15 years, and we spent an excess of a trillion dollars attempting to create a democracy in the Fertile Crescent. The utter incompetence of the last administration only made things worse. And despite the military pullbacks, United States personnel are still deeply committed in the region. I want you all to look at this map. There are 5,000 troops in Iraq today, not counting the 3,750 additional troops the president has just deployed. In Jordan, there were 2,795 troops, 13,000 in Kuwait and 12,000 in Afghanistan. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, Walid Phares, Congressman Mark Green, I want to bring you all in on this. Colonel, aren’t these troops more targets for the Iranians? I mean, I understand targeted strikes, but shouldn’t we be pulling back rather than sending more troops to this very unstable region?
Daniel Davis: Absolutely. I mean, I couldn’t agree with you any more strongly. I mean, and that’s one of the things President Trump ran on was to end these endless wars and that’s why the American people voted for him and it makes a lot of tactical sense. I can assure you I fought four combat deployments in this area, and I know that they’re not going to accomplish anything. Those small number of troops there, we definitely need to withdraw them, get them out of harm’s way because they’re not defending our interest anyway and so that gives us a lot more freedom and now then that leaves the Iraqis and the Iranians to have to deal with the political turmoil in their own countries on their own without the worry about American troops in the way.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman Green, you interrogated Saddam Hussein. Very briefly, tell me what he told you. And were we looking in retrospect was it folly to remove Saddam Hussein when he was holding down many of these Islamic elements that we’ve seen bubble up and in many ways destroy the civil society of that country?
Mark Green: No. I don’t think so at all. I think it was the right thing to do. He was a murderous dictator. We know he used mustard agent on his own people. We have the images. We have the —
Raymond Arroyo: I know but there’s murderous dictators across the world. They’re in Sudan. They’re in Syria. They’re right now still in power. Do we remove them all?
Mark Green: Well, if you’ve got a guy like Saddam Hussein and if you look at the intelligence that we had at the time, which there was good intelligence that he might have a nuclear — he was looking for fissile material, I think it was the appropriate thing. Now, some of the mistakes that happened afterwards, you know, we did not do a great job in nation building. But taking Saddam Hussein out I thought was the right thing and when I talked to him —
Raymond Arroyo: What did he tell you, very briefly, Congressman?
Mark Green: He told me all sorts of things like why he started the Kuwait war, why he started the Iran/Iraq war. I mean, he was a megalomaniac who thought he was the king of the world. He thought he could do anything and his disappearance from the world stage is good for the world.
Raymond Arroyo: Walid Phares, —
Mark Green: Just like this Soleimani.
Raymond Arroyo: I’ve got to move on. Gentlemen, back in 2017, President Trump said this about Saudi Arabia or in Saudi Arabia rather about America’s role in the Middle East going forward. Watch.
[begin video clip]
Donald Trump: The nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them. The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves, for their country, and frankly for their families and for their children.
Raymond Arroyo: Walid Phares, doesn’t this latest troop deployment violate the president’s Middle East doctrine?
Walid Phares: Not at all because what we have not aired are the other parts of the speech where he told them drive them out. Drive the jihadists out. Drive the Iranian regime out and we will stand by you. It doesn’t mean that we will do your wars. You can revolt against them and we will be backing you by all the possible ways we can and commenting on this map, all the forces that we have now in the Middle East are not even equal to the initial force that we have deployed in Iraq. I’m against the idea of having a huge army but these forces basically are mobile and the last argument they’re going to be fired at, no. We are going to have them be the target. We’re not going to be the targets ourselves.
Raymond Arroyo: Okay. Very quickly, Walid, inform people about — I mean, I have long been and I will be in full disclosure I was very dubious about President Bush going into Iraq because I saw the Chaldeans, the Christian community there, utterly ruptured and leaders at the time warn this will destroy us. That has come to pass. That community’s gone and with it went civil society. You see an upside to this strike against this Soleimani that there could be a silver lining here. What is it, Walid?
Walid Phares: Look, I see an upside if we continue to do certain strategic actions. The downside if we just do it. And then go do nothing. For example, the Christians in the north that you are very concerned about, the Chaldeans, the Syrians and even the Yazidis have been refugees for the last now four or five years. By weakening this organization which is stopping them from going back home, we can bring the refugees back home and civil society since you mentioned civil society have we not seen for the last three months what was happening from Baghdad to Basra all these young Shia and majority in Iraq today is against these militias. So, we get to the 99 percent of the process. We get to [unintelligible] and then we go back home.
Raymond Arroyo: Yeah. Gentlemen, Adam Schiff seems to be up to his old tricks again. This time questioning the timing of Trump’s strike. Watch this.
Adam Schiff: I have yet to be fully satisfied that the administration either has a strategy, that this is not simply a one-off act of retaliation or preemptive strike. The question is why the administration chose this moment, why this administration made the decision to remove him from the battlefield when other administrations of both parties decided that would escalate the risks not reduce them.
Raymond Arroyo: Colonel, what do you make of a congressman, particularly a political adversary, questioning the timing of an attack and a president’s duty and constitutional duty to protect his troops and the homeland?
Daniel Davis: Well, I think President Trump has already answered that question pretty soon. They said they had actionable intelligence. The secretary of defense said that we had information that they were in the middle, in the midst of planning an attack that could have potentially killed hundreds of people. So, I think that has been pretty much answered. But all along those same lines is one of the things I hope President Trump does do is that when he sent those troops in there into both Iraq and Syria it was with an actionable military mission that could be accomplished, which was to drive ISIS out of their caliphate which he successfully accomplished but now then those troops are still there and they don’t have a military accomplishable mission. In fact, it’s very vague which is always a bad situation because that’s when you can get into mission creep. That’s why I hope the president withdraws them very soon.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman Green, before I let you go, are you concerned that the Republican Party is now cast as the regime change in the Middle East war party once again and the consequences that could have in 2020?
Mark Green: No, not at all. I mean, the president has responded honestly quite measured to what Iran is doing. You look at when the drone was shot down. He specifically chose not to go kinetic and to use a computer virus. And then they attacked with 11 rocket attacks our bases. He chose five bases, camps of theirs to attack and then they attacked a U.S. embassy. This is sovereign U.S. territory. So, he went and took out the guy who planned the mission. He’s very, very measured and proportional. I don’t think that that’s the image of the Republican Party. Now, I will say that, you know, with folks like Senator Warren and Adam Schiff running around saying that this is an assassination using the terms that the Iranians are using, I mean, that certainly emboldens the enemy when they don’t support the troops that are in the field. This is not an assassination. These soldiers are there under congressional authority. The War Powers Act has nothing to do with this and yet they’re out there talking about that stuff. It’s ridiculous.
Raymond Arroyo: Colonel, Walid, Congressman, thank you all for being here. We’ll see what Iran does next. We’ll stay in touch. Coming up, does Nancy Pelosi think she’s the president? She and other Dems are whining about Trump not getting permission to kill Soleimani. But did he need it? Congressman Matt Gaetz and Lee Zeldin fire back next.
[commercial break]
Raymond Arroyo: Congressional Democrats are furious with President Trump for not getting their permission to strike terrorist mastermind, Qasem Soleimani.
Chuck Schumer: The operation against Soleimani in Iraq was conducted, however, without specific authorization and any advance notification or consultation with Congress. I’m a member of the Gang of Eight, which is typically briefed in advance of operations of this level of significance. We were not.
Raymond Arroyo: It has an air of solemnity and prayerfulness. Joining me now is Matt Gaetz House on Service and Judiciary Committee member and Lee Zeldin of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Congressman Gaetz, does the president need Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer’s permission to launch an airstrike on a dangerous target?
Matt Gaetz: The president would need congressional authorization to start a war with Iran, but as the president made very clear, this was an effort to protect our troops and to stop a war, not to start one. What the world is witnessing is a change in doctrine. The Obama-Bush Middle East regime change doctrine was to invade and then hope to persuade people that we were liberators. Instead, the Trump doctrine is at its best when we strike the terrorists and then bring our troops home. I’m concerned about the additional troop deployments for the reasons you mentioned in the last segment. I’m grateful that President Trump is trying to end the war in Syria. He is the first president to end one of these forever wars and not start one. And we should not engage in a war with Iran absent congressional approval.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman, I don’t remember Democrats whining about the 563 drone strikes that Obama ordered. In fact, President Obama ordered ten times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The Obama administration said the strikes complied with the extremely broad authorization for the Use of Military Force Act that was passed by Congress after 9/11. Congressman Zeldin, why are airstrikes acceptable under a Democratic president, but verboten now?
Lee Zeldin: Double standards. I mean, we’ve seen it at play over the course of this year on so many different levels, but that’s your answer. And here, this particular strike was meant in order to save lives of American diplomats, to save lives of U.S. troops. Nancy Pelosi, today, she used the word “disproportionate” to talk about —
Raymond Arroyo: She did.
Lee Zeldin: — this act that was successful in taking out Soleimani. “Disproportionate?” I mean, how many hundreds of more U.S. troops have to be killed, Nancy Pelosi, before it’s proportionate? How many more thousands of U.S. troops have to lose limbs before it’s proportionate, Nancy Pelosi? So, I mean, for everything that’s happened in the past, this was important justice. But that’s not why this was done. This was done to protect American diplomats and American service members going forward. It was an emergency. It was done effectively. It was appropriate. It was legal. It was proportionate.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman, here’s how 2020 Democratic candidates are reacting to the drone strike. Listen to this.
Male Speaker: His actions now put us on the path to another war, potentially one —
Joe Biden: — who follows a string of dubious actions that President Trump has taken that have drastically increased the prospects and the risk of war with Iran and danger to Americans.
Pete Buttigieg: Taking out a bad guy is not a good idea unless you are ready for what comes next.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman Gaetz, is the president really putting us on a path to war with this strike against Soleimani in your mind?
Matt Gaetz: It is not the president’s actions that put us on the greater path to war. It was Soleimani’s actions that were leading to war. Remember, Soleimani was trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran because he believed it would enhance his political standing within Iran if he could demonstrate his survivability. Soleimani problem is he vastly overestimated his own survivability. And when folks wrote his name on the walls outside our embassy as they were attacking American soil, attacking Americans, they essentially signed his death warrant. So if I were the next leader of the Quds Force, I certainly wouldn’t want those folks writing my name on the walls of any American embassies.
Raymond Arroyo: Republicans are pretty unanimous in their support for the president’s strike. But here’s what Senator Rand Paul said today. Listen.
Rand Paul: Without a declaration of war, without Congress and the American people behind it, what you get is a messy mission. You get a mission of escalating intermittent violence, but he really has no purpose or plan. And the country doesn’t — hasn’t been told to be united. The president said he didn’t want perpetual war in the Middle East, but he’s adding more and more troops. If you don’t want perpetual war, you don’t keep sending more targets over there.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman Zeldin, does he have a point when you’re adding more troops? Are you worried that this could drag the president and your party and the country into a war, even if it’s not the intention?
Lee Zeldin: President Trump is someone who desires to end wars, not start them. And we’ve seen them throughout his entire time in office from One Nation to the next, one conflict to the next, his goal was to eliminate the ISIS caliphate, which was successful. His goal here is to protect American diplomats. It’s important to notice — note that that raid battalion that was sent over from Fort Bragg —
Raymond Arroyo: Right.
Lee Zeldin: — that was sent over while there were still these attackers outside of the U.S. embassy. The Marines sent up from Kuwait, that was something that was done while you still had these people attacking the U.S. embassy. So while Joy Reid was on MSNBC saying that this was Trump’s Benghazi, President Trump and his administration were ensuring that this was going to be a situation that was going to protect American lives. At the end of the day, it cost Qasem Soleimani his life. And I would just add that Matt Gaetz was making a ton of really important points just now, and to add to that, it’s almost like Rowhani and Zarif are writing the talking points for these Democratic presidential candidates, for the Senate Democrats, the House Democrats. They are so invested in wanting to take President Trump down.
Raymond Arroyo: And in a moment, I mean to get into the media and how they’re also echoing the same lines. But I’ve got to get to this, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz thinks she’s figured out why the president ordered the strike now.
Debbie Schultz: This action was taken more in President Trump’s self-interest rather than our national interest. Donald Trump was just impeached a week and a half ago, and we need to get to the bottom of how and who carry — helped him carry out this illegal cover up to allow him to withhold aid to help him politically and personally. That’s outrageous. And I think that has a lot to do with what this attack was about.
Raymond Arroyo: “To help him politically and personally.” Congressman Gaetz, might we be looking at the next article of impeachment against the president from this Democratic House? And is this all about distracting people from a nonexistent trial?
Matt Gaetz: It’s pretty rich when Democrats say that this is Trump attempting to distract from domestic political issues when they have used impeachment to distract from the fact that they have no agenda for the American people on health care, on infrastructure, on immigration, or really anything. And so I think that’s really the Democrats going back to the same hymn in the hymnal, because they have really no other options and no other plan for the American people.
Raymond Arroyo: Congressman, thank you both very much for your insights. Happy New Year. Now, most people aren’t shedding any tears over the killing of Soleimani, but the radical left is irate. Congressman Ilhan Omar tweeted today, “We are outraged the president would assassinate a foreign official, possibly setting off another war without congressional authorization.” Fellow squad member Rashida Talib added, “We cannot stay silent as this lawless president recklessly moves us closer to yet another unnecessary war that puts innocent lives at risk at home and across the globe.” Here to respond is Asra Nomani. She is the cofounder of the Muslim Reform Movement. Asra, why are these two congresswomen so angry over the killing of a terrorist?
Asra Nomani: Well, what Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar forget is 40 years of terror that this man and his regime have put upon the people of Iran and women and civil rights activists throughout the region. What we have done in the United States today is taken out an assassin, a man who has taken himself siege upon the dreams of generations of people here over the last 40 years. And so, what these two congresswomen have done is allowed their hatred of Donald Trump to blind themselves from the reign of terror that this man Soleimani has put upon his own people and Americans throughout the region.
Raymond Arroyo: Asra, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted she vowed to stop Trump tweeting this, “So what if Trump wants war? Knows this leads to war and needs the distraction?” There’s that line again. “Real question is will those with congressional authority step in and stop him? I know I will.” Asra, does it sound like she’s attempting here to turn impeachment into a political weapon for a foreign power?
Asra Nomani: It really feels as if what Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have done is taken this agenda to come to hour and dethrone as they put it the leader of America and what they are forgetting in this moment is that what we have faced over these last 40 years as Muslims and as reformers in our community, our regimes like the regime in Iran that do not respect democracy like we practice here in the United States, that would not even allow women like them to speak openly and publicly like they do and so they have taken the wrong side on this battle as they have on so many other battles because of this intense hatred that they have for the democratically elected leader of this country.
Raymond Arroyo: It’s really unbelievable. Thank you, Asra, for your insight. Coming up, the media seems to have forgotten just who Soleimani was. You won’t believe how some news outlets are describing the terrorist mastermind. Tammy Bruce and Matt Schlapp are here to expose the media’s latest disgrace next.
Welcome back to the Ingraham Angle. Terrorist, murderer, evil mastermind. These could all be acceptable ways of describing Qasem Soleimani. But apparently some didn’t get the memo. Last night the Washington Post called Soleimani, “Iran’s most revered military leader.” It brings to mind their eulogizing al-Baghdadi, the other terrorist, as an austere religious scholar. Remember that? Joining me now is Tammy Bruce, Fox News contributor, president of the independent woman’s voice and Matt Schlapp, chair of the American conservative union. Thank you both for being here. Now, this is how the broadcast media was describing this terrorist. Watch. [begin video clip]
Female Speaker: The U.S. has stripped Iran of an inspirational military leader.
Male Speaker: He is the second most powerful person in Iran.
Male Speaker: In Iran, he is seen as a revered military leader.
Male Speaker: This guy is regarded in Iran as a completely heroic figure personally very brave.
Raymond Arroyo: Oh, the Mother Teresa of Tehran. Tammy, why do some media outlets insist on lionizing these terrorists? What’s the motivation?
Tammy Bruce: You know, one of my favorites, by the way, is the New Yorker. Soleimani, a flamboyant construction — former construction worker and bodybuilder with snowy white hair, a dapper beard, and arching salt and pepper eyebrows, which I will have hopefully, you know, in maybe another 30 years. They’re doing it because and this is a knee jerk reaction now they’ve been trained. It’s automatic. It’s instinct because this is a good thing that President Trump did. There — they cannot accept that something that would actually in just the basic facts of reality cast a good light on the president. So, their instinct like with al-Baghdadi is to try to cast these individuals as these were like nice guys or maybe didn’t deserve this and Trump’s a maniac and you don’t love him for this because this was wrong. They are so engaged in this delusion that it’s affecting their ability even to relate basic figures and facts when it comes to reality. In fact, then it becomes a lie. It becomes a perpetual lie to the American people.
Raymond Arroyo: But it’s repeated and repeated and repeated. Matt Schlapp, how did this guy become the Mr. Rogers of Tehran? I mean, what is happening here?
Matt Schlapp: Yeah. Well, I think Tammy’s right that he’s now a foil to Donald Trump, but I think it’s important to put this in perspective. Remember under the Bush years when we went after terrorists in many cases we would arrest them and send them to Gitmo but according to the left that was abusive of their human rights.
Matt Schlapp: So, what did Obama do to enhance the human rights of terrorists? He started to assassinate them. I never read very many op-eds about it was a problem when thousands of terrorists were taken out with drones by President Obama, but here President Trump has the audacity after actionable intelligence that he was doing to go after innocence with a new attack takes the man out. Now we have to read all this about it being unconstitutional, an abridgement of human rights internationally. Barf, Raymond. Barf.
Raymond Arroyo: Tammy and Matt. I want you to listen to how CNN’s John Berman described the killing of terrorist Soleimani.
Joe Biden: That’s nothing compared to the murder of General Soleimani and this comes during the Senate impeachment trials. [end video clip]
Raymond Arroyo: Murder is unlawful, unjustified killing, okay, of a person.
Tammy Bruce: That’s correct.
Raymond Arroyo: As if we didn’t have the right.
Tammy Bruce: It’s a legal finding. Yeah.
Raymond Arroyo: Okay. But he seems to be indicating here that the president doesn’t have a right to remove a person who’s orchestrated hundreds, if not thousands of American deaths.
Tammy Bruce: Yeah. All of the effort on the left, including the impeachment, is to try to make President Trump illegitimate. Their argument is that, effectively, he shouldn’t be able to operate. He shouldn’t be allowed to operate. He shouldn’t choose Supreme Court justices. He shouldn’t act as the president. But this is not going to bode well for them next year. The American people understand what’s happening. They can make up their minds about who’s dangerous. It’s their family that are in the military. This was — these were specialized strikes. No civilians were injured. We are going to manage this. And you’ll remember he was attacked for removing our troops from the border of Syria —
Tammy Bruce: — because that was abandoning our allies. There is nothing this man can do that will be approved of. And the American people see this, I believe, for what it is.
Raymond Arroyo: Matt Schlapp, you heard earlier there are some concerns, even among congressional Republicans, that we may be entering another endless war or quagmire here. But I want to contrast the handwringing and the depiction of Trump’s order to take out Soleimani with the way the media reacted to Osama bin Laden’s death during the Obama administration. Listen.
Male Speaker: President Obama will be remembered as the leader who nailed bin Laden.
Female Speaker: And it could be the defining moment of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Female Speaker: President Obama’s talk about unity does reflect a real palpable feeling in a lot of the country.
Female Speaker: It was breathtaking, and the moment of Barack Obama’s presidency so far.
Raymond Arroyo: I haven’t heard any of this breathless commentary —
Tammy Bruce: I need a cigarette after that.
Raymond Arroyo: — since Trump removed these terrorists. Matt, are terrorists only worth removing if a Democratic president does it?
Matt Schlapp: Look, it’s a pretty scary thing, which is there was a time in this country where there was a national security consensus, be you liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, when it came to our national security, we could stand together. I applauded Barack Obama when he took out Osama bin Laden. I’m disgusted that these Democrats who want to be the commander in chief and want to replace Donald Trump can’t even stand up for the security of the American people and our allies. And remember, we’ve been at war with Iran for 40 years. We’ve never recognized this regime.
Tammy Bruce: A cold war.
Matt Schlapp: This is not a state that’s recognized by the American government. They are as rogue as al-Qaida is rogue. If it’s okay to take out Osama bin Laden, you should be able to take out a terrorist like Soleimani.
Tammy Bruce: And can I add —
Raymond Arroyo: Yeah.
Tammy Bruce: — part of the media complaint is that, “Oh, this is going to be perpetual war.” And even the complaints of some people in Congress.
Raymond Arroyo: Yes.
Tammy Bruce: We were told it was going to take 30 years to get rid of ISIS. It took 18 freaking months.
Raymond Arroyo: [laughs]
Tammy Bruce: Donald Trump does not do perpetual anything. He’s a businessman. There are end points. The faster you get something built, the fast you do something, the better —
Raymond Arroyo: The better.
Tammy Bruce: — for the overall picture of what you’re achieving. This is about getting things done. And finally, we have an action — man of action in the White House.
Raymond Arroyo: Before I run out of time, I want both of you to react to this. Fox News’ Peter Doocy today asked Joe Biden if he’d greenlight an airstrike to save American lives. Listen.
Peter Doocy: If you were ever handed a piece of intelligence that said you can stop an imminent attack on Americans, but you have to use an airstrike to take out a terror leader, would you pull the trigger?
Joe Biden: Well, we did. The guy’s name was Osama bin Laden.
Female Speaker: Thank you so much.
Peter Doocy: And weren’t you — didn’t you tell President Obama not to go after bin Laden that day?
Joe Biden: No, I didn’t. I didn’t.
Raymond Arroyo: “No, I didn’t.” Now, Uncle Joe must be having a senior moment because that’s not exactly what he told Obama. Here’s Joe Biden from 2012.
Joe Biden: Mr. President, my suggestion is don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.
Raymond Arroyo: Matt, is it any wonder that Bob Gates said Biden was wrong about every foreign policy issue over the last four decades? What’s going on here?
Matt Schlapp: I’m having a flashback to another Democratic presidential candidate. I think Joe Biden was against the assassination of Osama bin Laden before he was for it.
Raymond Arroyo: Tammy?
Tammy Bruce: Yeah. Look, this is, I think — this is why primaries are important, campaigns are important, people being in front of the camera, being asked questions, hard questions, which falls always to Peter Doocy, apparently.
Tammy Bruce: Which is great for us. But it really shows you the nature of what politicians have gotten used to doing, lying, and making things up as they go along. We’re in an age now, technological age, where we can immediately remind people about what was really said. That’s a benefit for the country.
Tammy Bruce: And these are the kinds of things that will make his candidacy, of course, and they have a problem.
Raymond Arroyo: Tammy Bruce, Matt Schlapp, thank you both for being here. See you soon. Coming up, what could Trump do to make Hollywood hate him even more? If you answered kill a terrorist, you’re right. Tom Shillue and actor Robert Davi are here for more on Friday Follies. Stay there.
Raymond Arroyo: It’s Friday, that means it’s time for Friday Follies. You didn’t think we’d skipped this week, did you? Hollywood is enraged that the U.S. killed a terrorist, senior citizens get a new hobby, and the pope gets slap happy. Joining us now with all the details is comedian Tom Shillue, Fox News contributor and host of Fox Nations, the quiz show, and actor-singer Robert Davi. Thank you both for being here. This is an all-star panel tonight, gentlemen, thank you.
Male Speaker: Really good to be here. Thanks for having us.
Raymond Arroyo: Now, Hollywood is in an uproar over the death of brutal terrorist Qasem Soleimani. They took to Twitter to express their outrage. Rose McGowan felt the need to apologize to Iran. She wrote, “Dear Iran, the USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. Fifty two percent of us humbly apologize. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us.” Tom, she later apologized for that but what do you see here? What’s going on?
Tom Shillue: Does she realize that she would not be very welcome in Iran? The [unintelligible] would not appreciate many of the outfits that she’s worn on the red carpet.
Raymond Arroyo: Including that one.
Tom Shillue: Yes. But she — look, I don’t want to pick on Rose McGowan. She seems to have been chewed up and spit out by Hollywood but, you know, so I encourage her to keep up her fight against Harvey Weinstein and all these pigs who went after her when she was a young actress. But with the politics, she’s not so bright.
Raymond Arroyo: Well, as Tammy Bruce said on the way out, the very people she’s trying to bring to justice she wouldn’t be able to do that if she were in Iran. Now, Robert, this is director Rob Reiner. He tweeted, “What a horrible sinking feeling having a commander in chief who you know is a pathological liar trying to justify striking the heart of Iran’s military.” The heart of Iran’s military? Is he for real?
Robert Davi: You know, it’s astounding to me. The — I feel like we’re in a clown world. When I saw the response to a lot of the people, the media, the politicians and then also Rob Reiner and the rest on the strike against a terrorist, since I’m a kid all I remember is death to America from Iran. Burning of the American flag. What Ronald Reagan went through with Jimmy Carter, the appeasement. These people forget about what happened in Nazi Germany in the ’30s when everyone was appeasing. The same left of Hollywood, the same left of the politicians appeased and then until Hitler killed six million Jews then everyone now turns a different — I mean, it’s a clown — it’s crazy, Raymond. I don’t understand it. The heart of the Iran —
Raymond Arroyo: These operations used to bring Americans together. It’s troubling that it doesn’t on any level and, you know, the troops, the people in harm’s way, that’s secondary. Now, I want to turn to something a little lighter because we need a palate cleanser. According to a recent survey, more adults over 50 are playing video games. The AARP survey claims that in three years’ time the elder gamer population has grown from 40.2 million gamers in 2016 to 50.6 million today. Now, we wanted to meet these people, so I hit the streets to find them.
Raymond Arroyo: What game are you playing and what system are you on?
Female Speaker: I don’t play video games at all.
Male Speaker: Um. I sometimes log on to a Sudoku site.
Female Speaker: I don’t play.
Female Speaker: I do play cell phone games.
Raymond Arroyo: Oh. What do you play on cell phone?
Female Speaker: Solitaire.
Raymond Arroyo: I got a Sudoku across the street.
Male Speaker: I play absolutely no games.
Raymond Arroyo: How about you?
Female Speaker: None.
Raymond Arroyo: No Fortnite?
Female Speaker: Nope. None.
Raymond Arroyo: No Grand Theft Auto?
Female Speaker: No.
Male Speaker: No. I have a car, and please don’t give anybody any ideas, okay?
Raymond Arroyo: Tom, do you really believe there are 50 million elderly people playing video games?
Tom Shillue: Well, it depends on how you define games because the article you sent me, the woman was profiled, she likes playing Wii bowling.
Raymond Arroyo: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean —
Robert Davi: That’s a good game.
Raymond Arroyo: I know but do chess and word puzzles really count as video — they’re not entering, you know, they’re not playing Fortnite.
Robert Davi: They’re not playing Halo 5.
Raymond Arroyo: Right. They’re not doing that. Now I have to hit this story, no pun intended, before we leave. The Pope during a New Year’s Eve visit to St. Peter’s Square encountered an Asian pilgrim. She crossed herself then she reached out to him and he slapped her hand. On New Year’s Eve he apologized saying, “Many times we lose our patience. I do, too, and I’m sorry for yesterday’s bad example.” Now everybody loses their patience but not everyone is the Pope. Thoughts. Robert Davi.
Robert Davi: Well, it was kind of jarring when I saw that slapping.
Raymond Arroyo: Oh, yeah.
Robert Davi: It reminded me of my grandfather when I used to tease him and then he would kind of like — I mean, all right, but he’s — you got to realize he’s the representation of Christ. He is not Christ.
Robert Davi: But at the same time what she wanted to tell him, what I understood, was that the underground Christians in China — was that a dicey story?
Raymond Arroyo: That hasn’t been confirmed. We’re not sure.
Robert Davi: It’s not confirmed. Oh, I see.
Raymond Arroyo: There are some rumors that that may be what he’s talking about, but we couldn’t confirm.
Robert Davi: But I could see, I mean, you know, he might have physically had some pain and that’s a reaction.
Raymond Arroyo: Tom.
Tom Shillue: This is like the Zapruder film. I keep watching it over and over. The first time I thought it was the Pope’s fault and then I said wait a minute. She must have yanked his arm. I think it was her fault and now I’m back and I’m thinking the Pope obviously he overreached. We can tell that because he apologized.
Tom Shillue: So, I, you know, I think the slap was a little hasty, but we know — Raymond, you remember, it was a few months back when he was —
Raymond Arroyo: With the ring thing.
Tom Shillue: When he was pulling his hand away.
Raymond Arroyo: We have video of that, which we may — we’ll play that out to the end, okay? Gentlemen, thank you both. Hang around. Final thoughts and I’m going to keep these guys in line. We’ll have a word in a moment. Stay there.
Robert Davi: Poor Pope.
Raymond Arroyo: Poor Pope.
Raymond Arroyo: Well, we thought for a moment we’d sing Oh Soleimani, but we decided not to do that. Robert Davi is at Birdland in New York on the 20 —
Robert Davi: Yes, 25th of January.
Raymond Arroyo: — 5th of January.
Robert Davi: Saturday night. Get your tickets.
Raymond Arroyo: Tom Shillue, Fox Nation quiz show is a blast. I’ve done it once. He didn’t ask me back but that’s it and you can read the Will Wilder book. The whole series is available everywhere on Amazon and anywhere you buy books. Grab them. They’re great family reading. That’s all the time we have tonight. Want to thank Laura for letting me sit in. I’m Raymond Arroyo for the Ingraham Angle. Shannon Bream take —
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Three Footnotes to About 2,500 Words on Why I Still Bother (to Blog). (#2 of 2,June 29, 2019)
Three Footnotes to About 2,500 Words on Why I Still Bother (to Blog). (#2 of 2,June 29, 2019) (short-link ends “-ad3” | just under over 2,000 words). Two Posts published in a row only to segregate the footnotes from post In About 2,500 Words,** Why I Still Bother… (short-link ends “-ac4″/ #1 of 2) which really should be read first. It’s more important and has more content.
These footnotes are named, not numbered; each has its own text box and background color.
Footnote: Taxation + Tax-Exempt Sector: “Not quite the level-playing field facilitator…”
The private, tax-exempt sector can’t even be seen as a whole without significant and ongoing attempts to follow tax returns (audited financial statements, often in rare supply, are also necessary). Unfortunately (?–is it really fortune/happenstance, or coincidental?), structure and access to databases of IRS tax returns are designed, organized, and controlled by the same tax-exempt sector (increasingly, merging into each other, as “Foundation Center” recently did by acquiring “Guidestar” and now labeling it “Candid”) Or, The Urban Institute did by re-structuring its previous data base “NCCS” (National Center for Charitable Statistics), which I just revisited after having noted a year or so back that it’d been shut down; readers were directed to just a few alternate providers). IRS.gov holds much, but doesn’t upload several years worth of returns, and not all organizations that file or once filed are searchable on its Exempt Organization Search list.
Aaron Swartz Arrest, Trial, Awards .. from “theFamousPeople.com,” viewed June 27, 2019) Click image to enlarge.
I’ve posted on this from time to time. I read Guidestar (formerly Philanthropic Research) and Foundation Center (and The Urban Institute’s) tax returns.. I’ve talked (blogged) about on-line platforms claimed as sponsors by other nonprofits (GiveWell, JustGive, etc.) …. I’ve talked (blogged) about the problems with not just incompatible interstate but also basically unreliable databases, BOTH public and private, and the lack of even a pretense by the USDOJ in providing one (that is ONE) database for its distributed grants. ### (See right below this footnote)
Years ago, I also looked at the JSTOR (history, tax returns) organizations… remember, when, and why outstandingly talented* Aaron Swartz (MIT, invented Reddit, 1986-2013), as reported, committed suicide while facing multiple federal felony charges and prospect of 50 years in federal prison for improper downloads? (*See also family background, and private education, but even so…).
… Designers (that is, developers, builders, whoever undertakes to finance the database library projects) decide what IS and what is NOT measured, data entry standards, and who gets to see what, and if so, at what cost….which reports can be run from it, etc. Meanwhile, I’m seeing rampant (the word fits!) problems in basic data entry of names, organizations, and symptoms of very strange redirections of basic organization name searches, etc. Read this blog long enough or far back enough; when examples show up, I call attention to it.
Recently I’ve been noticing how and where community foundations (with significant clout and usually, assets, DAFs (Donor Advised Funds, etc.) fail to show respect by publishing their lists of grantees (if they’re filing Forms 990, that’d be, after 2008, IRS, Schedule I, grants to domestic (meaning, in the USA) organizations and governments (a) consistently and (b) in visible-to-the-naked-eye format ( c) in the IRS-requested format, which is many rows per page, not a thousand pages (electronic) of only two to three grantees per page and every 3rd or 4th row another column heading — reducing the ability to scan or browse.
Even if all involved were voluntarily showing respect, and playing “nice,” it’s still not really traceable, or I believe, being tracked or even sensed, accounting-wise. The systems are just “there” doing their thing, year after year.. No working human being in his or her right mind could assess or monitor it sufficiently. For those who may have a mind to,** for funders or grantees it seems “no big deal” to simply change a legal business name, or claim to have changed it (affecting what a person might use as a name search) when in fact it means “acquired a dba.” **(I’m one, but the “in her right mind” descriptor may change if I keep it up for much longer….) (Recent example found: “CharityWatch.org” where “CharityWatch is a dba, the legal name of the California entity with a Chicago address is American Institute for Philanthropy, Inc.). I tweeted about it June 25). Other phenomena (behaviors) include closing down one business entity and starting up another similarly named but not identical entity — while maintaining the website as if there was no real transition in corporate (charity) identity. Or having related organizations all using the same website, but the website doesn’t exactly reveal this — only the tax returns (including ones you wouldn’t know to look for unless you read the main charity’s tax return which mentions them — or sometimes doesn’t — on a Schedule R or otherwise. Large grants which are alleged to have been delivered often do not show up as received on the exact grantee’s tax returns for the same time span.
The examples are endless. I’ve read thousands of tax returns (not keeping count!) in the past decade, and with each one, typically also look through any entity’s website (usually searching for a business identity to find whether a tax return exists and who, in fact, it represents). .. The preceding paragraph is just off the top of my head.
### See Incredible how Gullible We’ve Been. For Example: Where is ANY USDOJ Grants Awarded Database? Why won’t the USDOJ Even Divulge Actual Grant Numbers on its token LISTS (not Database) of Grantees? [Started mid-Aug. 2016<~~ Published Aug. 31, 2018!<~~]
(Day-after update) I looked for one of my posts on the USDOJ’s lack of databases, which I discovered over time looking up grants cited by domestic violence advocacy organizations. Judging from the tags on this post (see image), that included “BWJP.”
LGH Aug. 31, 2018 post ‘Incredible How Gullible We’ve Been..’{{Look at the tag citing the DOJ grants I was looking for back then. Imaged for 6-20-2019 post #2}}
With all the mothers and others quoting United States’ domestic violence advocacy groups which cite their sponsoring federal grants (from HHS, DOJ or anywhere else), why have not more women, in particular, or men (hey, fathers’ rights groups — this was an easy target, yet has anyone taken aim at it yet? (Of course it couldn’t be only aimed at the “OVW” part of the US DOJ and Office Justice Programs: the description applies to the WHOLE department)… It’s just a little detail, but when there’s a main body of text (citing references) or an on-line publication (citing sponsorship), what kind of individual doesn’t check them out and learn a bit more on who’s producing them?
[Justice.gov is the main website. “Feel free.” FYI, yes I’m aware of USASpending.gov. Ever tried using it and producing a report in form useable enough to communicate with others? Here’s a link from Congressman Adam Schiff (California’s 28th District). As you can see, it’s aimed at people looking to receive federal grants — not people looking to see federal grants awarded for a better sense of the redistributions: https://schiff.house.gov/help/federal-grants
I spend a LOT of time, when reading publications on-line, whether some academic journal that’s let down its barriers for specific purposes, or someone else who published an article from such a journal on-line, or the publication of well-known nonprofits using public (or public and private) backing — even on-line media websites, well-known ones, IF I’m going to read an article published under a certain organizational name, I’m going to look for who wants that information out. Generally speaking, we know that subscriptions alone don’t fund most media.
Footnote “The Clapham Group”
(There are some tax returns in two tables below this light-yellow background-color section. They go with it, but were added after the move and have no background color or special borders. The third footnote is light-blue and easy to distinguish. The tax returns simply look up organizations named in the biographical summary of The Clapham Group Principal.).
From “The Clapham Group” “About” “Team” [scroll down for] “Mark Rodgers” description which didn’t display well (interfering pop-ups). I just wanted to know who it was, so copied & pasted the text in order to read it. Notice prominent Christian, “faith-based” references. Interesting.
Mark Rodgers, Principal (The Clapham Group) (context: he’s listed on Buffett-founded (Early Childhood Fund) ‘Alliance for Early Success’ in Nebraska). Board members there not paid except Exec. Director (Lisa Klein) as I recall..
Mark Rodgers is the Principal of The Clapham Group a company that seeks to influence culture upstream of the political arena. Mark served as the third-ranking Republican leadership staffer in the U.S. Senate for six years overseeing strategic planning and strategic communications. He also served as a high profile chief of staff to Senator Rick Santorum, working on Capitol Hill for a total of 16 years. He was known on the Hill for his work on such issues as poverty alleviation and global AIDS, as well as protecting life at its most vulnerable stages.
Mark is a published writer and a speaker at large and small gatherings on the topics of faith and public life, culture and caring for the least of these. His work over the years included an outreach to “culture creators,” and he has worked closely with artists such as Bono, Patty Heaton and The Fray. He still collects pop culture artifacts, as the walls of his office attest.
Mark is a social entrepreneur, and enjoys finding ways to help people “do good while doing well.” In the 1980s, Mark worked at the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation, a faith-based organization committed to addressing the social needs of Pittsburgh from a Christian perspective. He also founded the National Institute of Lay Education (NILE), which developed adult education curriculum to encourage reflecting Christian involvement in public life. He earned a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from Penn State, and attended Trinity Episcopal School for ministry. He is currently a Policy Fellow with the American Conservative Union Foundation. Mark is married to Leanne, and the proud father of four children.
I just “had to” look it up and was awestruck at how (messed up) entities labeled “American Conservative” (four showed up in a basic search at the “FoundationCenter.org” website) can be.
These two, probably less than the other two (one cannot decide what legal domicile it is — and what’s more neither can the State of California.. Another existed just one year (Initial Return 2007, terminated 2008 because it wasn’t accepted by the IRS as tax-exempt anyhow, and what looks like (unless this was intentional) a fruitcake (or possibly fabricated identity? I dnk which) President…. Whose undergraduate listed includes ‘Transpersonal Psychology’ and more degrees at California Institute of Integral Studies… (unrelated, but here’s an image (or two) from that LinkedIn). There are about 10 different Ostrolenk LinkedIns — several in the UK, one (looks older) is a lawyer. This one, however, mentions the odd-filing “American Conservative Defense Alliance” shown above:
Michael Ostrolenk3d (LinkedIn 324665 images); he formed American Conservative Defense Alliance (2007-2008, IRS tax-exempt status DENIED) still referenced ~ Screen Shot 2019-06-29
Conservative.org appears to be Mr. Rodgers’ group although I didn’t see his name offhand there (or on any tax return, but as a fellow, it might not show up: Fellows aren’t “employees” and only key or highest paid employees show up on a tax return) ; its website is also a real mess (not showing here, doesn’t even have a contact address (but BI I I I G photos and a lot of unused white space, it does), and enough VERRRRY fine print sprinkled around to communicate that it is actually a 501©4 (not tax deductible) but there exists a 501©3 too (link to it shows “error” — next to a huge photo of our current President). See next 3-image gallery and pdf (printout) of the Board of Directors page, mostly to show format. Note: there are some “read-more” links under the each person’s biography. They may still be active in a pdf. Pdf first: ACU | ‘Conservative’org’ Board of Directors (Warning| little text lots of white space | needlessly! (Read-more links may still work) printed 2019June29(<~~click first on the link, then on blank page icon to display. The blank page icon will have blog and post title above it in large print). Now the three-image gallery. First image (notice the url (web address window) sub-domain in gray window-frame at the top) is what click on the link to “501©3 Foundation” displayed. There’s no other obvious link or reference to the foundation.
ACU | ‘Conservative’org’ About (Top,Bottom) Bd of Direx etc (Warning| little text lots of white space | needlessly!) No Financials, Crappy Layout, mustB 501c3+501c4 ~~9 SShots 2019Jun29
Based on common sense and a Form 990 tax return which claims the same website, “conservative.org”, these are its last three tax returns.
Total results: 3. Search Again. (EIN#521294680, Founded 1970s, the 501©3)
American Conservative Union Foundation VA 2017 990 35 $1,296,921.00 52-1294680
American Conservative Union Foundation VA 2016 990 34 $995,110.00 52-1294680
American Conservative Union Foundation DC 2015 990 26 $1,590,940.00 52-1294680
And for the sake of consistency and comparison, here are for the 501©4. I could further detail this, but am already irritated at having to work so hard for basic information, and already know this is a common trait of some organizations:
Total results: 3. Search Again. EIN# 520810813 (founded 1960s, the 501©4)
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE UNION INC VA 2017 990O 32 $616,899.00 52-0810813
American Conservative Union VA 2016 990O 32 $1,291,202.00 52-0810813
American Conservative Union DC 2015 990O 31 $2,424,576.00 52-0810813
Notice the pattern of declining assets? Look at Part VIIB on the latest tax returns (spending $3.2M on “communications” + 50% of its total functional expenses in category “Other” (Part IX Line 11g, explained in print too messy to bother reading today, Schedule O) may have something to do with it. Whatever they’re spending the money on, judging by the condition of the website, it ain’t the website! Conferences, seemingly.
I did find the $3.2M contractor (Mohler Consulting, LLC, David T. Mohler, established 2005) registered as a business in Maryland. Another subcontractor ($183,000) “Design Foundary” even accounting for the misspelling of “Foundry”, I did not. I then looked at the street address and found a “Perfect Settings.com” Looking for this registered as a Maryland Business, however, no deal (with or without the space in the name). It showed a “trademark” so I looked for it (USPTO.GOV) briefly as a trademark (with and without the settings). No deal. I then googled “Design Foundry” spelled right, found “foundrycrew.org” which calls itself “Design Foundry” and is in Hyattville, MD (but not the same address). As I said, however, it wasn’t found registered as a business, perhaps it’s a dba. And any company can move within just a year and a half; perhaps they did, but the address doesn’t match.
There are MANY things I could say on looking at the latest tax returns (of both, above), but won’t here, particularly as I don’t know who’s listening or with whom it’d really register. Most of the comments would make sense only to people who are habitually looking at tax returns, enough to have some points of comparison and recognize professional versus unprofessional (a) presentation (b) filling out of the form (i.e., following IRS basic instructions) and (c ) taken both together, what’s likely happening with the organizations. MAYBe in another time and context.
On this database, both tax returns were photocopied (messy) and shrunk, leaving wide margins on both sides, making a bit hard to read without the “zoom” function, or if simply printed to hard copy. Why would anyone SHRINK an 8X11 document to print it to 8X11 format for scanning or whatever other purpose?
FOOTNOTE “Clarification” When I say “backed by a person,” referring to someone with a human face likely to be profiled on Forbes Magazine or the news, I also include and refer to the usual delivery method: that person’s excess corporate wealth or some of it is, of course funneled into tax-exempt foundations (whether filing 990PFs as private foundation or 990s as public charity | see IRS.gov for official definitions) or several of them formed over time). The tax-exempt foundations are typically run, controlled or funded by the person or their heirs and then circulate their grants, programmings, and shared investment platforms among others who agree with them. The more foundations and better paid their officers (not all directors take pay — but they can cite the foundations in their biographies) or investment managers (!), the greater the powerhouse. Add to this, pulling and blending in public revenues (also ongoing) from government entities, there is a “food chain” of tax-exempt entities feeding BOTH each others, certain individuals which run them, and/or the businesses (consultancies, management, etc.) which contract with them.
All of which brings up my question, is it possible to even live, work or function safely, NOT tax-exempt (which most of the population in any developed country such as the USA is) without seeking to dominate the global or national landscape, anywhere BUT as a microbe somewhere on that food chain, and hierarchy …
How is it possible to refuse to be treated collectively, like half-grown children, by the public/private visionary collaborative planners and leaders, without joining them and treating others similarly? I’m in the US, and the concept of crawling up to either agencies or nonprofits after what I already went through as a (battered) wife and mother, makes my skin crawl, still. Crawling and asking for justice, food, or even safety so as to be able to safely work for wages for food (and housing) is not, and should not be, the natural state of humanity.
And I am going to have to do it again, this week to ASK for help from people entrusted with helping me, knowing the alternative is to fight the same (and others aligned) to wrest control of it back — in a corrupt system and without the financial resources for any fight. I just used resources last year for FLIGHT to a less expensive space and safe place. I should be, at this moment FIGHTING (legally) not WRITING (in public interest) — or, in so many words, begging for enough for the very short-term, basic needs. They are two entirely different modes and mindsets.
If you don’t do the drill-downs and don’t translate the PR into economic (operating entities) terms, which can seem like a foreign language — although it certainly isn’t to those involved running such networks, rough experiences in life or no rough experiences, without doing this, you have no concept of the scope and the depth of spin in each succeeding round of program promotion… or the level of betrayal of public trust and public interest … now routine practice in public institutions collaborating and consolidating operations with each other and private funders, more and more each year. As I have been saying for several years now.
Tagged with "Drill-Down" "#DoTheDrillDown" geological pt of reference, Footnotes to Post 'In About 2500 Words' (June 29 2019), Habits of the Wealthy, Intergenerational transmission of wealth, Philanthropic Behavior of Billionaires, Public/Private Partnerships (as the Food Chain), tax exemption, Taxation vs Tax-Exemption, The Clapham Group | Mark Rodgers (AES-Alliance for Early Success | Board of Directors, Wealth poured into tax-exempt foundations to influence public policy, Why I Still Bother to Blog
« In About 2,500 Words,** Why I Still Bother… [Published June 29, 2019/#1 of 2]
FamilyCourtMatters.org Blog Previews, In Hindsight: Short(ish) Summaries (Collected July 1, 2019ff) »
WalletHub’s “Most Innovative US States” added 2019Mar20 (click link to see)
//d2e70e9yced57e.cloudfront.net/wallethub/embed/31890/geochart-innovation.html
Source: WalletHub
GOOGLE news/For later comment. #SantaClaraCountyCA #OfficeOfWomensPolicy sanjosespotlight.com/thousands-marc…. . . 10 hours ago
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Major SA parties gang up to entrench power
The SA Labor government has quietly introduced a bill to almost eliminate preferential voting for the upper house
Last week, while media and most South Australians were focused on the euthanasia debate, SA Attorney-General John Rau quietly introduced the Electoral (Legislative Council Voting) (Voter Choice) Amendment Bill. He incorporated most of his speech on 16/11/16 into Hansard p 7867 instead of reading it out.
“I and others are deeply concerned about the impact of this legislation if it passes both houses with Liberal Party support,” FamilyVoice South Australia director David d’Lima said today.
“The bill would eliminate voting tickets and private preference deals by ‘micro parties’ – that is a good thing,” he said. “But instead of adopting the new Senate voting system, where people are required to number six parties above the line in order of their preference, the SA proposal would restrict people to voting for just one party above the line. If they want to preference other parties as well, they would have to number every single box below the line – but few would do so.
“The result would be in effect, a ‘first past the post’ voting system,” Mr d’Lima said. “The bill would make it very difficult for minor party candidates to gain seats. This would deprive parliament of significant minority views that deserve to be heard.”
Both Labor and Liberal parties are said to support the bill, believing it would give them more power. “This view is short-sighted,” David d’Lima said. “I urge them to think again!”
SA MPs chose life!
Pro-life MPs Vincent Tarzia and Stephan Knoll (centre, rear) with some ‘Choose Life’ supporters outside the public gallery
FamilyVoice South Australia director David d’Lima has congratulated South Australian House of Assembly MPs who “chose life” by voting early this morning to reject a bill to legalise euthanasia.
David d’Lima was the lone member of the public in the public gallery when the third reading vote came at about 4 am. Speaker Michael Atkinson used his casting “no” vote to maintain the status quo after the vote was tied, 23:23.
Mr Atkinson had taken an active part in the debate while Deputy Speaker Frances Bedford was in the chair, leading a clause-by-clause attack on the Death with Dignity Bill .
“The Speaker’s first amendment – to change the bill’s ‘propaganda’ title to a more neutral Assisted Dying Bill – was successful,” David d’Lima said. “This move demoralised and rattled the bill’s sponsor Duncan McFetridge and other pro-euthanasia MPs.
“Labor MP Chris Picton worked hard to improve the bill with a number of amendments – but despite a 27:19 second reading vote, a majority decided that the bill’s final wording did not provide sufficient protection for vulnerable people.”
Kids do best with a mum and a dad
Large child abuse study finds kids are safest in family with married biological parents
FamilyVoice South Australia director David d’Lima is asking state MPs to vote against a bill that would allow singles and same-sex couples to adopt children.
“A very large US study of child abuse of all kinds looked at substantiated reports in six different family types, among other factors,” Mr d’Lima said today. “It found that by far the safest family type was where children were raised by their two married biological parents. The most dangerous type was where one biological parent was cohabiting with an unrelated person.
“Children released for adoption have suffered incredible loss,” he said. “They cannot be raised by their married biological parents, but they deserve married adoptive parents with both mum and dad role models – the second-safest family type.”
David d’Lima said that fathers tend to parent differently from mothers, and that both are important.
“Gender matters,” he said. “Men are different from women, and not only in their genitals. For this reason I hope that the SA parliament will again reject moves to allow people to change the sex on their birth certificates, merely by presenting a GP’s letter saying they have received counselling.
“Such a move would trivialise what it means to be a man or a woman. It would weaken current protections for women. It would be a retrograde step for South Australia.”
Please bring on the vote, Mr Premier!
Parents choose faith-based schools, expecting that all staff will uphold their faith’s values
FamilyVoice Victoria director Peter Stevens wants to know why the Andrews government is delaying, possibly indefinitely, an upper house vote on the controversial Equal Opportunity Amendment (Religious Exceptions)Bill.
The bill has already passed the Legislative Assembly. Debate has begun in the Legislative Council, and a vote was expected this week – but nothing happened.
The bill has caused great community concern because it would deny parents their right, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to determine the religious and moral education of their children.
“All staff at a faith-based school – not only chaplains, but teachers, receptionists, librarians and groundspeople – have an impact on the students by the way they live their lives,” Peter Stevens said. “Yet this bill would limit the school’s right to select the most suitable staff for all positions. A government appointee would have the power to determine whether faith is an ‘inherent requirement’ for jobs at the school.
“By contrast, Premier Andrews has no such restriction. He is free to choose all his personal staff from those who support Labor Party values. How fair is that?”
A majority of Victorian Legislative Councillors are said to share Peter Stevens’ concerns.
“Please bring on the vote, Mr Premier!” he said.
Israel moves to protect kids from online porn
A majority of Israeli children between nine and 15 have been exposed to online porn and violence
FamilyVoice research officer Ros Phillips has praised a recent move by the Israeli Knesset (parliament) to give initial approval to a bill to protect children. It would require internet service providers to block access to pornographic, gambling and violent websites by default. “Customers would have to personally contact their internet providers to have the block removed,” she said.
The bill was co-sponsored by lawmakers from across the political spectrum. The only party that refused to support the bill was left-wing Meretz.
“The damaging influence of watching, and addiction to, pornographic and severe violence has been proven in many studies, with great harm to children,” said MP Moalem-Refaeli. “Today, it is easier for a child to consume harsh content on the internet than to buy an ice cream at the local kiosk.”
The bill mentions the “negative side of the internet which includes gambling, violence, pornography, pedophilia and more, which are apt to harm the public who are exposed to them, especially children”. It also points out that 60 percent of Israeli children between the ages of nine and fifteen have already been exposed to internet pornography, and cites reports and studies of children hurt by exposure to harmful or sexual content on the internet, causing long-term damage.
Ros Phillips is hoping the current Australian Senate inquiry on the harm to children from online pornography will recommend similar legislation when it hands down its report, due on 23 November this year.
“Something needs to be done urgently to address this problem”, she said.
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Jobs Work online from anywhere in the world
Alligator (Abandon Kansas album)
Alligator (The National album)
Richard of Dunkeld
An alligator is a crocodilian in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae. The two living species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). In addition, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the Paleocene epoch about 37 million years ago.
The name "alligator" is probably an anglicized form of el lagarto, the Spanish term for "the lizard", which early Spanish explorers and settlers in Florida called the alligator. Later English spellings of the name included allagarta and alagarto.
An average adult American alligator's weight and length is 360 kg (790 lb) and 4.0 m (13.1 ft), but they sometimes grow to 4.4 m (14 ft) long and weigh over 450 kg (990 lb). The largest ever recorded, found in Louisiana, measured 5.84 m (19.2 ft). The Chinese alligator is smaller, rarely exceeding 2.1 m (6.9 ft) in length. In addition, it weighs considerably less, with males rarely over 45 kg.
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Alligator
Alligator (stylized, alligator) is the third studio album from Abandon Kansas. BC Music, which stands for Bad Christian Music, released the album on May 11, 2015.
Critical reception
Ben Rickaby, giving the album four stars at HM Magazine, writes, "This is a great indie alt-rock album featuring a wide range of musical styles and ambient sounds to effectively get across the raw emotion behind the lyrics." Awarding the album three and a half stars from Jesus Freak Hideout, Ryan Barbee says, "this isn't a faultless album." Nathaniel Schexnayder, writing a two and a half stars review at Jesus Freak Hideout, states, "maybe there should have been some extra thought put into this complicated album." Rating the album four stars for Jesus Freak Hideout, Scott Fryberger writes, "alligator really feels like the band is finally coming into their own." Brody B., giving the album four stars at Indie Vision Music, describes, "Despite some odd track placements, Alligator is an incredible record."
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Alligator_(Abandon_Kansas_album)
Alligator is the third studio album by American indie rock band The National, released on April 12, 2005 on Beggars Banquet. Recorded and produced by Peter Katis and Paul Mahajan, the album brought The National critical acclaim and increased their fanbase significantly.
Alligator appeared on many year-end top 10 lists, including Uncut and Planet Sound, both of which ranked it as the number two album of 2005. Pitchfork Media ranked Alligator at number 40 in their top albums of the 2000s list.Alligator has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide.
The band performed album track "The Geese of Beverly Road" at the wedding of producer Peter Katis. A photo of the band performing on stage, with couples dancing in the foreground, became the cover of the band's next album Boxer.
The band supported Barack Obama's presidential candidacy in 2008. In July of that year, the band designed and sold a T-shirt featuring Obama's image above the words "Mr. November," a reference to both the closing track on the album and the month of the U.S. presidential election. All proceeds were donated to Obama's campaign. The song had been written, in part, about John Kerry's candidacy four years earlier.
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Alligator_(The_National_album)
The Germanic first or given name Richard derives from German, French, and English "ric" (ruler, leader, king) and "hard" (strong, brave), and it therefore means "powerful leader". Nicknames include "Dick", "Dickie", "Rich", "Richie", "Rick", "Ricky", "Rickey", and others.
"Richard" is a common name in many Germanic languages, including English, German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Dutch. It can also be used as a French, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian name.
People named Richard
Rulers and aristocrats
Richard, Duke of Burgundy (died 921)
Richard I, Duke of Normandy (933-996)
Richard II, Duke of Normandy (died 1026), son of Richard I of Normandy
Richard I of Capua (died 1078), King of Capua and Count of Aversa
Richard fitz Gilbert (before 1035 – c. 1090), Norman lord involved in the conquest of England
Richard I of England or Richard the Lionheart (1157–1199)
Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall (1209–1272), elected King of Germany
Richard de Clare, 6th Earl of Gloucester (1222–1262)
Richard Óg de Burgh, 2nd Earl of Ulster (1259–1326)
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Richard
Richard († 1178) was a 12th-century bishop of Dunkeld. He got the bishopric of Dunkeld, the second most prestigious bishopric in Scotland-north-of-the-Forth, after serving the King of Scots. He was capellanus Regis Willelmi, that is, chaplain of King William of Scotland, and had probably been the chaplain to William during the reign of King Máel Coluim IV. He was consecrated at St Andrews on 10 August 1170, by Richard, former chaplain of King Máel Coluim IV but now the bishop of St Andrews. Richard continued to have a close relationship with King William, and was in Normandy with the king in December 1174 when the Treaty of Falaise was signed.
He died in 1178. He allegedly died at Cramond in Midlothian and was buried on Inchcolm. Both details may be the result of confusion with Richard de Prebenda, but buriel on Inchcolm was common for the bishops of Dunkeld.
Dauvit Broun's list of 12th century Scottish Bishops
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Richard_of_Dunkeld
The term street football and street soccer (in North America) encompass a number of informal varieties of association football. These informal games do not necessarily follow the requirements of a formal game of football, such as a large field, field markings, goal apparatus and corner flags, eleven players per team, or match officials (referee and assistant referees).
Often the most basic of set-ups will involve just a ball with a wall or fence used as a goal, or items such as clothing being used for goalposts (hence the phrase "jumpers for goalposts"). The ease of playing these informal games explains why they are popular all over the world.
Street football can be divided into three varieties: minor adaptations of the association football rules, games based on scoring goals and games which are not.
Street football World Championship
The first Street football World Championship took place in Mariannenplatz, Berlin.
Final placements
Street Soccer's team
Argentina Club 25 of Mayo
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Street_football
richardroundtree.net
alligatorfeet.com
northernalligatorlizard.com
richardstrauss.net
alligatordance.com
alligatorally.com
admiralrichardbyrd.com
alligatorcreditcard.com
onlinerichardstrauss.com
richardstraussonline.com
richardthelionheart.org
richardstraussgroup.com
richardhoagland.com
richardsbay.net
richardpaul.org
richardstraussradio.com
richardwolff.org
richardbyrd.org
alligatorsandals.com
richardstraussfm.com
Sautel. Rassemblés pour une double inauguration
"La vitalité, l’esprit d’innovation et d’initiative qui animent élus et population du Sautel montrent, selon le maire Richard Moretto, qu’en se battant au quotidien, il est possible de faire de la ruralité un territoire moderne et vivant qui produit de la proximité, du lien social et de l’emploi confortant ainsi la démocratie et la liberté de chacun"....
Michel Richard – Macron, le président des pauvres ?
S'attaquer à lui, c'est s'assurer un brevet d'humanité, de compassion et d'amour du peuple ... Michel Richard – Le défaut impardonnable d’Emmanuel Macron ....
Le Brésil de Bolsonaro en «guerre» contre ses artistes
Rio de Janeiro. Cette fois la ligne rouge a été franchie ... En fond sonore, l’ouverture de Lohengrin, l’opéra de Richard Wagner préféré d’Adolf Hitler ... Une phrase copiée d’un discours de Joseph Goebbels,Cet article est réservé aux abonnés ... ....
Edit Sympatico 19 Jan 2020
Oh la, la... que c'est beau! ... . DuProprio. DuProprio. DuProprio ... CHARLES LAFORTUNE ET SOPHIE PRÉGENT ONT VENDU LEUR SUBLIME MAISON DE BOUCHERVILLE POUR 2 MILLIONS JEAN-MICHEL ANCTIL VEND SA SOMPTUEUSE DEMEURE ANCESTRALE DE BOUCHERVILLE RICHARD TURCOTTE VEND SA MAISON POUR 1.5 MILLIONS DE DOLLARS LA MAISON DE 25 MILLIONS DE CÉLINE À LAVAL EST VENDUE ....
Le tennis français en quête d’éclaircies
Mais ce contingent pourrait se réduire comme peau de chagrin, car les forfaits sur blessure de Lucas Pouille, demi-finaliste l’an dernier, et celui de Richard Gasquet, ainsi que les tirages globalement compliqués, n’incitent pas franchement à l’optimisme ... » LIRE AUSSI -Open d'Australie ... Humbert, 21 ans, est devenu le plus jeune Français à remporter une épreuve ATP depuis Richard Gasquet en 2007 ... » LIRE AUSSI -Open d'Australie ... ....
Le 31 janvier prochain à 21h05 sur TF1, Alessandra Sublet présentera une émission diffusée en deux parties, qui va beaucoup faire parler . Stars à nu ... Parmi elles, on pourra notamment retrouver les anciennes Miss France Marine Lorphelin et Mareva Galanter, l'animateur Bruno Guillon, les comédiens Franck Sémonin, Héloïse Martin ou encore Firmine Richard ... "Dans la vie, il faut savoir aller au bout des choses" ... Brad Pitt ... Exclu ... ....
Mathilda May raconte le jour où elle a failli mourir lors d'un tournage en Patagonie
Mathilda May, ancienne actrice à la renommée internationale désormais metteuse en scène, était l'invitée d'Isabelle Morizet dimanche sur Europe 1. Dans l'émission "Il n'y a pas qu'une vie dans la vie", elle raconte un tournage en Argentine qui a bien failli lui coûter la vie !INTERVIEW ... L'actrice, qui a notamment tourné avec Richard Gere ou Bruce Willis, interprétait le rôle de Katharina dans Cerro Torre, le cri de la roche....
Le prochain James Bond pourrait être « de n'importe quelle couleur »
Les féministes passeront leur tour . pas question de toucher à la tradition et de remplacer James Bond par une femme ... Jusqu'où osera-t-elle aller pour incarner les dix ans qui viennent ? Les rumeurs annoncent l'arrivée de l'écossais Richard Madden, vu dans Game of Thrones, ou encore James Norton, 34 ans, un jeune Britannique qui a suivi ses études à Cambridge et s'est fait connaître dans des séries télé ... CultureCinéma. ....
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Home ‹ Board index ‹ General Discussion ‹ Off-Topic
Other video games, TV shows, movies, general chit-chat...this is an all-purpose off-topic board where you can talk about anything that doesn't have its own dedicated section.
by Dee4Three on Thu Apr 19, 2018 2:57 am
Looked for a thread on here related to music, couldn't find one. So, here we are.
Figured it would be cool to have a space to share music that we are listening to at any given time. Personally, I go through fazes, but certain music sticks around for life. Recently, I've been listening to Chali 2na and some of Jurassic 5's music again.
Thinking about doing a 2K17 highlight reel video using the song below, catchy... I also think Chali 2na is vastly underrated.
"I don't know if I practiced more than anybody, but I sure practiced enough. I still wonder if somebody - somewhere - was practicing more than me." - Larry Bird
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvHJXrqit8Dc6HBY5P6EmAA
https://twitter.com/Dee4Three84
Dee4Three
Location: New Hampshire, USA
by Andrew on Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:43 am
We did have one, but it's been neglected, so it's probably best to start fresh.
by bigh0rt on Fri Apr 20, 2018 12:20 am
Podcasts. As I get older and more crotchety, I listen to less and less music. It's only a matter of time before my answer here is NPR or some other equivalent.
bigh0rt
NLSC Team Member
by Dee4Three on Fri Apr 20, 2018 2:15 am
bigh0rt wrote: Podcasts. As I get older and more crotchety, I listen to less and less music. It's only a matter of time before my answer here is NPR or some other equivalent.
I don't listen to podcasts, maybe I should.
But, when you do get the itch to listen to music, what is it? Like what's the most recent thing you played?
by bigh0rt on Fri Apr 20, 2018 3:22 am
Dee4Three wrote:
90's and early 2000's hip hop and r&b. DMX. 50 Cent. Eminem. Nas. Jay-Z. Kanye West. Dr. Dre. 2Pac. B.I.G. Lil Wayne. Busta Rhymes. Big Pun. A lot of that. I feel incredibly stereotypical anymore, like the old man yelling at the cloud about how today's music is absolute trash and garbage and doesn't compare to BACK IN MY DAY. It's tough to feel like you've fallen right in line with what is expected of you, but here I am. Like my father talking about The Beatles.
However, I don't think it's something to be ashamed of, or something that an individual should even question. I DO believe that most of the music today is scripted garbage, hardly any of the "Musicians" who make it onto "Radio Hits" write music. They are literally born and raised in the industry, and have the reigns handed to them in order to produce a garbage message in the form of social engineering.
The amount of songs (and rappers names) that speak about Xanax, or have something to do with Xanax, is no coincidence. What they put in front of our youth/young adults in the form of content is a damn shame. Have you looked at the billboard top 100 recently? 6ix9ine, Lil Uzi, etc etc... it really is a bunch of pure garbage.
However, some of the early 2000's stuff, and some 90's stuff was trash as well, and some of it seems to have been for the same purpose, to direct a good portion of the population towards a movement, a sort of social engineering. Nothing wrong with sticking with stuff you like, though. In fact, I think so many people want to be "In" nowadays that they pretend to like stuff they actually do not.
With that being said, I think this is the best Live performance I have ever seen (Obviously I was not there.. as I was not born yet). Talk about singing with feeling. I grew up listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ted Nugent, Megadeth, etc. Once out of my parents house, I held onto some of that but also listened to a lot of Nelly, Eminem (A LOT), Nas, etc. I go through fazes.
FYI - I am not religious. So that has nothing to do with me liking this performance, I like it because of the feeling, the realness of it.
by [Q] on Fri Apr 20, 2018 7:29 am
bigh0rt wrote:
I can't stand the mumble rap and the garbage they play on the radio. It must've been at least 5 years since I've listened to the radio on a consistent basis.
Only new guy I fucks with is J Cole.
I don't like podcasts. I feel like it's people sitting around shooting the shit with nothing to talk about. If anything I'll watch a show like MMA hour on YouTube where there's like video to go with it
Like you said some music sticks with me and I have been a 2pac fan for over 23 years. I even got one of his tattoos on my chest in his honor
I saw Chali 2na and J5 perform last year. Man they ROCKED IT when they did In The House from NBA Live 06
NBA Live 18 Advocate
Location: Westside, the best side
by Andrew on Fri Apr 20, 2018 11:10 am
I also find myself at the age where I'm tending to listen more to old favourites and the music I grew up with, rather than new stuff. Admittedly I've never really been into the music scene, discovering new bands and the like, and my taste is pretty eclectic to say the least, but I can definitely relate to the "old man yells at cloud" feeling.
If I do discover a new (or newish) song that I like, it's actually usually through the soundtracks for NBA Live or NBA 2K.
[Q] wrote: I don't like podcasts. I feel like it's people sitting around shooting the shit with nothing to talk about.
by diamenz on Fri Apr 20, 2018 12:56 pm
a timeless gem from '96. pac could paint such a perfect picture in so few words. what's haunting about this twenty-two year old track is that everybody featured in it is now dead, even the producer.
diamenz
by bigh0rt on Fri Apr 20, 2018 11:15 pm
I take back everything. Lil Tay 4 Lyfe.
by [Q] on Sat Apr 21, 2018 3:55 am
Andrew wrote: If I do discover a new (or newish) song that I like, it's actually usually through the soundtracks for NBA Live or NBA 2K.
Lol I don't specifically mean the nlsc podcast, as you guys do cover some interesting stuff but i cringe when I see a 2 hour sound clip loading up and there's one small thing I wanted to hear about.
It's funny those soundtracks don't necessarily have songs you will listen to, but you're forced to listen to it so much those songs actually grow on you. There's usually one or two songs that I really like that I had never heard of. City On Lockdown was a good one this year
by Lamrock on Sat Apr 21, 2018 9:55 am
[Q] wrote: I can't stand the mumble rap and the garbage they play on the radio. It must've been at least 5 years since I've listened to the radio on a consistent basis.
You don't like Kendrick? Or Vince Staples? Or Danny Brown? Or any of the Odd Future guys? I agree that mumble rap is terrible, bunch of tatted up 16 year old kids high on Xanax. And now they have their martyr Lil Peep whose music we have to pretend was good. But there is still a lot of good rap out there IMO.
Lamrock
by [Q] on Sat Apr 21, 2018 10:03 am
Out of all those guys you named, Kendrick is the only one whose music I've listened to. Some of it is good, but for some reason it's hard for me to like him even though he's from Compton/LA
I know he's good, but not my cup of tea. I admit I like his newer stuff better than the old
Speaking of Cole, his new album dropped today. I wouldn't have known if Arcane hadn't been hyping it for days lol
by Andrew on Sat Apr 21, 2018 1:27 pm
Snoop Dogg on mumble rap:
by Dee4Three on Tue Apr 24, 2018 1:18 am
I'm sure. Only been to a couple concerts my whole life, never for that genre of music.
Speaking of which, that's always been one small regret I had. I wish I had gone to more concerts when I was younger.
Heard this for the first time today, catchy. Never heard of these guys before.
by Kenny on Wed Apr 25, 2018 4:53 pm
Lately I've been loving Cardi B's album. One of the few lately that I've been able to listen to from front to back without wanting to skip tracks. I also listened to J. Cole's new album the other day, but it wasn't really for me. I appreciate socially aware rappers, but I find him to be a bit corny or something. Maybe he needs more features
My listening habits depend on the environment around me, I guess. When I'm at work, I find English lyrics distracting, so I tend to listen to a lot of latin pop artists like Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, and Gloria Estefan. When I want something a bit heavier, I find I like Napalm Death and Cannibal Corpse, since I can't really understand their lyrics through the growls, but I like the instrumentation.
When I'm on the train, I like metal bands like Opeth, Meshuggah, Lamb of God, and Slayer. Although, in saying that, I also listen to a lot of pop on the train as well.
Yeah, my musical taste is all over the shop at the moment
Dion Waiters thinks you should check out my Sonics 2K17 thread.
Thon Maker's Biggest Fan.
by shadowgrin on Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:47 pm
Never been a fan of Fall Out Boy nor appreciated any of their previous songs but these two from their last album have gotten on repeated play for me.
HE'S USING HYPNOSIS!
JaoSming2KTV wrote: its fun on a bun
shadowgrin
Doesn't negotiate with terrorists. NLSC's Jefferson Davis. The Questioneer
Location: In your mind
Shadowgrin,
That thumbnail for "The last of the real ones" is enough to give me nightmares.
Never been a big fan of Fallout Boy, but not bad. The beginning of that song has a bit too much of an Adam Levine sound... but it gets better after the intro.
Whenever I hear Fallout Boy, I think Panic at the Disco..... anybody else get that? Similar sound.
I'd say... going from Gloria Estefan to Slayer.... but I am kind of like that as well. I go from Megadeth to Andy Grammar, or Eminem to Everclear. I think that says something about a person, shows they have an open mind. I also think it shows that the person can have many different mood sets.
Either way, not a fan of Cardi B, or Lopez/Estefan/Shakira. However, I see the draw.
Last edited by Dee4Three on Thu Apr 26, 2018 1:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
by [Q] on Thu Apr 26, 2018 3:59 am
J LO FTW
I would recommend Selena (Quintanilla) as well. Como La Flor is my jam
For other non English songs, check out Babymetal. They were surprisingly good
by shadowgrin on Thu Apr 26, 2018 8:57 am
Dee4Three wrote: Whenever I hear Fallout Boy, I think Panic at the Disco..... anybody else get that? Similar sound.
Both of them know. The singer of Panic is wearing the purple llama costume in the video.
shadowgrin wrote:
Fallout Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic, etc all sound the same to me
Interesting. Makes sense that they would know, though.
Sound wise, I always thought the same about The Killers and The Bravery. In fact, pretty sure they got into a fued at one point. Always thought those two bands sounded a ton alike, never could really tell the difference.
Never liked either of them anyway.
by shadowgrin on Thu Apr 26, 2018 4:38 pm
[Q] wrote: For other non English songs, check out Babymetal. They were surprisingly good
Q you closet weeb
by Lamrock on Fri Apr 27, 2018 8:13 pm
Dee4Three wrote: Sound wise, I always thought the same about The Killers and The Bravery. In fact, pretty sure they got into a fued at one point. Always thought those two bands sounded a ton alike, never could really tell the difference.
Guess you wouldn't like Franz Ferdinand either
by Dee4Three on Sat Apr 28, 2018 1:57 am
Lamrock wrote:
Correct, but Take Me Out isn't a bad tune. Otherwise, not a fan. I actually just went through a Franz playlist after you mentioned it just to refresh my memory.
Nostalgia with this one. (Chali again, just with J5). My buddy and I used to play this when going to play pickup ball. We used to go to a local college (UNH) where they had 4 courts running every night. Had to pay $5 every time to get in, but it was worth it. My buddy was a big J5 fan.
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Ancient human genomes suggest (more than) three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans
This new preprint at bioRxiv is quite the Christmas present for those of us with a passion for European genetics and prehistory. It's the first paper to report on full genomes from Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe.
All of the successfully tested Mesolithic Y-chromosomes, one from Luxembourg and four from Motala, Sweden, belonged to haplogroup I. This probably won't come as a surprise to many people, as this marker was always the main candidate for Europe's indigenous Y-haplogroup. However, three of the results fell into haplogroup I2a1b, and none into I1, which is today the most common Y-haplogroup in most of Scandinavia.
What this suggests is that I1 expanded after the Mesolithic and replaced most of the I2a1b across Northwestern Europe. I'd say these were mostly expansions from North-Central Europe, although recent chatter on the web suggests that two distinct I1 lineages might have arrived in North-Central Europe from Eastern Europe at different times.
All of the Mesolithic mtDNA sequences belonged to haplgroups U2 and U5, which is line with past results. The single Neolithic sample, from a 7500 year-old Linearbandkeramik (LBK) site in Stuttgart, Germany, belonged to mtDNA haplogroup T2. Again, not very surprising considering what we've seen to date.
The genome-wide results, on the other hand, are not as straightforward. The basic upshot is that Northern Europeans are mostly of indigenous European hunter-gatherer origin, while Southern Europeans are largely derived from Neolithic farmers of mixed European and Near Eastern origin. But the authors identify a minimum of three ancestral populations from their stats (WHG, EEF and ANE), and four meta-populations from the available ancient data (WHG, EEF, ANE and SHG). Here are brief summaries of each of these groups:
West European Hunter-Gatherer (WHG): this ancestral component is based on an 8,000 year-old forager from the Loschbour rock shelter in Luxembourg (one of the individuals mentioned above belonging to I2a1b). The WHG meta-population includes the Loschbour sample and two Mesolithic individuals from the La Brana Cave in Spain. However, today the WHG component peaks among Estonians and Lithuanians, in the East Baltic region, at almost 50%.
Early European Farmer (EEF): apparently this is a hybrid component, the result of mixture between "Basal Eurasians" and a WHG-like population possibly from the Balkans. It's based on the aforementioned LBK farmer from Stuttgart, but today peaks at just over 80% among Sardinians. Apart from the Stuttgart sample, the EEF meta-population includes Oetzi the Iceman and a Neolithic Funnelbeaker farmer from Sweden.
Ancient North Eurasian (ANE): this is the twist in the tale, a component based on a previously reported genome of a 24,000 year-old Upper Paleolithic forager from South Central Siberia, belonging to Y-hg R*, and known as Mal'ta boy or MA-1 (see here). This component was very likely present in Southern Scandinavia since at least the Mesolithic (see the summary of SHG below), but only seems to have reached Western Europe after the Neolithic. At some point it also spread into the Americas. In Europe today it peaks among Estonians at just over 18%, and, intriguingly, reaches a similar level among Scots. However, numbers weren't given for Finns, Russians and Mordovians, who, according to one of the maps, also carry very high ANE, but their results are confounded by more recent Siberian admixture (see the discussion on the European outliers below). The ANE meta-population includes Mal'ta boy as well as a late Upper Paleolithic sample from Central Siberia, dubbed Afontova Gora-2 (AG2).
Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer (SHG): this is a meta-population made up of Swedish Mesolithic and Neolithic forager samples from Motala and Gotland, respectively. It's a more easterly variant of WHG, with probable ANE admixture.
Below are the two most important figures from the paper: a) the three-way mixture model that is a statistical fit to the data, and b) a plot of the proportions of ancestry from each of the three inferred ancestral populations. As per above, East Baltic populations are the most WHG, which is somewhat curious, because they mostly carry Y-DNA R1a and N1c1.
So if not for the ANE, we'd simply have a two-way mixture model between indigenous European foragers and migrant Near Eastern farmers, at least for most Europeans anyway. Moreover, the seemingly late and sudden arrival of ANE in much of Europe is important, because it's a smoking gun for a major population upheaval across the continent during the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age.
Interestingly, archeological data suggest that this was also the period which saw the introduction of new social organization and perhaps Indo-European languages across most of Europe. None of this was lost on the authors of the paper, but it appears they'd rather be cautious pending more ancient genomic data, because they chose not to explicitly mention the Indo-Europeans.
This study raises two questions that are important to address in future research. A first is where the EEF picked up their WHG ancestry. Southeastern Europe is a candidate as it lies along the geographic path from Anatolia into central Europe, and hence it should be a priority to study ancient samples from this region. A second question is when and where ANE ancestors admixed with the ancestors of most present-day Europeans. Based on discontinuity in mtDNA haplogroup frequencies in Central Europe, this may have occurred during the Late Neolithic or early Bronze Age ~5,500-4,000 years ago35. A central aim for future work should be to collect transects of ancient Europeans through time and space to illuminate the history of these transformations.
The absence of Y-haplogroup R1b in our two sample locations is striking given that it is, at present, the major west European lineage. Importantly, however, it has not yet been found in ancient European contexts prior to a Bell Beaker burial from Germany (2,800-2,000BC)12, while the related R1a lineage has a first known occurrence in a Corded Ware burial also from Germany (2,600BC)13. This casts doubt on early suggestions associating these haplogroups with Paleolithic Europeans14, and is more consistent with their Neolithic entry into Europe at least in the case of R1b15, 16. More research is needed to document the time and place of their earliest occurrence in Europe. Interestingly, the Mal’ta boy belonged to haplogroup R* and we tentatively suggest that some haplogroup R bearers may be responsible for the wider dissemination of Ancient North Eurasian ancestry into Europe, as their haplogroup Q relatives may have plausibly done into the Americas17.
No doubt, a lot of people will now be wondering about the main source of the ANE that apparently rushed into Europe at the onset of the metal ages. The Siberian steppe will probably be the favored option for many, since this is where Mal'ta boy and Afontova Gora-2 were dug up. However, I'm pretty sure the source was Eastern Europe.
First of all, as already mentioned, it seems that ANE was present in Sweden during the Mesolithic (Figure S12.7 shows around 19% ANE in the Motala12 sample). Secondly, despite the ANE and WHG being classified as separate ancestral and meta-populations, the differences between them appear to be clinal rather than discrete, which I think can be seen in the PCA and ADMIXTURE results from the study (see here and here). Thus, I'd expect a lot more ANE in Eastern Europe during the Mesolithic than in Scandinavia. Thirdly, it's likely that the ancestors of modern Uralic speakers were in Siberia very early, possibly during the Mesolithic, and they were probably East Eurasians aka. Eastern non-Africans (ENA), which ANE is not.
Indeed, latest linguistics research suggests that the pre-proto-Uralics migrated at some point from Siberia into the southern Urals, in far eastern Europe. The Uralics proper then expanded from the southern Urals, probably during the Bronze Age, both to the east and west, as far as the Baltic. This Uralic expansion is certainly reflected in the Lazaridis et al. data, and it's not the only relatively late migration into Europe that shows up in their stats.
While our three-way mixture model fits the data for most European populations, two sets of populations are poor fits. First, Sicilians, Maltese, and Ashkenazi Jews have EEF estimates beyond the 0-100% interval (SI13) and they cannot be jointly fit with other Europeans (SI12). These populations may have more Near Eastern ancestry than can be explained via EEF admixture (SI13), an inference that is also suggested by the fact that they fall in the gap between European and Near Eastern populations in the PCA of Fig. 1B. Second, we observe that Finns, Mordovians, Russians, Chuvash, and Saami from northeastern Europe do not fit our model (SI12; Extended Data Table 3). To better understand this, for each West Eurasian population in turn we plotted f4(X, Bedouin2; Han, Mbuti) against f4(X, Bedouin2; MA1, Mbuti), using statistics that measure the degree of a European population’s allele sharing with Han Chinese or MA1 (Extended Data Fig. 7). Europeans fall along a line of slope >1 in the plot of these two statistics. However, northeastern Europeans fall away from this line in the direction of Han. This is consistent with Siberian gene flow into some northeastern Europeans after the initial ANE admixture, and may be related to the fact that Y-chromosome haplogroup N 30, 31 is shared between Siberian and northeastern Europeans32, 33 but not with western Europeans. There may in fact be multiple layers of Siberian gene flow into northeastern Europe after the initial ANE gene flow, as our analyses reported in SI 12 show that some Mordovians, Russians and Chuvash have Siberian-related admixture that is significantly more recent than that in Finns (SI12).
The authors are actually referring to the Kargopol Russians from the HGDP in that quote. But from my own analyses with a wide variety of samples from Russia, I know that other Russians show similar levels of Siberian admixture to Belorussians, Ukrainians and Estonians.
In any case, this of course means that there are more than three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, albeit not all of them influenced all Europeans. Also, it's very clear that to learn all the details about the peopling of Europe, these sorts of studies really need to start focusing on the large swath of land that stretches from present-day Poland to the Urals. In other words, Eastern Europe.
I was also going to discuss the genetically inferred pigmentation of the ancient individuals, but, because of the small sample size, there's not much to discuss at this stage. The Loschbour forager possibly had blue eyes (50% chance), but dark hair and skin. On the other hand, the Stuttgart farmer definitely had dark eyes and hair, but relatively light skin. I wonder if this swarthy hunter-gatherer skin complexion has anything to do with the fact that today lots of people from around the Baltic tan really well?
Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, Alissa Mittnik, et al., Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, bioRxiv, Posted December 23, 2013, doi: 10.1101/001552
Another look at the Lazaridis et al. ancient genomes preprint
The really old Europe is mostly in Eastern Europe
EEF-WHG-ANE test for Europeans
First genome of an Upper Paleolithic human
ADMIXTURE analysis of Allentoft et al. and Haak et al. ancient genomes
FR7 you reading this? Can you make spatial maps of the ancient components from this study?
ZeGrammarNazi said...
"Based on the ratio of sequences aligning to chromosomes X and Y, we infer that Stuttgart was female while Loschbour and five Motala individuals were male11 (SI5). Loschbour and four Motala males belonged to Y-chromosome haplogroup I, showing that this was a predominant haplogroup in pre-agricultural northern Europeans12, 13"
Very interesting results. Y-DNA seems to be present in Western HG's after all.
"Stuttgart belonged to mtDNA haplogroup T2, typical of Neolithic Europeans10, while Loschbour and all Motala individuals belonged to haplogroups U5 and U2, typical of pre-agricultural Europeans1,"
"By analyzing sites known to affect phenotype, we inferred that neither Stuttgart nor Loschbour could digest milk into adulthood, that both had a >99% probability of dark hair, that Loschbour probably had darker skin than Stuttgart, and that Loschbour had a >50% probability of blue eyes while Stuttgart had a >99% probability of brown eyes (SI7)."
The first post should read, "Y-DNA I seems to be present...". Typo...
Tone said...
The Loschbour hunter gatherer had blue eyes, but darker skin than the brown-eyed, Stuttgart, LBK farmer?
The plot thickens.
Loschbour - Y-DNA I2a1b
Motala 2 - Y-DNA I
Motala 3 -Y-DNA I2
Motala12 - I2a1b
Looks like I2a1b was widespread in Mesolthic Europeans
truth said...
The admixture run is interesting. The MA1 individual on K=20 appears like a mixture of the Kalash component, some Australian aboriginal, Northern-European, and Amerindian..isn't that similar to the UP siberian individual ?? Just change Kalash for South-Asian...
Wait a minute...it's him !
MA1 is Mal'ta boy from Siberia,
This study suggests that he was closely related to groups like Corded Ware and Unetice that invaded Europe from somewhere in the east, probably Eastern Europe, during the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age.
So it looks like Mal'ta boy was related to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. This makes a lot of sense, because he belonged to Y-DNA R, and the Corded Ware remains to R1a.
This is a breakdown of how modern European samples come out as admixtures between the ancient samples.
EEF WHG ANE
0.781 0.092 0.127 -- Albanian
0.931 0 0.069 -- Ashkenazi_Jew
0.593 0.293 0.114 -- Basque
0.418 0.431 0.151 -- Belorussian
0.715 0.177 0.108 -- Bergamo
0.712 0.147 0.141 -- Bulgarian
0.561 0.293 0.145 -- Croatian
0.495 0.338 0.167 -- Czech
0.495 0.364 0.141 -- English
0.322 0.495 0.183 -- Estonian
0.554 0.311 0.135 -- French
0.675 0.195 0.13 -- French_South
0.792 0.058 0.151 -- Greek
0.558 0.264 0.179 -- Hungarian
0.394 0.456 0.15 -- Icelandic
0.364 0.464 0.172 -- Lithuanian
0.932 0 0.068 -- Maltese
0.411 0.428 0.161 -- Norwegian
0.457 0.385 0.158 -- Orcadian
0.713 0.125 0.163 -- Pais_Vasco
0.817 0.175 0.008 -- Sardinian
0.39 0.428 0.182 -- Scottish
0.903 0 0.097 -- Sicilian
0.809 0.068 0.123 -- Spanish
0.746 0.136 0.118 -- Tuscan
0.462 0.387 0.151 -- Ukrainian
Davidski, The beige component that appears in the K=14 run is not present Mesolithic Euros and is absent in the Basque and Sardinians. It does appear in the Mal'ta boy way out in Siberia, though. It seems IE-related expect for its high frequency in the Levant and Egypt. What's your take on this component?
About Time said...
Ah, wow. So hg I was mesolithic European. Especially interesting since I is related to IJ and therefore a cousin of "typically Middle Eastern" hg J. Food for thought.
R looks more paleo-Eurasian and less exclusive to Europe.
No comment on pigmentation, but I hope you are paying attention barakobama.
Most interesting was WHG from Luxembourg. Is this what showed up later with Bell Beakers?
"Is this what showed up later with Bell Beakers?"
I doubt it, since it peaks in Lithuania. Although the Bell Beakers probably did carry a lot of it.
Interesting that the West European Hunter Gatherer is showing strongest in Balts, Scandinavians, Belorussians, and Scotts --- the wild fringe of Neolithic Europe. At first I guessed that WHG (since found in the Luxembourg individual) was a Western- Atlantic-type component, but now I see it's more of a Pan-European culture.
Perhaps they should have called it West EURASIAN Hunter Gather. Still, very cool stuff.
I don't think it's exclusively IE. I suspect that it was pushed south from the Mammoth Steppe during the Ice Age, and moved into Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, other parts of West Asia, and South Central Asia. Then it expanded again with the Proto-Indo-Europeans from Eastern Europe, along with R1a.
It is somewhat puzzling that it didn't manage to move into the Western Mediterranean to any great extent, considering its heavy presence in the East Mediterranean, but I guess there were some good reasons for that, like geography as well as culture.
I think K=8 is the most interesting one. Clearly Hg R is corellated with the south-central asian component. It looks like Hg R entered Europe from Central Asia. One can find P,Q,R1a, R1b and R2 in central Asia, but only R1a and R1b in Europe.
Well, there's definitely Q and R2 in Europe as well. Actually, one of these ancient samples from Sweden might have been Q, but they couldn't confirm it.
More importantly though, for the Indo-European story, Europe has R1a-CTS4385 and R1a-Z645, while Central Asia just has a subset of R1a-Z645, which as you know is R1a-Z93.
Yes you are right, but we can never know how Central Asia looked before they were over run by the Mongol and Turkic onslaught. My guess is that they looked a lot like Tajiks everywhere.
i meant to say that they did not all look like Tajiks everwhere across central asia...well my guess that is. The only wasy I see the tocharian Centum being explained is that Centum first spread from Central Asia in all directions, while Satem was a later evolution, which only spread with the Proto Indo-Iranians and Balto-Slavs with minimal expansion west and south. We will have to wait for more aDNA obviosuly to know more.
Davidski, the authors state:
"Loschbour and Stuttgart had little or no ANE ancestry, indicating that it was not as pervasive in central Europe around the time of the agricultural transition as it is today. (By implication ANE ancestry was also not present in the ancient Near East; since Stuttgart which has substantial Near Eastern ancestry lacks it.) However, ANE ancestry was already present in at least some Europeans (Scandinavian hunter-gatherers) by ~8,000 years ago, since MA1 shares more alleles with Motala12 than Loschbour:."
Given the absence of the component in Neolithic European farmers with roots in the Near East, and at least some presence of the component in Mesolithic remains from Northeastern Europe (Molata12), perhaps the component has been present from Northeastern Europe to at least the Northern side of the Caucasus since Mesolthic times, and it was spread from there to at least the Near East and farther West into Europe. Who knows how long it has been present in South Asia?
Yes, I agree, that component has been in Europe for a long time, it's just that it moved into Western and Central Europe after the Neolithic, probably with the early Indo-Europeans. Its presence in the Near East is also likely to be related in part to the Indo-European expansions.
Fascinating. Also, I noticed that Table 1 shows Bedouins, Jordanians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians get a solid (i.e., negative) f3 statistic for Stuttgart + African.
So LBK + African = Arabs.
Ditto for Stuttgart + South Asians = Armenians, Georgians, etc.
This means the EEF got around and were not restricted just to Europe.
Maju said...
How can that be? If you look at the PC graph, the closest thing to any WEHG (and particularly to La Braña 2) are Basques and Southern French. This result can only be product of pooling Scandinavian and West European HGs. Lithuanians and Icelanders are closest to Scandinavian HGs but not to West European HGs.
The distinction between Scandinavian and Western European HGs and the conclusion that in the end La Braña samples are not really closer to Northern Europeans than to Basques and Southern French (or even to Spaniards) is the first thing I noticed in this study.
If we use the PC graph to draw conclusions from the four "ancestral populations" (not three), we see that what you call WHG is actually two different things and one (Western European HGs) manifests most strongly in SW Europe (Basques and Southern French) and the other (Scandinavian HGs, Hamburgian instead of Magdalenian) manifests most strongly in the Balto-Scandinavian zone, albeit with strong Northern Eurasian (IE/Uralic) influence.
Actually I divided Europeans in the PC graph in four regions:
1. ANE dominated: most Eastern Europeans (Mordvins, Russian, Finnish, Ukrainians, Belorussians) and some other Europeans (Hungarians, Czechs, Bulgarians even some Albanians).
2. Scandinavian HG dominated: Middle-Western Europeans, Scandinavians and Baltics.
3. Western European HG dominated: Basques and some French (notably all Southern French).
4. Neolithic dominated: Sardinians, Canarians, Spaniards, Italians, Maltese, Greek.
So I believe that, judging on the PC graph, pooling WEHG and SHG in a single pooled sample seems dramatically distorting of reality. Isn't the text of this paper all about differentiating Magdalenian WEHG like Loschbour and Hamburgian SHG like Motala? Then why this last minute artificial blurring?
You can't just focus on the PCA and ignore everything else.
Post-Mesolithic North Eurasian gene flow across the north skews the PCA results in this case, and makes it look like WHG aren't all that closely related to Northeast Europeans. But they are, it's just that Northeast Europeans have a lot of ANE and Uralic admixture.
I had not found the supplemental material yet, sorry. I still find both contradictory in appearance and possibly in substance.
"Post-Mesolithic North Eurasian gene flow across the north skews the PCA results in this case, and makes it look like WHG aren't all that closely related to Northeast Europeans".
They are different components in all the study. Whether the genetic influence is post- or pre-Epipaleolithic (there was no "Mesolithic" in Europe) is irrelevant to the results. What are you talking about?
The distinction I was trying to make was between Scandinavian HGs and Western European HGs (La Braña and Loschbour). One issue I believe that is clear in the PCA is that while Braña 2 is very close to modern Europeans, Loschbour is very distant instead. This at the very least could affect the estimates about West Asian ancestry of EEFs. It may be as simple as tracing a median line between:
a) Loschbour and the West Asian diagonal
b) Braña 2 and the West Asian diagonal
In case (a), EEFs are closer to West Asians while in case (b) they are not, rather to Braña 2 instead.
Similarly, if (c) you trace a median line between Braña 2 and the EEFs, Basques are closer to Braña 2, but, if (d) you trace a median line between Lochsbour and the EEFs, Basques are closer to these.
However I do not understand why Eastern and Central Europeans do not score much much higher in the ANE column, because judging from the PCA they should be like 60-80% ANE, even if you use Lochsbour and MA1 as references, instead of the more central HG samples.
Whether the genetic influx happened at one point or another, it should not matter, after all they are comparing ancient individuals with moderns without previous modeling. I wonder if it is the presence of non-WEA populations what is causing this distortion.
In any case, after seeing that PCA, I'd have produced a second one, with only Europeans and at most a few control West Asians. It could be clarifying. Too many outliers usually blurry things rather than clarify and, after all, all ancient samples are closer to Europeans than to anybody else, even MA1.
"... it's just that Northeast Europeans have a lot of ANE and Uralic admixture."
According to the data of the supplementary material, they do not: the largest figure is 18.7% in Estonians, compare with the record low 4.1% in Sardinians. That's not "a lot", certainly not in the way that it appears in the PCA.
I'm not sure but I suspect that the distortion is caused in the PCA because the ANE samples there are defined essentially in the vector of East Asian and Oceanian polarity, which is in real terms much larger than it appears (surely because they are "projected", whatever that means) so the realistic distance appears somehow extremely "compressed". My best guess in any case.
I just hope that they can fathom a second PCA without so many outliers for the formal publication, maybe even a third and fourth (chewing on some possible wise sampling strategies, including a PCA with just aDNA individuals and then forcing moderns in it relative to them - supervised mode or whatever that is).
Krefter said...
It seems the genetic origin of Europeans will come close to being figured very soon. This looks like a very serious study. When you add this to new info that will be released about La Brana-1, Rise Project, the Genomic History of Denmark, DNA from ancient Pontiac steppe people, Mal'ta, a thousands and thousands of ancient Eurasian Y DNA and mtDNA samples, other stuff I don't know about, And everything we can ever want from modern populations. It is amazing how much has been discovered already. I wont be surprised that in 50 years from now people will have a basic understanding of the genetic history of all humans.
" The first are Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who are more closely related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians than to any present-day population. The second are West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), related to the Loschbour individual, who contributed to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners. The third are Early European Farmers (EEF), related to the Stuttgart individual, who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harbored WHG-related ancestry. "
I think most people who are interested in this stuff already basically knew that. Modern Europeans are a mix between pre Neolithic hunter gatherers, near eastern farmers, and Mal'ta like people.
It seems WHG represents what has been called north European like ancestry, which has been hypothesized based on autosomal DNA from Mesolithic Europeans to be descended from them. Why did they call it west European hunter gatherers? Was it isolated to western Europe and later spread to eastern Europe were it is most popular today. mtDNA from east European and Scandinavian hunter gatherers show they dominated by mtDNA U5 and U4 like the western ones. It would make sense they had very similar ancestry. There are also traces of "north European like ancestry" in near easterns, north Africans, central Asians, and Siberians. So to say they didn't affect near easterns only Europeans doesn't make sense to me. We know Indo Iranian languages were brought to the near east by Europeans. There is always random mixing too.
I think the LBK guy probably is similar to Otzi and Gok4. Probably had majority Meditreaen in globe13 with also a good amount of southwest Asian, west Asian, and north European. When they say mainly of near eastern origin, I don't think they mean they were extremely similar to modern near easterns. It is not a surprise they also have some WHG like ancestry since ancient mtDNA shows they mixed, not much though.
I doubt the ANE's made a big contribution. I wonder though if related people to Mal'ta took up a lot of Europe for a long time. They didn't say the 8,000 year old Swedish hunter gatherer was similar to the other hunter gatherer, maybe he was like Malta. I doubt it because mtDNA from Mesolithic Sweden(Pitted ware, and St. Forvar) show they were no different from other hunter gatherers of Europe dominated by mtDNA U5 and U4. The St. Forvar 8,600 year old hunter gatherer from Sweden was very similar to the Pitted ware hunter gatherers, La Brana's, and I would assume the 8,000 year old hunter gatherer from Luxemburg.
"We model the deep relationships of these populations and show that about ~44% of the ancestry of EEF derived from a basal Eurasian lineage that split prior to the separation of other non-Africans."
WOW!!!!! That is surprising, based on their mtDNA and autosomal DNA from other farmers, I would assume they were nearly 100% west Eurasian. I have heard Davidski say their main component is usually called Meditreaen(peaks in Sardinia) in autosomal DNA tests and is very related to what is usually called southwest Asian(Davidski says peaks in Bedouins) are closely related. Take out the north European admixture in Meditreaen and the east African admixture in southwest Asian and there basically the same. It seems that is what Davidski has said(correct me if I'm wrong).
"Loschbour - Y-DNA I2a1b
Looks like I2a1b was widespread in Mesolthic Europeans"
PLEASE CONFIRM THIS!!!
This is even better than learning more about La Brana-1. It finally proves Y DNA I descends from pre Neolithic Europe. I don't want to rub it in the faces of Neolithic Y DNA I theorist, though. I don't claim to be some expert I just mainly listened to what others said. So, Maju I think this is evidence that I2a1 in trellis was probably descended from hunter gatherers not Greek Neolithic, maybe related Greek hunter gatherers.
I would have expected I1 for the Swedish ones, but whatever. There is a north-west European I2a1b subclade,, I2a1b1 L161.1 I wont be surprised if it descends from the hunter gatherers of north-west Europe. Since the Luxemburg guy had it and one Swedish one. That probably also means I2a1b has been present in eastern Europe for just as long. Same for I2a1a1 M26 in western Europe, same with I2a2 in central Europe, all other I2 in Europe, I1?. Possibly I2a2, I2a1a1, and I1 spread in the Neolithic and metal ages and replaced a lot of I2a1b. There are a lot of ideas running in my head.
Eupedia has a pretty good page for Y DNA I2 rightfully calling it "Continental Europe's Mesolithic paternal lineage". Maciamo says there have been rare I2a1a P237.5 subclades found in north-western Europe and are probably descended from north-west European hunter gatherers.
No surprised, still don't understand why such a large amount of hunter gatherer ancestry survived but not maternal lineages? Well, Y DNA I shows a lot of their paternal lineages did.
Okay, so far we know 24,000 year old Upper Palaeolithic Siberian Mal'ta had "dark skin, dark brown hair, and brown eyes", 7,000ybp late Mesolithic hunter gatherer from northern Spain La Brana-1 had blue eyes, ~5,300ybp early copper age farmer from the Alps Otzi, had "brown hair, brown eyes, and fair skin", Copper age people of Pontiac steppe from 3,000 and 2,000BC had pale skin and darker eyes than average modern Europeans, we know bronze and iron age kurgen probably Indo Iranian people of Siberia(probably most of Asia) had pale skin, majority light hair and eyes.
If that info is legit, we also know that 8,000 year old late Mesolithic hunter gatherer from Luxemburg had 50%< chance of blue eyes and 99%< chance of dark hair, 7,500 year old early Neolithic farmer from central Germany had 99%< for dark hair, 99%< for brown eyes, and had paler skin than the 8,000 year old late Mesolithic hunter gatherer from Luxemburg.
What has been found by so many people in autosomal DNA. Is that there is very exclusive ancestry in Europeans that is higher in Mesolithic hunter gatherer samples so far, and from what I have seen is it correlates with light hair and eyes. Not perfectly though Sami are about as dark haired and eyes as southern Europeans. So the dark hair and also likely blue eyes in the Mesolithic man from Luxemburg is not a surprise. What is surprising is that he probably had darker skin than the 7,500ybp LBK farmer. Because I excepted the farmers to be overall darker pigmented. The Meditreaen in globe13 and in many other tests is extremely high in farmer samples so far.
Meditreaen, southwest Asian, and west Asian in globe13 are highest in darker haired and eyed, and tanner skinned Europeans. These ancient samples could mean it is a lot more complicated. It is possible the hunter gatherers were not as pale as I first thought and the farmers are not as dark as I first thought. Predictions for how long pale features in Europeans have existed are usually pretty recent starting in the Mesolithic. So it is definitely possibly many Mesolithic and definitely Palaeolithic Europeans were white-olive skinned and very dark haired and eyed. Maybe most modern Europeans Mesolithic ancestry is from the paler ones.
"By analyzing sites known to affect phenotype, we inferred that neither Stuttgart nor Loschbour could digest milk into adulthood"
I know very little about this, but I do know lactose persistence is highest in Europeans, so no surprise.
There's really no need to focus on the PCA all that much, because the paper by and large isn't based on it. The meat and potatoes of the study are the formal mixture tests.
Fanty said...
So we know now,....
H/G = Y-DNA I, mtDNA: U5, blue eyes, possibly somewhat "tanned" skin.
physically phenotypes: Robust, wide faced, round skulled. As modern anchestor phenotypes are usualy named: Brunn on the British Isles, Borreby in Scandinavia and northern Germany and Baltid south and east of the Baltic sea.
EEF: Y-DNA G+E, mtDNA H, K... lots others.
Brown eyed but white skin. Physical phenotypes: filigrane, light boned, slim faced and with longish skulls. Generally refered to as "Mediteranide" type.
Did they say something about ANE Y-DNA? Is it true that that 20K year old R guy from Sibiria has ANE like autosomal DNA?
Did they explain why ANE populations seem to be responsable for 40-80% of West Europeas paternal lineages (40-60% in NE Europe) but contribute only 12-18% autosomal DNA? Genetical drift? Founder Effects?
Yeah I know "R = Indio Eropeans"... but wait, they said THREE populations are resplonsable for modern European genetics: WHG, EEF and ANE, they dont say anything about a 4. like "Indio Europeans", so.... whats R? Seems like the only ANE whos Y-DNA we know has R? -.-
Wow, you know a lot about their skeletal features. It is not just mtDNA U5, but also U4, U2(specifically U2e but also possibly other lineages), "north European" like ancestry probably what WGH stands for, Y DNA I, blue eyes(also 50%< chance for brown eyes, right?) probably all light eyes, tannish but probably still pale, dark hair, has now been identified in Mesolithic west European hunter gatherers.
There are also debatable mtDNA H(including H1b and H7) samples from Mesolithic Portugal, for sure H from Mesolithic Karelia, debated H(including H6) from Magdalenian Palaeolithic northern Spain, possibly H's from multiple samples from Palaeolithic Europe and also possibly RO's and HV's. There are also U*'s with no modern lineages found in Palaeolithic Europe. So the mtDNA from pre Neolithic Europe is not so pure and the same.
Y DNA J and T also probably existed in Neolithic Europeans, probably almost all west Eurasian mtDNA that is non U5, U2e, U4, and U* in Europe is descended from Neolithic farmers. Brown eyes, dark hair, and pale skin(still not for sure for the LBK guy) is probably a good description of the pigmentation of Neolithic European farmers. They probably looked most similar to modern southern Europeans.
Fanty, you've never heard of Mal'ta boy? Look through Eurogenes old threads from October or November you will find it, also look at threads about him on Dienekes and for what they were.... we are.
He had Y DNA R* it was apart of a separate lineage from R1 and R2, so it can be ancestral to modern European R1. I heard that some experts from FTDNA say it is likely that another upper Palaeolithic Siberian from the same area but from around 11,000-17,000ybp(not 100% sure), most likely had Y DNA R1a1a1 M417*, he also was most related to west Eurasians.
So who knows Y DNA R in Eurasia today might originally have a origin in Siberia or with people connected to the Mal'ta people. Over 1,00's and 1,000's of years of mixing the original Y DNA R people's blood gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Y DNA R1 spread very recently in Europe mainly with Indo Europeans and I haven't heard of any pre Neolithic R lineages in Europe except R1a is a likely possibility. Pre Neolithic European hunter gatherer ancestry is what makes modern Europeans distinct. So I doubt Mal'ta's people are the main or a very big part of European ancestry.
Following their figure 2A model whereby EEF is 44% (ish) "basal Eurasian", one of the interesting things we can do with these proportions Davidski posted up is transform these percentages into percentages of West Eurasian, "basal Eurasian" and ANE ancestry (e.g. West Eurasian is all the WHG ancestry + 56% of EEF, while BE is 44% of EEF).
WE BE ANE
0.521 0.410 0.069 -- Ashkenazi_Jew
0.573 0.297 0.130 -- French_South
0.522 0.410 0.068 -- Maltese
0.646 0.172 0.182 -- Scottish
0.506 0.397 0.097 -- Sicilian
The basal Eurasian vs ANE proportion slightly confounds my expectations by not being consistently more basal Eurasian vs ANE in the Northwest fringe compared to the Northeast European fringe
From Extended Data Figure 6: Another thing I notice here is that Europeans apparently have only EEF (Stuttgart) and ANE (Malta) in common with Middle Eastern and (I would guess) South Asians. WHG is exclusive to Europe. Too bad they didn't include South Asians or Central Asians in this.
Aside from that, the Basal Eurasian really stands out as a novel key finding.
Looking at the k-means output, a little bit of the Stuttgart/Sardinian (magenta) in k=20 shows up in Afar and Ethiopian Jews (just a tad bit also in Oromos and Somalis).
At k=20, the magenta Stuttgart/Sardinian also shows up in Nogay, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and Kuchin Jews, also a little bit in Hazara, Uyghur, and Kusunda.
Also notice this study includes Ami and Atayal, which form their own component at k=19 and k=20. Shows up in Chinese, Japanese, Cambodians, etc.
"There's really no need to focus on the PCA all that much, because the paper by and large isn't based on it. The meat and potatoes of the study are the formal mixture tests".
I understand that the authors chose to do that. However the PCA seems to evidence some shortcomings, not so much of the methodology, I guess but of the samples choice for the "formal mixture tests". As I said before, it seems obvious that if these tests would have been performed with Braña 2 instead of Lochsbour, the results would be radically different, because in the PCA Braña 2 is as distant from Lochsbour as this one is from the most distant EEF sample or to Russians.
I see therefore important methodological contradictions which are most apparent when contrasting with the PCA, the only test where all ancient samples are present.
It's very possible that Lochsbour is not really representative, much less ancestral, to the Western European Hunter-Gatherer component in modern Europeans (and even in EEFs) but a marginal line. Have you even looked at his skull? He looks "archaic" or otherwise very anomalous with low forehead and very prominent browridge, totally unlike our usual Paleolithic HG, let alone modern Europeans. He's obviously not "archaic" in the genetic aspect but he's quite strange-looking in both the phenotype and the genetic aspect as well.
But, as I pointed above there are other less clear issues, notably the extreme difference between ANE (rel. to MA1) in the formal tests and in the PCA, where MA1 relationship seems overwhelmingly dominant for Eastern+ Europeans.
@Matt: what would be "Basal Eurasian"? All aDNA samples are West Eurasian or of clear West Eurasian (and even European) affinity. I don't make any sense of your transformations.
MfA said...
MA1 - K19
Lithuanian (N. European) 32,85%
Mbuti (Pygmy) 0,85%
Chipewyan (Amerindian) 16,73%
Mala (ASI) 11,03%
Pima (Amerindian) 6,06%
Papuan (Ocenian) 0,97%
Kalash (Caucasus+Gedrosia) 26,91%
Karitiana (Amerindian) 2,91%
Onge (Onge) 1,70%
http://abload.de/img/malboy_k19qyzbt.png
Maju, i would like to see more evidence of way you think modern Basque and southern French are so close to La Brana-2 and WEH. Honestly Maju i think you are a bit biased because your Basque. Just looking at the globe13, K12b, and K7b results of La Brana(not sure which), Davidski's thread about Mesolithic ancestry in Europe, and that the Spanish scientist said he was most related to modern north Europeans not Spanish, makes me think what you saying is biased and not accurate.
I have seen you argue that the same thing in Fennoscandia Biographic project. It seems pretty clear to me many people who create autosomal DNA tests(including from Geno 2.0) have found very distinct ancestry in modern Europeans that is highest in Lithuanians. My ranking based on the tests results I have seen are.
1.North east Baltic's
2.Finnish-Sami
3.Northeast Europeans
4.Slavs(xBalkans)
5.Germanic Scandinavians
6.Non Slavic Russians
7.Central Europeans and British-Irish
9.Northern Balkans
10.Basque
11.Iberia
12.Southern Balkans(X Greece)
13.Northern Italy
14.Central Italy
15.Southern Italy
16.Greece
17.Sicily
18.Sardinia
It also seems pretty obvious to me that what has been called Meditreaen type ancestry descend from Neolithic farmers like Otzi, Gok4, and probably this LBK girl. I know your a freaking genius and I respect your opinion so I would like to see all your evidence that isn't true.
@Fanty
"Yeah I know "R = Indio Eropeans"... but wait, they said THREE populations are resplonsable for modern European genetics: WHG, EEF and ANE, they dont say anything about a 4. like "Indio Europeans", so.... whats R? Seems like the only ANE whos Y-DNA we know has R?"
I think it will eventually turn out to be 4 components with the confusion caused by three of them closely related i.e an ancient parental hyperborean HG population split into eastern and western child clusters by the ice followed later by the farmers pushing more into the western child cluster than the eastern child cluster before being over-run by both of them via a HG to herder transition (two imo, first a western and then an eastern).
"Did they explain why ANE populations seem to be responsable for 40-80% of West Europeas paternal lineages (40-60% in NE Europe) but contribute only 12-18% autosomal DNA? Genetical drift? Founder Effects?"
Herder over-run, smaller population > larger population?
(Or - wild speculation - lactose tolerance fluke followed by selection in place?)
M. Myllylä said...
Barak, you have obviously a fetish about Finnish-Sami, I saw it already when you tried to connect our yDna's that are common with almost every group from Russia to Scandinavia and Baltic countries, except certain N1c1 that connect Finns and Samis. We have a common FU-language root, our languages diverged earlier than any other languages in the whole Northern Europe, excluding Slavic and Germanic proto languages. We have common admix, like we have with Estonians, Northern Russians and Scandinavians, but our genetic distance is at least ten times what you see between countries in Central Europe. There has been Finnish migrations to the Lapland, like has been also to Sweden and Swedish migrations to Finland, South Saamis have a significant Sacndinavian admix, but being honest you shouldn't connect these events to our ancient roots only because you have a fetish. I am not going to repeat this to you, only now and once.
barakobama what does it mean your "Non Slavic Russians"?
My PC cant download all the info about these ancient samples. I did though look at the link with K=19 results of these ancient sample, MfA showed.
Davidski, all the hunter gatherer's are 100% something, and the farmer was mainly something else but with a little hunter gatherer, and Malta was extremely mixed with some blue, that is what was excepted right? I think these hunter gatherers unlike La Brana's and the Pitted ware guys, had no farmer ancestry, not a surprise farming had not reached their area of Europe. I bet in globe13 and K12b they would come out 100% North European. I bet the LBK person will be very similar to Otzi and Gok4. Mal'ta also has a lot of Native American and some south Asian and a tiny tiny bit of Oceania and I guess also Admananese(Onge). That is similar to the K=9 in you showed.
Since Mal'ta people had similar culture to Europeans at that time, Y DNA I is estimated to be about 25,000 years old, two 31,155 year old mtDNA pre U5(2 of 5 defining mutations), was found in the Czech Republic, and that U5 is estimated to be over 30,000 years old. Makes me think that those Mesolithic European hunter gatherers are mainly descended from Upper Palaeolithic European hunter gatherers associated with cultures like Gravettian. U2e has already been found in Germany from 11,000ybp, Karelia from 7,500ybp, and now Sweden from 8,000ybp, we already know U5 and U4 have been found all over Europe from the Mesolithic. I think the relation all those hunter gatherers in Europe had in the Mesolithic went very far back like before the LGM.
The U5a(no U5b), U2e, and U4(St.. Forvar) already found in Mesolithic hunter gatherers of Sweden or I guess St, Forvar was from an island by Gotland but whatever. I think that means they were closely related to the hunter gatherers of Karelia and far eastern Europe period. Who had a high amount of U5(all U5a), U4, and U2e. That may mean the Karelia people also had I2a1b, I would think possibly also some other type of I, N1c, an even R1a. The mtDNA's in the RO family found in Mesolithic and Palaeolithic Europe complicates the mtDNA story of pre Neolithic Europe. I just found today I have mtDNA U5, so a direct maternal lineage that goes back over 30,000 years in Europe, my Dad has H64 which has only been found in 4 European samples out of over 10,000. I wonder if it has a Neolithic farmer origin like probably most H in Europe or a strange member of the RO family that has existed in Europe since before the Neolithic.
Ethnic groups in Russia like Udmurts, Mordovians, Bashkirs, etc. who are not Slavic Russians, i don't mean ones by the Caucasus mountains or far east.
What are talking about? I don't have a fetish towards Finnish-Sami. They are one of many people I have researched on. My rankings were honest and had no favoritism or un favoritism towards any people. You guys have distinct I1a2 L22 subclades that take up about 80% of your I1 and around 20% of your total Y DNA, that has a common ancestor with Swedish-Norwegian I1 from before the bronze age. I know your N1c1 is shared with Baltics and Uralics and other people in Russia. There may be subclades that are unique to certain regions and ethnic groups like with I1.
You guys are very related because your languages are most related to each other, they share the same I1a2 l22 subclades and high amount of N1c, both have a high amount of mtDNA U5b1b1 and V, and you guys live right next to each other.
I understand you guys aren't identical, but you definitely come from the same or very related root.
jackson_montgomery_devoni said...
Davidski,
Will it be possible for you to create an ADMIXTURE analysis now that can give an individual proportions of European Neolithic farmer, European Mesolithic hunter-gatherer and Ancient North Eurasian ancestry?
I was going to inquire about creating a calculator as well. However, I was wondering if the authors would release the allele frequencies that were used, so one could compare individual results with those from the paper.
A problem that may arise is that there may not be a large number of SNPs that overlap with those tested by most companies (23andMe, FTDNA, Ancestry, etc.)
pyromatic said...
These results are certainly surprising, especially since I2-M423 is rather rare in modern Scandinavia. I don't think I would extrapolate these results and state all I is mesolithic, since these samples are all I2-M423. Furthermore are these samples related to each other?
What is known about the single hg I sample, Motala 3? Is it M423- or did their testing of other SNPs fail? I2-M423 was previously noted in samples from 5k ybp. I1 still remains to be found...
http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?107551-Y-DNA-I-found-in-Mesolithic-Sweden(-I1)-and-Luxemburg-alot-of-other-good-stuff&p=2229802#post2229802
Why don't you then, being a serious researcher, update your beliefs to the knowledge level of serious researcher. If you could do it, you could also know that the closest upstream SNP (CTS2208) of the Finnish "Bothnian" I1 (the biggest subclade in Finland) is found from Germany (Saxony) and from Eastern England? You could also know that a lot of Finnish N1c1 clades is shared with Estonians and Swedes, in Sweden seaside areas nearest to the Baltic region. Don't bother people by your generalisations; the Russians could hear you telling that their Rurikid princes were Finns or Samis, Speaking about the languages following time lines like you I could bundle to English an Serbian people and speak about Serbian-English history. Maybe I start it and then wonder why people don't take me seriously.
I've updated the post with lots of commentary.
Please don't hate me.
@ Maju - the model given in the paper models Europeans as a mixture of European Early Farmers, ANE and West Eurasian Hunter Gatherers.
It also models West Eurasian Hunter Gatherers as descended entirely from a West Eurasian population, and European Early Farmers as a mix of this "West Eurasian" population and a "basal Eurasian" population in about a 44:56 ratio. This is given in the abstract and the Figure 2 A model.
So we can approximate basal Eurasian, "West Eurasian" and ANE proportions in the populations based on the above. Based on their assumptions.
One note about the "West Eurasian" population here is that it, like ANE, it actually shares more drift with East Eurasian hunter gatherers than the "basal Eurasian" does. In other words, their "West Eurasian" is more East Eurasian like than "basal Eurasian" is. Even though this is the element which may contribute most to distinguish the most distant present West Eurasian populations from other world populations, they've labelled it as basal Eurasian because they are operating under a model of serial founder effects / bottlenecks, where this is presumed to split off first.
"So what could be the cause of this relatively recent Siberian gene flow into Northeastern Europe? The best bet is the Uralic expansion and, for the Chuvash and Mordovians, perhaps also the Turkic expansion. Based on latest linguistic research, the pre-proto-Uralics appear to have expanded at some point from Siberia into the Volga-Ural region, in far eastern Europe. During the Bronze Age the Uralics proper then expanded from the Volga-Ural both back to the east and also west, as far as the Baltic (see here). I don't know if there's any consensus on when these two expansions took place, but it'd be interesting to find out."
This sounds geberally great. However this study saw the Finnish-Siberian admix clearly older than Mordovian-Siberian admix, despite of the linguistic branches. Finns and Mordovians belong to the same branch being parallel. So we need more explanations if we want to use linguistic explanations to resolve genetic problems. I can't claim that I know, but being stupid enough to look only these results we now have I would consider linguistic adaptation in Iron Age Finland and Estonia and Scandinaian admix in Finland with people of mesolithic origin. Looking at your double Uralic migrations the Siberian admix in Finland should be from the first one and Baltic-Finnic people from the second one.
What about the Turkic expansions, couldn't they have made the estimated dates of the Siberian-like admixture more recent for the Chuvash, Mordovians and even Kargopol Russians?
Also, Baltic Finns are near the Baltic, as you well know. While Kargopol Russians, Mordovians and Chuvash are in Russia, with Tatarstan and Western Siberia not that far away. Thus, very recent contacts between populations within Russia, which obviously didn't affect Finland, might also be the cause for this discrepancy.
Yes, it could have been the Turkic expansion or other Eastern expansions. We know the history in Russia under the Turkic reference during the first millennium. This study gives for the age of Mordovian-Siberian admix 69.8 generations, around 1750 years. What a chance to make a conclusion about where they got the newer Siberian-like admix. It doesn't give the admix age for the Finnish Siberian, but it should be about 4000 years old, plus-minus something depending on their walking speed from the Uralic home. Unfortunately this is only grey theory because Finland has met several migrations during the last 2000 years, but the baseline still remains.
spagetiMeatball said...
We don't man. Awesome comments. But if light skin was brought to europe by agriculturalists that might turn the hole thing on its head. SLC24A5 is recent, but not that recent, right?
It's difficult to be sure of anything with this stuff anymore. Soon we might be reading in the La Brana paper that he had blue eyes, blond hair and light skin.
For now, I'm willing to accept that foragers had darker skin, but lighter eyes, than farmers, and modern European pigmentation, including both light skin and high incidence of light eyes, is the result of these two pigmentation complexes mixing, plus some selection.
So A at SLC24A5 might be of farmer origin. But who knows, because the Stuttgart sample was apparently mixed Basal Eurasian and WHG anyway.
Ponto said...
I do not accept the Near Eastern admixture in Sicilians and Maltese, even in the Jews it is problematic. All three groups have North African ancestry either via the Moors or through residence in North Africa. North Africans have a lot of Near Eastern type ancestry, its age I have no idea but certainly existed before the coming of Arabic speaking groups like Bedouins. Anyway the Near Eastern thing is just a soft option as it is unlikely too many Bedouin would have made the trip from Arabia to North Africa to Sicily and Malta. The Maltese are essentially modified Sicilians. Linguistically Maltese is derived from Siculo-Arabic which was derived from a 9th century form of Maghrebi Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is logical to expect that Maltese would be much closer to Standard Arabic if derived from actual Arabs from Arabia, but Maltese and Arabic are not mutually intelligible.
@Matt:
You say: "the model given in the paper models Europeans as a mixture of European Early Farmers, ANE and West Eurasian Hunter Gatherers".
Actually, if you follow the supplemental materials, what they do is to compare them with Stuttgart (proxy for EEF), MA1 (proxy for ANE) and Lochsbour (proxy of Western European HGs, not "Eurasian" HGs). While Stuttgart is pretty much interchangeable with the other EEFs used in the PCA, Lochsbour particularly is not, being in fact very distant not just of modern Europeans in general, but of other Western and Scandinavian HGs.
So the main question here is: how good proxy it is for the Western HG admixture? And the answer must be: very poor, almost certainly inducing large levels of error. There is no test controlling for alternative comparisons such as with Braña2, which seem much closer to modern Europeans and should produce very different apportions therefore.
I'll try to explain that graphically in my upcoming blog entry.
@Davidski:
I believe I have spotted why MA1 produces such different appearance of similitude with Eastern Europeans, etc. If I'm correct, the PCA has a third dimension where the distance to East Asia and other Pacific Ocean regions manifests (that's why these populations are said to be "projected" but fall very close to the Caucasus and not out of graph, as they should in a normal bidimensional PCA). We know that MA1 has very strong affinity with Native Americans and therefore should score quite high in that third dimension, as the formal tests are absolute, they measure both: (a) distance in the flat bidimensional PCA and (b) the hidden distance in the third dimension, which must be quite important judging on them. So, as long as we accept MA1 as proxy for ANE, the formal tests are valid. However I do wonder which would be the measures if instead of the remote Siberian MA1, they used the other sample AG2 (which right not I'm not sure which one it is but must be mentioned somewhere). It is also possible that instead of such low frequencies, as happens with WHGs, the values would be at least somewhat higher (or even a lot higher) - sadly not knowing that "projected" third dimension, I can't measure the approx. difference at all.
Projecting samples onto PCA is problematic when the number of markers exceeds the number of samples. This causes projection bias, which means that the projected samples fall closer to the middle of the plot than they would if they weren't projected. A lot of people don't correct for this, and I don't think these guys did it.
Nevertheless, I mentioned the PCA because all of the ancient samples were projected. That means we can safely discuss the relationships between them on that plot, especially if we largely ignore the results of the other samples.
... "all of the ancient samples were projected".
I did not notice that part before, thanks for mentioning, because it's obviously important.
I would think that the (or maybe "a") PCA should have been done with the ancient samples only and, if anything then projecting the moderns in it. Otherwise what we see is how the ancients appear in relation to modern WEA genetics and not vice-versa, i.e. how moderns appear in relation to ancient genetics.
However comparing ancient to moderns is also revealing:
1. In the ANE component: AG2 appears as Mordovian and MA1 as intermediate between these and North Caucasians (with the known Native American tendency probably also manifest, even if the Karitiana themselves are also "projected").
2. The WHG component: shows a great deal of variation in affinity to modern Europeans: Braña 2 and Skoglund are quite similar, Braña 1 and Motala quite less so, while Lochsbour is very distant in fact. Naturally Scandinavian HGs are more similar to NW and NE Europeans, while Western HGs (especially the Braña samples) are more similar to SW Europeans instead.
3. EEF component: seems almost identical to Sardinians and, quite interestingly, also Canarians. In general it seems to have a hidden African affinity, because if you trace a line from the European cluster to them, it falls close to Bedouins in the extreme, rather than close to Northern West Asia, as we should expect if they'd be a simple Europe-West Asian mix. This probably has some relation with yDNA E1b-V13, which ultimately must have an Egyptian origin. In fact EEFs tend only very weakly, if at all, towards West Asia (i.e. Turkey or Syria/Lebanon).
So I'm getting quite wary of this simplistic West Asia vs WHG assumption: Egyptians should also be factored in, on one side, while, on the other, the WHG should be factored from the closest and not the farthest samples. Obviously if modern Europeans have some WHG ancestry, that will not uniform from all the ancient WHG populations, but stronger from some and weaker-to-zero from others like Lochsbour. So Lochsbour is a very mediocre proxy at best for WHG admixture, I must say, and there seem to be other issues hidden in the complexity.
I like to hope that peer-review will solve some of these issues (although sincerely I doubt it) but in any case these are serious questions to be addressed in future studies with a more adequate, refined, strategy of analysis.
Well, for example, AG2 might appear very Mordovian there, but I bet that if he wasn't projected he'd be somewhere where the Chuvash and Mari are on these sorts of plots. See here...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/cluster-analysis-of-west-eurasia-13.html
So I wouldn't bother with that PCA too much, because it's almost useless. It seems they just ran it because PCAs are expected in these sorts of papers. All the really cool stuff is in the supplementary/extended PDFs where they discuss the formal mixture tests. I still haven't grasped it all, but it does make a lot of sense.
Kristiina said...
That new SNP is an interesting finding! I went to see Terry's page http://www.goggo.com/terry/HaplogroupI1/ and saw that he has updated his Phylo Tree. On FT site, that I1d CTS2208, CTS5476 is indeed found in one German, American and English person. As L22+ is found in a wider area, including Poland and Karelia, it is possible that I1d CTS2208, CTS5476 is found also east of Germany, and also because commercial testing is concentrated in Western European countries.
I1(xI2) frequency is quite high also in some parts of Belorussia: Central Belorussia 6.82%, West Belorussia 6.85%, WP Belorussia 8.26%. There is very little commercial testing in Belorussia and we might find interesting stuff there!
I say this also because in Motala and Loschbour, it was specifically I and I2 that was found and not I1!
Could be some kind of Phoenician link at play in Sicily, Malta, etc (before SSA gene flow in NW Africa). Would explain low levels of WHG in these populations.
The ANE thing doesn't make sense to me. Mal'ta was very mixed with some WHG ancestry aka Upper Palaeolithic European ancestry who were the ancestors of WHG. Mal'ta seems like a mut not apart of a distinct population, what part of him was unique, besides being mixed? If they can somehow detect ANE admixture(what part), I think it may be connected with Y DNA R, maybe also Q in Native Americans. Who today has the highest amount of ANE, south-central Asians?
ANE was absent from that LBK girl, and her ancestry mainly had just come out of the Near east. There was most likely no Y DNA R in her people, just G2a, E1b1b V13, J1, J2, T, and hunter gatherer I2. The farmers of Europe like the LBK girl, like Otzi, like Gok4 were not very similar to modern Near easterns, even though that is were they came from.
The main ancestors of all the different near eastern people today, were probably somewhere around there but later the LBK girl's, Otzi's, and Gok4's people disappeared or mixed in. Y DNA R1b seems to have been in west Asia for a long time since before the Neolithic. The main ancestors of modern near easterns probably carried some R1b and that is where their ANE ancestry comes from. I think R1a1a1 M417 Indo Europeans that spread in east Europe and the R1b1a2a1a L11 ones that spread in west Europe, both probably carried ANE ancestry. Same with the near eastern people Italians and Balkaners most likely have mixed with since after the Neolithic. The Swedish hunter gatherers did have a good amount of ANE ancestry so it could have already been in some areas of Europe. Who knows it could have arrived in Finland because their main ancestors came from Russia were they mixed with the ancestors of many future Indo Europeans, there are a lot of possibilities.
I can't believe that the Stuttgart was mixed Basal Eurasian. I totally respect these people who did this study, but honestly that sounds impossible. The ancestors of all modern Eurasians(and north Africans) in my opinion would have looked a lot like modern Admanese, Papuans, and sub Saharan Africans(I could be wrong of course).
I know over 60,000 years that could have changed but I doubt they would have developed the exact same way as west Eurasians ancestors did. If the Stuttgart girl was so non west Eurasian, why did she have probably light skin, and I am guessing Caucasoid skeletal features. I believe this study may have found something but saying almost 50% non west Eurasian is honestly nuts.
We now know blue eyes existed in Mesolithic west Europe, 2/2 samples(1 probably) have blue eyes so far, I really doubt they normally had dark skin. Europeans today with a lot of light hair and eyes also tend to have the lightest skin, while Europeans with a lot of EEF ancestry like Sardinia and most south Europeans will more oftenly have tannish skin, their known to be olive.
Both light hair and light eyes are very exclusive to Europe, just like WHG ancestry. It makes the most sense to me the WHG had light skin like EEF did. The guy from Luxemburg shows Mesolithic west Europeans may not have been as pale as Lithuanians or Finnish, maybe more like Sami. He is just one sample though if we get more genomes from many different periods in Europe's history and many different regions we may see the depigmentation happen. Who knows the Luxemburg guy's people maybe didn't survive well, but other Mesolithic people did. His people could have been tannish. I think the Luxemburg guy was, because the LBK girl wasn't albino probably not very pale. Honestly I have seen many northwest Europeans with naturally tannish or brownish skin and also light colored eyes. Dark skin definitely existed in Mesolithic north-west Europe but may have been a minority like today.
According to them Sardinians have 17.5% hunger gatherer admixture. Sardinians have a very high frequency of I2 that probably comes from the mesolithic europeans. If the Scots and English have such a high frequency of WHG, it does not show up in the mtdna (10-15%) or y-chromosome (10-15), I would expect the dinaric alps to have a very high frequency of WHG, it is possible that founder effects changed the landscape of uniparental variation, not just on the paternal side but also on the maternal side.
The WHG were a pure group (few groups like this exist now) where almost everyone was lactose intolerant had blue eyes and black hair, and all had I y-dna and U5 U4 or U2 mtdna, they had a little variation so they were not clones (they didn't all have U5 and I2, they had other forms of U and I that are disconnected by millennial), I cant find one single modern group with less diversity than the mesolithic europeans who lived from at least north iberia to moscow, can you? On the other hand the neolithic Europeans(LBK) were highly admixed, using them as a component is not really scientific.
Kristiina, you are right. We don't know yet where the CTS2208+ L287- is from. Now we can say only that very likely it has been in Germany, because also British finds (two) support it. But we really know nothing about Belorussia, nothing about Estonia, something about Poland and Germany. I asked a year ago from Finnish researcher about new yDna studies. They had no plans, in fact they had no idea about any new studies regarding the Baltic Sea region.
"On the other hand the neolithic Europeans(LBK) were highly admixed, using them as a component is not really scientific."
And yet they had been ALMOST (few exceptions) excluvively G people. Thats not "Highly admixed" to me. At least it does not show in their Y-DNA. Of course they seem to have been extremely diverse in their mtDNA. Agreed.
I mean neolithic Europeans in general, not LBK (who are just one group of neolithic Europeans)
David, I also don't get what exactly "basal eurasian" is. Is it the same thing as the "southwest asian" or "meditteranean" component that is frequently discussed? Barakobama raises an interesting point, in that the populations that carry most of this component don't appear all that similar phenotypically to papuans or aborigines who have are believe to be very early divergences.
On Dienekes blog, it's been suggested the Basal Eurasians were a group that continued gene flow with NE Africans after other Eurasians split from Africa. Nubians-Natufians.
My reading of Lazaridis was different. I thought that there was first a Nonafrican/African split. Second, basal Eurasians split from Non-Aricans. The other nonafricans continued to mix with each other, only later diverging to east and west branches.
So the Basal Eurasians were isolated early. Either by geography or maybe endogamy would be my guess. Ie if their evolutionary trajectory had special functional adaptations (neurophysiological for instance).
Or could be simple geographical isolation (like in North Africa if these were pre-Natufians).
Papuans are actually closely related to the Onge. So they're Eastern non-Africans in this study, but with inflated Denisovan admixture.
My understanding is that Basal Eurasian is a group that stayed in Arabia as the other Eurasians moved out, but finally expanded during the Neolithic.
Also, I was just thinking, couldn't Basal Eurasian be responsible for Y-DNA E?
Oh crap, I thought that linking "Basal Eurasian" to hg E was an original idea, but it's not. Here's a quote from the supplemental PDF.
"More speculatively, some basal Eurasian admixture in the Near East may reflect the early presence of anatomically modern humans 7 in the Levant, or the populations responsible for the appearance of the Nubian Complex in Arabia 8 , both of which date much earlier than the widespread dissemination of modern humans across Eurasia. Finally, it could reflect continuing more recent gene flows between the Near East and nearby Africa after the initial out-of-Africa dispersal, perhaps associated with the spread of Y-chromosome haplogroup E subclades from eastern Africa 9, 10 into the Near East, which appeared at least 7,000 years ago into Neolithic Europe 11 ."
Your right the Mesolithic Europeans were very unmixed. We don't know if all had black hair and blue eyes, just this one sample from Luxemburg probably did. We don't know the hair color of La Brana-1 according to a Spanish article he also had blue eyes, I would guess also black hair but probably paler skin.
Not all Mesolithic Europeans had mtDNA U5, U4, and U2(U2e). C1f(only sample) and H found in Mesolithic Karelia. There are members of the RO family that have also been found in Palaeolithic Europe. It does seem they were very pure and traced their ancestry back over 30,000 years in Europe but they were not completely pure.
There are some modern populations like that. Native Americans, Papuans, far southern Dravidens, San.
Basal Eurasians might possible be represented both by Haplogroup G Y-DNA and mtdna haplogroup N1,N2 and X?
How about hg E (Basal Eurasian) + hg G (Balkan or Anatolian WHG-like) = EEF?
Maybe Basal Europeans is a huge category that is unscientific, maybe it is represented by both G and E. It should be divided into perhaps 2 subdivisions? G is highly divergent, being less closely related to K then H is(HIJK), I seriously doubt that the linearback had any E, we only have 3 samples of them. I seriously doubt that E lineages are responsible for 20% of the Scandinavian genepool.
some basal Eurasian admixture in the Near East " This does not account for all basal Eurasian Admixture,. Do perople from india have basal Eurasian Admixture? If so Basal Eurasian may be simply represented by FXIJK of F Xhijk.
E was found in Neolithic Iberian remains, but I don't recall the details.
If WHG and ANE can be so phylogenetically close to each other, even though they seem to be represented by I and R, respectively, then I don't see why WHG-like populations elsewhere, like the Balkans, couldn't have carried G.
I any case, I think E is a really good candidate for the earliest Neolithic paternal marker in the Fertile Crescent.
Davidski when they say Ashkenazi Jews, Sicilians, and Maltese have near eastern ancestry that cannot by explained by EEF. Do they mean EEF is related to what is in the Near east today or is extremely "Meditreaen" like, or is just they have non WHG and EEF west Eurasian ancestry, which is in modern near easterns. Italians and Balkaners have a pretty high amount of near eastern ancestry that has not been found in any Neolithic Europeans. How do we explain it? In globe13 their southwest Asian vs west Asian percentages are the same so they possibly got it from the same source. I am guessing it could be from the metal ages or Neolithic, the high amount of J and E1b1b in Italy and the Balkans may be connected. Typically near eastern mtDNA is also highest in Italy and the Balkans.
I really don't understand the ANE thing, what is it? MA1 was very mixed so how could there be a pure component that represents him? I know that other ancient north Eurasian was very west Eurasian like but still I am very confused on what ANE really is. Is it highest in the Kalash and other south-central Asians? Do you think it could be connected with Gedrosia in K12b? Is it very west Eurasian like? It seems people are trying to classify this pre historic extinct population and it is just in the air and very hard to understand. Whatever ANE is I think it may be connected with Y DNA R. The fact it exists in Native Americans, near easterns, and Europeans is very surprising, maybe Y DNA P is the original connection.
Irish have almost exclusively Y DNA R1b P312 but almost all their ancestry comes from pre Neolithic European hunter gatherers(No R1b), and early European farmers who came form the near east(No R1b). There are many different ways a paternal or maternal lineage becomes the most popular in a population. The early European farmers do seem to be a distinct people though in autosomal DNA.
Wow, I didn't know the Onge were very related to Papuans. Who are very related to native Australians right? It makes sense they have the same black skin, nappy hair, and similar facial features(not Australians). I have heard many just assume the Onge have been there for 60,000 years and are not very related to other non Africans. Are Papuans-Onge-Australians in the same eastern Eurasian group as East Asians aka Mongoloids? I have an idea of what west Eurasian is but it seems south Asians are their own group(despite west Eurasian features), maybe also mixed between different non African groups.
Y DNA E1b1b is the dominate Y DNA haplogroup of north Africans, who are overwhelmingly west Eurasian. It would make sense to me way back when in the Palaeolithic some west Eurasian E1b1b's went to the near east and then went to Europe in the Neolithic. Y DNA E it self I have heard is suppose to have originated in sub Saharan Africans not non Africans. I know very little about it though. This basal Eurasian origin of E might make sense since its brotherclade D is exclusively non African.
Y DNA G is most diverse around Iran and the Caucasus right? I doubt it was WGH like, who so far we can only connected with Y DNA I, there are probably others though. The basal Eurasian thing doesn't make sense to me mainly because of the west Eurasian phenotype of these farmers. If there were a people who branched off from the common ancestors of all modern non Africans, they would not have west Eurasian features. Where is the strange unknown so far branches of M and N in these farmers? I think they found something because they know what their doing but I doubt it was basal Eurasian.
The genetic structure of the Near East and North Africa changed after the Near Eastern ancestors of EEF migrated to Europe. Sicilians, Maltese and Ashkenazi Jews have relatively high admixtures from the Near East and North Africa from after this period of change.
Also, ANE looks like the eastern version of WHG to me. That's probably why the Swedish Mesolithic forager, Motala12, can be described as a mix of WHG and ANE. See here...
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/7623/eduy.png
And I don't think MA1 was mixed. It's just that his population contributed DNA to a wide variety of modern Eurasian groups, while the WHG only contributed DNA to modern Europeans.
The 7,000 year old Epicardial Spain was E1b1b V13 the most popular type in Europe today, there were three G2a's in the same site. Davidski if you don't already, you need to check out Ancient Eurasian DNA, it has tons of info along with sources to the study's.
Wow, Davidski did you see how close AG2 was to northeast Europeans(most Mesolithic), on PCA thing. There was some weird unexpected stuff like Basque and south French being close to the Brana's when all other evidence points to them being closest to northeast Europeans. But still I think AG2 may have had some Palaeolithic European ancestry or related ancestry. The 32% N. European in K=19 for MA1 is evidence he also had Palaeolithic European ancestry. I think that may be why they are phylogenetically close to each other. Or maybe they were a brother group. MA1;s people had a related culture to what is in Europe at the same time so they were connected to Europe.
Y DNA E is very old and has many different lineages in many different places so I think its story is probably very complicated.
Are there modern people with basal Eurasian? That could somehow be connected with Y DNA G and other haplogroups that leave the tree early, I don't know.
Neolithic Iberian remains ARE NOT LBK, LBK had N1a mtdna. N1a mtdna was never found in iberia according to ancient dna.
It seems they tested a limited number of SNPs. It would be nice to see them test more of the I1 and I2 defining SNPs to see if the I* sample falls into pre-I1, I2, or some other line. That I2-M423* is found in 7500-8000 year old remains is consistent with Ken Nordtvedt's datings, as is that these sample are negative for the downstream SNPs they tested which are younger, per Nordtvedt, than the samples.
The Swedish hunter gatherers had typical Mesolithic European mtDNA haplogroups, they also had I2a1b like the Luxemburg guy. They definitely had similar ancestry, all in K=19 came out 100% NE. European.
So you think MA1 got those results because his people later mixed with many Eurasians? The reason Europeans have some ANE is because it WHG then to modern Europeans? How can that be true if ANE ancestry probably spread in most of Europe during the metal ages.
What do you think MA1's people were? That tree you should me thinks they were a brother group to west Eurasians not specifically WHG. Being a brother group of WHG might make sense since the MA1 people had a similar culture to ones in Europe at the same time. I am still very confused with the ANE they still seem to be a up in the air and mystical while WHG is something I can touch and understand.
I am happy there is now even more evidence early European farmers were pretty different from modern near easterns. I didn't like people biasedly assuming LBK's mtDNA would be similar to modern near easterns, when really it wasn't. It was more similar to modern near easterns than the hunter gatherers of Europe but that's it, their subclades matched more with Europe. A lot of their subclades like J1c are sister clades to more typically near eastern J1b.
The Meditreaen component or whatever you and other keep finding I think without I doubt descends from EEF. Otzi had some southwest Asian and west Asian though and Gok4 had some southwest Asian(globe13). So they had some ancestry from I guess the main ancestors of modern near easterns. It is interesting to see how the EEF Meditreaen is connected with southwest Asian in obviously southwest Asia.
Otzi had much more southwest Asian in globe13 than west Asian and Gok4 had only southwest Asian so that I guess could be evidence their connected. It is surprising EEF were also pretty pale skinned like Mesolithic Europeans probably were. Modern people in the Caucasus and Sardinia are also pretty pale skinned, this could mean that pale skin was not exclusive a European trait in west Eurasia 10,000 years ago. I read about that gene that affects pale skin on Dienkes and how it is so spread out in west Eurasia and has a over age estimate that is over 20,000 years old. I think that is WGH EEF had some kind of common origin. But maybe WGH was very blue eyed, dark haired, and tannish skinned but I doubt mainly tannish skinned.
LBK had N1a were not closely related to the neolithic iberian remains, due to the lack of N1a and F*/H in Iberia . LBK almost certainly lacked E1b1b which is supported by 3 ancient remains. Basal Eurasian admixture is found in LBK which helps prove that most likely basal eurasian admixture is not directly associated with E.
They had similarities, Y DNA G2a has been found in both, they had many of the same mtDNA haplogroups not found in European hunter gatherers. Autosomal DNA has already shown similarties between Otzi, Gok4, this LBK girl, and a Neolithic Iberian. The La Brana hunter gatherers had some 'Meditreaen" ancestry probably because of mixing with Neolithic Iberians. Both Cardiel and LBK are suppose to come from the same Greek Neolithic source. There mtDNA definitely has some difference but without a doubt they had common ancestry.
Three Y DNA samples only allow three Y DNA haplogroups to be found when they certainly had more. I guarantee you in the future some type of E1b1b will be found in LBK. Like most Neolithic Europeans(at least western and central) their main Y DNA haplogroup was G2a
"E was found in Neolithic Iberian remains, but I don't recall the details".
→ http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2011/11/breaking-news-neolithic-iberian-dna.html
L'Avellaner cave (Garrotxa District, Catalan Pyrenees) produced G2a and E1b-V13, probably Cardium Pottery arrivals, along with two of the four mtDNA lineages (K1a1a and T2b). The other two mtDNA lineages are probably aboriginal (most likely U5b and H1).
Similarly a later Chalcolithic site in nearby Languedoc produced G2a (fixed in a single haplotype) and I2a in the patrilineal side, along with a mixture of "Neolithic" and "Paleolithic" lineages on the matrilineal one: 3 H1, 3 H3, 2 HV0*, 1 V, 1 U*, 5 U5, 2 K1a, 6 J1, 2 T2b and 4 X2.
→ http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2011/06/languedoc-chalcolithic-dna.html
They did not carry the West European lactose tolerance allele, just as Central European EEFs didn't either. The first ones spotted with these allele are Chalcolithic Basques of the Ebro basin, in a very interesting scenario of still incipient admixture (most are homozygous for either allele).
→ http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2012/01/caught-in-act-lactose-intolerant-and.html
I'm of the opinion that the T allele in the rs4988235 (lactose tolerance) site is of Western HG origin (a mere fluke, no obvious selection involved, at least not in a long time).
"I don't see why WHG-like populations elsewhere, like the Balkans, couldn't have carried G".
Mostly because G and particularly G2a is not too common today in that region. While G2 is present in Greece, it is always found at low frequencies, unlike I2 or E1b, which are much more common and, together with J subclades, make the bulk of the yDNA pool.
On the other hand G2a is much more important in Italy, so maybe it underwent a founder effect over there that manifested also further West (Iberia particularly).
On the other hand, barring the Caucasus and some Palestinians (both most unlikely sources of Neolithic flows), G or G2a is also not more important in West Asia than it is in Italy or Iberia. Frequencies in Turkey are smaller than in Italy or Portugal for example. Curiously it is also found in Egypt (only relevant place in Africa for this lineage), so maybe there's some founder-effect correlation between G2a and E1b-V13 (unclear though).
"I any case, I think E is a really good candidate for the earliest Neolithic paternal marker in the Fertile Crescent".
Almost certainly not: E (outside Africa) seems to have experienced a distribution along the Eastern Meditarranean coasts but is rare to no-existent further inland. In fact the high frequencies found in Greece and Albania have no parallel in West Asia other than to some extent the Southern Levant. E certainly had no role in the area of Mesopotamia nor further East (and only very limited impact in Anatolia), so it must have arrived via coastal routes from Palestine/Egypt almost certainly.
I think you guys are missing the bigger and more interesting picture painted by Z74 by focusing on CTS2208. Z74 unites the western, more Norwegian branch of L22 that is L813+ with the eastern, Bothnian branch that is CTS2208+. My suspicion is that Z74 will have a center in Sweden, suggesting a mode of dispersal of L22+ Z74+ I1 in Scandinavia.
Admittedly, this isn't really my area of interest, but it's now overlapping increasingly with my area of interest, so I need to look into it in detail at some point.
"Neolithic Iberian remains ARE NOT LBK, LBK had N1a mtdna. N1a mtdna was never found in iberia according to ancient dna".
Well, the main reason is not genetic but archaeological LBK never arrived anywhere beyond the Seine river (except for a very brief transitional period at its very end in the area of Brittany). On the other hand Cardium-related influences did arrive to the southern and western parts Central Europe (La Hoguette), overlapping with early LBK.
In the genetic aspect it is true that N1a as such has not been clearly spotted in Iberian aDNA (although some "N" sequences are worth a second look probably) but it has been spotted in SW France (Megalithic context) at frequencies very similar to those found in LBK sites: 1 H, 1 X2, 1 N1a.
→ http://leherensuge.blogspot.com/2010/08/megalithic-adna-from-charente-maritime.html
To discuss the Neolithic we must understand the Neolithic, at least to some extent. Regarding European Neolithic we must notice that Thessalian Neolithic:
1. Is contemporary of the late phases of PPNB, the oldest Neolithic without doubts in Anatolia and the Levant, previous phases like PPNA or Gobekli Tepe are transitional (Mesolithic) and probably still largely hunter-gatherer in their economy, if not totally.
2. Unlike PPNB, Thessalian Neolithic had pottery since day one (origin?)
3. It may have some links to Anatolian Neolithic but the matter remains in need of clarification (non-PPNB sites are invariably more recent or at best contemporary to the earliest Thessalian Neolithic).
In brief: it is likely that Thessalian Neolithic had some roots in West Asia but its exact relations remain obscure to this day. It is also one of the oldest Neolithic areas outside the Fertile Crescent core and its pottery is one of the oldest ones (excepting East Asia).
On the other hand it is clear that the two main branches of European Neolithic had their roots in Thessaly: Sesklo for the Painted Pottery branch (leading later to Linear Bands Pottery, LBK) and Otzaki for the Impressed Pottery branch (leading later to Cardium Pottery). The presence of Cardium Pottery in late Biblos (Lebanon) is derived not original (as its late dates should reveal on their own).
Eastern European Neolithic is unrelated to these branches and probably has local Epipaleolithic roots (Dniepr-Don culture). It is less clear but also very likely that the Almagra Pottery sites of Southern Iberia and the earliest Megalithic sites of Portugal are also older than the arrival of Cardium Pottery to Eastern Iberia (mostly) and therefore not directly related to this Thessalian Neolithic or only obliquely so.
Also, back to the East, the area of Jarmo (and therefore by extension Mesopotamia, Iran, etc.) seems to have developed a distinct Neolithic tradition. So there is some distinction between East and West in the Fertile Crescent (in addition to also some distinction between North and South in the Western part of it). Probably we should consider three different regions in the Fertile Crescent: the Levant, Anatolia and the Zagros-Mesopotamia area. But they had connections also, of course (and the area of Gobekli Tepe may have been a major connecting node, as well as later the cities of the Upper Euphrates like Mari, etc.).
The issue of possible Egyptian influences in Palestinian Mesolithic is a bit confuse but likely to be real, especially durable may have been their influence in the semi-desert specialist Harifian culture, which in turn is probably the ultimate origin of Semitic cultures (via the PPNC and the Circum-Arabian Pastoralist Complex).
What is not clear is how these influences reached Greece or whether if this arrival was still Mesolithic or already Neolithic. But I would bet for a "coastal route" type of link, something that would later characterize the Impressed-Cardium branch (deep sea sailing demonstrated).
They had a genetic relationship somewhat In mtDNA, but definitely in Y DNA and autosomal DNA, plus they came from the same Greek Neolithic source.
The Natufians!!
Is Basal Eurasian in modern Europeans? If it isn't even in Sardinia that wouldn't make sense.
True, the proportions I have given are only valid for the assumptions of their model, where Early European Farmers are over slightly half "West Eurasian" and slightly under half "Basal Eurasian" (which really, properly could be called "Ancient Mediterranean" instead, among other speculative names, I guess, on the basis of its distribution).
Whether using the Iberian La Brana samples would give different results than Loschbour in their f statistics (and whether this would affect their models) sounds like something worth emailing the study authors about, and then including in your blog response, if you get an answer you can disclose.
It might be that they were unable to use these samples as a comparison due to the low coverage of these samples, which maybe are not at a level where they have confidence they can get the right statistical power out.
If this is the case, hopefully these tests will be replicated with fuller coverage La Brana genomes, later in 2014, so perhaps we should treat these as more caveated results until then. And hopefully by a lab, although I'm sure the genome bloggers can have a stab at it.
I just posted a comment at bioRxiv, which is waiting to be approved, but I didn't say anything about the Basal Eurasians. I was just questioning the validity of classifying WHG and ANE as separate ancestral populations, as opposed to just meta-populations of a wider Northwest Eurasian forager gene pool.
You should post your question there. I'm sure the authors are watching the comments section and will reply eventually. Getting them involved in a discussion could be really interesting, and might result in some changes to the final draft. But who knows, we might get swiftly checkmated instead.
Pyromatic, I didn't miss the Z74, I was answering to Barak who has bad shortages in his knowledge about the North European history and the CTS2208 is the link between larger I1 groups and the Bothnian.
I agree with you. The Z74 is one of the most interesting branches connecting Norwegian and Finnish branches. We have obviously only one pure Z74 case, in Sweden, although a lot of samples in Norwegian and Finnish subclades. Hopefully we come to see more Z74 cases without known downstream mutations and could estimate the origin of that mutation.
FYI, my take on this study, for which this discussion has been a good way to clarify my ideas (thanks, particularly to Davidski):
→ http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2013/12/ancient-european-dna-and-some-debatable.html
Fascinating discussion, everyone.
If Basal Eurasians were pre-Natufians, then they might have had an evolutionary tendency to prefer sedentism (even if they moved around by necessity) that eventually led to agriculture.
It looks like WHG and ANE were two endpoints of a chain of hunting cultures, which would entail a very different adaptive strategy from an evolutionary point of view. I would really like to know whether ANE for instance had more Neanderthal introgression.
Something people might be missing wrt Basal Eurasians and EEF is this. Look at Table 1 in the paper. f3 statistics show that Arabs are a mix of Stuttgart EEF and African. When did this happen? We badly need ancient DNA from the Middle East to get a handle on why this is before making too many assumptions based on modern populations.
Indeed, this paper suggests that the Middle East is nothing like it was during the Neolithic genetically. The two main culprits were Sub-Saharan African admixture, probably in large part due to the slave trade from the early historic period to basically today, and ANE + R1 steppe horde admixture during the metal ages.
I am actually wondering if these early splits involved evolutionary adaptations during range expansions.
For instance: what if the Non-africans were becoming more migratory and hunter adapted (maybe mixing with Neanderthals in some cases) during a range expansion out of Africa. This would put new evolutionary pressure on the Non-africans in terms of physical and cognitive adaptations.
It could be the Basal Eurasians were the Non-africans that were initially "left behind" by the multitude of expanding hunting cultures for various reasons. Self selection and maybe exclusion by the hunter males for not being physically or psychologically fit. This sort of anti-adaptation to hunting then unexpectedly segued into a different evolutionary arc based on sedentism (seen in Natufians), which fortuitously led to agriculture.
Just a theory. But could explain the otherwise strange separation of Basals from other Non-africans at this stage. If Basals = Natufians, then they might have been active in North Africa too (not just Levant) and were sedentary before agriculture (which seems otherwise hard to explain, unless they were initially just those "left behind" by an incipient hunter specialization during a range expansion of Non-africans).
Sorry Davidski, my last comment was aimed at @ Maju's earlier comment in response to me, as I didn't make that clear at all.
The Onge are closer to South Asians and East asians than they are to papuans and malenesians.
If basal eurasian is E1b1b associated we should at least see a type of basal eurasian in the onge.
I am left wondering also about where Y-DNA haplogroup J may have been during the Neolithic. It is a bit surprising that none has shown up so far in Neolithic male remains from Europe. Maybe it did not expand out of the Near East/West Asia until the Bronze Age or later. Or maybe some will show up in the Balkans from the Neolithic period once some remains from there are tested.
Maybe J comes out to be pretty young in Europe.
I recall that study that claimed between 10-25% "middle Eastern" + "North Aftrican" admixture in some southern European populations (Iberian, French, Italian, Greece and Balkan peninsular) with admixture event estaminations of younger than 2000-2500 years ("recent"). (estamination by IBS chunks of a size fitting that time span)
A so young and still quiet impressive admixture must be visible in Y-DNA, I am sure. And will most likely take up at least some parts of the J and E in Europe.
Natufian said...
@About Time
I remember the times, pre y-dna wars, when people admired the spirit of innovation, and adaptability of once thought proto-Europeans, that was responsible for the very base of human civilization - farming. Now, since its emergence is not represented by certain groups of interest, various imaginative stories emerge, basically dancing around the fact that the leap of human ingenuity happened within some other group.
A strange separation is likely to be from various layers, phases of immigration. Living on their own for tens of thousands of years. Being excluded because others saw them as inferior hunters is out of context. You seem to expect a native population to abandon their ways, tradition, and an early ancestral land (ritual burials of ancestors), for an opportunistic venture with strangers. They were already self-sufficient and able to sustain themselves while adapting to nature. It’s a new perspective, and I can see your perception a bit skewed toward glorifying other .
You imply a Neanderthal differentiation as a game changer. Neanderthal was very much widespread in the ME so all people probably had similar admixture, except for those that did not stay too long. I expect no visible differentiation until people acquired Neanderthal admixture in Siberia. Admixture does not necessarily translate to better hunter, nor some advanced evolutionary model. Man is an omnivore. You promote a speculative hierarchy model, with meat dependency on top. Neanderthals were outcompeted for a reason. Greater meat dependence means that burning proteins instead of carbs. Much of the time in processes of digesting meat, rest of the time preparation for hunting. So, apart from on spot ingenuity, they had less time and energy for thinking and applying complex solutions.
Natufians were still hunter gatherers, and first domesticated dogs found in their graves indicate a deep connection with hunting. They hunted gazelles, wild boars, ibexes for quite some time before the proposed climate changes happened which influenced their ecosystem slowly, during a period of thousand years. This could be why they remained in what was once a paradise on earth, and adapted.
You offered an image of hunters that can’t actually hunt, live of the land before the invention of agriculture, being both physically and mentally weak and miraculously surviving wild animals, diseases and other confronting groups. At the same time they invent and implement, a labor intensive activity that asks for a giant leap of faith for an incredibly rudimentary, and incomplete meal. All of that while being pioneers of civilization.
Why does hunter gatherer isolate and stay in one place?
They have enough food or are adapted to hunting in a niche that others find uninviting. Nobody cares about them if seen as inferior. The land they inhabited is not appealing for other hunters. Adaptation to bad hunting condition- better, more inventive hunters.
Maybe this was a part of an intuitive strategy by Natufians to specialize and settle in certain place discouraging new immigration. Settlers know the terrain, are better prepared for hunting and defending location from trespassers. Early nomadic groups would presumably prefer uninhabited and undisturbed areas than confrontation and competition. Maybe not a question of them being left behind, but maybe left alone?
Primary reasons for migration out of group or related groups other than climate?
If one population reached a certain level where animals were being hunted out, we could speculate that hunting became more difficult and competitive, so some decided to leave. The task of searching for easier prey-better conditions was always undertaken by a small opportunistic bunch of people. The adventurous nature in men could be a potent driving mechanism, once civilized. On the other hand one must not turn the face from hardships and should stay on the spot to overcome the forces of nature, to mature and evolve. This is a reward for those that decide to stay.
The hunting spirit lives in all of us.
The patterns of perception and reaction that make an excellent hunter group might be completely disruptive or useless in a small farming collective.
Conversely, the patterns of social interaction and empathy that make a small settled community a warm and mutually supportive place might be useless or disruptive in a hunting band.
Cognitive/behavioral adaptations can be context specific and contrary to other adaptive tendencies. Humans are rather ruthless pack animals (especially when resources are scarce) that push out and exclude members of the group that don't fit the group's mold. When many groups are shaped by similar environmental circumstances and therefore exert similar forms of peer pressure and exclusion, that becomes natural selection and or sexual selection.
Range expansions are a time when things like this become important.
No reason (especially with intelligent social mammals like humans) this fissioning could not generate two groups, one Natufian tending and another Eurasian hunter specialized.
Human nature is to "glorify" your own group ideal, so probably hunters thought they were the One a True Way and farmers thought the same about themselves. That's neither here nor there, objectively. What matters is how this type of changed shaped evolutionary history, fissioning or forming a cooperative symbiosis etc.
Just a theory, but could explain the unusual Basal Eurasian phenomenon.
When I read about character differences in people with wide or slim faces I thought about selection aswell. But then came up secondary studies that said, there is no difference.
The first studies that claimed that there is a difference claimed that:
wide faced people (like hunter gatherers had all been) are:
more willing to break or bent rules or to cheat in games
more ready to act criminal or immoral
more successfull CEO in companies (possibly because he acts immoral and breaks all laws.... ha ha ha
more ready to use physical violence
In time of stress and danger for the group, more ready to sacrifice himself to protect/save the groups existance.
(Wich contradics Nazi teaching wich saw the Nordid type (slim face, longish skull, technically a Mediteranite type with blond hair, blue eyes (and becusse of that pigmentation looking "northern European" to anyone) and taller than the real mediteranite types) would be the "hero" archetype (Soldier, policeman, fire fighter etc... the guy who in movies always survives til the end and gets the girl, while the wide faced guys are only his comrades (the weapon smith, the ogre like Berserk guy etc) who usualy give their lifes on the way...sad ;-P
Well... uh... *scratch head* Why on earth should genes that control behavior stuck to genes that control phyical apearance? It somehow doesnt make sense to me. Even if that was initially the case, wouldnt it mix after milenia? -.-
Really, next time you watch a movie, check it out. ;-D
Why's that? Do the Onge carry E1b1b? I doubt it.
Onge are closer to South Indians, East Asians and Papuans than to Basal Eurasians or any type of Western Eurasians.
That I1d-Z74 (L22+ Z74+) is found in one Swede on the coast near Finland. I still think that we cannot be at all sure of the origin of I1 until Eastern Baltic Sea area, Belorussia and Russia are better explored.
Mikej2, do you have any idea to which haplotypes Saami, Komi or Mordvin I1 haplotypes belong?
Kristiina, I have no idea, I only wait for new SNP results and accept everything that is based on scientific work. I stopped already long time ago expressing my opinion about where the I1 is from, or I answer that from Poland or Canada :-) But regarding Russian results you can ask from the Russian forum Molgen.
I find some of the combinations really interesting.
Scottland and Sardinia are somewhat the oposite of each others.
Sardinia aprears to have lots of HG Y-DNA and mtDNA but very low HG autosomal DNA.
Scottland has lots of HG autosomal DNA but is very low on HG mtDNA and Y-DNA.
Finland is high in HG Y-DNA and mtDNA and (we have no data, but I guess) high on HG autosomal.
The Baltic states are high (relatively compared to other European states) on HG mtDNA and autosomal DNA but low on Y-DNA.
Scandinavia has lots of autosomal and Y-DNA from HG but is low (the south) on mtDNA.
I also observe many cases of HG Y-DNA and HG mtDNA beeing complementary.
Britian, France, Scandinavia, Germany and Ukraine, all show a pattern in where the part of the country with many HG Y-DNA is the one wich is low on HG mtDNA and the part of the country wich is high on HG mtDNA is low on HG Y-DNA.
Here's my chronology for the peopling of Europe based on this study...
Indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers = WHG in the west, WHG/ANE in the east, ANE/WHG further east
Mixed Neolithic farmers = EEF
East European proto-Indo-European invaders = ANE/WHG
Early Uralics = ENA/ANE/WHG
Secondary Indo-European expansions across Europe = WHG/ANE/EEF
So under that model, Y-DNA R1a, R1b and N1c1, and also mtDNA H, can be linked to the dissemination of hunter-gatherer autosomal DNA across Europe. In fact, even people who belonged to Y-DNA J and G and were part of the later Indo-European groups, like Celts, Slavs and Germanics, disseminated WHG and ANE across Europe, because that's what they were mostly despite their Y-DNA.
@Fanty: Which haplogroups are you associating with HG?
I wouldn't pay too much attention to outdated phenotype theories. Hard to imagine any necessary close connection between facial appearance and evolutionary adaptations from so long ago.
There are some nice tables early in this thread. Minimum EEF in Europe is 32.2%, median is 57.7%. If people look like Otzi in many various ways and combinations in any given corner of Europe, it's no real surprise.
CEOs are not "hunters," they are business people engaging in mercantile behavior in a modern economy. That said, I don't doubt that the population of Navy SEALs has a very different cognitive/behavioral profile than the conscientious objector Quakers or Harvard Business School grads for that matter.
Vets have an age old problem readapting to civilian life for a reason. Cognitive/behavioral predispositions amplified by experience and memory, so neural pathways are nothing like average civilian and definitely different than the kind of people who were draft dodgers. Think of that fissioning happening across a population: all the Navy SEALs leave and all the Quakers stay. Maybe the Harvard MBA's split their chances with either group.
Gui S said...
http://i40.tinypic.com/2dt8zmb.jpg
http://i42.tinypic.com/bjd3sn.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/9gzvyc.jpg
An attempt at putting them all together with WHG = Magenta, EEF = Yellow, ANE = Cyan
http://i40.tinypic.com/9tlw76.jpg
I am seeing a relationship with bioclimatic zones (Subtropical/Mediterranean mostly yellow, Temperate mixed, Boreal Forest/Taiga warm tones).
Thanks, the WHG/EEF/ANE map came out great.
Those of you with accounts at GEDmatch should try the EEF-WHG-ANE test for Europeans. It's based on Eurogenes K13 ancestry proportions.
http://bga101.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/eef-whg-ane-test-for-europeans.html
Awesome, bro! Love your blog and the effort you put forth in your projects. Keep up the good work!
Sorry, if this is a double post as the first one did not appear. As I was looking at the maps by Gui S., I couldn't help but notice how the ANE in central Europe matched with the location of R1b-L11 before it split into the Celtic and Germanic groups. Perhaps, it's all linked and shows R1b as more Pontic than it is Near Eastern. Logically, it seems to make sense. However, with everything that's come up lately, logic may not help at all. Another hypothesis I have is that the basal is the group that either stayed behind in the Near East or back migrated there. Next, either the WHG and ANE broke off at the same time going in opposite directions, or these two due to their relation, moved north together through the northwest part of the sub-continent. They then split in Central Asia or West Siberia, going to their respective locations. Again, as some have brought up before; where is J? Is it intrusive to the Near East? Obviously I being HG and with no basal, as well as no HG in the basal, we have a problem. Unless J and I split 30-40kya, one staying with the basal. This has got my head spinning.
ANE was present in southern Sweden during the Mesolithic, and probably all over Eastern Europe, but it only spread across much of the rest of the continent after the Neolithic. So it's association with Eastern Europe and Y-DNA R, as opposed to just R1b, looks very reasonable at the moment.
As for Y-DNA J, wouldn't that be associated with late Neolithic, and even historic, gene flow from Anatolia, and thus a late entry of EEF-like admixture into Europe, which today makes some Mediterranean European groups genetic outliers from Europe?
@Chad Rolfsen
IJ. We know I is at least Mesolithic in a Europe. J might be ANE in a Middle East and S Europe (entering S Europe from later Middle Eastern migrations).
R. Probably ANE, given relation to Q. Levite-Kurdish-Azeri-Karmanian R1a is almost definitely ANE.
Leaves maybe E as Basal Eurasian. Do Africans and Asians with DE lineages have Basal Eurasian admixture?
The one known I1-Z74* is American of Swedish descent. Where in Sweden is unknown at this time, but based on some of his closest matches (GD of 1 or 2), his ancestor likely hails from Småland.
You may all be very interested to know that Ken Nordtvedt contacted one of the study's authors and had him check the various SNPs thought to be phyloequivalent to M423 in the Loschbour and Motala12 remains. He states that approximately half of these SNPs are derived and the other half ancestral in these remains, breaking the phyloequivalence and suggesting that these individuals are from the population ancestral to the modern I2-M423 crowd or on a separate, now extinct line. He's updated his I2-M423 tree to reflect the positions of Loschbour and Motala12 on the tree.
Any chance we can get the calculator with the eutest v2 k15? That seems to be more accurate in my ancestry than the new k13. Thanks!! Keep up the great work!
"Why on earth should genes that control behavior stuck to genes that control phyical apearance?"
Signalling.
It would have to signal something important. Say ability-propensity for violence was at least partially related to testosterone levels in the womb and those testosterone levels also influenced facial shape such that squareheads were both more likely to be violent and better at it while slimheads were less likely and less capable. In a violent environment females who preferred squareheads might have more surviving children on average and increase as a proportion of the population whereas females who preferred slimheads might have less. If the environment became more peaceful then the process would be reversed.
That would provide a simple mechanism to adapt to changing levels of violence in the environment.
If correct then squarehead and slimhead male skulls could reflect the level of violence in the environment at a particular time rather than population shifts.
(Just an example - not saying it's correct.)
Just to stress the critical point. The above would only work if *all* populations had both squareheads and slimheads with just the proportions shifting based on their (relatively) recent environmental history.
MIT Professors
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mit+professors&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=7AnFUvyAHdPo7Aacm4GIAQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1600&bih=784
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/US_Navy_040630-M-0374B-002_U.S._Marine_Staff_Sgt._Larnell_G._Mills,_center,_a_Martial_Arts_Instructor_Trainer_assigned_to_3rd_Marine_Division,_inspects_a_Marine_after_performing_Right-Shoulder_Arms.jpg
Not conclusive obviously :)
Could be simply testosterone levels. Also anatomical adjustments for chewing meat etc.
Wrt "signaling," in nature there is also convergent evolution or homoplasy.
These evolutionary factors are very different from the genomic clusters in k means etc (just population history).
Two populations can have different population histories but convergent evolutionary adaptations. Or complementary adaptations.
Morphology is fine for signaling. But is subject to being wrong for inferring phylogeny, especially superficial features the human brain responds to. Look to nature for many examples of homoplasy. But ultimately for humans the cognitive behavioral adaptations are key, including related to social functions.
A society with no MIT professors would be as disadvantageous as a society with no Navy SEALs. But the MIT profs would mostly fail "mental toughness" trials, just as the SEALs might fail the math requirements at MIT. Complementary specializations.
@Grey, US Marines are not very selective. Navy SEALs are extremely selective, so is a better comparison to MIT profs (another but very different extremely high functioning collective).
But wrt evolutionary cognitive adaptations, look at the facial expressions presented in each group photo. One group presents as very friendly,empathic, relaxed, open.
Other group (even though the marine is not a large guy) presents very different posture. Speaks to preferred neurological states and getting back to main point, neurophysiological adaptations during human evolutionary history.
Or look up a documentary about Navy SEAL "mental toughness" trials. Nonreaction to pain, logical approach to situations that would panic the average person. Basically selecting for individuals able to use neocortex to override amygdala functions.
"A society with no MIT professors would be as disadvantageous as a society with no Navy SEALs."
Quite so and if the optimal frequency of each type varied with the environment then you'd need a mechanism to modify the frequency.
"CEOs are not "hunters," they are business people engaging in mercantile behavior in a modern economy."
I didnt say that CEOs are Hunters. I said that I ead about a paper that claimed that companies with wide faced CEOs are more successfull than companies with slim faced CEOs.
About Ötzi:
Ötzi has Farmer genes but his phenotype is more H/G than Farmer. He does not match the Farmer stereotype.
What Y-DNA I connect to HG?
Well we know of only one so far: The "I" variant of the Balcans (whatever the name in this minute may be or if the nomenclatue has changed while I type)
Neither Scottland, Scandinavia, Finland or the Baltic states have many of this.
On the other hand have countries stuffed with HG YDNA (Sardinia and the Balcans) not so much HG autosomal DNA.
Besides that....
The concept of phenotypes isnt THAT outdated at all.
Because DNA agrees to old phenotype stuff like this:
1. old school antropologists claim Farmers are a people, because they have different skulls.
2. 1990s scientists claim: Nah! Farmers are not a different people, the peoples skulls simply changed after they adapted farming...its the food that causes this...
3. aDNA proves: the farmers had been a different people...old school anthros had it right.
But yeah of course lifestyle must affect phenotypes aswell, after all there had been major penotype changes in the past 2000 years without major migrations to explain them. Like ..... around Christs birth, most Europeans seemed to have a Farmer style phenotype while from like 900AD - 1700AD Europeans more and more resemble mesolithic HG and from 1700AD- today they seem to farmerize again.
And there was no migration that would explain it.
Fanty, I am responding not so much to you citing the paper as the sort of pop-culture extrapolations of these things. I think the average CEO would have been completely useless in a Paleolithic hunting band.
It's just a different skill set, with different cognitive priorities. It's common for business people to talk about themselves as "hunting" in pop culture, and this is fun and motivational, but should not be confused with thinking of actual hunting cooperatives. I submit that a much better modern cognitive-behavioral analog for an archaic hunting collective would be SEAL Team 6.
I point this out because I think there are evolutionary neurophysiological differences involved. I think this might relate to the split of NonAfricans into two groups: Basal and ANE/WHG.
Both sets left Africa for some reason and separated from Mbuti. I think the ANE/WHG sapiens expanded out into hostile/unknown territory (Middle East?) where Neanderthal was around. Probably coming into conflict and mixing (ANE?).
Visible Neanderthaloid skull features show up in archaic Russian crania even in Eneolithic. This was noted in some of the Kurgan crania. Inherited from ANE?
This range expansion placed evolutionary demands and maybe involved introgression for Neanderthal genes (including cognitive/behavioral genes). These Sapiens became functionally less chimp-like and more wolf-like.
The Basals were sedentary "homebodies" stayed behind (outskirts of Africa?), maybe with many individuals actively rejected by hunter bands but also by self-selection. They might have also been go-betweens who tried to keep contacts with Africans and Eurasian WHG/ANE, possibly also choosing to avoid (dangerous?) encounters with Neanderthals. This would itself be its own type of evolutionary selection, against wolf-like characteristics (and Neanderthal genes?).
The historical changes you are talking about in European skulls could be inter-class differences in population growth. The modern period is the time of the bourgeoisie and their cognitive-behavioral specializations.
Cranial anatomy might be relevant because it tracks neural anatomy (i.e., shape and - function? - of the brain).
The farmers were different people not just because of population movements, but because these little villages were (IMO) hotbeds of evolutionary selection. Health problems and new selective stresses of every kind. Bad diet, changed environment, inbreeding depression but also quick fixation of any beneficial traits. A new kind of human emerged out of these farming settlements. One biproduct might be light skin color (adaptation to Vitamin D deficiency in cloudy conditions and low meat diet).
I don't believe in a "10,000 Year Explosion." I think there were times of abrupt change over the course of just a few centuries and maybe generations. I think the range expansion out of Africa into old Neanderthal territory (Basal vs ANE/WHG) I speculated about was one. I think farming was another.
These evolutionary situations (first wolf-like hunting collectives; later farming settlements) were places where only some people went. Many left, and many didn't make it. New traits selected for by these windows of intense change then diffused out to other populations.
Well, its simple to determine what WHG genes cause and what EEF genes cause.
WHG genes are the one thing that seperates Europeans from non-europeans.
And its also the thing that makes the difference between northern Europeans and southern Europeans. As northern Europeans are a mix between both (Scandinavians even equally) while southern Europeans are close enough to almost be pure EEF. The WHG-Genes must be the difference then, right?
So, what IS the difference? Except of course for coloration of eyes and hair, wich is clear.
Who says the northern EEF like Gok4 were not blond, blue, and fair skinned? They were living in northern latitudes.
Also, Fanty you are assuming that these WHG-EEF-ANE components are the sources of all functional genetic variation in Europeans. I'm not sure that's the case.
If anything, the process of mixture itself WHG+Basal (=EEF), then EEF+WHG, then EEF+WHG+ANE (or separately in various combinations?) could have been a time of intense social selection (that's technically "sexual selection" in Darwinian terms).
Making hunters into people who can live successfully in a dense, internally peaceful farming collective settlement would have been tricky. Some of that is acculturation, but some of it might have involved evolutionary selection. Co-adaptive traits.
Since pigmentation keeps coming up. From conversion spreadsheet: Irish have higher WHG % than the English and Dutch and a few percent higher than Germans and Austrians.
I can tell you that in Ireland, literally the only natural blond I met was Polish. Most Irish have brown or even black hair, with some redheads - but the Irish are uniformly pale and pasty (skin type 0 or 1) and many can't tan, at all. Natural blonds are very common (even in adults) in Dutch, Germans, etc. - who are less pale than the Irish and can generally achieve a golden/bronze tan with no redness.
This tells me that even if WHG had some blonds and fair skinned people (we now know that some had blue eyes and brown skin), either there was already local pigment variation (reasonable possibility). Or these highly visible traits have been shaped by later populations that came into Europe (light pigmented northern EEF?) or social/sexual selection.
Darwinian sexual (social) selection for light hair/eyes/skin could have acted on more than one population, precisely because it was a visual cue of "group belonging." Maybe it co-evolved in some WHG and in EEF and helped them get along better and protect each other.
I think it is wrong to say that the Siberian influx was caused by Uralic migrations. The Siberian component in Northeastern Europe actually peaks in the Arctic region, not in the Uralic Volga-Ural urheimat. It is highest in Norweigan Saami, and it is also high along the whole Arctic coast, whether Slavic- or Uralic speaking. Siberian-ness is simply something which has been native to the region for a long time. Obviosuly there has been many influx of ENA genes into Europe, but I think it would be a sensation if any could actually be connected to linguistic expansion.
There are many opinions on the Uralic origins - the most extreme are at one end is that Uralic formed a genetic family with Indo-European (Indo-Uralic). The most extreme on the other end is that Uralic migrated from the East and only acquired later loan words from PIE. Davidski seems to assume the latter. Most linguists argue for a compromise, however. Uralic was a group close to PIE with very early loan words.
Yes, the fact that ANE can be linked to Y-DNA R and the arrival of Indo-European languages deep in Europe during the Copper Age, and ENA to at least some subclades of Y-DNA N, and the arrival of Uralic languages deep in Europe during the Bronze Age, is very interesting indeed. That's probably why I blogged about it twice.
And you seem to be confused about the relationship between Indo-European and Uralic. The two aren't all that closely related, but their homelands did probably abut each other, and that's why they share many early loans.
But the ANE Proto-Indo-Europeans seem to have been mainly pastoralists, and as a result much more numerous than the nearby ENA Uralics, who were certainly mainly hunter-gatherers still. So when the Indo-Europeans expanded west and east, they didn't drag much ENA with them. Also, when the Uralics expanded west, they weren't numerous enough to affect the genetic structure of Europe by and large, so the ENA they brought with them has since mostly stayed as a minor component among their Uralic-speaking descendants.
For some background about the Indo-Europeans and their relationship to Uralics, check out these videos..
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/tracing-indo-europeans-conference-videos.html
"And you seem to be confused about the relationship between Indo-European and Uralic. The two aren't all that closely related, but their homelands did probably abut each other, and that's why they share many early loans."
They also share part of the core vocabulary, such as the word for "name", so a phylogenetic common origin cannot be ruled out. Many linguists such as Collinder supports this theory. While it's perhaps not the majority view, I wonder why only side of the scientific debate is seen as credible? The link you posted goes to an article that challenges the current consensus by suggesting an Eastern origin. Why do you regard this as more correct? In short, what are the actual reasons to assume that Uralics were ENA?
All Uralic speakers and groups from former Uralic regions of Russia (like the Kargopol Russians from the HGDP) carry significant levels of ENA. The only exceptions are the two westernmost groups who are actually overwhelmingly of Indo-European ancestry; Hungarians and Estonians.
ENA from the European Arctic can't explain this away as a coincidence, because most of the Uralics and former Uralics west of the Volga in Russia never had regular contacts with anyone from the Arctic, and yet their ENA levels are clearly higher than among people from long standing Indo-European (Slavic and former Baltic) regions of Russia.
Well, all Uralic people also live neighbors with Siberian peoples, except Estonians and Hungarians. Finns, Saami and Estonians also stem from the same Baltic population, post-Baltic contact, something which is evident from linguistics. Saami has acquired a high Siberian admixture however, as they migrated the furthest North. They also gave a significant share of Siberian genes to the Finns. This is the most common explanation I have seen in Scandinavian anthropology.
The Siberian admixture in Mordvins is probably a separate affair, since it has also been shown to be a different admixture. But it shouldn't be hard to explain as the neighbouring Ugric peoples are at least partly Siberian.
As I said, I dont dispute the ENA influx, just the connection to Uralic expansion, since I think it depends on too many assumptions.
The only assumption I'm making is that the early Uralics from the southern Urals took significant levels of ENA with them to the west. This assumption is supported by the presence of non-trivial Siberian admixture among all Uralics except the two most western groups. There might have been extra Siberian gene flow into many Uralic speaking groups from other sources. But this doesn't change what I said.
It may just be me but neither of the two browsers i have installed will load the comments above 200 on the Laziridis thread.
@ Barakobama
Read that again. He scored NEGATIVE 7.61! That is my friend's score!!!! There is no European WHG in the Near East. You need to come to terms with this. It is ANE that is spread in Indo European domains. NOT WHG!! Please get off of it and move on. How do you know from just over a dozen samples that there weren't those other types all spread out and all that we see is a founder effect? There was no WHG component of any importance in Indo Europeans. Again, where is it in Asia or the Near East? Only ANE is there. Now let's move on to something else
Look up the Kent, UK bronze and iron age dig site. Eight of the 13 bodies had tested for isotopes from Southern Scandinavia. Meaning that they grew up there during enamel formation on their teeth. Nine were local, how many were kids of people from Scandinavia, they don't know. Five were from the Western Mediterranean.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2336094/Bronze-Age-burial-site-3-000-years-ago-contain-Scandinavian-western-European-migrants.html
8 of 13 foreign born, excuse me. 25 in all.
Chad you simplify Indo European even early ones where not all the same. How do you explain 35%+ WHG in modern north-west Europeans while just 5,000 years ago right before Indo Europeans arrived they were typical EEF? The connection between Indo European and ANE will turn out to be much more complicated than you say. There is WHG in the near east even if Indo Europeans were pure ANE.
Why do you and Davidski ignore over 30% mtDNA U5, U4, and U2e(all typical Mesolithic European), and that they had majority light hair and eyes which today correlate with WHG ancestry and the "blue eye" mutation has been found in 2/2 Mesolithic European samples? You really think they had little WHG ancestry? Do you think somehow the ANE people in central Asia developed the exact same phenotype as WHG in Europe?
It made a little genetic effect on Bretons and doesn't explain why Insular Celts and Germanics(Norse-) have such similar results in admixtures.
http://www.eupedia.com/images/content/Northwest-European-admixture.gif
autosomal dna map, Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Low countries all very linked it seems.
"How do you explain 35%+ WHG in modern north-west Europeans while just 5,000 years ago right before Indo Europeans arrived they were typical EEF?"
Ertobolle -> Funnelbeaker
Forager -> Forager/Herder
barakobama. Think about what you are implying. If there is no Mesolithic in NW Europe, then what happened to them? Did the farmers kill them all off with pitchforks and stones? Think about it. They mixed. There were fewer farmers up North than the South, naturally, so the mix shifted towards WHG naturally. Look at the clines. WHG increases as you go away from the Farmer heavy Mediterranean, yet ANE is pretty much unchanged. If your Indo Europeans were so heavy in WHG, then where is it on the Mediterranean where you see high ANE? Where is it in the Near East where you see ANE? Or Asia? There was no light hair in the Mesolithic samples. They had similar phenotype because they are the basically the SAME derived West Eurasian people. The difference is that ANE is the group that mixed into Native Americans, therefore making it appear different or shifted East. There is no European WGH outside of Europe, therefore it is not the component of Proto-IE people. We cannot explain it 500 times. Read the paper. As I said before, the only way that ANE stays steady, is if it is the last thing thrown in, and it must be a pure or nearly pure component through Europe as they mix in. No one else fits that description post Neolithic except IE speaking people.
There are no mass graves anywhere in Europe. They mixed. There was no killing off of people. There was Mesolithic left over! Period!!!
Chad can you please make paragraphs it would be much easier to read?
I am going to have to read Laz 2013 like 1,000 times before I understand everything and make good conclusions. You cant make the assumption that the reason modern north Europeans have much more Mesolithic ancestry than southern is because the farmers slowly mixed with the hunter gatherers as they went north. How many hunter gatherers do you see in Europe today(sami have around 30% EEF don't mention them their ancestors were farmers)? How many full blooded WHG people are there in killed off and there was a small amount of their blood in farmers.
Autosomal DNA results Swedish Funnel beaker farmers is prove what you say is not true.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2013/09/more-on-east-baltic-as-refuge-for.html
Even Laz 2013 said the results of the Swedish farmers, Otzi, Stuttgart, and modern Sardinia are very similar. Ancient mtDNA and Y DNA from Neolithic Europe is also very good evidence they did rarely mix with hunter gatherers and basically replaced them.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CCcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theapricity.com%2Fforum%2Fshowthread.php%3F106283-Ancient-Eurasian-DNA-Organized-2&ei=yNLhUoK9I8i82gXA5IGQCw&usg=AFQjCNGa68d7wLwNwroClVfWb2NFyTVyUg&sig2=eYAHhjp1rRiCwa0kF_lzOQ&bvm=bv.59930103,d.aWM
Why would all of a sudden over 2,000 years after the farmers arrived would they begin to admix so much with hunter gatherers(doubt many where left) that some would become mainly of hunter gatherer blood? There were not enough hunter gatherers to be the source of the amount of WHG in modern west Europeans.
How many modern west Europeans have Y DNA pre-I2a1b or a close relative to I2a1b and C-V20? Maybe around 0.00000000001% both those haplogroups have been found in Mesolithic west Europe. How many Finnish have mtDNA U5a, U4, and U2e the answer is well under 5% even though those three haplogroups take up about 100% of mtDNA samples from Mesolithic Scandinavia. I highly doubt a lot of blood from Mesolithic Scandinavians survived.
There is really no genetic evidence for heavy mixing with hunter gatherers and farmers right before Indo European migrations.
I know it doesn't make sense to say Indo Europeans raised EEF and ANE in southern Europe if anything only ANE. But for the rest of Europe it does make sense to say Indo Europeans and Uralics were heavy in WHG and ANE. I don't think of that test as if it is some type of God I consider a lot of possibilities this all could be a lie.
In many admixtures I have seen there is north European(aka hunter gatherer) ancestry in all southern Europeans except Sardinians I really thought that could have something to do with Indo Europeans.
I don't think you really understand what ANE is you just repeat what others say. ANE seems very west Eurasian it only seems part east Eurasian in admixtures probably because native Americans have some.
You say there is no WHG outside of Europe even though you haven't seen results of so many different Asian people that may have WHG. You are making assumptions to fit your hypothesis.
I cant believe you are still ignoring the correlation between WHG and light hair and eyes. There is one Mesolithic hair color sample!! 2/2 have the blue eye mutation that convinces me light hair also existed in Mesolithic Europe. The hypothesis they were dark skinned, black haired, blue eyed ignores all evidence in modern people light hair, eyes, and skin are all connected.
You still ignore over 30% mtDNA U2e, U5, and U4 in Indo Iranians too. That's more than any modern Europeans the rest of their mtDNA was typical of Neolithic Europeans. So they probably had a lot of EEF and WHG. Can you give me an examples of likely ANE mtDNA? No you cant because ANE may be fake or because it is more complicated and mixed up than what most say.
That is one admixture I am not convinced at all.
Chad, I don't want to be your enemy, it is just when people get frustrated we insult others. I am just trying to understand all of this stuff and find out what really happened, you know what I mean?
We're not enemies. Here's an example of mixing for you. Pitted Ware Culture in Sweden. Look up ajv70 and ajv52 in google. Lots on them. Some cultures are a mix of Hunter and Farmer. Some have some farming, but resemble hunters more. There was a mix going on. More so in the north, as the hunters were starting to take up farming too. Not only does there appear to be a small farmer link, but also a Saami link with the group. It mixed in with Scandinavians at this time to varying degrees.
The fact that the native language, probably related to Uralic is found under Germanic, is another clue to the mixing. If HG died out, why would the language be there? These are some people suspected of abandoning farming to go back to hunters. Former Funnelbeakers possibly.
http://fennoscandia.blogspot.com/2013/08/ajv70-and-modern-european-variation.html
http://fennoscandia.blogspot.com/2013/11/ajv70-and-modern-european-variation-ii.html
I know what ANE is. You are the one saying it is not related to WHG, not me. WHG and ANE both have U mtdna. Gravettian culture appears to spread from Central Europe to Mal'ta. Both WHG ( I )and ANE (R) are derived west Eurasians.
You say that you want to learn, but ignore everything that you are told and shown. If you wanted to learn, you would listen. If you can prove that IE people are WHG, then do so. It is impossible to prove looking at the numbers. The lack of European WHG in Mediterranean people with ANE, the Near East and Asia. The paper says that WHG is not found outside of Europe. It is not my conclusion. It makes no sense talking about it if all you have is speculation. I am giving you papers, examples, and the math.
I see no point in discussing it further.
Also look at the plots on the maps for Laz paper. They WHG meet in a V near modern Spanish and French. La Brana is not far from modern Spaniards. It may already have some North African mixed in the Mesolithic.
Brits and other Northerners cluster near the Scandinavian HG. That is figured as Motala played a role in populating Britain.
Davidski(or someone else) can you please help explain the F-Statistics. Here is a quote from pg.7 which kind of explains it.
"To test if present-day Europeans were formed by admixture of populations
related to Loschbour, Stuttgart and MA1, we analyzed f3(X; Ref1, Ref2) statistics which measure the correlation in nucleotide frequency differences between a test sample and two populations: (X-Ref1) and (X-Ref2). If the three populations are related by a simple tree, the statistic is expected to be positive5. However, if X is admixed between populations related to Ref1 and Ref2, the statistic can be negative and provides evidence of admixture in population X5. For each present-day West Eurasian population, we tested all possible modern reference populations with at least 4 individuals, along with Loschbour, Stuttgart, Motala12 and MA1 (Table 1).
For the majority of European populations (n=18) the lowest f3-statistic is observed with Loschbour and a Near Eastern population as references, suggesting that many Europeans derive from a mixture between WHG and populations related to present-day Near Easterners. Only Sardinians form their lowest f3-statistic with Loschbour-Stuttgart so the mixture process is unlikely to have been a simple WHG-EEF one (Table 1). Other European populations form their lowest f3-statistics with MA1-Stuttgart, which we hypothesize reflects the cline of increasing relatedness to MA1 in Fig.1B.
In the Near East, no population has its lowest f3-statistic with Loschbour or Motala12, but all have their lowest f3-statistic with Stuttgart (Table 1), suggesting that most of the ancestry of this sample may be directly inherited from populations of the ancient Near East, while modern Near Easterners have additional influences related to Africa, North Eurasia, or South Asia (Table 1)."
I don't know what nucleotide frequencies are but that doesn't matter because what matters are the results. I think it might be the same as an allele in a SNP.
What do they mean by a simple tree? Do they mean the three populations only relation is very ancient ancestry and their populations haven't mixed since they split, like it would be for an Irish and Chinese person? Do F-statistics somehow find if a population is admixed or just tell how related they are? I understand that the lower the number the more related or more likely admixed.
When they say a population forms its lowest F3-statistic with for example Chinese-Japanese does that mean most of that population's ancestry from a related people to Japanese and Chinese or that those where the top two most related people to them?
Why would most modern European populations form the lowest F3-statistic with Loschbour-modern near easterns than with Loschbour-Stuttgart? They don't really give the details so I don't know the full meaning of that statement. It is interesting that Sardinians are the only ones who form their lowest F3-statistics with Stuttgart-Loschbour because they always have unique results in admixtures compared to other Europeans and their results are always very similar to Otzi and the Funnel beaker farmers, and in Laz 2013's admixtures to Stuttgart.
The fact that "other" Europeans form their lowest F3-statistics with MA1-Stuttgart probably means there is MA1 related ancestry in "other" Europeans and it is higher than Loschbour related ancestry.
When they say no modern near easterns form their lowest F3-statistics with Loschbour and MA1 do they mean when those two where included because it is F3 not F2? Also when they say modern near easterns all formed their lowest F3-statistic with Stuttgart, does that mean they did F2? This doesn't mean there is no WHG ancestry in the near east just a lot more Stuttgart related ancestry, I think they excluded the possibility that there are different types of ancestry within the near east that can be very unrelated.
I will have more questions and statements later. I am starting to understand this stuff.
I believe the last thing I saw states that west Asians and Europeans today are closely related by ane admixture in both. Another hint at an ane ie people invading both, making them look more related than they are.
Whg like, not European whg specifically. That's important.
barakobama,
As far as I can see, there are two main issues with your approach...
1) You think that the genetically Mediterranean Neolithic farmers of Northern, Western and Central Europe were representative of Northern, Western and Central Europeans of the time, when in fact, there were people hiding in the woods during this period across Northern, Western and Central Europe who were Mesolithic-like (ie. very North European).
2) You seem to think that mtDNA U can only be linked to WHG, when in fact, the presence of U2, U4, U5 etc. in prehistoric Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia suggests they're ANE markers as well.
On globe 13, La Brana is more than twice as much "Mediterranean", as ajv70 and 52. Possibly more evidence of that mixture you ask about.
There is other evidence he had some farmer ancestry, It is not a big surprise since he is 7,000 years old and farmers had arrived in Iberia by that time. The admixture between farmers and his people probably occurred quite a few generations before him.
There may be common ANE ancestry in west Asians and Europeans but the reason they seem so related is because they are so related. North Africans who from what I know have no ANE ancestry fall into the same west Eurasian group. There is evidence of strong relation between west Asians and Europeans in mtDNA too and phenotype. There are obviously Caucasian skull shapes from pre Neolithic Europe from Europeans who probably had no ANE ancestry.
North Africans have a small amount of ANE, less than the Near East, but it's there. Small influx during recent history, and old R1b entrance to the Near East and spread with Egyptian and Islamic culture can explain it. ANE makes Europeans and West Asians closer. Europeans are more derived. Basal in the Near East and West Asia is 60-80%+ In Europeans it is topped out at 40% only 15-25% in the North. So Europeans would be as far from West Asia as Native Americans are from Malta as the percentages are similar. They do not plot that close without ANE pulling them to a single point. Of course ANE is not in the southern WHG pre Neolithic, from samples so far. Hence, they pull more towards Basques, Spaniards and French. Northern Europeans are around the Scandinavian hunters as they are a good chunk of their Mesolithic heritage.
Take out that 40%EEF in the North and ANE from West Asians and they go way towards Malta and then some as Malta is in the Near East. They wouldn't look like they share any ancestry. Northern Europeans would be way more off the charts than Loschbour.
Sure. It's just interesting to me as I'd always assumed Britain would be more genetically connected to France.
@Barakobama
Didn't you say this three weeks ago? Yet, here you are saying they were wiped out in the North because you aren't seeing a lot of the haplogroups discovered in digs so far.
"Basing everything on mtDNA H is a joke!! It was a bad assumption people made that it must mean that it will be constant with total ancestry."
@barak
"Autosomal DNA results Swedish Funnel beaker farmers is prove what you say is not true."
There were megalithic farmers at various sites along the coast (so they could complement poor farming conditions with fishing) for a very long time.
http://www.saveyourheritage.com/images/Megalithic_architecture.png
There was also a coastal fishing/hunting forager culture e.g. Ertobolle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erteb%C3%B8lle_culture
The surviving fishing/hunting forager culture of the north/northwest beyond the range of LBK turned into Funnelbeaker culture (as a result of megalithic farmers mixing with the foragers imo).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture
The interesting thing about Funnelbeaker is it is mostly a mixture of HG and domesticated animals: forager ->forager/herder -> population expansion
"How many modern west Europeans have Y DNA pre-I2a1b or a close relative to I2a1b and C-V20?"
How many have G? Both I and G were later swamped by R (imo) but where is the biggest concentration of I?
http://www.stclairresearch.com/images/350px-Haplogroup_I.png
note the correlation of surviving I with Funnelbeaker
http://www.geocities.ws/reginheim/funnelbeakerculture.gif
(also note on the I map how it looks like a wedge came through the middle of the I distribution)
nb the other interesting thing about Funnelbeaker which I hadn't noticed before is
"It was dominated by animal husbandry of sheep, cattle, pigs and goats, but there was also hunting and fishing. Primitive wheat and barley was grown on small patches that were fast depleted, due to which the population frequently moved small distances."
Shifting agriculture. Slash and burn - just like Tacitus describes.
Thinking about it in terms of ecozones i would bet the northern edge of LBK is where the conifer forest line was at that time (it is up near Finland now but has been retreating north since the LGM) and it's the boreal forest that is suited to slash and burn farming).
The problem with the idea that ANE=PIE is that Gujaratis (N India) and Vishvakarmans (S India) don't have any.
Some (not all) Gujaratis have a little EEF (almost totally IE part of India), but not Vishvakarmans (Dravidian area). That could match IE.
ANE looks a lot like Kurgan expansions and could have something to do with IE in Europe. But it can't be the mechanism that brought IE deep into India, because it isn't there.
That leaves us with PIE = EEF or something else. Only alternative is that no genetic component really encapsulates that language spread, and "Indo European" was more a cultural package than a population.
Personally, I think Europeans got a lot of what seems like "Europeanness" from EEF. Arabs have it too, just in a different flavor. The real essential EEF is neither exclusively Euro or Asian, but sui generis that influenced the development of populations in both places since the Neolithic. EEF might seem both completely foreign and strangely familiar to us.
The interesting conundrum is
- Caucasus populations tend to give the most negative f3 statistics with Onge for South Asians, i.e. the populations who represent the "West Eurasian" ancestry of South Asians are most like Caucasus people.
- Caucasus populations appear to be the most negative f3 for Ancient North Eurasians (MA-1), once similarity with Ancient North Eurasians and Western Hunter Gatherers is resolved for Europeans.
- Yet the South Asians don't appear to give negative f3 statistics for MA-1 itself, but some do for Stuttgart (EEF).
A theory I'll tender for this would be that, although the original PIE may have been Ancient North Eurasian, their descendants who picked up a sort of EEF ancestry but without any real WHG mixture (basically like Caucasus people may be) were the ones who actually moved into India.
EEF may be much more like the (Indo-European?) Ancestral North Indian blend of (ANE + EEF - WHG) than than ANE itself is (since ANE is relatively like WHG), so that maybe is why it may gives more negative f3 statistics.
It would naturally be just an elite-dominance in India. It's not the large movement archeologically, like the one into Europe. I believe India was much more densely populated at that time.
By the time they were in the Tarim basin and other regional sites, we already see a population that is hybridized with the mtDNA records (many East Eurasian and Near Eastern). It could only be more admixed by the time they reached North India.
I've heard what Matt says about Caucasus people. I believe it was Georgians who show to be most similar to the ANI branch.
"The problem with the idea that ANE=PIE is that Gujaratis (N India) and Vishvakarmans (S India) don't have any."
This isn't really an answer to your question as I don't know enough but I've been thinking about the Norman conquest of England and how relatively easy it was after the native warrior-elite was killed.
If you take a premise that the only things that can stand up to the psychological effect of a cavalry (or chariot) charge is either:
1) suitable terrain
2) other cavalry
3) large blocks of trained, disciplined infantry
then its easy to see how a cavalry/chariot invader could quite easily conquer a much *larger* population once the native warrior elite is killed because a non horse-culture population without suitable anti-cavalry terrain can't train large blocks of disciplined infantry any more.
So i'm wondering how much actual IE mixture there might be after a chain of conquests starting from IE population A conquering a much larger population B followed by now IE elite dominated B (not A) conquering large population C and C conquering large population D in a chain.
(The result might be different from when steppe tribes conquer other steppe tribes because in that case the population densities are similar.)
So how much Norman DNA is in England compared with how much in Ireland, Wales or Scotland - increasing or decreasing? - and then again how much compared to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa etc - an increasing percentage or a decreasing one?
(I have no idea and it may be an increasing percentage but your question made me wonder.)
The other thing I wonder but haven't checked out is how may IE expansions into North India were there i.e. was there an Indo-European speaking but non-steppe population first (on foot with sheep) followed later by a steppe version (on horses with cattle)?
The UK may provide a similarity here again i.e. an early IE expansion (Celtic) having a very dramatic effect on a similar or lower population density target then a second (Germanic) into a similar population size also having a dramatic impact then a third (Viking) into a larger population having somewhat less (although hard to say as they were mostly the same as the A-S) and then finally the Normans invading a much larger population and having ? impact.
@Grey, I have a really hard time accepting mass language replacement in a place as big and dense as India without some kind of identifiable population movement.
The comparison with England is worthwhile, but Englishness is also inscrutable in its own way too. I saw a documentary where a British woman (rich, apparently) from the Roman times showed clear African features. Border societies and colonies with access to new trade routes and upward economic mobility (like Roman Britain and Norman England) can be a melting pot for migrants from all over.
@Matt, so you are thinking that maybe ANI was Basal + ANE? I wonder if there is any way to test f_3 stats from synthetic ANI or Basal individuals based on projected allele frequencies. It would be good to know how ANI fits in with MA1, Stuttgart, Basal, also in terms of PCA and admixture performance.
Hopefully, we will see genomes from Farmana this year. I bet we will have some surprises.
Davidski besides "Fisher gatherer" mtDNA from Blätterhöhle, Germany what evidence is there hunter gatherers were hiding in the woods? Look at the hundreds of mtDNA samples from Neolithic west-central-north Europe it is pretty obvious the farmers mainly replaced the hunter gatherers. How popular are Loschbour, Motola12's, and La Brana-1's Y DNA lineages today? Why would farmers and hunter gatherer begin to mix in the late Neolithic? There were probably not nearly enough hunter gatherers to be the source of most WHG ancestry in modern north-west Europeans.
We know through ancient mtDNA that Mesolithic Europeans were dominated by mtDNA U5, U4, and U2e. Why would ANE people who had been separated from WHG for 10,000's of years have the same mtDNA haplogroups? MA1 had mtDNA U but he was apart of a lineage that doesn't exist today and has no relatives passed U, so just as related as U5 is to U6. The fact there hasn't been any obvious ANE mtDNA discovered shows the whole ANE thing is probably more complicated than even Laz 2013 says.
Can you guys please show me evidence that light hair and eyes correlates with ANE ancestry? I have noticed it correlates almost perfectly with WHG ancestry. Since those bronze and iron age Indo Iranians had typical farmer and hunter gatherer mtDNA and had majority light hair and eyes obviously that means they were mainly WHG and EEF not ANE.
Grey can you please not simplify Y DNA G its specifically G2a. There have been so many migrations that you wont find correlation in a major way to probably any haplogroup if you go back to the Neolithic and Mesolithic. Don't simplfy Y DNA I, you have to research the subclades. Most Y DNA I today could very likely be from recent migrations and not left overs from the Mesolithic. All of the Y DNA I from Mesolithic Motola, Sweden was negative for I1 which takes up practically all y DNA I in Scandinavia today. So any Y DNA I Funnel Beaker culture picked up from Mesolithic Scandinavians or central Europeans was probably some type of I2a1. Y DNA I in different areas have very different histories and migration paths.
My whole point has been that Neolithic north-west Europeans were mainly replaced by Indo Europeans who came in the metal ages. That is why Y DNA G2a is much more rare today than it was in the Neolithic. R1b L11 and R1a Z282 became the dominate Y DNA haplogroups of most of the areas G2a was probably dominate.
You know that autosomal DNA from Funnel beaker farmers basically proves your hypothesis Funnel beaker culture had a lot of hunter gatherer ancestry incorrect. How much Y DNA I2a1 is there in Scandinavia today? The late Mesolithic Ertebølle people were probably replaced like Mesolithic Europeans in mainland Europe.
"Davidski besides "Fisher gatherer" mtDNA from Blätterhöhle, Germany what evidence is there hunter gatherers were hiding in the woods?"
Look at the I distribution.
"Why would farmers and hunter gatherer begin to mix in the late Neolithic?"
Maybe it wasn't time but place i.e. they didn't mix until the farmers reached the northern limit of the neolithic package (but not the limit of a shifting agriculture version of it).
In other words where was the boreal forest line in 4000 BC?
I wonder about Basal in ASI and ANI as the skin allele sharing shows heavy shared ancestry between the Near East, South Asia and Europe. Especially the former two.
"My whole point has been that Neolithic north-west Europeans were mainly replaced by Indo Europeans who came in the metal ages."
Well to me the most likely option is various clades of I were dominant in western Europe until a big wedge of R travelling NE to SW came through the middle.
"You know that autosomal DNA from Funnel beaker farmers basically proves your hypothesis Funnel beaker culture had a lot of hunter gatherer ancestry incorrect."
It doesn't prove that. If the Funnelbeaker culture developed to fit into a forest ecozone which wasn't suitable for the standard neolithic package but was suitable for a shifting agriculture version of it then the transition is likely to have taken place around the edge of the farmer zone - whether the LBK or the megalith culture farmers. To disprove the point you'd need Funnelbeaker DNA from the farmer edge deeper into the forest around the Baltic that doesn't show that doesn't a EEF -> WHG cline.
There's plenty of R1a-Z645 all the way from Europe to India, and this surely is the Indo-European marker. So the ANE must be there as well, but maybe it's muffled because it got heavily diluted along the way, as often happens with autosomal components? Maybe the paternal signal of the Indo-Europeans survived better because they were highly patriarchal and patrilineal?
Gedrosia shows up in British all the way to Orkney, without any actual language on record that we know about. It's just strange not to see ANE in India at comparable levels,
"Since those bronze and iron age Indo Iranians had typical farmer and hunter gatherer mtDNA and had majority light hair and eyes obviously that means they were mainly WHG and EEF not ANE."
How do you know that this wasn't the typical ANE/EEF mtDNA on the steppe back then?
maybe even caste systems in place. Restrictive breeding on locals could ensure their dominance, no matter how diluted their descendants would be mating with locals females.
India is a head scratcher no matter which theory is on the table. Very high levels of R1a without any accompanying autosomal component from East Europe or f_3 stat showing ANE mixture.
If the Caucasus like ANI in India goes back 12 kya and also brought R1a, it can't be IE without complete rethinking of how old IE really is.
I know nobody wants to consider this, but my theory is that EEF could be the mechanism. Could also be the vector for light pigmentation in India and Turko Mongols.
Remember, Scythians came later and had more than one tribe in their culture. They show up in Assyrian records. The Pazyryk tomb shows a pink skinned man with dark hair and non-Mongol features (just like Catacombs by the way).
We know there was a big influx from Mideast into Central Asia around time of Scythians (1st millennium BCE). Maybe some light pigment alleles came in then too.
Look closely at the study that found light hair and eyes near Karasuk area. Those were not Afanadevo; they were much later (Iron Age if I recall). Still not excluding late West Asian origin, even though today we think of those people as darker (post Mohammed).
I mentioned some big counter examples with evolutionary rationale for why light skin/hair might not be pre-Neolithic. So far data points don't prove me wrong.
What was the model used by Patterson to test for ANE in India again? Did he explore the issue in some detail? Maybe the ANE is indeed being lumped into the EEF and/or the ASI proxy? It's very difficult to imagine that there would be no ANE in South Asia considering the loads of R1a and R2 there. Did he test the Pakistani populations?
Because mtDNA U5 and U4 have been found in nearly every Mesolithic European site with mtDNA samples and two 31,155ybp pre U5's were found in the Czech Republic, because U2e has been found in Mesolithic Germany, Sweden, and Karelia. U5, U4, and U2e were all typical of WHG people why would they also be typical in ANE people?
The rest of the mtDNA of Indo Iranian samples from the bronze and iron age were either east Eurasian or some type of haplogroup typical of modern west Eurasians and Neolithic European farmers. I don't see evidence of non WHG and EEF ancestry in their mtDNA and I don't see any evidence in modern European or near eastern mtDNA.
Their hair and eye color is very good evidence they had a high amount of WHG I don't think anyone would argue against that.
@Davidski, lack of ANE in India is from f_3 stats for Gujarat posted by Nick Patterson on Dienekes blog comments (I quoted here too for Seinundzeit).
But paper does not cover this.
Btw, we know about West Asian influx to Steppe bc of diachronic study of Siberian mtDNA (Dienekes covered it sometime in 2013 or maybe 2012).
Not all Y DNA I is the same.
There are plenty of I subclades in Europe many that have been separated since the Mesolithic or upper Palaeolithic. I1 probably wasn't in Scandinavia during the Mesolithic instead all the I was probably some type of I2a1 or just I2 which might amount to 1-3% of modern Scandinavian Y DNA. Most I in Europe today probably expanded after the Mesolithic.
You and Davidski you using this idea that there were plenty of hunter gatherers in north-west Europe during the Neolithic and they began to mix with farmers in the late Neolithic so that your Indo European=pure descendants of ANE still seems reasonable. How else do you explain the rise of WHG in north-west Europe in the metal ages besides with Indo Europeans. Indo Iranians probably had a very high amount of WHG ancestry based on their hair and eye color and mtDNA. The Unetice culture shows a very surprisingly high amount of mtDNA U5(mainly U5a), U4, and U2e.
So how come the Andronovo remains show markers for light eyes and hair? The Pazyryk Scythians just look like an continuation of the Andronovo population. They both show links to Eastern Europe via nuclear, Y-DNA and mtDNA, not to the Near East.
Ancient human genomes suggest (more than) three an...
West Eurasian cluster analysis: 13 clusters from 1...
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»ESC History»Eurovisions of the Past: A Retrospective of Eurovision 2011
Eurovisions of the Past: A Retrospective of Eurovision 2011
Posted by jadeukesc on August 25, 2018 in ESC History, Eurovision Through the Years
Editorial – In this series, we will be looking back on the past ten years of the Eurovision Song Contest, this time looking at a year which saw the return of the 2010 champion and the return of one of Eurovision’s most popular countries. Oh and it was the Eurovision invasion of those crazy twins from Dublin.
Düsseldorf, Germany (NDR)
Esprit Arena, Düsseldorf, Germany
Debut:
Withdrawals:
Last Place:
Feel Your Heart Beat!
Eurovision 2011 was an exciting year with big names and the return of one of Eurovision’s most popular countries when Italy returned to the contest after dropping out in 1997. Italy were welcomed back as part of the selective countries who get automatic qualification into the final. Lena, the 2010 contest winner returned to represent host country Germany for the second time. Dino Marlin, Bosnia & Herzegovina 1999 representitive also returned to represent his country. Moldova also sent a veteran in 2005 entrant Zdob şi Zdub who also made a return. Another big return came in the form of 1998 winner Dana International.
The United Kingdom came with a successful boyband in Blue who came very close to getting the UK back to the Top 10 making it to 11th Place and Ireland brought X-Factor UK contestants Jedward to the contest who would bring Ireland back in to the Top 10 for the first time since 2006.
A draw took place that determined which semi-final the artists would compete in. Only the public and jury of the competing countries were allowed to vote for each semi final each having a 50 / 50 share of the vite. The big five were split up into two groups, each voting for just one semi final.
Semi Final One
Spain and the United Kingdom were allowed to vote in the first semi final as well as the competing semi finalists that are listed below. The Top 10 qualified to the Grand Final… (Qualifiers in Purple):
01 Poland Magdalena Tul “Jestem”
02 Norway Stella Mwangi “Haba Haba”
03 Albania Aurela Gaçe “Feel the Passion”
04 Armenia Emmy “Boom Boom”
05 Turkey Yüksek Sadakat “Live It Up”
06 Serbia Nina “Čaroban”
07 Russia Alexey Vorobyov “Get You”
08 Switzerland Anna Rossinelli “In Love for a While”
09 Georgia Eldrine “One More Day”
10 Finland Paradise Oskar “Da Da Dam”
11 Malta Glen Vella “One Life”
12 San Marino Senit “Stand By”
13 Croatia Daria “Celebrate”
14 Iceland Sjonni’s Friends “Coming Home”
15 Hungary Kati Wolf “What About My Dreams?”
16 Portugal Homens da Luta “A luta é alegria”
17 Lithuania Evelina Sašenko “C’est ma vie”
18 Azerbaijan Ell & Nikki “Running Scared”
19 Greece Loukas Giorkas feat. Stereo Mike “Watch My Dance”
Armenia failed to qualify for the first time since their debut in 2006. Turkey also failed to qualify for the first time since Semi Final’s were introduced. Another shock non-qualifyer came from Norway’s Stella Mwangi who was a fan favorite.
Semi Final Two
Germany, France and Italy were allowed to vote in the first semi final as well as the competing semi finalists that are listed below. The Top 10 qualified to the Grand Final… (Qualifiers in Purple):
01 Bosnia and Herzegovina Dino Merlin “Love in Rewind”
02 Austria Nadine Beiler “The Secret Is Love”
03 Netherlands 3JS “Never Alone”
04 Belgium Witloof Bay “With Love Baby”
05 Slovakia TWiiNS “I’m Still Alive”
06 Ukraine Mika Newton “Angel”
07 Moldova Zdob şi Zdub “So Lucky”
08 Sweden Eric Saade “Popular”
09 Cyprus Christos Mylordos “San Aggelos S’agapisa”
10 Bulgaria Poli Genova “Na inat”
11 Macedonia Vlatko Ilievski “Rusinka”
12 Israel Dana International “Ding Dong”
13 Slovenia Maja Keuc “No One”
14 Romania Hotel FM “Change”
15 Estonia Getter Jaani “Rockefeller Street”
16 Belarus Anastasia Vinnikova “I Love Belarus”
17 Latvia Musiqq “Angel in Disguise”
18 Denmark A Friend in London “New Tomorrow”
19 Ireland Jedward “Lipstick”
The Grand Final had a total of 25 finalists. The contest was won by Ell & Nikki who represented Azerbaijan with “Running Scared” and this was Azerbaijan’s first win and it was a win that Azerbaijan tried to get again for years to come. Italy came 2nd place with Sweden coming in at 3rd Place.
The Big Five
Italy performed the best out of the big five coming 2nd with Germany also finishing top 10 in 10th place. The United Kingdom came very close finishing 11th place. France and Spain did not fare so well finishing 15th and 23rd respectively.
France Amaury Vassili “Sognu”
Germany Lena “Taken by a Stranger“
Spain Lucía Pérez “Que me quiten lo bailao”
United Kingdom Blue “I Can”
02 Italy Raphael Gualazzi “Madness of Love”
06 Bosnia & Herzegovina Dino Merlin “Love in Rewind”
10 Germany Lena “Taken by a Stranger”
Marcel Bezençon Awards
Artists Award: Ireland “Lipstick” performed by Jedward
Composer Award: France “Sognu” performed by Amaury Vassili
Press Award: Iceland “Da Da Dam” performed by Paradise Oscar
The Barbara Dex
The annual contest where fans can vote for the worst dressed of the year. This year the award went to Eldrine who represented Georgia with “One More Day”
Something a little different for the 2011 edition of this retrospective Series. Earlier this year on July 6th we lost Vlatko Ilievski who represented FYR Macedonia. He passed away at the young age of 33 so this one is dedicated to him. Here is the video of him performing his 2011 song “Rusinka”
← ETSC 10: Get to know the songs!
Sweden: Melodifestivalen Reveals its First Act →
171 comments on “Eurovisions of the Past: A Retrospective of Eurovision 2011”
Niclas A. August 26, 2018 at 03:30 Reply
Germany and Italy!!!
And Greece is great as well if one just ignore Stereo Mike.
Also like France and Moldova a lot.
Ukraine and winner Azerbaijan the most overrated. “Running scared” most certainly qualifies as one of the most anonymous winners ever in my book. There’s a reason why I always forget this one.
I’d also like to add that I prefer “Live it up” to “We could be the same”. :$
2011 should also be remembered as the most open voting ever. 20 out of the 25 finalists got at least one ‘douze’.
Martin McGuinness August 26, 2018 at 19:20 Reply
That’s a nice little fact.
Sekhmet Morgan August 26, 2018 at 19:21 Reply
Hopefully it’ll be the same for ETSC :)
That would be nice too :)
4porcelli August 26, 2018 at 11:50 Reply
Ugh this has been a horrible week. Last Sunday a friend of mine near Cologne died, cancer, my age. Yesterday I woke up with a flash from adream/vision of a friend of mine from DC having died. We’d lost touch some years ago but it was exactly the same sequence/feeling I’d had when several other friends had died before so at the very least it’s left me concerned.
Then it just about 24 hours news that two famous people who accompüanied me much of my life had died; first TV host Dieter Thomas Heck who was a true champion of German Schlager (good, bad and very bad, nonetheless a lover of music) and a staple of Saturday evenings growing up; then Sen. John McCai, the last decent American conservative and a genuine hero. Not a good week in a year when you generally have the feeling that there is a great disturbance in the force.
McCain obviously, I can’t believe I spelled his name wrong sorry. RIP and Godspeed to all.
Dominik August 26, 2018 at 12:37 Reply
Mein aufrichtiges Beileid. I have also lost a friend to cancer several years ago and seeing a person succumbing to this disease makes you feel helpless.
Dieter Thomas Heck was a natural entertainer. There’s a lack of characters like him on German TV. He gave his heart and soul to his profession. Alan Rickman and Prince leaving us for good two years ago left me in a similar shock, because their passion and talent made them so omnipresent that the thought of them being mortal never occurred to me.
Thanks guys appreciate it – and sorry about your losses, too; I know the feeling of loss never goes away because (hopefully) thoe folks always stay with us. @Dominik – yes, Alan Rickman and Prince were – on the “famous talented people” level – were hard for me as well; in recent years so were David Bowie and George Michael (where his death was made worse by many people in media and real life saying he OD’d when it turned out drugs were not involved.
togravus ceterum August 26, 2018 at 13:42 Reply
I am very sorry for your losses. :( I lost a close friend (and perhaps the love of my life) to cancer at the age of 27. (I was 24 years old then …) Luckily I had the support of friends and family.
I had totally forgotten about Dieter Thomas Heck which is strange because Hitparade was a very important show in my youth. I never stooped to sending in a postcard though. ;) McCain is a great loss too. A fighter against Mr. Trump’s dirty populism and the last US conservative standing. He is not standing anymore. :(
The postcards were for OLD people! It’s funny as you undoubtedly recall when Saturday night show Wetten dass.. was cancelled, there was a discussion that it was the last “campfire” show the whole family watched together after everyone took the then-traditional Saturday night. But actually Hitparade and the more internationally oriented Disco which really brought in the big stars were the shows everyone watched together after the bath. I remember my grandma always seemed to make oxtail soup, which we ate along with way too much white bread made by her brother the baker!
Sweet memories indeed. :)
Sorry for your loss :o :(
Condolences sent your way.
viscapaul August 26, 2018 at 21:20 Reply
2011 such a lame predictable contest and we had to endure Baku 2012 nonsense, hey sweetie, how do you feel re pope’s visit there? were his comments enough? Ireland is the new orange I feel! :-) finally
Hi Paul. Well his visit went down well with those who travelled to see him and there
was extensive coverage here on TV as expected but the numbers were well down. His comments today were a step in the right direction but the need for the church to accept their actions here as criminal and to be prepared to face justice is what needs to be done moving forward. There are many, many decades of abuse in various forms that this country is hurting from at the hands of the church and the healing process is still early so there is as I say, some way to go.
thanks Martin, indeed there was a lot of coverage, especialy comparing with past pope visit in 1979, and I remember visiting there in 1979 and told to shut my mouth via my family re the catholic church
Martin McGuinness August 26, 2018 at 22:05
Yes, I went to see the Pope in 1979 in Drogheda. It was immense. Thankfully Ireland has broken the shackles held by the church and is a country progressing for a better future. Of course the country has its fair share of problems to get through as with anywhere but we have come a long way in a short period of time, I am hopeful for that positive future for Ireland but only time will tell.
Thanks gents! Now news that the ultimate NY playwright Neil Simon died as well so that’s friends plus icons of (German) TV and music, political decency and heroism plus theatre left us in a mere week. So I’ll try to crash for the night shortly before a news alert that Ted Danson and/or Diana Ross died (hard to believe Aretha left us a little over a week ago). I know it’s “normal” considering my age (togravus’s much younger brother) and the related age of icons but it’s a bit much in one week.
dimitris esc August 26, 2018 at 21:25 Reply
And now a shooting at Jacksonville. :/
indeed, from a journalistic point of view check out 30th anniversary of Silke Bischoff murder in Germany, when you watch the videos is indeed the nadir of journalism and German police too I guess, maybe our dear Toggie can fill us in more
I wasn’t born yet in 1988, but as a former journalism student I know enough to fill you in:
Two men, Rösner and Degowski, had tried to rob a bank in Gladbeck, about 50km north of Düsseldorf. They escaped with money, a car and two hostages. They picked up Rösner’s girlfriend and drove up north to Bremen where they took more hostages after hijacking a bus. Again they fled via Autobahn and stopped at a service station. Rösner’s girlfriend was arrested and a hostage was killed after the police was unable to exchange her to the criminals.
They headed to the Dutch border, the police still chasing them. One officer got killed after his car hit a truck.
Following another gunfight Rösner and Degowski demanded a new car. The police gave them a BMW that had been prepared with tracking device and a tool that allowed the car to stop the engine via remote control. The criminals took two hostages from the bus with them and drove to Cologne. As you pointed out, Paul, it was the nadir of German post-war journalism. When they arrived in Cologne many journalists were following the culprits, demanding exclusive interviews. One had the nerve to join them in their getaway car and guide them to the Autobahn. He faced no consequences.
One of these depraved individuals is the host of a prime time political talk show on ARD.
On the Autobahn the BMW got rammed by a police car. It led to a final gunfight with the hostages still being inside the car. The hostages were two teenage girls. One managed to jump out of the car, while the other got shot by Rösner. The survivor still suffers from depression.
It was the Gladbeck hostage drama that started a debate on media ethics. The German Press Council added another code of behaviour to their press code. The guideline says that no reporter should be made the tool of criminals. Further there are no interventions allowed between the police and the perpetrators. No interviews should ever be held during the crime.
Dominik August 26, 2018 at 23:29
It’s Frank Plasberg.
togravus ceterum August 26, 2018 at 23:31
Thanks. I thought so. I find Mr. Plasberg utterly insufferable. he has no ethical frame of reference.
Btw, I just watched Anne Will while doing some paperwork. Mr. Bouffier made me really upset.
Yeah, Bouffier can get in line with Plasberg. They both lack manners and a moral compass.
You could even tel lthat Anne Will felt uncomfortable because she was constantly moving in her chair while Mr. Bouffier went on with his dangerous nonsense. (Or she needed to go to the loo … LOL) He was also very condescending towards the lady hairdresser employing refugees in Winnenden. Since Winnenden is just around the corner from where I live, I think about supporting her by getting my next haircut there. However, that won’t be easy for me because I adore the Turkish hairdresser who has cut my hair for more than 10 years now.
Now that I’ve watched Anne Will in the Mediathek I see your point. Mr. Bouffier is the archetype of a narrow minded politician. He’s dodging Will’s questions and making hollow promises. She made a smart conclusion by the end: ”You have nothing else to offer”. Big mouth, zero solutions.
Big props to the coiffeur for her engagement and faith in Toni! Gotta head off to work. Later!
I am back from an insanely tedious meeting which I had to prepare last night while watching Anne Will. The lady from Winnenden perfectly represents what I love about the Swabian Mittelstand: pragmatic and not ideological. :)
I mean she has to be pragmatic in a situation like hers. She needs to hire anyone who’s motivated enough or else she can close her salon anytime soon.
It makes me sick when I read that the state’s budget reached a surplus of 48 billion euros, but hard-working people are still poorly paid. Education and care system could need some money too. NRW doesn’t even compare with BaWü. Schools are being closed, teachers and computers are lacking. It’s no surprise we finished at the bottom of the latest study on quality of education.
Well, all the money goes to the top. It is called capitalism. :(
Living in BaWü I sometimes think that I live in a different world from many other parts in Germany. Public baths and libraries aren’t being closed here. On the other hand, our schools are going downhill. Education has always been my major area of disagreement with the Green Party. Since you live in NRW, I am confident that you know what I am talking about.
The level of education went downhill everywhere. I’ve been a proud Green Party supporter, but their wishy-washy politics are one of the reasons why they have lost my vote.
I feel rather homeless atm too.
4porcelli August 27, 2018 at 21:50
Agree the Greens have uznfortunately become the new FDP, willing to say and do anything to get those ministerial limousines. Another problem they have is that they seem to have abandoned the policies they initiually set to avoid becoming a party of political bureaucrats. Instead they now seem to be the worst in endlessly rotating the same cast of grumpy, unsmiling know-it-alls between various cushy positions. Glad I won’t have to vote for a while (well, the Euro parliament tho I might skip that) since I really wouldn’t know who for; SPD has also become just tragic.
SPD has totally lost its backbone. It breaks my heart if I look back onto the once proud party’s history. I still vote Green by default because they have successfully fought the CDU corruption here in BaWü.
My father is an architect f. e. When he had finished university, he had to join the CDU because he would not have got a single public job back in the 70s if he hadn’t. He left the party as soon ashe did not need public jobs anymore. :)
well I was 21 years old at the time and remember it very well studying journalism, for those who are lost here is German media standing around a car with hostages with a gun, doing nothing apart from asking the gun man to point the gun at the hostage’s head, eventually the poor hostage (SIlke Bischoff) was shot and died this after they had already killed a poor 15 year old boy on a bus, , a sad day for journalism :-(
thanks so much for reminding us of such a tragic event from a journalistic point of view
it was and still is a tragedy and I would ask any potential journalists here to watch those videos that are available about it which thankfully led to very strict european laws re the media , after 30 years RIP
I’ve read an article about Gladbeck when I was 13/14 years old and the picture of Degowski holding a gun on Silke’s head is burned into my mind. The victims will never be forgotten, but sadly the media’s focus was laid on the criminals. Rest in peace.
Votes sent.
It’s been a most enjoyable edition. A great mix of songs.
Hints: 6 Male. 4 Female, Four in English, Six non English, Three countries return from my last vote proper at ETSC 8 with one just missing out in reserve.
thanks truly believe finally Ireland got 21st century right ! : -)
oops wrong thread!
PJ August 26, 2018 at 23:00 Reply
Martin, you knew the Irish act?
Answered other thread lol :D
I enjoyed 2011
The winner was okay, doesn’t bother me, it was more a surprise and I quite like listening to it now and again. I loved Italy and Bosnia Herzegovina and thought Ireland did a fine job with Jedward, that backdrop still looks great. France was a disappointment live but I love the studio. Germany was better than her winning entry imo and Lena and the twins having such larks was great to see. Even Georgia and Denmark won me over.
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Tag Archives: Bray Wyatt
Fastlane: Review/Recap
Becky Lynch And Sasha Banks Defeated Team B.A.D.:
Don’t really have much to say about this. It was actually a pretty good match, all things considered, from both teams and did a decent job kicking off the night and managed to avoid any kind of gaffs (unfortunately the latter women’s match wouldn’t be so lucky). This thing is obviously just a way to build up the feud of Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks going after Charlotte and the Diva’s title. I’d presume it’ll be a three-way for the belt at WrestleMania, or just a straight up Sasha/Charlotte match. I’d be more keen to the Sasha/Charlotte match because you know that both the company and the women want a star-making match of not only showing off the skills of the women on this huge stage and they can be just as good if not better than the men, but they also want to make huge starts out of these women as the torchbearers for the division for the next decade+. So, it’s easier to make a great singles match with planned ideas, spots and fluidity (the latter part which often plagues divas matches) than to create a great triple threat match which often includes dealing with a lot of timing issues and having to eliminate one person so much that it always seems like a revolving singles match. Anyways, I’m not complaining either way, and I’m sure either match will be great, I just sense that this is a match execution that they’ll want to pull off in spades to further benefit and lend credence to the division as wrestlers.
Kevin Owens Defeated Dolph Ziggler to retain the Intercontinental Championship:
This was your prototypical Kevin Owens/Dolph Ziggler TV match that was really no different than the last 567 times they faced off. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad by any stretch. They’re basically the king of kicking off shows, and if it wasn’t for that extra women’s match that’s what they would’ve been doing, although this was basically the same. Owens was obviously going to win, since he just won the belt and WWE seems like they actually have and want Kevin to do stuff (not that it’s apparent lately) and Ziggler has been doing nothing since that whole Rusev/Lana thing that we’re probably just better off forgetting.
I have no clue what Kevin Owens will be doing for WrestleMania. I’m thinking either a program with AJ Styles for the title, which I’d love, or maybe a program with Chris Jericho for the title, which would be fine, especially since Owens/Jericho worked a bunch on house shows over the past year and their dueling promos would be a lot of fun. I mean, a Sami Zayn feud would be awesome, but I don’t think that’s happening so soon, especially with Zayn dealing with NXT stuff, but I wouldn’t fret since I’m sure we’ll be getting a lot of it over the next decade.
Big Show, Kane and Ryback Defeated The Wyatt Family:
This wasn’t even all that bad! I was surprised! I couldn’t even think of a match I’ve been looking forward to less than this one (although, I feel like I say that on ever PPV review I do). I mean, it makes absolutely no sense why didn’t give the Wyatts the win, as that seemed a foregone conclusion. The booking on the Wyatts is the most schizoprenic, they’ll languish in the background and lose to everybody, then they’ll be pushed like they finally want to build them as legit monsters who win and dominate, but then they’ll just get pushed down again and back to scrape the doldrums. In a perfect world it would be cool to see the Wyatts as legitimate threats and not just glorified jobbers in the skins of people who in theory would be a lot more successful.
Charlotte Defeated Brie Bella to retain the Divas Championship:
Oh, man, this thing was terrible. Not too many other ways to put it. The whole match both Brie and Charlotte seemed to be on a completely different page. This is where that fluidity thing I mentioned in the Sasha, Becky/Team B.A.D. thing comes into place. Often in women’s matches they’ll seem so stiff and so hesitant of the next move and spot that it becomes so blatantly and painfully obvious that this is staged and everything is pre-determined. There’s no seamless back-and-forth, but rather waiting and stumbling around to set up the next move, or wait an unrealistic amount of time to do something or just do something so strained and removed that it looks painfully manipulated. This match was that idea in a nutshell. There was countless times where Charlotte would have to do some many unnatural delays or moves to make sure she and Brie were in the proper position to do a move that it was so blatantly stunted. It wasn’t just Brie, where I think the problem lies in both women being not having much experience with each other and neither really taking charge. The whole thing culminated in a finish apropo of the entire match with Brie having Charlotte in a single leg crab, until she decided to seemingly launch herself into the ropes and give up the move only for Charlotte to magically recover put her in the figure-8 and win. What you were supposed to know is that Brie’s leg was injured and thus the pain of putting pressure on her leg in that move launced her out of the move? I dunno, it was a bad match and a bad finish. Charlotte will redeem herself at Wrestlemania with some more worthy competition, and Brie I’m sure will have a better showing as she winds her career down and remains thankful that this wasn’t her goodbye match.
AJ Styles Defeated Chris Jericho:
Looking back Chris Jericho was pretty much the perfect fit for AJ’s first feud in WWE. They’re both decade+ vets in the business, are of similar sizes and can put on great matches with seemingly anybody. In the end I never got that classic match I expected from the two that I know is in both of them, but instead we just got some really, really good matches, which especially on this show shouldn’t be anything to complain about. I think, funnily enough, that this match was similar to the Brie/Charlotte match (I know.. hold on, let me explain), but on the opposite side of the spectrum. As good as the matches were and this one was, both men just seemed to slightly be on different pages. Whether it was AJ still getting used to the new ring and relative new style (yet he’s still better than 95% of the roster being this new to the company) or if it was Jericho’s age and style not being able to keep up with AJ. Sometimes you’d see them just off on a spot, like that AJ springboard off the ropes to Jericho drop kick, where to anyone less skilled than them it would look blatantly obvious, but instead these guys are so good that slight misses go largely undetected.
I also had a pretty big issue with having Jericho kick out of the Styles Clash, especially when he was just going to give up the submission to Styles, anyways. I would’ve loved to have seen them build up the Styles Clash as this great move, maybe not Japan levels of building it up, but at least have it built up enough to help out another guy that could use the rub rather than wasting it on Jericho a week in. Especially when they have AJ using the calf slicer as his main finisher now and the Styles Clash could’ve been used as a “big match” move that AJ only busted out when absolutely necessary. We’ll see, though, I guess I should just be happy they gave AJ the win over Jericho and actually made him tap out.
The Cutting Edge Peep Show with The New Day:
I rolled my eyes at first because it just seemed like a lame time filler to pimp the new Edge and Christian show, and it was that, but the dreaming side of me actually thought they’d use this to debut Enzo and Cass on the main roster to feud with The New Day into Mania. But, nope, as soon as The New Day started talking about the League of Nations I knew this thing was only destined to get worse. It makes total sense in retrospect that they’d go with this feud since neither has nothing to do, but I could care less. The New Day act is sooo played out with me and always goes on about 5 minutes longer than it should. As if things couldn’t get much worse on this show…
Curtis Axel Defeated R-Truth:
Yep, you read that correctly, the co-main event match on this show was Curtis Axel with the Social Outcasts beating R-Truth in two minutes when a Goldust accidental distraction led to the pin because we absolutely needed that story continued on this show. How this makes it on, even as a dumb time filler when Kalisto/Alberto Del Rio languished on the pre-show is beyond me, because you know full well they could’ve just shifted things slightly and had that match on here to at least bring up the mean.
Roman Reigns Defeated Dean Ambrose and Brock Lesnar:
The theme of this show really was if you came into it expecting exactly what everybody knew was going to happen (which it did) then it probably didn’t bother you too much. As much as you might’ve wanted Ambrose to win and how fun it would be to throw a wrench in everything, you knew WWE wasn’t doing anything to mess with the story they had of Roman and Triple H with Roman gunning after that belt yet again, he’s already won it twice somehow! The match was good, nothing amazing and pretty serviceable to all. It will never get old watching Brock get built up like the monster he is and just destroying guys left and right.
I’m writing this after RAW, so WrestleMania is becoming a lot more clearer. We got the match that nobody say coming with Shan McMahon coming back to the company to face Undertaker in a Hell In A Cell match to win the rights to Monday Night Raw. I’m sure there will be a lot of strings pulled from now until then and the match itself will probably be a cluster in terms of guest spots and smoke and mirrors towards whoever will win. Regardless, I’m excited for the match and at the very least the idea of it because it sounds like the most fantasy booking thing ever, especially in 2016.
Dean Ambrose is facing off against Brock Lesnar in a street fight, which sounds amazing and has the potential to steal the show. The street fight stipulation is a good idea, because it’s the only way that things can sway in Ambrose’s favour towards a fair and believable fight, because realistically Lesnar should mop the floor with the scrawny Ambrose. I’m much more excited about this than I am the before rumoured idea of Lesnar/Bray Wyatt which was seemingly being set up at the Rumble. I was looking forward to the legit Lesnar/Wyatt match, but not the tedious month+ long build up of boring promos and attacks.
I don’t know what’s truly happening with the tag belts outside of New Day/League Of Nations feud, but don’t know how that’ll play into WrestleMania. They’ve been putting together a few tag teams of late like Social Outcasts, R-Truth/Goldust, plus the Dudleyz and Usos feud that seems to be happening and now it seems like Styles/Jericho are going to be a team which I’m not the biggest fan of. So maybe they’ll do a big multi-team match like they did last year?
It seems like the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal will be back, as it’s now just an easy match to throw all your leftover guys into, and especially since a ton of the big guys have nothing to do like Big Show, Kane, Ryback, the Wyatts etc. I have no clue what this means for Bray Wyatt as I can’t see anyone relatively big or decent for him to feud with that he hasn’t faced already. Who knows.
Of course you got John Cena posting cryptic things on Twitter about him pushing hard to make some certain goal. Hmmmm. This is the same dude who posted about him struggling to regain the mobility in his weak arm and then two days later posted him squatting 300 lbs. The dude is a freak, so he’ll probably be back, but I have no clue facing. The fantasy booker in me wants John Cena vs. AJ Styles for the dream match we’ve always wanted over the past decade.
And, oh yeah, that whole Triple H vs. Roman Reigns for the title thing. It’s hilarious that WWE thinks that continually putting bigger and bigger things in front of Roman for him to “overcome” to win the title will somehow get people to like him, yet it’s having the opposite effect where it gets comical how much he beats out to get what he deserves. I’m sure there will be a special ref or special enforcer or people in each of their corners or whatever, but I don’t think much will work and the fans are just too far gone on Reigns in this iteration to see him win like this.
I was getting pretty skeptical of Mania with all the injuries, lack of big matches and the mess the world title picture is, but the whole Shane/Undertaker thing has really piqued my interest and the Lesnar/Ambrose thing is bound to be a lot of fun. Plus, I’m sure they still got a few surprises up their sleeves since it’s the “biggest WrestleMania of all time” (haven’t you heard!?!?), and given we’re still more than a month out a lot is bound to change, but I’m back excited for Mania, and hey, we at the very least get an NXT Takeover special to look forward to, no matter the Mania card.
Standard | Posted in Wrestling | Tagged Adam Rose, AJ Styles, Alberto Del Rio, Becky Lynch, Big Cass, Big E, Big Show, Bo Dallas, Braun Strowman, Bray Wyatt, Brie Bella, Brock Lesnar, Charlotte, Chris Jericho, Christian, Curtis Axel, Dean Ambrose, Dolph Ziggler, Edge, Enzo Amore, Erick Rowan, Goldust, Heath Slater, Jey Uso, Jimmy Uso, John Cena, Kalisto, Kane, Kevin Owens, King Barrett, Kofi Kingston, Lana, League Of Nations, Luke Harper, Naomi, NXT, R-Truth, Ric Flair, Roman Reigns, Rusev, Ryback, Sami Zayn, Sasha Banks, Shane McMahon, Sheamus, Social Outcasts, Tamina, The Dudley Boyz, The New Day, The Usos, The Wyatt Family, Undertaker, WrestleMania, Xavier Woods | 0 comments
Royal Rumble: Review/Recap
Dean Ambrose defeats Kevin Owens in a Last Man Standing match to retain the WWE Intercontinental Championship:
Besides the Rumble match itself this was really the only match I was looking forward to on the card, with how great Owens and Ambrose are together, both with their promos and their chemistry in the ring, and then add on the stipulation of the Last Man Standing and it had all the elements to presumably blow this feud off perfectly. Now I could easily see these two going back-and-forth on a couple more PPVs as I’m not sick of this match-up at all, but it seems like they’re diverging the guys after this since we’re heading into Mania and I presume they have different ideas for each of them heading into that show.
Anyways, the match was great as anticipated, and really the perfect way to kick off this show or any, with the energy high and weapon spots used to get the crowd going early. There were some cool moments like Owens just beating a ten count by rolling out of the ring onto his feet on the outside, Ambrose striking Owens who had a chair wrapped around his head and the general jawing back-and-forth between the two guys which gave the match an air that these guys actually hated each other. It was pretty clear that when Owens set-up a double-decker table outside the ring that he was eventually going to go through it for the 10-count loss, especially when the cameras made sure to never show it in a shot again until the fateful moment when Owens went to the top rope to moonsault onto Ambrose who was laid across a bunch of chairs, only to have Ambrose spring to life and push Owens through said tables and regain his belt.
The New Day defeats The Usos to retain the WWE Tag Team Championship:
I think I’ve said before that I’m sick of The New Day and their whole schtick, I mean I like them still, it’s just that their gimmick has worn a bit thin especially when they do the same overlong promos every week and have the same matches week in and week out. It doesn’t help that they’re facing off against the Usos, who aren’t bad, but are just generally bland and aren’t really great enough wrestler or have a good enough gimmick that they stick out to you to make you care about them one way or the other. Unsurprisingly, because of all this this was basically just a regular RAW TV match you’ve already seen a thousand times between the teams and wasn’t anything new.
There needs to be some new blood mixed in to at least make things fresh again in the tag division, but on the surface there isn’t really anyone. They already ran through the lackluster Dudley Boyz feud, one was starting up with the Lucha Dragons until Sin Cara go injured and now this Usos one doesn’t have any legs to it, so I don’t know where they go from here. I can’t even think of any teams, outside of any combination of jobbers they could mix and match, or I guess falling in line with that have them do a program with the Social Outcasts, which could be fun or a disaster. Or maybe they finally bring up an NXT tag-team, like Enzo and Cass who seem to have passed their opportunity to gain the NXT tag belts, and throwing them up with The New Day to go promo for promo with their colourful antics wouldn’t be the worst thing to head into WrestleMania with.
Kalisto defeats Alberto Del Rio to win the WWE United States Championship:
I’m unsure of the reason why this belt hot-potatoed between the two guys over the past few weeks, but here we are again with Kalisto winning the belt yet again, where hopefully he can maintain a little bit of a run with it this time. I really enjoyed the matches between the two, they obviously have chemistry, and this one was more of the same again, minus a couple missed cues and one large botched spot, but it was a great showcase for Kalisto and something that WWE actually tries to build off and not just squander like they did when he won before. They obviously wanted to push Kalisto and unfortunately or fortunately the Sin Cara injury gives them the exact excuse to do that with a guy who could be a great mid-card singles guy if they give him a proper run.
Charlotte defeats Becky Lynch to retain the WWE Divas Championship:
This was another solid match between the two. Unfortunately for Becky she’s basically just a stop-gap between the Charlotte/Sasha Banks feud that most certainly will be leading to that as the women’s match at Mania. After Ric Flair’s distraction help Charlotte picked up the victory and saw Sasha Banks walk down the aisle as she celebrated. The pop for Banks was bigger than I imagined, like it looked like it was deafening in there, and long overdue to turn her face since that’s what everybody so badly wanted when they’d chant her name in every Divas match. The Charlotte/Sasha Banks program for the title is what everyone has been waiting for since the NXT stars got promoted to the main roster, so let’s see if they can deliver us that classic women’s match on the main roster that everybody has been salivating for.
Triple H wins the 30-man Royal Rumble Match to win the WWE World Heavyweight Championship:
The PPV wasn’t surprising in the least, matter of fact everything we thought would happen, did. So, of course, it’s the end of the match Roman hits his moves on Bray Wyatt as the clock winds down to see who the 30th entrant is… and Motorhead hits and Triple H in his impossibly buff body hits the ring to lay waste to all in advance of his 14th World title win. Now we all knew this was going to happen, Triple H had conspicuously been off TV since Reigns went crazy and gave him a severe beatdown following the TLC PPV, he was going to come in and spark the HHH/Reigns feud, presumably setting up their Mania match where Roman goes over for his PROPER coronation that WWE so badly wants with him standing tall after the biggest show of all time with the victory and title. The booking here was all sorts of weird, though, with them having the League of Nations take Reigns out of the match, beat him down and then have Reigns just walk backstage to supposedly nurse his injuries that were fine enough for him to walk on his own power. I mean, if you’re gonna do the whole “one vs. all, Reigns as entrant #1” stick at least have him stay in the match legit for the whole time, go that 55 minutes until he gets eliminated, but don’t cheap out on the person you’re trying to go over (above everybody else), it doesn’t make sense why you would cheapen his look in the match by pulling him out so weakly. Have him valiantly fight for the whole time and thus his loss to a fresh Triple H at #30 makes sense, rather than how they did it here.
Conversely there was actually some very smart booking in the match in regards to eliminations that follow storylines or perhaps set up storylines. Lesnar’s position in the match was basically just to feud with all the Wyatt’s, which is fine because that’s what it looks like he’s going to do for the next couple months. Sure, it was weird when the previously eliminated Wyatts eliminated Lesnar and then Lesnar just looked all mean and pissed off, but did absolutely nothing about it. We also had Sami Zayn come in to further move along his what will be life-long WWE feud with Owens and eliminate him to set-up whatever they do in the future. Owens eliminated AJ Styles to possibly set-up something in the future. Chris Jericho was eliminated by Dean Ambrose with rumours that they could do something at Mania, stemming from Jericho’s whole defiance of Ambrose back when they teamed at Night Of Champions. Small touches like this help to provide continuity with the overall storylines and are pretty easy things to do to either start a feud or plant seeds for things further down along the line.
Oh, yeah, how could I forget AJ freakin’ Styles debuted at the show, causing me much delay in writing this since I literally can’t stop watching his entrance debut on YouTube. It was seemingly the worst keep secret in wrestling that Styles was going to debut at the Rumble, but damn if I didn’t get excited like it was an unknown surprise when I first saw him walk around the corner in his entrance. I can’t even begin to describe how cool and surreal it is to finally see my favourite enter a WWE ring. They did it perfectly, putting him at #3 where Roman just dumped Rusev and was waiting for his opponent, all the attention drawn to who would be next. Some cool music hit and nobody really knew what was up until Styles sauntered out and the PHENOMENAL words went across the titantron and the crowd went absolutely nuts, like goosebumps each time I watch it level of nuts. I was literally watching the match, a damn WWE match, shaking my head at just how bizarre it was to see Styles in a WWE ring facing off against all these WWE superstars after over the past two decades doing everything but go to WWE and after headlining an ROH and NJPW PPV within the last month. They handled him perfectly to in the match, teasing the Styles clash, while still getting over his moves, and they had him go 27 minutes which is super respectable, especially since he’s not going to win and then having someone of the calibre of Owens, who he could feud with, eliminate him. It was awesome and I really could’ve wrote this whole thing about Styles, but I can’t wait to see how he’s used in WWE and the gravity of his entrance and treatment in the match gives me hopes that they won’t squander him and actually have high hopes for him.
So, we’re right where he though we were really, HHH won the title and know Roman’s gonna chase it for WrestleMania, which I know people hate having HHH main event that event, but really what better options are there at this point with everybody injured and with the company wanting to put Reigns over so bad, even to his detriment. I think it’ll be a good match regardless, whether WWE gets their moment or not, and they certainly didn’t set Roman up well in that Rumble match, but let’s see what they got for the next couple months.
Standard | Posted in Wrestling | Tagged AJ Styles, Alberto Del Rio, Becky Lynch, Big E, Braun Strowman, Bray Wyatt, Brock Lesnar, Charlotte, Chris Jericho, Colin Cassady, Dean Ambrose, Enzo Amore, Erick Rowan, Fastlane, Jey Uso, Jimmy Uso, Kalisto, Kevin Owens, Kofi Kingston, Lucha Dragons, Luke Harper, Ric Flair, Roman Reigns, Royal Rumble, Rusev, Sami Zayn, Sasha Banks, Sin Cara, The Dudley Boyz, The New Day, The Usos, TLC, Triple H, WrestleMania, Xavier Woods | 0 comments
TLC: Tables, Ladders And Chairs: Review/Recap
The New Day Defeats The Usos and the Lucha Dragons to retain the WWE Tag Team Championship in a ladder match:
This year the ladder match opens the show once again and once again it steals the show right out of the gate. Originally, I thought and expected the ladder would go to the Owens/Ambrose Intercontinental match, which would’ve been great in its own right, but after seeing this I’m glad it went here. I can’t even remember the last time WWE had a multi tag team ladder match and that alone provided a fresh aspect to a match we haven’t seen in awhile. Of course, as expected, this thing was just a gigantic spot-fest with all three groups utilizing their high-flying abilities (+ Big E) for some fantastic moments. Highlighted by the incredible Solina del Sol delivered by Kalisto to *insert name of the correct Uso* off the top of a ladder in the middle of the ring, collapsing down through a ladder wedged in between the ropes. I can’t remember a move in recent memory that made me jump out of my seat like that. Big E also did a pretty cool move where he was trapped under a ladder and bench pressed it off him while the Lucha Dragons were climbing the ladder. I’m always amazed that people still find new and inventive things to do in ladder matches after all these years and this thing definitely delivered.
I think the New Day are getting a bit stale, due in large part to their constant long-winded promos that they deliver each time they’re out, but it was no question they were going to retain. It’s hard to tell when their time will run out with the belts, I’d imagine sooner rather than later, but still expect them to be a major player in the tag division for the foreseeable future. It seems like only a matter of time until the Lucha Dragons get a run with the titles, hopefully only pushing Kalisto’s stock even higher, because that dude has star potential.
Rusev Defeats Ryback:
This is just a dumb, filler of a feud that was pretty meaningless and lacked any teeth whatsoever. They tried to to this whole thing of Lana feigning getting attacked by Ryback and such, but it’s all just so boring and pointless. I remember they tried doing this feud a few months ago and nothing happened to it, unfortunately they actually went forward to this. I find Ryback pretty boring and he’s pretty much lost in the shuffle nowadays after his Intercontinental reign went down in flames. Rusev on the other hand is a better worker than he’s given credit for on the card, and has been wallowing in sub-standard stuff to what he’s capable of since he got run over in the Cena feud from earlier this year. It wasn’t a noticeably bad match or anything, just wildly forgettable and unnecessary.
Alberto Del Rio Defeats Jack Swagger to retain the United States Championship in a chairs match:
Del Rio obviously was going to retain over Swagger, who only got this title match because of the connection of his former manager Zeb Colter being Del Rio’s manager now. Except for the fact that Del Rio broke things off with Zeb the previous week, possibly hinting of interference or an appearance by Zeb in this match to return to Swagger’s side, except nope, none of that happened. Del Rio won in this chairs match (which might be the dumbest gimmick match currently used) with little fanfare, with the most noticeably dumb thing to happen in the match was when Swagger had Del Rio in his ankle submission Patriot lock move where Del Rio proceeds to get out of the move and no-sell it, walking around perfectly fine, but not only that it leads directly into the finish where Del Rio’s does his stomp off the top rope, driving his supposedly injured foot into Swagger, but showing no effects, and getting the 1-2-3. So, Del Rio keeps the belt, until presumably Cena comes back in the ensuing months and takes it back. You don’t just get to keep your win over Cena.
The Wyatt Family defeats The Dudley Boyz, Tommy Dreamer and Rhyno in a tables match:
This feud was presumably made because a. Like 90% of why the Dudleyz came back is so they could compete in a tables match at this PPV and b. to get the Wyatt’s a win in a feud, even if it’s against some 40-year-olds. That’s the biggest thing to come out of this thing, the Wyatt’s actually got a win over somebody, whether it actually means anything. It’s funny because WWE always projects the Wyatts as this immovable faction full of creepy ass-kickers, except for the fact that they lose to pretty much every body they’re in a feud with. It’d be nice to see them actually get meaningful wins and put some tangible cred behind their names to book them into an actual top force, not just glorified jobbers. This one was at least a step in the right direction with the Wyatts dominating having only Erick Rowan (the Wyatt family member that I think the other family members couldn’t care less about) be eliminated while the rest of the team stood strong the rest of the match.
Dean Ambrose defeats Kevin Owens to win the Intercontinental Championship:
This was really the only surprise of the night for me, Ambrose finally getting a win and getting the taste of some gold as he was on fire for a lot of the year, but never got anything done. Owens with the title was great, as he has been in every storyline, and I just don’t think we were close to telling the end of his story with the belt, granted I’m sure he’ll be chasing his rematch down. Not really sure what this means going forward for both men, there was always the rumoured Sami Zayn feud for Owens now that he’s coming back and looks less and less destined for NXT in the long run. Does Dean Ambrose settle in as the Intercontinental champion and try to give his U.S. title reign a run for its money?
Charlotte defeats Paige to retain the Divas championship:
I’ve never been invested in this feud, but I don enjoy the how it seems WWE doesn’t even know who is heel or face in this thing anymore. Charlotte literally plays the full out heel in this match for her first time, and thus Paige is playing the babyface role, where just a few weeks ago she was heel and a few before that she was face. Then in a post-match segment Charlotte is being a dick to Becky Lynch, along with Ric Flair, but then she seems to be legitimately regretful to things she said to Becky while her father keeps yapping away. It doesn’t make much sense, especially when Charlotte as a full-out heel is a lot more interesting and fun, anyways.
Sheamus defeats Roman Reigns in a TLC match to retain the WWE World Heavyweight Championship:
This thing went as expected with wins teased for both until the inevitable run-in by the League of Nations members to beat down Roman to help Sheamus score the win. There were a few moments where they got me and I thought Reigns might overcome all the odds against the interference and Sheamus’ sure win and take the title, but nope, at least not for another 24 hrs. or so…
That would’ve been the expected WWE ending and have the show close out there, as they’ve done time and time again. But, nope, this time Roman had enough and snapped on Triple H spearing him, beating him down, slamming him on a table, elbow dropping him through said table that didn’t break on the first go around, spearing him again after deciding he just wasn’t done after walking up the ramp. Reigns beat HHH down, HHH sold hilariously flopping around like a fish for some bizarre reason and for once Reigns actually looked like a beast that his look so much demonstrates he should be. This silent ass-kicker who just destroys with no regard for consequences or repercussions that could come. It looked like a step in the right direction for Reigns.
So, since I’m writing this after the Raw that followed the PPV, it would be kinda foolish not to talk about that since it’s directly follows from the events of the PPV and includes something pretty big. Nope, Reigns wasn’t taking the title from Sheamus on the Sunday night PPV, instead he took it on Raw completing a mini-arch for Roman over the two nights that actually genuinely seemed to cash in on a storyline with him that seemed relatively unforced.
Stephanie opens Raw with Reigns saying she’s not going to fire him because Triple H didn’t want to (I have no reason why he didn’t want to, and I hope they actually explain this when Triple H comes back), but she claims some guy named Vince McMahon is coming to the arena and he of course has the superseding end-all opinion on Reigns’ employment. Then because Stephanie is Stephanie she slaps Reigns a couple times. Later in the show Vince comes out lambasts Reigns, Reigns calls him an old man and just because of that he gets a world title match that night that if he loses he gets fired but if he wins he gets the title(?), and then Vince kicks Reigns in the balls and then it becomes crystal clear that Reigns is winning the title since Vince and co. backstage would never have their golden boy Reigns get doubly humiliated by Steph and Vince that way without him achieving something memorable in the end. So, in the main event Vince tries to provide a distraction to the ref, only to receive a Superman punch from Reigns which Vince sells beautifully, a brogue kick hits Sheamus that he amazingly kicked out of, into the spear for the win. Then cue the Philadelphia fans cheering Reigns in this rousing coronation of the man finally winning this title. Yeah, you read that right, the same city that booed Reigns out of the building this past January when he won the Rumble and his right to the WrestleMania main event and world title shot, cheered this man because for the most part things actually worked this time and the dude had enough crap piled on him, just give it to him and let him run with it already. Plus, people seemed to have rather wanted to put the tile on a dead fish than have Sheamus continue to run around with it.
Now where they go with it I have no clue. Obviously at least up until the Rumble Reigns and Sheamus will continue to feud with it, but after that I have no clue. It seemed like Reigns would be winning the belt at Mania with his celebration on that grand stage, but looking back now I think there’s no way WWE could last that long keeping the belt off Reigns, and really they couldn’t have kept it on Sheamus much more than they have. So, who wins the Rumble to go against Reigns. Realistically there’s only like three options Lesnar, Cena and Undertaker. Who legitimately else has a shot that they would let main event what they are attempting to make their biggest Mania yet. That’s it, and I doubt it’ll be Taker in the title picture. Lesnar seems like the best bet, since they could do the rematch since last year, even though I don’t think there’s a single person clamouring for that. It’s been rumoured WWE would like to do the whole Cena vs. Reigns Mania match with Reigns going over and Cena passing the torch, but is it time for that now? Who knows, but it seems like WWE doesn’t have the most varying options what to do with the title since their roster seems thinner and thinner by the day. Hell, at the end of Sunday night it seemed like it was going to be a Reigns/HHH feud going forward whether that would be at the Rumble or stretched to Mania, but now Reigns has the title, so what now. Killing two birds with one stone and having HHH go for the title would be hilariously amazing and I probably shouldn’t joke about. I look forward to looking back at this in four months and laughing.
Anyways, that’s where things stand and I’m semi-excited to see where things go, even if I’ll probably be let down. I was actually really optimistic for the PPV, and while it ended up being pretty disappointing, the Raw angle with Reigns winning the title on TV (something unseen in over four years) has my interested peaked. I’ve never hated Reigns as much as most, I definitely had my problems with him, and he’s definitely much better now, even if his promos do suck. But, I’m glad they finally stuck the belt on him and hope they just run with it and I hope it’s as great as they think it’ll be. I think Regins will get better just with the belt around him through some sort of osmosis, but we’ll see.
Standard | Posted in Wrestling | Tagged Alberto Del Rio, Big E, Braun Strowman, Bray Wyatt, Charlotte, Dean Ambrose, Erick Rowan, Jack Swagger, Jey Uso, Jimmy Uso, John Cena, Kalisto, Kevin Owens, Kofi Kingston, Lucha Dragons, Luke Harper, Paige, Rhyno, Ric Flair, Roman Reigns, Rusev, Ryback, Sheamus, Sin Cara, The Dudley Boyz, The New Day, The Usos, The Wyatt Family, TLC, Tommy Dreamer, Triple H, Wrestling, WWE, Xavier Woods, Zeb Colter | 0 comments
Survivor Series: Review/Recap
Roman Reigns defeats Alberto Del Rio to advance to the WWE World Heavyweight Championship tournament finals:
This was probably the most obvious outcome of the night, because no matter what would happen in the main event, it was all going to concern Roman somehow. It’s a smart opener, too, as they could get a good pop out of the crowd with Roman coming out to kick off the PPV, although he got pretty soundly booed, so maybe not the best with this crowd. This actually ended up to be my favourite match of the night and I think definitely Albert’s best since he came back to the company a month ago. The finish was never in doubt, but both were good enough together to really sell the near-falls.
Dean Ambrose defeats Kevin Owens to advance to the WWE World Heavyweight Championship tournament finals:
Another good match, not as good as the first, and actually a bit disappointing given the talent between the two guys, but it was never anything outwardly bad, just could have been better. It was pretty certain that Dean was going to advance, to push the whole Roman vs. Dean thing, but I don’t think a Kevin Owens win would’ve been too far out of the picture (especially with how things eventually ended). It seems like Owens and Ambrose were going to feud for the Intercontinental title into this PPV anyways, until the Rollins injury mucked everything up and I’d imagine they’ll continue this going forward. Hopefully the matches get better, I have no doubt that they won’t, and from the in ring work to the matches this could be a top mid-card feud that has the potential to be the best thing going for the company right now.
Ryback, The Usos and the Lucha Dragons defeats The New Day, Sheamus and King Barrett:
This was the “oh, damn, this is Survivor Series and I guess that means we need a 5v5 elimination match, so, uh, what scraps do we have around the locker room to fill this out.” Seeing as we had no clue who the participants were going into the match I thought they might have some mini-storyline reason of choosing these people, but nope it was just random leftover heels and faces to fill out the card, who are just a bit above working the pre-show. The match was actually pretty fine, at least until the New Day left with an “injured” Big E to leave Sheamus stranded alone, which I thought was setting them up coming back or complaining when they eventually lost that technically they hadn’t been eliminated, but nope, Sheamus just eventually got beat by the faces.
Charlotte defeated Paige to retain the WWE Divas championship:
Man, I barely remember this match, and I guess it makes sense because their feud is nothing to really retain either. Besides the lame attempt at giving this feud some depth and teeth with that random Reid Flair death comment on the previous RAW, there isn’t much that really makes you invested in any of this. I don’t think Paige is a particularly good heel in the first place and I’m not the biggest fan of hers either, and as well Charlotte is clearly lacking on the mic. You’d think since they’re such great wrestlers within the ropes they’d be able to at least put on something good, but unfortunately it was unforgettable with Charlotte eventually winning after an awkward submission spot. I’d hope this thing would be done here, but I imagine they’d want to keep pushing with Paige at the title.
Tyler Breeze defeats Dolph Ziggler:
I was looking forward to this a lot, actually, but it kinda just felt like a dud all the way around. The crowd seemed long sucked from the building and they only got just over five minutes to make this thing work. It was a fine enough match, but I was just expecting more given the calibre of performers in the ring. I’m glad Tyler got the win, even though I’m sure they’ll harp on his pseudo-cheating with tripping Ziggler for the win. I don’t see this thing ending anytime soon, so hopefully like Owens/Ambrose they can only improve on things.
The Brothers of Destruction (Undertaker and Kane) defeats The Wyatt Family (Bray Wyatt and Luke Harper):
I wasn’t expecting much from this, but I’m surprised it was even worse than I was expecting. I was 99% sure that Undertaker would get the win since this PPV was centred around his 25 years in the company, but a part of me thought they might flip the script and have the Wyatts triumph when everything was seemingly against them. But, nope, this was just a glorified squash match for Undertaker and Kane going through their greatest hits for a short ten minutes with the easy win by an eventual tombstone to Undertaker. Taker and co. were taking it super easy, and hopefully this was just an easy stepping stone to honour his 25 years and he’ll prepping for a more worthy match at WrestleMania, since we know he still has some good matches left in him given his last two against Brock. And who knows where the Wyatts go from here, given that they’re basically glorified jobbers by now, with WWE trying to give them the illusion that they are all high and mighty powerhouses, yet they lose every feud they’re in, losing all their credibility.
Roman Reings defeats Dean Ambrose to win the WWE World Heavyweight championship, but…
I was really looking forward to this, given the whole storyline business of Reigns and Ambrose being best buddies and everything coming down to them taking each other on one-on-one to see who’s the best, and beyond that it’s a fresh match for once! I guess the theme of the night was short matches and I was astonished how short this thing was. I couldn’t believe how early they were going for their finishing moves, telegraphing the end, I thought it might just be an entertaining close call for the middle of the match, but nope eventually Reigns got the spear on Ambrose in just under ten minutes for the win. Don’t get me wrong, the match was good for what it was, but it felt so condensed and rushed, and for what reason I have no clue, since by the time ended the show was still a good 20 minutes short of the 3 hour window.
I was certain that the big angle here would be the Dean Ambrose heel turn on his best buddy that I thought was going to happen way back at SummerSlam, giving the main event a big feud with a backstory and cementing the big heel with Rollins out of the picture. Instead, they decided to go the whole other route, and actually stick with it, so outcomes Triple H to congratulate Reigns who responds with a spear to Triple H all to turn around from a brogue kick from Sheamus and him cashing in his Money in the Bank contract. Sheamus kicked out of the first brogue, and I thought, “oh, okay, now they’re just going strengthen Reigns by having him best Sheamus’ attempt at the title,” until another brogue kick smashed in Reigns’ face and Sheamus got the three for the title.
I’m really not up in arms about this finish as most are, mainly stemming from how much people hate Sheamus. I used to, too, I mean I still don’t necessarily like him, but he’s an actual heel in this day-and-age who actually gets legit heel heat, has a stiff moveset and can be used correctly. Now, I don’t really think this is the best move to put at the top of your card, but I mean it is the deadest period of the year where people tune out, and I’d be surprised if they had Sheamus with the title going into Mania.
With Rollins out it seemed the no. 1 thing WWE wanted/needed was to establish a no. 1 heel and that’s what they did (or at least tried to do) with Sheamus. They needed a top heel (in their eyes, anyways) to go against Reigns, and in doing so gave him the belt to help generate that. Obviously, they’re trying to build sympathy for Roman with the fans and try to build him up and actually get people to cheer and like him before they put the belt on him, because apparently Vince sees him as the face/top of the company for the foreseeable future and he wants to set everything up right. If Reigns isn’t standing tall with the belt at the end of WrestleMania 32 then either something drastic happened, but I would be stunned if that wasn’t the case. I’m interested to see how they work this thing and if they can actually get Reigns over, or at least moreso, this time, because if they screw things up or fail to pull the trigger it might be too little too late with Roman. He’s still pretty terrible on the mic, but his ring work is very solid and I can definitely see him succeeding and winning over the fans to be a draw on top for all fans, but the booking will ultimately decide this in the coming months. I’m fascinated to see how this plays out.
Ultimately, I didn’t hate the PPV like most did, largely stemming from the Sheamus ending, but mostly I just felt underwhelmed. I was actually looking forward to a bunch of these matches, none of them were terrible, but the only one I really liked was the Reigns/Del Rio one, one that I wasn’t even looking forward to. Reigns/Ambrose was good, but seemed so much like a tease at an actual full length match in the future, possibly when one is heel, and I can’t wait for that.
It’s going to be an interesting an interesting time in the WWE due to how uninteresting things are right now. They’re heading into December, their biggest dead time, with no Rollins or Cena (along with the load of other injured stars) with a new champion that everybody hates and a no. 1 contender that most are just so-so on at best. I’m being like The New Day and trying to stay positive!
Standard | Posted in Wrestling | Tagged Alberto Del Rio, Big E, Bray Wyatt, Charlotte, Dean Ambrose, Dolph Ziggler, Jey Uso, Jimmy Uso, Kalisto, Kane, Kevin Owens, King Barrett, Kofi Kingston, Lucha Dragons, Luke Harper, Paige, Roman Reigns, Ryback, Seth Rollins, Sheamus, Sin Cara, Survivor Series, The New Day, The Usos, Undertaker, Vince McMahon, Wrestling, WWE, Xavier Woods | 0 comments
Hell In A Cell: Review/Recap
Alberto Del Rio Defeats John Cena to win the United States Championship:
So, if you’ve been reading the dirt sheets for the past couple weeks you’ll know that John Cena is set to take some time off, supposedly until close to the end of the year, so it seemed like a foregone conclusion that whoever was Cena’s mystery opponent they would take the belt from him, and that he did. And, also, if you’ve been reading the dirt sheets over the past couple months you’ll know that Del Rio was heavily rumoured to be coming back to the WWE, seemingly sooner rather than later, and that he did. Realistically, he was probably the best person they could’ve got to do this, outside of Daniel Bryan, but nobody truly knows his condition anymore it seems and I’m sure WWE would want to promote the hell out of D-Bry returning and not just have him randomly appear. I really don’t like the idea of having Del Rio returning with Zeb Colter as his manager, it doesn’t seem needed at all, besides the fact that I can’t stand Colter, and Del Rio can more than work by himself. I just hope they don’t give him the short stick, even with his probably stipulation heavy contract, Del Rio can still fill a top role in the company, especially with Cena out. As for the match itself, it was anti-climatic the whole way through, it was some, like, barely over seven minutes and Del Rio just did a couple random kicks to Cena’s head and pinned him, because of course Cena isn’t tapping to Del Rio with his regular finish. It was like Cena wanted to start his vacation extra early and, hence the quick match and that it was the first match on the card. Anyways, it was pretty dumb that Cena is built up as never losing and when he does cleanly like this it’s so pointless and doesn’t make much sense continuity wise, but eh, that’s just par for the course really.
Roman Reigns Defeats Bray Wyatt in a Hell In A Cell match:
This was probably low-key the match I was most looking forward to of the night, and unlike the other Cell match actually had some current build-up to it. Plus, Bray and Roman are great young talents who have some nice chemistry together. The match was a good brawl fest, with some nice use of kendo sticks and tables and positioned both men quite strongly, even if it was constantly clear that Roman would come out on top. I just really hope this is the end to the Reigns/Wyatt family feud that seems to have stretched for a year basically when you throw Ambrose’s feuding with Bray from late last year. I like Bray Wyatt and think he has sooo much potential, but it’d be nice to see him come out of a feud on top for once, I know he never was going to against Reigns, but it seems like Vince and co. like him and the Wyatts, yet they’re always stepping stones for others. We shall see.
The New Day Defeats The Dudley Boyz to retain the Tag Team Championship:
Man, I’m so sick of this feud already, and with the thought that they’d culminate it at TLC in December with a tables match, I don’t know if I can last that long. This thing is dead in the water, especially when they gotta keep up dumb finishes so that The Dudleyz don’t win and so that there’s a limp thread of a reason for them to keep feuding with The New Day continually retaining. They did some fun stuff with a framed DQ job from Kofi, but everything else largely falling flat, especially when The Dudleyz look so sloppy with their wrestling, missing out on simple moves, that take away from the supposed fidelity of the match. I prey they inject some new blood into this thing, or just cut bait early and have The Dudleyz work somebody else and The New Day do something else as they’re consistently part of the main event picture on RAW’s, so who knows.
Charlotte Defeats Nikki Bella to retain the Divas Championship:
This match was pretty uneventful and seemingly just Nikki’s rematch that she loses to get her out of the picture so probably Paige comes in and feuds for the belt next. Nikki looked really good in the match, and even though people were rightfully sick of her, she’s underratedly one of the best female wrestler on the roster, even with all the new NXT influence. I like Charlotte, too, and she might actually be my favourite overall, but I’m curious to see how long they keep the belt on her, even with the Flair pedigree and I wouldn’t be surprised to see her getting screwed out of it or something sooner than later.
Seth Rollins Defeats Kane to retain the WWE World Heavyweight Championship:
This was a pretty meh match and really exactly what was expected. It’s pretty telling when the World Championship match is a distant afterthought behind the two Cell matches. Hell, this thing probably could’ve been spiced up by putting it in the Cell, but here we are. I’ve never really like Rollins and Kane’s chemistry in the ring, they’re different styles obviously, but everything often seems so clunky and hemmed down with the two, and Seth’s been pulling out great matches with everybody, but this was a down moment for sure. At least this limited to a one PPV feud, we hope.
Kevin Owens Defeats Ryback to retain the Intercontinental Championship:
Damn, and I thought the Cena match was short just to get the belt off him, this one was the semi-reverse where Owens retained in, like, five minutes because I can only assume that’s how quickly they wanted this Owens/Ryback feud to be over so they can move Owens on to bigger and better things. I’m glad they didn’t stretch the feud out because Owens just murders Ryback in the ring and on the mic that Ryback never even seemed close to being a formidable opponent of Owens, even though they tried to make the story of how Owens cheated to win each time. There’s really not much of Ryback I can stand, he’s terrible on the mic and a poorer wrestler than he thinks he is and as much as he thinks otherwise, he just doesn’t have a good look. I’m looking forward to an actual feud with Owens and someone who can hang with him believably.
Brock Lesnar Defeats The Undertaker in a Hell In A Cell match:
Now I was pretty sure that this was going to be a good match, seeing as how their SummerSlam match was pretty fantastic (minus the finish) and that it’s supposedly the last time they’ll ever fight (this is the WWE, though, so you know to never fully believe anything they promise.), but damn if this thing exceeded expectations. Now, of course, this Cell match was going to be in the shadow of their classic blood-fueled duel inside the Cell at No Mercy in 2002, and this one being in the PG-era how could it compete, but oh, man, was their blood. Now, who knows if we’ll ever know if Lesnar and /or Taker purposely bladed (I’m going to guess no), but this match was as bloody as I’ve ever seen in a long time. I really think Brock’s just a bleeder and has some thin skin, because he’s constantly getting busted open, and pretty early in the match. It looked like they were working pretty stiff, too, so the unplanned blood seems pretty likely that way. But, otherwise this was a great match with a ton of brawling and and a kick-ass ending that most importantly saw Lesnar going over cleanly and getting the win as he should have. This is definitely a match I’m looking forward to going back and watching and if this is indeed the end to their decade-plus of feuding, it was a pretty worth conclusion. Generally, that would be it, but it’s no secret that Undertaker’s 25th Anniversary is coming at Survivor Series, the next PPV, so the Wyatt family (also in need of a new feud to start) come out and beat the hair extensions out of Taker and abduct him. Which was actually kind of badass for the Wyatt family to do, especially with their history. Obviously, this will lead into some kind of match, probably a Survior Series elimination match somehow at the PPV. Unfortunately it’s hard to see the Wyatt’s coming out on top again this time, but maybe Undertaker’s fully in his “putting others over” phase, but we’ll see. I’m cautiously optimistic.
Standard | Posted in Wrestling | Tagged Alberto Del Rio, Big Brother, Bray Wyatt, Brock Lesnar, Bubba Ray Dudley, Charlotte, D-Von Dudley, Hell In A Cell, John Cena, Kane, Kevin Owens, Kofi Kingston, Nikki Bella, Roman Reigns, Ryback, Seth Rollins, The Dudley Boyz, The New Day, The Undertaker, WWE | 0 comments
Night Of Champions: Review/Recap
So, I’ve been back in the WWE and wrestling game for officially a year now after my decade or so of an absence. Technically it was marked by SummerSlam, but Night Of Champions last year was the first PPV I specifically set out to watch and saw the build towards. What’s that old joke about wrestling, you never stop being a fan, you just go through periods where you are completely smothered by it and others where you can’t stand it, it’s like a life-long disease. So, it’s a year later and I still watch so much it from WWE each week, TNA, ROH, NJPW, Lucha Underground and not to mention my whole Attitude Era watching and various other stuff. I don’t know what I did with all my time before I got back into wrestling, oh yeah, just watch other random TV. Anyways, I ramble and go on wayyy too long in these wrestling articles, so basically I’m gonna write about each current pay-per-view each month as a way to get my thoughts out about the current product and such. Let’s see how this goes.
Kevin Owens Defeats Ryback to win the Intercontinental Championship:
I am just the biggest Kevin Owens mark and love everything about him. He’s Canadian, has a unique look, prides himself on his family, is a badass, has a brutal moveset which also features a ton of agile moves for his build, is fantastic on the mic, and so on and on. He’s probably my favourite thing in wrestling right now. And Ryback… let’s just say I feel the complete opposite. Ryback just seems like a child, he has this ridiculous physique that is so far gone that it’s comical, he is horrendous on the mic and it’s hard to take anything seriously with him. It was destined that Owens would take the belt off Ryback once they got into this feud, but I’m surprised they did it this quickly, although it was the right move. Ryback’s reign has been dreadful and was barely treading water and doing the title a major disservice. Owens is gold and him having the belt will definitely help its credibility and provide a better angle for their feud. I’m curious to see how it’ll play out since Owens promos murder Ryback and it makes him look not even in his league, but I’m looking forward to it, mainly as a way to see more Kevin Owens.
Dolph Ziggler Defeats Rusev:
WWE’s version of what they think is a juicy soap opera tail. Where nobody knows who the “good” guy is in this and pretty much everybody in this is awful. From Rusev’s treatment of the women by his side, to Ziggler playing two women even though he’s supposed to be the good one, to Summer and Lana’s cattiness and TOTALLY STEREOTYPICAL WOMEN STUFF WHERE THEY’RE ONLY GOOD FOR ONE THING. It just needs to end and has no drawing power and people just don’t care. Lana, one of the few good parts, generally, is off TV with a legit injury, so I don’t even know what’s happening here anymore. It seems like there might be some kind of swerve with the Ziggler turn or whatever, but it’s so far past caring at this point.
The Dudley Boyz Defeats The New Day:
The New Day are at peak overness and The Dudleyz are a perfect foil to combat their goofiness. The match wasn’t that great, but we all know it’s leading to a tables match, whenever that may be, such as Hell In A Cell, or however long they stretch it for. The Dudleyz will obviously get their tenth reign sometime during their return, but I don’t know if it’s the right move to do now since The New Day are so hot and capable of getting such a reaction no matter who they’re with. And The Dudleyz are an easy team to help put over others, given their history and in-ring skill so them working to strengthen the tag divison in other ways would be great. The Dudleyz feuding with the Wyatts would be so much fun.
Charlotte Defeats Nikki Bella to win the Divas Championship:
Nikki gets her record and then drops the belt less than a week later so now everybody’s happy? I thought they would give Nikki the win here, just so it totally didn’t seem like she got the record then the belt taken off her as quickly as possible, but eh. Can’t say I really enjoyed the match, even though I love Charlotte and am actually a pretty big fan of Nikkie Bella’s in-ring work. They had Nikki work Charlotte’s leg, continually going after it and largely dominating the match by targeting her leg and making it the focal point of her offense. It was a fine storytelling move, but one completely obliterated of credibility when Charlotte without having put much offense in gets the figure four (a leg submission) on Nikki then bridges into her figure eight modifier, putting pressure on Charlotte’s legs which are the main source of the move and she pulls it off effortlessly with no pain and Nikki taps out to lose. A body part that had been worked the whole match just magically healed and was of nothing to Charlotte and she showed no signs of struggle. This just bugged me so much when they put such an emphasis on Nikki working that leg, and it was just thrown out the window and thus the storytelling became pointless. I’m optimistic to see what happens with the title picture in the wake of the ugh Divas Revolution ugh and with Paige’s heel turn. There’s a ton of talent there to give good matches with Charlotte, Nikkie, Paige, Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch and even Naomi in spots. So, in theory the future should be bright, but let’s see if the booking agrees.
The Wyatt Family Defeats Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose and Chris Jericho:
This is another feud I’m sick of, even though I individually enjoy Ambrose, Reigns and the Wyatt Family, but it just seems like it’s been going on forever, especially when it just seems like yesterday that Ambrose had his singles feud with Wyatt. Chris Jericho was the mystery partner, and eh, I like Jericho but I wasn’t to moved with him being the partner, especially because it doesn’t really push that particular story. Sure, he cost them the match, but he isn’t booked seemingly to continue this and really just seems like to set up a possible feud with Ambrose somewhere down the line when Jericho wants to come back to TV. I didn’t really like the ending especially when they’re not going to continue that storyline with Jericho immediately, so why even book it like that. I honestly don’t know how much longer they can stretch this thing, because everything just gets repeated. It’s the same Wyatt promo every week, the same Reigns or Ambrose match that gets interrupted by the Wyatts each week. Like are they going to try to push to Survivor Series for an elimination match, because I can’t handle that. I’d love to see Reigns, Ambrose and Wyatt moved on as they’re all great talents just getting bogged down now. I also wish Reigns and Ambrose split and maybe they even did go with that rumored Ambrose turn. I just want all Shield members separate from each other, so they’re eventual feud and then reconciliation will be that much more special.
John Cena Defeats Seth Rollins to win the United States Championship:
John’s gotta get back his win and title, of course. It was fun while it lasted with Rollins being the dual champ, but by whatever way they weren’t going to have both titles on Rollins for that long. Cena’s good as the U.S. Champ, he has great matches with everybody and can pull good matches out of lesser people and at least provides a vessel where other superstars can show off their stuff on the John Cena level of attention, not that they’ll ever win, but yeah. This was another great match between the two, not as good as SummerSlam, but surprisingly high energy given Rollins had another match right after this.
Seth Rollins Defeats Sting to retain the WWE World Heavyweight Championship:
Unfortunately this match is now overshadowed by the injuries sustained to Sting when he took those turnbuckle powerbombs, but it was a really great match between the two and Sting gave it his all and did not hold anything back, which I guess unfortunately lead to his injuries. I wasn’t sure if it was scripted or not when the doctor was attending to Sting, but I was surprised to see the bumps he was taking especially the turnbuckle powerbombs that he took twice. I don’t think it’ll be the last we’ll see of Sting, but it’s really unfortunate for a seemingly great guy and one who even in injury put Rollins over exceedingly. And then, oh yeah, Demon Kane comes back to start the long-gestating and inevitable Rollins/Kane feud that we’ve all been clamoring for. That’s what’ll turn around the plummeting ratings! Now Demon Kane is fun and it’s nice to see him again, but I don’t have that much hope that the story will be that justifiable, plus a Rollins/Kane match just doesn’t inspire much from me. I hope it’s done with Hell In A Cell and Rollins gets to move on, someone mentioned it and I agree, a Rollins/Sheamus match has the potential to be a lot of fun. It kinda seems like Rollins days as champ are numbered, given the slumping ratings, the need to switch things up and a general malaise on him it seems nowadays. I always just assumed it would be Reigns to take the belt off him, now that he’s gained a lot more luster versue earlier in the years with the chorus of boos that greeted him, and he’s definitely a lot better on the mic now and is underratedly a good in the ring. Now that I think about it, they haven’t really done the Rollins/Reigns feud one-on-one especially due to the WrestleMania aftermath, so that very much could be a direction they go to soon, which would be a lot of fun. I think WWE is just counting the days to have Reigns, a strong babyface champ, go have a long run as Heavyweight champ and be the face of the company.
Overall it wasn’t that great of a show and has no matches that I’m fiending to rewatch, outside of possibly the Rollins matches because everything he puts on nowadays is usually gold. And of course the biggest news to come out of the event was just the randomly booked, oh, hey, by the way Undertaker/Brock Lesnar are blowing off their feud at Hell In A Cell inside the steel structure. No big deal. I was dreading them setting up their blow off match for WrestleMania 32 and it wasn’t something I was looking forward to seeing them waste on the event when there is so many better options for both of them to do at the biggest event of the year. And putting it at Hell In A Cell obviously is a response to the slumping ratings to book possibly the biggest match you can nowadays, Taker/Lesnar in a cell, and thus frees them up to start new feuds. I just hope they put Lesnar over cleanly like he deserves and should, there’s no reason for Taker at this stage to come out of this on top, especially since the Brock as that illustrious Mania victory over him. Undertaker does not need this feud victory to remain strong, neither does Lesnar since he’ll always be a beast, but Lesnar is still probably wrestling for a couple more years and is a legitimate option for the title picture and longer feud, while Taker is a special attraction once or twice a year and though seemingly on the brink of retirment, he seems content with working sporadically for the foreseeable future, which is good for WWE as long as his health stays up.
Standard | Posted in Wrestling | Tagged Becky Lynch, Big Brother, Braun Strowman, Bray Wyatt, Brock Lesnar, Charlotte, Chris Jericho, Dean Ambrose, Dolph Ziggler, Hell In A Cell, John Cena, Kane, Kevin Owens, Kofi Kingston, Lucha Underground, Luke Harper, Naomi, Night Of Champions, Nikkie Bella, NJPW, Paige, Recap, Review, ROH, Roman Reigns, Rusev, Ryback, Sasha Banks, Seth Rollins, Sting, Summer Rae, Television, The Dudley Boyz, The New Day, TNA, TV, Undertaker, WrestleMania, Wrestling, WWE, Xavier Woods | 0 comments
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Back to the EORTC website
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Electronics Production | August 10, 2007
Arcotronics acquired by Kemet
Editor: Jesper Olsson
Kemet Corporation announced today that it has agreed to acquire Arcotronics Italia S.p.A., a manufacturer of plastic film and metallized plastic film capacitors and wet tantalum capacitors, from Blue Skye (Lux) S.à r.l., a company owned by the special opportunities funds managed by D.B. Zwirn & Co., L.P.
In addition to manufacturing capacitors, Arcotronics is a leading manufacturer of battery and film capacitor machinery. Arcotronics has manufacturing facilities in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria and China. In the year ended December 31, 2006, Arcotronics had total consolidated sales of approximately €150 million (about U.S.$207 million at current exchange rates). Kemet has agreed to pay €17.5 million for 100% of the outstanding share capital of Arcotronics. Kemet will assume or refinance approximately €98 million of net financial debt and assume certain other liabilities of the company. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in early October 2007. Per-Olof Lööf, Chief Executive Officer of Kemet Corporation, stated, “The addition of Arcotronics to the Kemet group of companies is a meaningful milestone in our company's history, and further positions Kemet as "The Capacitance Company." The acquisition of Arcotronics provides an excellent complement to our recent acquisition of the Evox Rifa Group of companies earlier this year, and will allow us to expand our product offerings and technology base." “We are excited about the opportunity to join forces with an industry leader such as Kemet," stated Gianpaolo Di Dio, Chief Executive Officer of Arcotronics. “We believe that the combination of Arcotronic's product offerings and technology with Kemet's customer service and global logistics capability will lead to enhanced opportunities and benefits for our customers and employees."
Evox Rifa increased sales but reported loss
Kemet establish Strategic Marketing and
Business Development Organization
Rutronik adds Nordic Semiconductor
to its linecard in Finland
Kemet appoints Elhurt for Poland
Kemet closes Evox Rifa deal today
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The eviivo Awards 2017!
On Tuesday the 17th of October the stars of British hospitality gathered, along with many of our eviivo team, at the Cafe de Paris in London’s West End to find out the winners of this years prestigious eviivo Awards.
This year one of our award winners, Castle Levan, was even congratulated by a motion in the Scottish Parliament for winning the Quirkiest Place to Stay award! We’re so proud that all our hard work to put B&Bs in the spotlight has even reached the highest levels of Government!
Take a look at some of the great pictures from the event:
[smartslider3 slider=26]
This year’s judging panel featured some big names, from industry heavyweights like David Weston of the B&B Association to Neil Gerard of The Caterer along with major TV personalities including Michelin-starred chef Michel Roux Jr, famous baker, food critic and writer Dan Lepard, TV presenter Lisa Holloway and writer and broadcaster Harry Wallop, so you can be sure the winners of these awards really did deserve their prize!
Immortalised in fiction, on television and in film, Britain’s independent B&Bs, guesthouses and boutique hotels represent the pinnacle of British hospitality, providing some of UK’s most quirky and unique holiday experiences. That’s what we came together to celebrate. But this year for the first time we changed two things:
Firstly, this year’s awards were open to all UK B&Bs and independent hotels. Not just eviivo customers. And with 100% independent judges, we know the winners this year really are the best of the best!
Secondly, reflecting our increased international presence we presented three Hidden Gem awards to properties in Spain, France and Germany to celebrate the very best of hospitality from European B&Bs and independent hotels.
Congratulations to our International Hidden Gems for 2017:
Maison de Fogasses, Avignon, France
Schloss Retzow Apartments, Rechlin, Germany
Hotel Rural Anatur, Cervo, Spain
We’re very excited to add more awards for international hosts and hoteliers next year.
And of course, a big congratulations to our Star Amongst Star’s award winner, Abbots Grange, who has already been featured in both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror! See all 2017 award winners here.
And we look forward to seeing you at next year’s awards!
eviivo Awards
eviivo Podcasts
National B&B Week
The Adventures of Wooly
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Runaround
Album I Robot
Runaround Lyrics
It was one of Gregory Powell's favorite platitudes that nothing was to be gained from excitement, so when Mike Donovan came leaping down the stairs toward him, red hair matted with perspiration, Powell frowned.
"What's wrong?" he said. "Break a fingernail?"
"Yaaaah," snarled Donovan, feverishly. "What have you been doing in the sublevels all day?" He took a deep breath and blurted out, "Speedy never returned."
Powell's eyes widened momentarily and he stopped on the stairs; then he recovered and resumed his upward steps. He didn't speak until he reached the head of the flight, and then:
"You sent him after the selenium?"
"And how long has he been out?"
"Five hours now."
Silence! This was a devil of a situation. Here they were, on Mercury exactly twelve hours-and already up to the eyebrows in the worst sort of trouble. Mercury had long been the jinx world of the System, but this was drawing it rather strong-even for a jinx.
Powell said, "Start at the beginning, and let's get this straight."
They were in the radio room now-with its already subtly antiquated equipment, untouched for the ten years previous to their arrival. Even ten years, technologically speaking, meant so much. Compare Speedy with the type of robot they must have had back in 2005. But then, advances in robotics these days were tremendous.
Powell touched a still gleaming metal surface gingerly. The air of disuse that touched everything about the room-and the entire Station was infinitely depressing.
Donovan must have felt it.
He began: "I tried to locate him by radio, but it was no go. Radio isn't any good on the Mercury Sunside not past two miles, anyway. That's one of the reasons the First Expedition failed. And we can't put up the ultrawave equipment for weeks yet-'
"Skip all that. What did you get?"
"I located the unorganized body signal in the short wave. It was no good for anything except his position. I kept track of him that way for two hours and plotted the results on the map."
There was a yellowed square of parchment in his hip pocket-a relic of the unsuccessful First Expedition-and he slapped it down on the desk with vicious force, spreading it flat with the palm of his hand. Powell, hands clasped across his chest, watched it at long range.
Donovan's pencil pointed nervously. "The red cross is the selenium pool, You marked it yourself."
"Which one is it?" interrupted Powell. "There were three that MacDougal located for us before he left."
"I sent Speedy to the nearest, naturally. Seventeen miles away. But what difference does that make?" There was tension in his voice. "There are the penciled dots that mark Speedv's position."
And for the first time Powell's artificial aplomb was shaken and his bands shot forward for the map.
"Are you serious? This is impossible.'
"There it is," growled Donovan.
The little dots that marked the position formed a rough circle about the red cross of the selenium pool, And Powell's fingers went to his brown mustache., the unfailing signal of anxiety.
Donovan added: "In the two hours I checked on him, he circled that damned pool four times. It seems likely to me that he'll keep that up forever. Do you realize the position we're in?"
Powell looked up shortly, and said nothing. Oh, yes, he realized the position they were in. It worked itself out as simply as a syllogism. The photo-cell banks that alone stood between the full power of Mercury's monstrous sun and themselves were shot to hell. The only thing that could save them was selenium. The only thing that could get the selenium was Speedy. If Speedy didn't come back, no selenium. No selenium, no photo-cell banks. No photo-banks - well, death by slow broiling is one of the more unpleasant ways of being done in.
Donovan rubbed his red mop of hair savagely and expressed himself with bitterness. "We'll be the laughingstock of the System, Greg. How can everything have gone so wrong so soon? The great team of Powell and Donovan is sent out to Mercury to report on the advisability of reopening the Sunside Mining Station with modern techniques and robots and we ruin everything the first day. A purely routine job, too. We'll never live it down."
"We won't have to, perhaps," replied Powell, quietly. "If we don't do something quickly, living anything down-or even just plain living-will be out of the question."
"Don't be stupid! If you feel funny about it, Greg, I don't. It was criminal, sending us out here with only one robot. And it was your bright idea that we could handle the photo-cell banks ourselves."
"Now you're being unfair. It was a mutual decision and you know it. All we needed was a kilogram of selenium, a Stillhead Dielectrode Plate and about three hours' time-and there are pools of pure selenium all over Sunside. MacDougal's spectroreflector spotted three for us in five minutes, didn't it? What the devil! We couldn't have waited for next conjunction."
"Well, what are we going to do? Powell, you've got an idea. I know you have, or you wouldn't be so calm. You're no more a hero than I am. Go on, spill it."
"We can't go after Speedy ourselves, Mike - not on the Sunside. Even the new insosuits aren't good for more than twenty minutes in direct sunlight. But you know the old saying, 'Set a robot to catch a robot.' Look, Mike, maybe things aren't so bad. We've got six robots down in the sublevels, that we may be able to use, if they work. If they work."
There was a glint of sudden hope in Donovan's eyes. "You mean six robots from the First Expedition. Are you sure? They may be subrobotic machines. Ten years is a long time as far as robot-types are concerned, you know."
"No, they're robots. I've spent all day with them and I know. They've got positronic brains: primitive, of course." He placed the map in his pocket.
"Let's go down."
The robots were on the lowest sublevel - all six of them surrounded by musty packing cases of uncertain content. They were large, extremely so, and even though they were in a sitting position on the floor, legs straddled out before them, their heads were: a good seven feet in the air.
Donovan whistled. "Look at the size of them, will you? The chests must be ten feet around."
"That's because they're supplied with the old McGuffy gears. I've been over the insides - crummiest set you've ever seen."
"Have you powered them yet?"
"No. There wasn't any reason to. I don't think there's anything wrong with them. Even the diaphragm is in reasonable order. They might talk."
He had unscrewed the chest plate of the nearest as he spoke, inserted the two-inch sphere that contained the tiny spark of atomic energy that was a robot's life. There was difficulty in fitting it, but he managed, and then screwed the plate back on again in laborious fashion. The radio controls of more modern models had not been heard of ten years earlier. And then to the other five.
Donovan said uneasily, "They haven't moved."
"No orders to do so," replied Powell, succinctly. He went back to the first in the line and struck him on the chest. "You! Do you hear me?"
The monster's head bent slowly and the eyes fixed themselves on Powell.
Then, in a harsh, squawking voice-like that of a medieval phonograph, he grated, "Yes, Master!"
Powell grinned humorlessly at Donovan. "Did you get that? Those were tire days of the first talking robots when it looked as if the use of robots on Earth would be banned. The makers were fighting that and they built good, healthy slave complexes into the damned machines."
"It didn't help them," muttered Donovan.
"No, it didn't, but they sure tried." He turned once more to the robot. "Get up!"
The robot towered upward slowly and Donovan's head craned and his puckered lips whistled.
Powell said: "Can you go out upon the surface? In the light?"
There was consideration while the robot's slow brain worked. Then, "Yes, Master."
"Good. Do you know what a mile is?"
Another consideration, and another slow answer. "Yes, Master."
"We will take you up to the surface then, and indicate a direction. You will go about seventeen miles, and somewhere in that general region you will meet another robot, smaller than yourself. You understand so far?"
"Yes, Master."
"You will find this robot and order him to return. If he does not wish to, you are to bring him back by force."
Donovan clutched at Powell's sleeve. "Why not send him for the selenium direct?"
"Because I want Speedy back, nitwit. I want to find out what's wrong with him." And to the robot, "All right, you, follow me."
The robot remained motionless and his voice rumbled: "Pardon, Master, but I cannot. You must mount first." His clumsy arms had come together with a thwack, blunt fingers interlacing.
Powell stared and then pinched at his mustache. "Uh . . . oh!"
Donovan's eyes bulged. "We've got to ride him? Like a horse?"
"I guess that's the idea. I don't know why, though. I can't see - Yes, I do. I told you they were playing up robot-safety in those days. Evidently, they were going to sell the notion of safety by not allowing them to move about, without a mahout on their shoulders all the time. What do we do now?"
"That's what I've been thinking," muttered Donovan. "We can't go out on the surface, with a robot or without. Oh, for the love of Pete" - and he snapped his fingers twice. He grew excited. "Give me that map you've got. I haven't studied it for two hours for nothing. This is a Mining Station. What's wrong with using the tunnels?"
The Mining Station was a black circle on the map, and the light dotted lines that were tunnels stretched out about it in spiderweb fashion.
Donovan studied the list of symbols at the bottom of the map. "Look," he said, "the small black dots are opening to the surface, and here's one maybe three miles away from the selenium pool. There's a number here - you'd think they'd write larger - 13a. If the robots know their way around here."
Powell shot the question and received the dull "Yes, Master," in reply. "Get your insosuit," he said with satisfaction.
It was the first time either had worn the insosuits - which marked one time more than either had expected to upon their arrival the day before-and they tested their limb movements uncomfortably.
The insosuit was far bulkier and far uglier than the regulation spacesuit; but withal considerably lighter, due to the fact that they were entirely nonmetallic in composition. Composed of heat-resistant plastic and chemically treated cork layers, and equipped with a desiccating unit to keep the air bone-dry, the insosuits could withstand the full glare of Mercury's sun for twenty minutes. Five to ten minutes more, as well, without actually killing the occupant.
And still the robot's bands formed the stirrup, nor did he betray the slightest atom of surprise at the grotesque figure into which Powell had been converted.
Powell's radio-harshened voice boomed out: "'Are you ready to take us to Exit 13a?"
Good, thought Powell; they might lack radio control but-at least they were fitted for radio reception. "Mount one or the other, Mike," he said to Donovan.
He placed a foot in the improvised stirrup and swung upward. He found the seat comfortable; there was the humped back of the robot, evidently shaped for the purpose, a shallow groove along each shoulder for the thighs and two elongated "cars" whose purpose now seemed obvious.
Powell seized the ears and twisted the head. His mount turned ponderously. "Lead on, Macduff." But he did not feel at all lighthearted.
The gigantic robots moved slowly, with mechanical precision, through the doorway that cleared their heads by a scant foot, so that the two men had to duck hurriedly, along a narrow corridor in which their unhurried footsteps boomed monotonously and into the air lock.
The long, airless tunnel that stretched to a pinpoint before them brought home forcefully to Powell the exact magnitude of the task accomplished by the First Expedition, with their crude robots and their start-from-scratch necessities. They might have been a failure, but their failure was a good deal better than the usual run of the System's successes.
The robots plodded onward with a pace that never varied and with footsteps that never lengthened.
Powell said: "Notice that these tunnels are blazing with lights and that the temperature is Earth-normal. It's probably been like this all the ten years that this place has remained empty."
"How's that?"
"Cheap energy; cheapest in the System. Sunpower, you know, and on Mercury's Sunside, sunpower is something. That's why the Station was built in the sunlight rather than in the shadow of a mountain. It's really a huge energy converter. The heat is turned into electricity, light, mechanical work and what have you; so that energy is supplied and the Station is cooled in a simultaneous process."
"Look," said Donovan. "This is all very educational, but would you mind changing the subject? It so happens that this conversion of energy that you talk about is carried on by the photocell banks mainly-and that is a tender subject with me at the moment."
Powell grunted vaguely, and when Donovan broke the resulting silence, it was to change the subject completely. "Listen, Greg. What the devil's wrong with Speedy, anyway? I can't understand it."
It's not easy to shrug shoulders in an insosuit, but Powell tried it. "I don't know, Mike. You know he's perfectly adapted to a Mercurian environment. Heat doesn't mean anything to him and he's built for the light gravity and the broken ground. He's foolproof - or, at least, he should be."
Silence fell. This time, silence that lasted.
"Master," said the robot, "we are here."
"Eh?" Powell snapped out of a semidrowse. "Well, get us out of here - out to the surface."
They found themselves in a tiny substation, empty, airless, ruined. Donovan had inspected a jagged hole in the upper reaches of one of the walls by the light of his pocket flash.
"Meteorite, do you suppose?" he had asked.
Powell shrugged. "To hell with that. It doesn't matter. Let's get out."
A towering cliff of a black, basaltic rock cut off the sunlight, and the deep night shadow of an airless world surrounded them. Before them, the shadow reached out and ended in knife-edge abruptness into an all-but-unbearable blaze of white light, that glittered from myriad crystals along a rocky ground.
"Space!" gasped Donovan. "It looks like snow." And it did.
Powell's eyes swept the jagged glitter of Mercury to the horizon and winced at the gorgeous brilliance.
"This must be an unusual area," he said. "The general albedo of Mercury is low and most of the soil is gray pumice. Something like the Moon, you know. Beautiful, isn't it?"
He was thankful for the light filters in their visiplates. Beautiful or not, a look at the sunlight through straight glass would have blinded them inside of half a minute.
Donovan was looking at the spring thermometer on his wrist. "Holy smokes, the temperature is eighty centigrade"
Powell checked his own and said: "Um-m-m. A little high. Atmosphere, you know."
"On Mercury? Are you nuts?"
"Mercury isn't really airless," explained Powell, in absent-minded fashion. He was adjusting the binocular attachments to his visiplate, and the bloated fingers of the insosuit were clumsy at it. "There is a thin exhalation that clings to its surface-vapors of the more volatile ,elements and compounds that are heavy enough for Mercurian gravity to retain, You know: selenium, iodine, mercury, gallium, potassium, bismuth, volatile oxides. The vapors sweep into the shadows and condense, giving up heat. It's a sort of gigantic still. In fact, if you use your flash, you'll probably find that the side of the cliff is covered with, say, hoar-sulphur, or maybe quicksilver dew."
"It doesn't matter, though. Our suits can stand a measly eighty indefinitely."
Powell had adjusted the binocular attachments, so that he seemed as eye-stalked as a snail.
Donovan watched tensely. "See anything?"
The other did not answer immediately, and when he did, his voice was anxious and thoughtful. "There's a dark spot on the horizon that might be the selenium pool. It's in the right place. But I don't see Speedy."
Powell clambered upward in an instinctive striving for better view, till he was standing in unsteady fashion upon his robot's shoulders. Legs straddled wide, eyes straining, he said: "I think I think. Yes, it's definitely he. He's coming this way."
Donovan followed the pointing finger. He had no binoculars, but there was a tiny moving dot, black against the blazing brilliance of the crystalline ground.
"I see him," he yelled. "Let's get going!"
Powell had hopped down into a sitting position on the robot again, and his suited hand slapped against the Gargantuan's barrel chest. "Get going!"
"Giddy-ap," yelled Donovan, and thumped his heels, spur fashion.
The robots started off, the regular thudding of their footsteps silent in the aimlessness, for the nonmetallic fabric of the insosuits did not transmit sound. There was only a rhythmic vibration just below the border of actual hearing.
"Faster," yelled Donovan. The rhythm did not change.
"No use," cried Powell, in reply. "These junk heaps are only geared to one speed. Do you think they're equipped with selective flexors?"
They had burst through the shadow, and the sunlight came down in a white-hot wash and poured liquidly about them.
Donovan ducked involuntarily. "Wow! Is it imagination or do I feel heat?"
"You'll feel more presently," was the grim reply. "Keep your eye on Speedy."
Robot SPD 13 was near enough to be seen in detail now. His graceful, streamlined body threw out blazing highlights as he loped with easy speed across the broken ground. His name was derived from his serial initials, of course, but it was apt, nevertheless, for the SPD models were among the fastest robots turned out by the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation.
"Hey, Speedy," howled Donovan, and waved a frantic band.
"Speedy!" shouted Powell. "Come here!"
The distance between the men and the errant robot was being cut down momentarily-more by the efforts of Speedy than the slow plodding of the ten-year-old antique mounts of Donovan and Powell.
They were close enough now to notice that Speedy's gait included a peculiar rolling stagger, a noticeable side-to-side lurch-and then, as Powell waved his band again and sent maximum juice into his compact head-set radio sender, in preparation for another shout, Speedy looked up and saw them.
Speedy hopped to a halt and remained standing for a moment with just a tiny, unsteady weave, as though he were swaying in a light wind.
Powell yelled: "All right, Speedy. Come here, boy."
Whereupon Speedy's robot voice sounded in Powell's earphones for the first time.
It said: "Hot dog, let's play games. You catch me and I catch you; no love can cut our knife in two. For I'm Little Buttercup, sweet Little Buttercup. Whoops!" Turning on his heel, he sped off in the direction from which he had come, with a speed and fury that kicked up gouts of baked dust.
And his last words as he receded into the distance were, "There grew a little flower 'neath a great oak tree" followed by a curious metallic clicking that might have been a robotic equivalent of a hiccup.
Donovan said weakly: "Where did he pick up the Gilbert and Sullivan? Say, Greg, he. . he's drunk or something."
"If you hadn't told me," was the bitter response, "I'd never realize it. Let's get back to the cliff. I'm roasting."
It was Powell who broke the desperate silence. "In the first place , he said, "Speedy isn't drunk -not in the human sense - because he's a robot, and robots don't get drunk. However, there's something wrong with him which is the robotic equivalent of drunkenness,"
"To me, he's drunk," stated Donovan, emphatically, "and all I know is that he thinks we're playing games. And we're not. It's a matter of life and very gruesome death."
"All right. Don't hurry me. A robot's only a robot. Once we find out what's wrong with him, we can fix it and go on."
"Once," said Donovan, sourly.
Powell ignored him. "Speedy is perfectly adapted to normal Mercurian environment. But this region" - and his arm swept wide - "is definitely abnormal. There's our clue. Now where do these crystals come from? They might have formed from a slowly cooling liquid; but where would you get liquid so hot that it would cool in Mercury I s sun?"
"Volcanic action," suggested Donovan, instantly, and Powell's body tensed.
"Out of the mouths of sucklings," he said in a small, strange voice, and remained very still for five minutes.
Then, he said, "Listen, Mike, what did you say to Speedy when you sent him after the selenium?"
Donovan was taken aback. "Well damn it - I don't know. I just told him to get it."
"Yes, I know. But how? Try to remember the exact words."
"I said . . . uh . . . I said: 'Speedy, we need some selenium. You can get it such-and-such a place. Go get it.' That's all. What more did you want me to say?"
"You didn't put any urgency into the order, did you?"
"What for? It was pure routine."
Powell sighed. "Well, it can't be helped now - but we're in a fine fix." He had dismounted from his robot, and was sitting, back against the cliff. Donovan joined him and they linked arms. In the distance the burning sunlight seemed to wait cat-and-mouse for them, and just next to them, the two giant robots were invisible but for the dull red of their photoelectric eyes that stared down at them, unblinking, unwavering and unconcerned.
Unconcerned! As was all this poisonous Mercury, as large in jinx as it was small in size.
Powell's radio voice was tense in Donovan's car: "Now, look, let's start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics - the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot's positronic brain." In the darkness, his gloved fingers ticked off each point.
"We have: One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
"Right!"
"Two," continued Powell, "a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law."
"And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does Dot conflict with the First or Second Laws."
"Right! Now where are we?"
"Exactly at the explanation. The conflict between the various rules is ironed out by the different positronic potentials in the brain. We'll say that a robot is walking into danger and knows it. The automatic potential that Rule 3 sets up turns him back. But suppose you order him to walk into that danger. In that case, Rule 2 sets up a counterpotential higher than the previous one and the robot follows orders at the risk of existence."
"Well, I know that. What about it?"
"Let's take Speedy's case. Speedy is one of the latest models, extremely specialized, and as expensive as a battleship. It's not a thing to be lightly destroyed."
"So?"
"So Rule 3 has been strengthened-that was specifically mentioned, by the way, in the advance notices on the SPD models-so that his allergy to danger is unusually high. At the same time, when you sent him out after the selenium, you gave him his order casually and without special emphasis, so that the
Rule 2 potential set-up was rather weak. Now, hold on; I'm just stating facts."
"All right, go ahead. I think I get it."
"You see how it works, don't you? There's some sort of danger centering at the selenium pool. It increases as he approaches, and at a certain distance from it the Rule 3 potential, unusually high to start with, exactly balances the Rule 2 potential, unusually low to start with."
Donovan rose to his feet in excitement. "And it strikes an equilibrium. I see. Rule 3 drives him back and Rule 2 drives him forward - "
"So he follows a circle around the selenium pool, staying on the locus of all points of potential equilibrium. And unless we do something about it, he'll stay on that circle forever, giving us the good old runaround." Then, more thoughtfully: "And that, by the way, is what makes him drunk. At potential equilibrium, half the positronic paths of his brain are out of kilter. I'm not a robot specialist, but that seems obvious. Probably he's lost control of just those parts of his voluntary mechanism that a human drunk has. Ve-e-ery pretty."
"But what's the danger? If we knew what he was running from-!' "You suggested it. Volcanic action. Somewhere right above the selenium pool is a seepage of gas from the bowels of Mercury. Sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide-and carbon monoxide. Lots of it and at this temperature."
Donovan gulped audibly. "Carbon monoxide plus iron gives the volatile iron carbonyl."
"And a robot," added Powell, "is essentially iron." Then, grimly: "There's nothing like deduction. We've determined everything about our problem but the solution. We can't get the selenium ourselves. It's still too far. We can't. send these robot horses, because they can't go themselves, and they can't carry us fast enough to keep us from crisping. And we can't catch Speedy, because the dope thinks we're playing games, and he can run sixty miles to our four."
"If one of us goes," began Donovan, tentatively, "and comes back cooked, there'll still be the other."
"Yes," came the sarcastic reply, "it would be a most tender sacrifice - except that a person would be in no condition to give orders before he ever reaches the pool, and I don't think the robots would ever turn back to the cliff without orders. Figure it out! We're two or three miles from the pool-call it two-the robot travels at four miles an hour; and we can last twenty minutes in our suits. It isn't only the beat, remember. Solar radiation out here in the ultraviolet and below is poison."
"Um-m-m," said Donovan, "ten minutes short,"
"As good as an eternity. And another thing. In Order for Rule 3 potential to have stopped Speedy where it did, there must be an appreciable amount of carbon monoxide in the metal-vapor atmosphere-and there must be an appreciable corrosive action therefore. He's been out hours now-and how do we know when a knee joint, for instance, won't be thrown out of kilter and keel him over. It's not only a question of thinking-we've got to think fast!" Deep, dark, dank dismal silence!
Donovan broke it, voice trembling in an effort to keep itself emotionless. He said: "As long as we can't increase Rule 2 potential by giving further orders, how about working the other way? If we increase the danger, we increase Rule 3 potential and drive him backward."
Powell's visiplate had turned toward him in a silent question.
"You see," came the cautious explanation, "all we need to do to drive him out of his rut is to increase the concentration of carbon monoxide in his vicinity. Well, back at the Station there's a complete analytical laboratory."
"Naturally," assented Powell. "It's a Mining Station."
"All right. There must be pounds of oxalic acid for calcium precipitations."
"Holy space! Mike, you're a genius."
"So-so," admitted Donovan, modestly. "It's just a case of remembering that oxalic acid on beating decomposes into carbon dioxide, water, and good old carbon monoxide. College chem, you know."
Powell was on his feet and had attracted the attention of one of the monster robots by the simple expedient of pounding the machine's thigh.
"Hey," he shouted, "can you throw?"
"Master?"
"Never mind." Powell damned the robot's molasses-slow brain. He scrabbled up a jagged brick-size rock. "Take this;' he said, "and hit the patch of bluish crystals just across that crooked fissure. You see it?"
Donovan pulled at his shoulder. "Too far, Greg. It's almost half a mile off."
"Quiet," replied Powell. "It's a case of Mercurian gravity and a steel throwing arm. Watch, will you?"
The robot's eyes were measuring the distance with machinery accurate stereoscopy. His arm adjusted itself to the weight of the missile and drew back. In the darkness, the robot's motions went unseen, but there was a sudden thumping sound as he shifted his weight, and seconds later the rock flew blackly into the sunlight. There was no air resistance to slow it down, nor wind to turn" it aside-and when it hit the ground it threw up crystals precisely in the center of the "blue patch."
Powell yelled happily and shouted, "Let's go back after the oxalic acid, Mike."
And as they plunged into the ruined substation on the way back to the tunnels, Donovan said grimly: "Speedy's been hanging about on this side of the selenium pool, ever since we chased after him. Did you see him?"
'Yes.
"I guess he wants to play games. Well, we'll play him games!"
They were back hours later, with three-liter jars of the white chemical and a pair of long faces, The photo-cell banks were deteriorating more rapidly than had seemed likely. The two steered their robots into the sunlight and toward the waiting Speedy in silence and with grim purpose.
Speedy galloped slowly toward them. "Here we are again. Whee! I've made a little list, the piano organist; all people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face."
"We'll puff something in your face," muttered Donovan. "He's limping, Greg."
"I noticed that," came the low, worried response. "The monoxide'll get him yet, if we don't hurry."
They were approaching cautiously now, almost sidling, to refrain from setting off the thoroughly irrational robot. Powell was too far off to tell, of course, but even already he could have sworn the crack-brained Speedy was setting himself for a spring.
"Let her go," he gasped. "Count three! One-two-"
Two steel arms drew back and snapped forward simultaneously and two glass jars whirled forward in towering parallel arcs, gleaming like diamonds in the impossible sun. And in a pair of soundless puffs, they bit the ground behind Speedy in crashes that sent the oxalic acid flying like dust.
In the full heat of Mercury's sun, Powell knew it was fizzing like soda water.
Speedy turned to stare, then backed away from it slowly-and as slowly gathered speed. In fifteen seconds, he was leaping directly toward the two humans in an unsteady canter.
Powell did not get Speedy's words just then, though he heard something that resembled, "Lover's professions when uttered in Hessians."
He turned away. "Back to the cliff, Mike. He's out of the rut and he'll be taking orders now. I'm getting hot."
They jogged toward the shadow at the slow monotonous pace of their mounts, and it was not until they had entered it and felt the sudden coolness settle softly about them that Donovan looked back. "Greg!"
Powell looked and almost shrieked. Speedy was moving slowly now - so slowly - and in the wrong direction. He was drifting; drifting back into his rut; and he was picking up speed. He looked dreadfully close, and dreadfully unreachable, in the binoculars.
Donovan shouted wildly, "After him!" and thumped his robot into its pace, but Powell called him back.
"You won't catch him, Mike - it's no use." He fidgeted on his robot's shoulders and clenched his fist in tight impotence. "Why the devil do I see these things five seconds after it's all over? Mike, we've wasted hours."
"We need more oxalic acid," declared Donovan, stolidly. "The concentration wasn't high enough."
"Seven tons of it wouldn't have been enough-and we haven't the hours to spare to get it, even if it were, with the monoxide chewing him away. Don't you see what it is, Mike?"
And Donovan said flatly, "No."
"We were only establishing new equilibriums. When we create new monoxide and increase Rule 3 potential, he moves backward till he's in balance again-and when the monoxide drifted away, he moved forward, and again there was balance."
Powell's voice sounded thoroughly wretched. "It's the same old runaround. We can push at Rule 2 and pull at Rule 3 and we can't get anywhere-we can only change the position of balance. We've got to get outside both rules." And then he pushed his robot closer to Donovan's so that they were sitting face to face, dim shadows in the darkness, and he whispered, "Mike!"
"Is it the finish?" - dully. "I suppose we go back to the Station, wait for the banks to fold, shake hands, take cyanide, and go out like gentlemen." He laughed shortly.
"Mike," repeated Powell earnestly, "we've got to get Speedy."
"I know."
"Mike," once more, and Powell hesitated before continuing. "There's always Rule 1. I thought of it earlier-but it's desperate."
Donovan looked up and his voice livened. "We're desperate."
"All right. According to Rule 1, a robot can't see a human come to harm because of his own inaction. Two and 3 can't stand against it. Theycan't,Mike."
"Even when the robot is half cra- Well, he's drunk. You know he is."
"It's the chances you take."
"Cut it. What are you going to do?"
"I'm going out there now and see what Rule 1 will do. If it won't break the balance, then what the devil - it's either now or three-four days from now."
"Hold on, Greg. There are human rules of behavior, too. You don't go out there just like that. Figure out a lottery, and give memychance."
"All right. First to get the cube of fourteen goes." And almost immediately, "Twenty-seven forty-four!"
Donovan felt his robot stagger at a sudden push by Powell's mount and then Powell was off into the sunlight. Donovan opened his mouth to shout, and then clicked it shut. Of course, the damn fool had worked out the cube of fourteen in advance, and on purpose. Just like him.
The sun was hotter than ever and Powell felt a maddening itch in the small of his back. Imagination, probably, or perhaps hard radiation beginning to tell even through the insosuit.
Speedy was watching him, without a word of Gilbert and Sullivan gibberish as greeting. Thank God for that! But he daren't get too close. He was three hundred yards away when Speedy began backing, a step at a time, cautiously - and Powell stopped. He jumped from his robot's shoulders and landed on the crystalline ground with a light thump and a flying of jagged fragments.
He proceeded on foot, the ground gritty and slippery to his steps, the low gravity causing him difficulty. The soles of his feet tickled with warmth. He cast one glance over his shoulder at the blackness of the cliffs shadow and realized that he had come too far to return -either by himself or by the help of his antique robot. It was Speedy or nothing now, and the knowledge of that constricted his chest. Far enough! He stopped.
"Speedy," he called. "Speedy!"
The sleek, modem robot ahead of him hesitated and halted his backward steps, then resumed them.
Powell tried to put a note of pleading into his voice, and found it didn't take much acting. "Speedy, I've got to get back to the shadow or the sun'll get me. It's life or death, Speedy. I need you."
Speedy took one step forward and stopped. He spoke, but at the sound Powell groaned, for it was, "When you're lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is tabooed - "
It trailed off there, and Powell took time out for some reason to murmur, "Iolanthe."
It was roasting hot! He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, and whirled dizzily; then stared in utter astonishment, for the monstrous robot on which he had ridden was moving-moving toward him, and without a rider.
He was talking: "Pardon, Master. I must not move without a Master upon me, but you are in danger."
Of course, Rule 1 potential above everything. But he didn't want that clumsy antique; he wanted Speedy. He walked away and motioned frantically: "I order you to stay away. I order you to stop!"
It was quite useless. You could not beat Rule 1 potential. The robot said stupidly, "You are in danger, Master."
Powell looked about him desperately. He couldn't see clearly. His brain was in a heated whirl; his breath scorched when he breathed, and the ground all about him was a shimmering haze.
He called a last time, desperately: "Speedy! I'm dying, damn you! Where are you? Speedy, I need you."
He was still stumbling backward in a blind effort to get away from the giant robot he didn't want, when he felt steel fingers on his arms, and a worried, apologetic voice of metallic timbre in his cars.
"Holy smokes, boss, what are you doing here? And what am I doing - I'm so confused - "
"Never mind," murmured Powell, weakly. "Get me to the shadow of the cliff - and hurry!" There was one last feeling of being lifted into the air and a sensation of rapid motion and burning beat, and he passed out.
He woke with Donovan bending over him and smiling anxiously. "How are you, Greg?"
"Fine!" came the response. "Where's Speedy?" "Right here. I sent him out to one of the other selenium pools with orders to get that selenium at all cost this time. He got it back in forty-two minutes and three seconds. I timed him. He still hasn't finished apologizing for the runaround he gave us. He's scared to come near you for fear of what you'll say."
"Drag him over," ordered Powell. "It wasn't his fault." He held out a hand and gripped Speedy's metal paw. "It's O.K., Speedy." Then, to Donovan, "You know, Mike, I was just thinking - "
"Yes!"
"Well," he rubbed his face-the air was so delightfully cool, "you know that when we get things set up here and Speedy put through his Field Tests, they're going to send us to the Space Station next."
"Yes! At least that's what old lady Calvin told me just before we left, and I didn't say anything about it, because I was going to fight the whole idea."
"Fight it?" cried Donovan. "But - "
"I know. It's all right with me now. Two hundred seventy-three degrees Centigrade below zero. Won't it be a pleasure?"
"Space Station," said Donovan, "here I come."
"Runaround" Track Info
I Robot Isaac Asimov
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New posts New media
"Spreading the ideas of freedom loving people on matters regarding high finance, politics, constructionist Constitution, and mental masturbation of all types"
Mining Camp (General Discussions)
Business News & Views - Metals, Markets, Shipping, Energy, More
Thread starter searcher
Mother Lode Found
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Mother Lode
Deleted my posts. Nothing more than a long running thread with old, outdated business & shipping news. Waste of time and effort. No more. Far too many posts, threads & vids like this. nmcu
Always Take Things For What They're Worth & DYODD
RPM222
searcher said:
How Will Coalition Response Against Syria Affect Gold & Silver Prices?
SalivateMetal
In action against Syria, propaganda from both sides could weigh response and markets.
On long term the US attitude will help the price of the Gild and silver.
Hopefully there is still some small players in the metal industry with big incomes expectation than we can invest easily at low cost.
By exemple some than i'm actually folowing: ANX or MAE is still in low cost but get some good expectations of grow.
FthePolice
Go Oil Go! The Permian is hopping and soon the Bakken will be too. It's getting back to 2014 levels. The company I work for services the oil and gas industry and this new boom will give me lots of dry powder!
AgCuAuAl
Likes: searcher
TAEZZAR
LADY JUSTICE ISNT BLIND, SHES JUST AFRAID TO WATCH
Midas Member
Midas Supporter
ORYGUN
Gold Is “Where It Should Be” - Pierre Lassonde
From my old vantage point, I think he is pretty much correct.
While a much higher gold price is needed to bring bullish sentiment back into the mining space, the yellow metal is already fairly priced, said Pierre Lassonde, Chairman of Franco-Nevada Corp.“At $,1300 [an ounce], I will argue that gold is well priced,” Lassonde told Kitco News on the sidelines of the BMO Global Metals & Mining Conference.
http://www.kitco.com/news/video/sho...w.kitco.com/news/video/latest?show=Kitco-News
I'm supposed to respect my elders .... but it's getting harder and harder for me to find any now. TAEZZAR
Hispanic employees
Where the hell is "Hispania"?
If I were a Mexican, I would be pissed being called Hispanic !!!!
AND I AM PISSED ABOUT THIS SHIT NON-HISPANIC WHITE - WTF !!
But I should not be pissed as I am a NON-HISPANIC, MONGREL/HEINZ 57 !!
Back to the subject !
More than 400 Washington Post employees sign petition slamming billionaire owner Jeff Bezos' 'shocking pay practices', demanding 'fair wages' and urging him to 'share the wealth'
Am I missing something? In a free market, you should be able to pat whatever the traffic will bear. If they don't like the pay, quit & go somewhere else, I did many times in my working career. Yes, I missed that we are no longer a free market nation !!!
Bezos, Gates etc, etc....... did not get mega wealthy from giving away their profits, they got wealthy screwing people & other companies !!
Now, if the employees would simply get up & leave, how rich would Bozo, Gates, Et al, be ???
Uglytruth
Gold Chaser
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuelas-millionaires-poor-051601973.html
Venezuela's 'millionaires,' the new poor
Maria Isabel SANCHEZ
AFP•June 19, 2018
In inflation-ravaged Venezuela, eggs are beyond the reach of many consumers
In inflation-ravaged Venezuela, eggs are beyond the reach of many consumers (AFP Photo/Federico PARRA)
Caracas (AFP) - Elizabeth Torres is outraged, but as a Venezuelan she takes the affront in her stride. "We are a country of millionaires," she says ironically, eyeing a carton of eggs in the market. Price? Three million bolivars.
"You are a millionaire because you have to pay that much, and for that you get 36 eggs, but the minimum salary is 2.6 million! With what you get every month, you can't buy them," she says.
It's the great irony of the country's cruel decline. Sitting atop the world's largest reserves of crude, Venezuela -- once Latin America's richest country -- is now a state of millionaires, but the millions are in bolivars and practically worthless.
According to the country's leading universities, 87 percent of the population is now officially poor.
In the market in the eastern Caracas suburb of Chacao, Torres, a 64-year-old retired accountant, isn't the only one to grumble.
Between stalls of vegetables, meat and imitation leather shoes, people complain loudly about the cost of living.
Torres' salary is equivalent to 32 dollars at the official exchange rate and barely one much-coveted black market dollar.
Venezuelans have to pay seven-or-eight digit sums to buy staples like flour, rice, bread or some other reasonably nutritious and filling carbohydrate.
Carmen Machado, 57, was fired a few days ago from her job at an office cleaning company. They gave her 5.8 million bolivars as severance pay after four years of service, she said. Enough to buy a kilo of meat.
Venezuelans are forced to keep up with crazy prices that rise two or three times a week.
The accumulation is staggering. The opposition-majority parliament says hyperinflation was nearly 25,000 percent in the last 12 months, meaning the price of an item now costs 250 times' what it did a year ago.
- 'Not living, surviving' -
At a pet shop Olga Aviles, 53, is torn between buying a tin of food for her cat and a kilo of meat for the family.
"There always has to be a certain quota of sacrifice. If I spend on one thing, I don't spend on the other."
"In Venezuela, we are not living, we are surviving," she said.
"If you buy fruit, you cannot buy vegetables. If you buy grains, you do not buy cereal."
Though the government sells some subsidized foods in poorer neighborhoods and electricity, water and gas cost a pittance, many goods and services are priced on the value of a "dolar negro" or black market dollar -- worth 30 times the official one.
Only a small sector of society has access to dollars.
"We have to ask family members outside to send something back. With what we get here we cannot eat," says Aurora Gonzalez, 71, whose son emigrated and sends home remittances to keep his family going.
President Nicolas Maduro, whose controversial re-election in May will keep him in the presidency until 2025, argues that Venezuela's inflation is the result of speculation and an economic war designed to cripple the country and force a transition.
But Venezuelan economist Luis Vicente Leon blames the crisis on the state monopoly of foreign currency and strict price and exchange controls.
- 'Millionaires of lies'-
In March, Maduro announced a re-denomination of the bolivar, lopping off three zeroes from its value to counter hyperinflation. The launch has been postponed as the electronic banking system wasn't ready and nor were the promised new banknotes printed.
Leon dismisses the measures are "an ephemeral work of art".
"Removing zeroes from the currency does not extinguish the fuse that causes hyperinflation," says the economist.
Many Venezuelans are already lopping off the zeroes automatically, "for convenience and for the psychological effect. For instance, when something costs 4.5 million we say 4,500," says Olga.
In 2017, Maduro announced a new 100,000 bolivar bill, which would now no longer buy an egg. Now, the highest value will be 500 bolivars, which might buy you a coffee.
For Elizabeth Torres and many like her, it's a surreal, unfunny joke.
"We are millionaires of lies. What we are is poorer."
The death penalty is 100% effective against repeat offenders.
Please note timing......................4 months before mid terms....
"Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"The most improper job of any man... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it,
and least of all those who seek the opportunity." -J.R.R. Tolkien
GIM Forum
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Impressions: Tom Clancy’s The Division – E3 2015
Release: 2016(?)
Tom Clancy’s The (Troll Hard) Division puts you with a group of 3 post-apocalyptic sleeper agents in the midst of a viral epidemic killing off the US population and you have the single goal of looting every player and NPC that you come into contact with. It doesn’t even matter if they were situational allies or members of your own party, if they have a gun that you like, you can shank a fool and take it off of their body. What’s a dead body going to do to protest? Ragdoll in anger? At least, that would be what the E3 demo would lead me to believe that this game is going to play out.
The Open-world cooperative shooter-genre is definitely trying to explore new directions since Borderlands made its debut a few years ago for the closed party format and Destiny released last year as the drop-in drop-out open party format. Troll Hard has both a drop-in-drop out system where parties are automatically dropped into random servers with other random groups already in them but this is the first with a betrayal system that works contains both inter-party and intra-party mechanics.
The way that The [Troll] Division handles inter-party betrayals is that if any member makes a move on another group, your group is considered rogue (hostile) and all other groups in the area are notified of this putting your group at a disadvantage because you thought loot was more important than cooperation. The same modal goes for intra-party betrayal, if you shoot a member of your group, you’re marked as rogue so you better pick your battles carefully or stay that itchy trigger finger.
The reason why someone would want to betray the team is because of the loot you found in your run of the city. You find loot by killing mobs that protect chests, and the items in these chests can only be acquired after you evacuate the premise, of which there are only a handful of evacuation points. You can also find loot by killing other player-groups.
As far as the demo went, I should say that they didn’t make it a far comparison to the real thing because the coordinators gave an incentive to be the first to evac loot. Normally there wouldn’t be an incentive to pick a fight with a group currently trying to evac but for some awful reason they wanted to instigate the 3 groups that were in the demo into combat and so that’s what happened for about 15 minutes or so before the demo time was finished.
The internals of the game were simple. Your group can be comprised of different “classes” with different loadouts. A healer, a gadget tech assaulter and a ranged assault. The enemies in the demo were fairly diverse, ranging from a few basic goons to elite pyrotech enemies with weak-points to learn and backstories for all.
The game lends itself to having a fairly complex lore assuming the time is put into it, but I would really hate to pick up the game and always be stuck with people prioritizing gear over teamwork, whether it’s from within your group or dealing with other groups. I can just see the game a few weeks in, having bands of max level players camping evac points and killing everyone coming into contact with the zone.
mtberryyoshi
Analysis, Game Design, Gaming, Impressions
Analysis, E3, E3 2015, Game Design, Gaming, gaming analysis, Gaming Discourse, The Division, Tom Clancy's The Division, Video Games
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Last Said Stuff
Event Highlights: Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) 2017
Let’s talk about: Player-Driven Context; Final Fantasy XV, That Dragon, Cancer and How a player connects to a game
Best of Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) 2016
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Gameranx
Video Game News, Lists & Guides
BioWare May Have Dragon Age News Coming Next Month
Dennis Patrick / Updates / Anthem, Bioware, Dragon Age, Dragon Age 4, Dragon Age IV, featured /
BioWare may have a bad run lately. Mass Effect: Andromeda was a letdown originally when it launched back in 2017 and the studio’s latest IP release, Anthem, has not hit the expectations that many fans held when going into the title. With that said, there was some concern if this would eventually lead to the development studio closure by EA. While there have been comments before that there is no intention of closing down BioWare, fans are still likely going into the new game installments with some slight hesitation.
Still, we do know that the studio does have a new installment in the works that has plenty of fans already and that’s of course Dragon Age. The fourth installment to Dragon Age has been confirmed to be in development already, but little to no real news has been released as to what we can expect from the studio quite yet. That may soon change as BioWare sent out a tweet that suggests we could get some Dragon Age 4 news next month.
It’s already surpassed the tenth anniversary, but Dragon Age fans are already making down December 4, 2019, as the Dragon Age day. Now it looks like fans won’t be the only ones celebrating all things Dragon Age as BioWare announced that they would be celebrating with fans next month. What’s got people talking is that BioWare makes a note to call it Dragon 4ge Day, which again, indicates that something is coming out next month in regards to Dragon Age 4.
While we may not get the actual game for a few years, having some new concrete details about Dragon Age 4 will certainly keep the fan base talking among each other in anticipation of its release. Still, we’re interested in seeing just what exactly BioWare has in-mind, so we’ll have to keep a lookout for the official news next month.
Today marks 10 years of Dragon Age! This year we’re excited to join the community’s party on December 4th and celebrate a decade together in the world we all love. See you on 12/4 for Dragon 4ge Day!
— BioWare (@bioware) November 3, 2019
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot – Android 21, Mira, Detachable Tails & Flander’s Butt | Easter Eggs Guide
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot – There’s A Secret Alternate Universe Boss Fight | Time Machine Guide
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot – How To Summon Shenron | Every Wish Listed
PlayStation Games Under $20 Sale Now Live, Full List of Deals Detailed
Netflix’s Dragon Quest: Your Story Movie Release Date Set for February
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Battlefield 2018 Will Be Battlefield: Bad Company 3- Rumor
Now this would be a blast from the past…
Posted By Pramath | On 12th, Dec. 2017 Under News
We already know that there will be a new Battlefield game next year- this is something that EA has explicitly confirmed to investors in a financial call (and it is also in line with DICE’s release schedule over the last few years). What we haven’t known so far is what form the new Battlefield game will take. After the much acclaimed 2016 Battlefield 1, would the new game continue the historical take on the franchise? Or would we get something entirely new instead?
According to a new rumor, the new Battlefield game will be another blast from the past- in a manner of speaking. Rather than going historical, it sounds like the new Battlefield game will be a new title in the fan favorite, hugely beloved Battlefield: Bad Company sub-series, which saw its last release all the way back in 2010.
The information comes from AlmightyDaq, who to his credit also leaked information about Battlefield 1 accurately. Apparently the setting will be Vietnam, and the game will focus on smaller scale, tighter conflict. Also, it sounds like it won’t have microtransactions- at least, definitely not like how Battlefront 2 had them. All of which sounds really interesting- but so did Battlefront 2 itself, before the negative news about it began to come in thick and fast.
Finally, while the rumor comes from a credible source, it still is just that: a rumor. For now, take it with a pinch of salt. We’ll know for sure what EA and DICE intend Battlefield to be next year when they officially reveal it.
Tagged With: battlefield: bad company 3, DICE, EA, pc, ps4, Xbox One
Publisher: EA
Developer: EA DICE
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School Closings (WJAC)
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Home / Opinion / Trump’s visit reveals a California GOP on life support
Trump’s visit reveals a California GOP on life support
Posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 by CNN in Opinion
How enthusiastic were Republicans about Donald Trump’s first visit to the Golden State since becoming President to inspect prototypes for his proposed border wall? A column in the San Diego Union-Tribune from Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer, directed at Trump, was headlined: “there’s more to our border than a wall.”
The reality is Trump’s brand of xenophobia is toxic to what little is left of the Republican Party in California. Consider that California is home to one of the most diverse populations in the world. In 2015, the Latino population there surpassed the white population. That’s right, the largest group of people in the state are the ones that the President of the United States has more than once referred to as “bad hombres.”
To say that Republicans in California are on life support would be an understatement. The GOP has been shut out of every statewide political office. They are a permanent minority in the state Legislature. They may not even have a candidate qualify for the November ballot in either the gubernatorial or senatorial contests.
That didn’t stop Trump from using his remarks at the border on Tuesday to attack Gov. Jerry Brown for doing “a very poor job running California.” It’s worth noting that Gov. Brown enjoys a 53% approval rating (only 28% disapprove, according to a December poll from the Public Policy Institute of California) while according to Real Clear Politics, Trump’s average disapproval rating stands at nearly 54%.
To understand how dire the situation is for California Republicans — look no farther than 90 minutes north of the border, in what used to be the Republican stronghold of Orange County — which is showing signs of decay.
My former boss, Congressman Darrell Issa, and Rep. Ed Royce are retiring. Reps. Mimi Walters and Dana Rohrabacher are facing two of the most targeted contests in the country. Hillary Clinton was the first Democrat to win Orange County since FDR. The GOP registration advantage has gone from 18 percentage points in 1992 to just four in 2016.
Instead of evolving with the changing demographics, Republicans in California have continued to embrace the fringe policies and rhetoric of the most extreme edges of the GOP. No one embodies those policies more than Donald Trump. He has labeled Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists who bring drugs and crime to the United States.
Perhaps that explains why so many Republicans hoping to successfully get elected in November are avoiding Trump’s visit to San Diego. Three of the Republicans running to replace Issa have confirmed they have no plans to be seen with Trump.
There was a time when the visit of a sitting president of the same party would have candidates tripping over themselves to be seen and be photographed with the president. This time, Republicans are hiding from their President.
Trump’s visit to the border comes at a time when Hispanics in California are under siege from his administration. Just a few days ago, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced at an event in Sacramento a federal lawsuit against California over the issue of sanctuary cities. Meanwhile, reports surfaced that Trump’s supporters in Congress are planning to use the upcoming debate over government funding as an opportunity to cut off funding to sanctuary cities.
This war against California and push for extreme policies will only further the divide between the GOP and Hispanic community — in California and nationwide.
There is no viable path to political relevancy for Republicans without support from the Latino community. If the famous phrase “as goes California, so goes the country” is true, Republicans are about to follow Donald Trump into a permanent political exile.
Trump flexes muscles, follows his basic instinct
Russia is a rogue state. Will Theresa May do what Trump hasn't?
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Opinion: The terrifying issue for women in Election 2016
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Tag: Caleb Brantley
Florida’s Caleb Brantley selected by Cleveland Browns in 6th round of 2017 NFL Draft
Caleb Brantley #57 of the Florida Gators celebrates a defensive stop during the game against the East Carolina Pirates at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on September 12, 2015 in Gainesville, Florida. (Photo by Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
6-foot-3, 307 pounds, DT
Caleb Brantley was the first pick in the sixth round (No. 185 overall) of the 2017 NFL Draft by the Cleveland Browns.
Brantley, an All-State first-teamer out of Crescent City in 2012, declared for the draft after an All-SEC second-team effort as a redshirt junior. The compact, powerful tackle tallied 20 tackles for loss and 5.5 sacks over the last two seasons, despite being shuffled in and out of a deep defensive line rotation. Brantley was arrested and charged with misdemeanor simple battery less than a week before the draft for allegedly striking a woman and knocking her unconscious during a dispute at a Gainesville bar, ESPN reported.
Scouting report:
Brantley has the quickness to play the three-technique and the power to line up at nose tackle. His initial burst can help him slip past blockers, and he’s also comfortable bull-rushing through them. He isn’t big for an NFL defensive tackle, and it’s hard to tell if his frame could handle extra weight without wiping out some of his quickness. His on-field discipline was already a question mark (10 offsides penalties over the last two seasons), and his off-field trouble raised an unsettling red flag.
NFL Combine results:
40-yard-dash: 5.14 seconds
20-yard shuffle: 4.62 seconds
3-cone-drill: 7.66 seconds
Vertical jump: 27 inches
Standing long jump: 8 feet, 9 inches
225-pound bench press: 21 reps
Quote of note:
“Brantley has the talent and traits that should appeal to both two-gap and one-gap defenses. While we haven’t seen Brantley play in even half of Florida’s defensive snaps in a single year, the talent is there to become an early starter and a defensive force up front.” — NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein
Author Staff WriterPosted on April 29, 2017 April 29, 2017 Categories Florida, Football, gatorbytesTags 2017 nfl draft, Caleb Brantley, Florida Gators, gatorbytes, news, NFL Draft, sports, sportsfrontLeave a comment on Florida’s Caleb Brantley selected by Cleveland Browns in 6th round of 2017 NFL Draft
The Keanu Neal plan: Six Gators players who could turn into first-round picks with strong 2016
Who will be this upcoming season’s Keanu Neal?
Florida tight end DeAndre Goolsby (30) runs past the East Carolina defense including nose tackle Mike Myers (92), and defensive back Terrell Richardson (22) for a touchdown on a 32-yard pass play during the first half of an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2015, in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Neal benefited from a strong junior season at Florida and NFL combine performance to become a first-round pick in this year’s draft. Is there a current Gators player who could improve his draft stock enough to become a first-round pick in the 2017 draft? Continue reading “The Keanu Neal plan: Six Gators players who could turn into first-round picks with strong 2016”
Author Staff WriterPosted on May 3, 2016 Categories Anthony Chiang, Florida, Football, gatorbytes, Jalen Tabor, Jim McElwainTags Bryan Cox, Caleb Brantley, david sharpe, DeAndre Goolsby, Florida Gators, gatorbytes, Jalen Tabor, Jarrad Davis, Jim McElwain, Keanu Neal, Marcus Maye, news, NFL Draft, Quincy Wilson, sports, sportsfrontLeave a comment on The Keanu Neal plan: Six Gators players who could turn into first-round picks with strong 2016
Power rankings: What Gators position groups are most reliable, least reliable after spring?
We’re past spring practice, but still far away from the start of fall practice.
Florida head coach Jim McElwain watches a play during a spring football game at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on Friday, April 8, 2016 in Gainesville, Fla. (Matt Stamey/The Gainesville Sun via AP)
So what do we do? Let’s take a step back and take a look at where Florida’s position groups stand after the spring. Continue reading “Power rankings: What Gators position groups are most reliable, least reliable after spring?”
Author Staff WriterPosted on April 22, 2016 Categories Anthony Chiang, Florida, Football, gatorbytes, Jim McElwainTags Antonio Callaway, Caleb Brantley, Cece Jefferson, DeAndre Goolsby, Florida Gators, Fred Johnson, gatorbytes, Jalen Tabor, Jarrad Davis, Jim McElwain, Jordan Cronkrite, Jordan Scarlett, Luke Del Rio, Marcus Maye, Mark Thompson, martez ivey, news, Quincy Wilson, sports, sportsfront, Tyler JordanLeave a comment on Power rankings: What Gators position groups are most reliable, least reliable after spring?
Notebook: Jim McElwain pleased with Gators’ first spring scrimmage
GAINESVILLE — Florida held its first spring scrimmage on Thursday, allowing Jim McElwain to evaluate his team in game situations for the first time this month.
Head coach Jim McElwain of the Florida Gators watches the action during the game against the Georgia Bulldogs at EverBank Field on October 31, 2015 in Jacksonville, Florida. (Photo by Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
Overall, the Gators’ second-year coach was pleased with the scrimmage.
“Really felt good about the scrimmage on Thursday,” McElwain said. “We got about 117 snaps in, not counting special teams. Got a lot of guys some, I thought, valuable reps, especially some of the young guys.” Continue reading “Notebook: Jim McElwain pleased with Gators’ first spring scrimmage”
Author Staff WriterPosted on March 28, 2016 Categories Florida, Football, gatorbytes, Spring football practiceTags Ahmad Fulwood, Austin Appleby, Caleb Brantley, Cam Dillard, Chauncey Gardner, Dre Massey, Feleipe Franks, Florida, Florida Gators, gatorbytes, Gators, Jim McElwain, Jordan Scarlett, Kyle Trask, Luke Del Rio, news, sports, sportsfront, Thomas HolleyLeave a comment on Notebook: Jim McElwain pleased with Gators’ first spring scrimmage
Gators DT Caleb Brantley: ‘I’m the best D-lineman in the country’
GAINESVILLE — Caleb Brantley is looking to be one of the next Florida defensive linemen to stand on stage with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
The Gators have produced three consecutive first-round selections from their D-line, and tackle Jonathan Bullard is expected to make it four in a row in this year’s draft.
Brantley considered turning pro after the 2015 season, but chose to return and chase his first-round ambitions.
“I think I’m the best D-lineman in the country,” he said. “I’m coming out to try and prove it.”
The redshirt junior started 10 of the 13 games he played last fall, earning Second Team All-America honors from Pro Football Focus and finishing with 29 tackles and three sacks.
With Bullard gone, Brantley is Florida’s top returning defensive tackle and has shown it over the past few months.
“I’ve been really happy with Caleb Brantley in the front,” UF coach Jim McElwain said. “I think Jon Bullard did a great job of kind of teaching him what it is to be that person. So far he’s been really good this offseason.”
Brantley spent his first three years in Gainesville trying to become a consistent player and full-time starter. With that role now established, his new focus is getting a handle on the torch Bullard passed down to him.
“He taught me how to be a leader,” Brantley said. “Just be a role model to the younger guys and always do stuff right. You can’t be the guy that coaches look to if you’re messing up. I’m just trying to lead by example. Do all the little stuff, like having your shirt tucked in.”
One of Brantley’s qualities is being an unselfish player. While he’s a disruptive force for Florida because of his quick first step and ability to jump the snap, that doesn’t always show up in the box score.
“When you’re inside there’s 650 pounds of SEC offensive linemen trying to get after you. Caleb Brantley last year took a lot of double teams,” Gators defensive coordinator Geoff Collins said. “Sometimes the stress is going to be on Caleb Brantley getting doubled. But he understands … that’s when the magic happens.”
Brantley often demands multiple blockers, which frees up other defenders to make plays. This usually keeps him from leading the Gators in sacks or tackles for loss, but Brantley doesn’t care if his stats aren’t reflective of his impact.
“It is frustrating, but at the same time I can’t be selfish,” he said. “If you’re good, you’re going to get double-teamed nine times out of 10. It’s a chance for other guys to step up. I’m not the only one on the D-line that’s a hell-raiser.
“You’ve got CeCe Jefferson, Bryan Cox, Taven Bryan. I love our whole D-line. Pick your poison. We’ve got some guys that can get to the passer.”
Perhaps none do it better than Brantley. He was virtually unblockable Wednesday during Florida’s first spring practice in full pads.
“He’s definitely become a grown man for that defensive line,” linebacker Jarrad Davis said. “When it’s time for somebody to block him, good luck. That man knows what he wants and he’s not going to be stopped.”
Author Staff WriterPosted on March 17, 2016 Categories Florida, Football, gatorbytes, Jim McElwain, Spring football practiceTags Caleb Brantley, Florida Gators, gatorbytes, Jim McElwain, news, SEC Country, sports, sportsfrontLeave a comment on Gators DT Caleb Brantley: ‘I’m the best D-lineman in the country’
Florida Gators 2016 spring practice preview: Defensive line
With the start of spring practice inching closer — March 9 — we’ll take a look at the state of each position. We focus on the defensive line today, and shift to a different position each day leading up to the start of spring practice. Continue reading “Florida Gators 2016 spring practice preview: Defensive line”
Author Staff WriterPosted on March 5, 2016 March 9, 2016 Categories Anthony Chiang, Florida, Football, gatorbytes, Jim McElwainTags Andrew Ivie, Bryan Cox, Caleb Brantley, Cece Jefferson, Florida Gators, Forrest Palmore, gatorbytes, Jabari Zuniga, joey ivie, Jordan Sherit, Jordan Smith, Justus Reed, Keivonnis Davis, Khairi Clark, Luke Ancrum, news, sports, sportsfront, spring football, Taven Bryan, Thomas HolleyLeave a comment on Florida Gators 2016 spring practice preview: Defensive line
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Movie review: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Lou Movie reviews October 23, 2016 February 19, 2017 4 Minutes
The latest film in that other Tom Cruise action-spy franchise has landed in theaters, so, let’s talk about it! This is the review of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
IMDb summary: Jack Reacher must uncover the truth behind a major government conspiracy in order to clear his name. On the run as a fugitive from the law, Reacher uncovers a potential secret from his past that could change his life forever.
While I’ve closely followed Cruise and his Mission: Impossible movies, I managed to somehow miss the first Jack Reacher picture when it was first released in 2012. However, I did my homework and watched it before going to see the sequel. I really enjoyed the narrative of the film: the story was a bit different from the usual action movie plot. It had more of the actual investigation and an interesting dialogue rather just a ton of physical fights. But, when the action did happen, it was quite cool too – it was more rugged and down to earth than the spectacular and over the top action sequences in MI. Jack Reacher’s action reminded me of the action in Jason Bourne films, just with less shaky cam. The characters were fine as well, although the film was mostly a Tom Cruise show.
While the first film was a delightful surprise, the second one was just another uninspired and cliche sequel. I didn’t really have any expectations going into this film and I was right to not expect anything because Jack Reacher: Never Go Back was just an average action movie at best.
Richard Wenk (The Mechanic, The Equalizer, The Magnificient Seven), the director Edward Zwick and Zwick’s long-time collaborator Marshall Herskovitz wrote the screenplay for the film, adapting Lee Child’s 18th book of the Jack Reacher series. I had a lot of problems with the story. For one, the whole set-up seemed forced and rushed. It took two phone calls for Reacher to want to help Turner, while in the first film, more than 30 minutes had to be spent to actually get Reacher into the action. That whole thing with Turner being wrongly accused seemed like a recycled idea from the first movie as well. And don’t even get me started on that plot-line concerning his maybe-daughter – she was super annoying and was a huge liability to both the characters and the film’s narrative. She had one smart scheme, which we didn’t even see her carrying out – we were just told about it, and a ton of stupid ideas. And why even include her if she turns out to not be his daughter after all? Only to have that cheesy goodbye that didn’t add anything to the picture?
The villain showed up in maybe like 3 or 4 scenes in the whole movie. If you want to see a much better movie about the government contracts and arms’ dealers, then just check out War Dogs. Lastly, while the first film was slow but had a somewhat interesting dialogue about the investigation to fill in the time between the action, its sequel had a ton of small talk that didn’t get the movie anywhere. When it tried to foreshadow or set-up something, it did that in the most obvious way possible. From a thematical standpoint, I did like the overarching military v civilian life debate, however, what I didn’t appreciate was that whole male/female bickering. That plotline was irrelevant and felt out of place even more than the father/daughter storyline.
Edward Zwick, who has previously worked with Cruise on The Last Samurai and has also directed such films as the biopic Pawn Sacrifice, the war drama Defiance, and the comedy Love & Other Drugs, helmed Jack Reacher: Never Go Back and did an okay job. He opened the film with the sequence from the trailer, which I have seen multiple times before even watching the movie since I go to the cinema a lot. Wish they would have either chose a different scene for the trailer or changed it up a bit for the movie. The overall action was fine but nothing too striking or worth mentioning. I liked the gray colored shots of Reacher visualizing the escape or the past events, but the movie kinda dropped this idea halfway through.
Tom Cruise was good as Jack Reacher but I have come to expect this from him a long time ago. It’s nice to see him doing his own stunts, though – makes the movie a bit more realistic. Cruise also produced this film, like the majority of his action movies, but I’m actually quite interested to see if he will ever direct one. His upcoming pictures are a biographical crime thriller American Made and The Mummy reboot.
Cobie Smulders as Susan Turner was quite good too. I was happy to see her getting some work, because since How I Met Your Mother has ended, I haven’t seen much of her, well except in the MCU films, although her role in those is really small. I liked hers and Cruise’s chemistry in this movie and I also thought that she was good in the action scenes.
Danika Yarosh as Samantha Dayton a.k.a. the daughter. I don’t want to be angry with the big screen newcomer Yarosh because she was fine in the role, but, as I have already mentioned, her character was written terribly and didn’t even have a place in the film. Yarosh has been mostly acting in various TV shows and I do hope that this mediocre film and a bit cringe-y performance won’t stop her from being cast in more movies.
The supporting cast also included a lot of quite unknown (to me) actors, like Aldis Hodge, Patrick Heusinger, Holt McCallany, and Austin Hebert. No one really stood much but they also haven’t been really given a chance to do so.
In short, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is an average sequel that basically advises its potential viewers to skip it. The story is awful, the directing is okay and while the acting is good, the cast is not given enough solid material to work with. I advise you to Never Go Back to the Jack Reacher films.
Rate: 2.5/5
Trailer: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back trailer
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Published by Lou
Anti-social nerd, cinephile, and bookworm that is probably currently bopping along to some song or another and is also 75% radioactive fish, because she has spent half of her life in a chlorine-filled pool. View all posts by Lou
Published October 23, 2016 February 19, 2017
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7 thoughts on “Movie review: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”
Yeah, I kind of have to agree with you on this movie. It had some moments, but its ultimately direction was pretty blah. Never Go Back was a banal sequel. Nice review!
Very good movie. Tom Cruise when he is best. Great cast all around.thank you for review.
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NSG Commandos: Special force of Black Cats
NSG Commandos are like the nukes, the ultimate backup to the country and fear imbibed in the hearts of terrorists.
Remember the Mumbai attacks 26/11 or Pathankot attacks? Even when MARCOS and other elite Indian special forces were already present at both the sites, it was NSG that eventually took charge of the situation and neutralized the terrorists. NSG or National Security Guard is a special force unit under the ministry of Home Affairs India established in 1984 after Operation Blue Star . It is a specialized counter terrorism force intended to be used only in exceptional and extremely dangerous situation only after the state or Para Military forces fail to deliver the results. NSG have shown extraordinary courage in times of fear and hours of need. Here are some amazing facts about NSG you must know.
NSG Commandos are named as ‘Black Cats’ after the Cat family which is the sharpest of all the animals and extremely focused, among them the black cat is the one whose one look imbibe fear into the hearts of others. You never mess with them,ever. So would be the thought behind designing NSG pitch black uniform from head to toe. Like we fear the terrorists, the terrorists fear the NSG. Can we ever stop being in awe with these Men in Uniforms flaunting black all over?
NSG Motto
National Security guard Motto is to provide best of security to safeguard the borders and countrymen. सर्वत्र सर्वोत्तम सुरक्षा ( Omnipresent Omnipotent Defense) which is taken from Sanskrit language
NSG Hubs
When Indian Airline flight IC 814 was hijacked on 24 December 1999, there happened a major goof up regarding the NSG Commandos landing at the Amritsar Airport from New Delhi and the same happened during Mumbai attacks when NSG Commandos arrived several hours late which costed a lot to the country and human lives. So now there are total of five NSG regional hubs in the country with the newest NSG hub installed in Gujarat (Randesan village in Gandhinagar) after Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai with its headquarter based in New Delhi.
NSG groups
The 14,500 personnel strong NSG is divided into two types of forces. One is Special Action group (SAG) and another is Special Rangers group (SRG). The SAG is the elite and offensive wing whose members are strictly drawn out of Indian Army. They perform operations of Terrorism,Bomb Disposal, Hijacking etc.
The SRG group is reserved for Central Armed Police Forces(CRPF,BSF,SSB,CISF,ITBP) and concerned mainly with VIP security. So next time, please don’t relate the offensive and defensive wings together walking around the politicians and other VVIPs.
Trained to take only Head shots
As NSG Commandos are country’s premier counter terrorists response team so they are trained to take only head shots and may be two at one shot for neutralizing the target threat.
The unimaginary target practice
A NSG personnel does more firing in a week of alert status than in their entire 10-year career in Indian Army . On average, a Commando fires close to 14,000 rounds over a period of two months in ‘alert status’ which are daily drills and practicing in realistic scenario . The target strike rate has to be above 85% for a person to remain in the force.
NSG Commandos weapons
NSG Commandos are equipped with best of weapons, gadgets,night vision devices, real time war equipment and advanced guns. It ranges from side arms like Glock knife to deadliest of all the guns like Glock 17 9mm Semi-automatic Pistol.,Heckler & Koch MP-5 Sub-machine Gun, NATO Carbine to lot more.
NSG Combat Unit
The smallest combat unit in the NSG’s counter-terrorist ops is called a hit which include 5 members – two pairs, or partners and a technical support member. 4 hits make a team which is under the command of a Captain.
Female NSG Commandos
Though female Commandos are trained by NSG but they are yet to achieve the permanent commission. As of now, there is no such provision to join SAG but they can join SPG. Recently, On one of PM Modi’s foreign visits, there was one female SPG commando attached to the security. But after India got its first female full time defense minister as Nirmala Sitharaman it’s expected speedy deployment of NSG women commandos for anti-terror operations along with male commandos
Balidan
The balidan Badge is earned by NSG Commandos no wonder we have martyrs as glorious as Lt. Col Niranjan Kumar who gave the supreme sacrifice in Pathankot attack or Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan who attained martyrdom during Mumbai attacks.
NSG Commando Ranking in the World
NSG Commandos (SAG) are ranked among top 10 special forces of the world. Their credibility can be measured from the fact that NSG was initially modeled on Germany’s GSG 9 units which is one of the world’s most elite counter-terrorist faction but today NSG Commandos have surpassed them as Special forces, or specialized counter insurgency forces as military units in training to perform unconventional, typically insecure missions for a nation’s political, economic or military purposes. We can easily say that NSG is among one of the best special forces in the world.
Qualification to become a NSG Commando
NSG is deputation based special force and there is no direct entry. And one can join NSG to any of the wings but there are certain age limitations so if you are serious about joining NSG then setting up a goal and prior planning is important. The application criteria of NSG including age,height,weight etc would depend upon the rank one is applying for as the NSG offers entry at different ranks and functions. There should be no red ink entry, no criminal records or even punishment records for at least three years of the last service the applicant was in. Then the applicant need to obtain an ‘A’ grading medical evaluation test which includes complete mental and physical test. Then the applicant need to apply for National Security Guard training program in Manesar and also apply to become official member of NSG. Here you should have all the documents that also states about your service period in Army of Central Police force ready to be sent to NSG headquarters in New Delhi. Then once National Security Guard Office approves you proceed further with the recruitment process of NSG.
NSG training
The NSG training is so tough that it has a drop out rate of almost 80% . The National Security Guard training Center is located in Manesar Haryana where a 14 month training program is commenced along with the basic training for 90 days. The NSG commandos in making are trained to deal with combat gadgets and different kinds of arms/ specialized weapons such as AK-47/ 74s, browning hi-power 9mm pistols, etc. and bolt-action Mauser SP66/ 86SR which is specifically deployed for anti-terror/ anti-hijacking operations. There are also cross country races, jumping from heights, scaling different terrains and target shooting sessions. Those who qualify successfully are sent to further nine months of advance training. The advanced training unit has a superb bomb disposal squad unit. There are many other techniques and skills Commandos are imparted with. Those who qualify advance training successfully are included into NSG and sent further for specialized training. Some of the best NSG personnel are sent to Israel for advanced training. Though it is not known exactly what training they receive.
Roles and functions of NSG
The NSG is an elite force providing a second line of defense to the nation. They are the Armour safeguarding the unity of India and threat to anti-national elements to tear apart the sovereignty of the country. Primarily concerned with
Neutralization of specific terrorist threats in vital installations or any given area
Handling hijack situations involving piracy in the air and on the land.
Engaging and neutralizing terrorists in specific situations.
Rescue of hostages in kidnap situations
NSG Commandos contingent even replaced Para Commandos for 68th Republic Day Parade by debuting at the Rajpath New Delhi. We wish many more laurels for our super special force of India National Security Guards aka Black Cats and never felt safer before you guys. You Rock!
IF YOU ARE A DEFENSE LOVER AND IN AWE WITH NSG THEN YOU MUST READ 2019 BIGGEST MILITARY ROMANCE FICTION RELEASE ‘LOVE STORY OF A COMMANDO’ AN EXTRAORDINARY ROMANCE OF AN INDIAN NSG COMMANDO CAPTAIN VIRAT AND A MODERN WOMAN RIYA. TAKE A PEEK INTO THE LIFE OF A COMMANDO THROUGH THE EYES OF A GIRL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM.
LOVE STORY OF A COMMANDO
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Who are the Houston Bio-Artists?
by Henry G. Sanchez May 27, 2019
Details from the works of (clockwise from right) Sarah Sudhoff, Francis Almendárez, and Angel Lartigue (details)
In early April, my project space LOCCA: Law Office Center for Citizenship and Art hosted a mini-conference and panel discussion about a bio-art practice emerging from Latino/a/x artists in Houston.
Introduced were three artists suggesting new pathways for expanding the definition of what is considered “bio-art”: Sarah Sudhoff, Angel Lartigue and Francis Almendárez (who occasionally collaborates with his mother Jacqueline Posada). By inference this also suggests an expanded definition of Latino Art, as Houston is currently experiencing the ‘Primavera’ of Latino Art Now.
Bio-art is a highly challenged term, since there are so many subcategories of artwork that transcend disciplines in the various sciences. According to the working definition as outlined by the eminent, pioneering bio-artist and theorist Suzanne Anker, there are three types of aesthetic genres that emerge from this interdisciplinary practice.
First is the more traditional bio-art by way of mimesis, depiction and appropriation of images that come from the science sectors, or reference scientific images. This artwork can manifest in the form of paintings (with or without traditional mediums), photography — but also in MRI body and head scans, sonograms, photos of laboratories and other aesthetic presentations.
Second is the introduction of the technology — primarily the usage of science tools, laboratory equipment, microscopes, 3D modeling software, high-tech robotics or A-I theoretical models. See also: New media, interactive video, digital sculpture, hi-tech installations and other new emerging technologies ubiquitous in contemporary art.
Third is the category known as “wet laboratory practices,” or the use of bio-materials. Bio-matter is living art medium. The use of plant stuff, attempts at bio-engineering, and working with live specimens and bacterial samples in petri dishes are among many methodologies that dictate the form of the work presented.
Suzanne Anker, (L-R): Laboratory Life (Dresden), 2004, Inkjet print on watercolor paper, 24 x 36″; Remote Sensing (installation view), 2016, plaster, pigment and resin, 4 x 4 x 2″ ea.; Astroculture (Eternal Return), (detail), 2015, vegetable plants, LED lights, galvanized steel cubes, soil, no pesticides., dimensions variable.
Tying this together is an underlying proposition that many scientific practices and their intersections with art can and should be questioned. Inquiry into the ethical, political, societal, biological and economic implications and ramifications of the new frontiers of science become a central theme in the most effective bio-art works. Without such inquiry, the artwork becomes just an aesthetic exercise. Pretty, scientific images and forms devoid of any awareness of what they imply lack a rigor necessary for evaluating bio-art.
Ultimately, bio-art becomes a philosophical investigation, as much as it is about the science and art processes meshing together to make it look “scientific.” Because this is Art, it does not actually have to work scientifically. Firm scientific protocols do not have to be met, and thinking outside the box of science problems is a bio-art virtue. Artistic freedom begets scientific speculation. There are notable instances of the bio-artistic processes making scientific discoveries. Nevertheless, accepting or bestowing the title “bio-art” or “bio-artist” insist on questions such as: Is this work a truly interdisciplinary practice of art and science? Are ethical practices considered in the use of bio-materials? Does the work consider the socio-political, bio-scientific implications?
How does the work of Sudhoff, Lartigue and Almendárez fit into the working definition of bio-art? These artists explore a certain wedge into the bio-art definition — one that Anker alludes to as the “cultural imaginary.” If the term is stretched it can mean these Latino/a/x artists introduce their particular cultural practices, ethnic backgrounds and biological-biographical histories as another facet to an expanded definition of bio-art. Each use bio-material with an ethical concern. They evolve towards a deeper interdisciplinary practice that also includes performance iterations. While still experimenting with various scientific and biological methodologies, their work is guided and imbued with degrees of the autobiographical.
Sarah Sudhoff, (L-R): Circular calibration device, 2012, Archival pigment print, 30 x 24”; Surrender, 2013, video still, 45min performance.; Tipping Point 1.1, 2013, Archival pigment print, 22 x 15”; Tipping Point 1.14, 2013.
Sarah Sudhoff’s body of work can be seen as a textbook case on how the development of bio-arts interdisciplinary practices evolve. A photographer, Sudhoff’s taxonomy of comparing and contrasting medical devices, hospital rooms, used medical supplies and evidence of body fluids on surfaces dominate her early work. Recently, she has found inspiration in her own body as an art-form in durational performances, such as Supply and Demand, which involves the socio-medical implications of breast milk, and Wired 2.0, which stages the testing of bodily stimuli in order to measure arousal response. Her personal history and experience give the work a new background, structure and philosophical framework for ongoing art and science projects. Though thematically the experience of motherhood and female biology are familiar in contemporary art, Sudhoff’s approach to her personal “bio-material” from a scientific vantage point stands out. In what would otherwise be artwork that is medically removed — disconnected from emotions and theoretical — it instead layers personal, in-depth, emotional and autobiographical facets not always recognizable in bio-art.
Angel Lartigue, (L-R): Sub Scientist, 2017, multimedia; Substance Storage, 2017, mixed media; Operation Psychopomp, 2018, performance, Xoloitzcuintle, necro-bacteria, maggots & pupae.
For Angel Lartigue, the body as canvas was a starting point. Photoshopped images of themself encountering their own corpse in an urban nature gave way to role-playing and hybrid installations of altars, to science and the folkloric. Lartigue embodies the alter-ego Sub-Scientist (a submissive for his audience and the scientific process). Sub-Scientist asks participants for DNA samples (via swabbing the inside of one’s mouth and depositing it in vials with solutions to extract the DNA) to exchange, collect and intermingle. These are incorporated into ceramic abacuses and folk-art sculptures. Drawing connections between their body and sexuality and the scientific processes, they continue with new iterations, with cross-dressing roles wearing petri dishes containing necro-matter of avian and human cadavers. Lartigue, as the Sub-Scientist and Operation Psychopomp’s ring-master, explores the connection of our biology to the earth by way of gender roles, spirituality and ethnic heritage. They become a modern-day curandero/a (traditional native healer), equipped with an innate knowledge of the cycle of life, brandishing the tools of science while questioning its scientific purpose.
Francis Almendárez, (L-R): Home away from home, 2019, performance, multimedia; Para el día de mañana I (maximizing the temporary to imagine potential futures), collaboration with Jacqueline Posada , 2019, multimedia; Para el día de mañana, (detail), 2019.
Francis Almendárez’s recurring theme of culinary heritage depicts crops and food play in a central role in his video installations. His videos narrate the food on his table, and ruminate about for whom and why the food is made, and recall scents and tastes. Almendárez’s recent exhibitions permit plant life to take proper place alongside video hardware. Potted in common plastic and recycled containers, the staples in his family kitchen — sources for seasoning and food ingredients — take sculptural form in an art space. Its materiality and witnessing of plant growth aid in the interpretation of ideas about sustainability, D.I.Y. permaculture, and culturally inherited knowledge. His collaborator, his mother Jacqueline Posada, insists on the necessity of such practices. Raised on a farm in Honduras, Posada knows that in the U.S. there are few opportunities to value this expertise. Posada and Almendárez present the physical fruits of a kitchen garden, which transport and transcend a cultural lineage in an age of scarcity. The ethical care of food questions the modern practices of corporate farming and mass consumption.
Let’s look at some other contemporary Houston artists who may fit in subcategories of what is considered bio-art.
(L-R): Dean Ruck, Big Bubble, 1998; Carrie Marie Schnieder, Survival Creativity in Scale Models, 2019; Shrimp Boat Projects, Zach Mosur and Eric Leshinsky, 2010-15.
Carrie Marie Schneider’s Survival Creativity in Scale Models, aquariums as mini-cinematic theaters, asks participants to play and reimagine life in a post-Harvey Houston. Lina Dib’s recent sound installation, North to South and Back, of bird songs and of people making bird calls becomes, from an ornithological perspective, sonic-art, transforming into an avian taxonomic system. Shrimp Boat Projects, by Eric Leshinsky and Zach Moser, was a working shrimp boat the artists harnessed for seasonal fishing, and allowed access for the public to gain a rare waterscape experience. Dean Ruck’s Big Bubble, in downtown Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, is a consistent presence for the unaware tourist while oxygenating the waterway.
In fact, the first show at the newly built Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 1972 exhibited pioneers at the intersection of art and natural science. Historically, Texan artists are known for bringing natural elements as medium into their work. But is the use of natural material as medium enough to fulfill an expanded definition of bio-art?
Sudhoff, Lartigue and Almendárez’s specific personal history, heritage, gender and cultural practices, combined with an ethical concern for the bio-material, indeed contribute to expanding definitions of bio-art. They reveal facets of the science-art aesthetic which intersect with spiritual and sociological speculations, suggest metaphorical loss, and explore bodily intimacy mediated through technology. These types of frontiers in art-making multiply the purposes of bio-art beyond an interdisciplinary practice with theory, and give greater meaning to the “cultural imaginary” in bio-art today.
Henry G. Sanchez is a Houston-based artist. Sanchez’s recent BioArt Bayoutorium — a social-practice, bio-art project located along Buffalo Bayou in the 2nd Ward of Houston — included a shipping container outfitted with microscopes, imaging equipment and nature tours on pontoon boats.
Anker, Suzanne and Flach, Sabine, The Glass Veil: Seven Adventures in Wonderland, Art / Knowledge / Theory. Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers. Bern, Switzerland, 2015.
Gershon, Pete, Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 1972-1985, Texas A&M University Press, 2018.
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Robert Boyd May 28, 2019 - 09:12
My problem with this kind of art–art that intersects science–is similar to my problem with a lot of social practice art. Artists might be educated laypeople–even very well-educated laypeople–but they aren’t scientists. They don’t typically have the years of training and experience that a biologist has. As Sanchez writes, “Because this is Art, it does not actually have to work scientifically. Firm scientific protocols do not have to be met.” But those protocols are there for a reason, and their rigor is what allows one to feel confident in the results of scientific exploration. (And to be honest, science has had a big crisis of confidence in the past few decades–the replication crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis).
The reason I compare it to social practice art is because social practice art does usually seek to accomplish a social outcome, but often fails to live up to what non-artist activists and social workers achieve. Because artists aren’t experts in these fields. But we often accept their deficiencies because their hearts are in the right place.
Anyway, if the art is inherently interesting (and much of what Sanchez wrote about above is very interesting indeed), I don’t much care if it doesn’t live up to actual scientific practice. I just hope we as viewers and and as those who experience this work can tell the difference.
David A. Ross June 2, 2019 - 09:25
I appreciate the comment above, but want to thank Henry for such a clear and well-reasoned take on this complex subject. What I feel Mr. Boyd seems to side-step, is that artists working with the language and tools of scientific research do not intend to do science. Rather, they are trying to create new knowledge by other means. This may or may not be of interest to conventional scientists, but I’ve spoken with a number of more conventional researchers who find both direction and inspiration from the work of so-called bio-artists. And of course, it seems clear to me that bio-art practice provokes an extraordinarily useful conversations about the ecological crisis that defines our era.
Henry G. Sanchez June 4, 2019 - 21:47
I have faith that viewers can tell the difference from what it being strictly protocoled in the lab and the making of bio-art. Science has blinds spots in analyzing its social, ethical and political implications (see: genetically modified foods, eugenics, the use of pesticides and the corporate misuse of science for the sake of profit). In traditional science there is no room the artist prerogative for “speculative fabulations”, “magical thinking” is left outside and the idea of play is verboten. I would venture to safely say that 99% of all science experiments are unsuccessful, and as for the social outcomes of activism one doesn’t have to look far to see the disproportionate triumphs of the right-wing and regressive policies on the majority of people and social activists who did not vote for “you-know-who”. But nobody is perfect.
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Cavotec – Complete Ground Support Equipment
Cavotec’s Airports Market Unit is a complete ground support equipment (GSE) integrator for the global airports sector.
Working closely with airport operators, airlines and aircraft manufacturers, we develop a diverse range of advanced GSE – including fuel, water and power supply units, tunnel systems, pre-conditioned air units (PCAir), aircraft connectors and caddies – that help our clients reduce tarmac congestion, improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
Cavotec’s Airports Unit is composed of four entities: Cavotec Dabico US and UK, Cavotec INET US, Cavotec Meyerinck and Cavotec Fladung: each bringing its own area of specialisation and expertise to the Group.
Cavotec GSE technologies service aircraft at airports and other applications worldwide.
Some of our major customers and applications include: Anchorage Airport, Bahrain Airport, Boeing, Corporation, Cargolux, ClaVal, Dubai Airports, Emte Sistemas, Frankfurt Airport, Gamuda, Gatwick Airport, Heathrow Airport, Lufthansa, Munich Airport, New Delhi Airport, Oslo Airport, Shanghai Airport, Siemens and Saudi Oger.
Along with the many GSE products that we offer, Cavotec Aviation Market Unit includes:
Cavotec Aviation Design Services
Cavotec has assembled and developed a team of engineers who are able to design full gate in-ground systems for 400hz, Fuel, Wet Service and PCA. We have a track record and reference list as working as a gate designer for all of our in-ground GSE services. Cavotec is able to take on a turnkey gate design or, portions of the design to work as a consultant to the consultant, depending on the project requirements.
Cavotec System Integration
System Integration has been the back-bone of both Cavotec INET and Meyerinck businesses for the last forty years, this expertise and knowledge has been transferred to all of the Cavotec Aviation Market Unit and can be offered throughout our GSE Systems. Using a combination of Cavotec own manufactured equipment and strategic partner products and systems we are able to offer full gate GSE System Integration.
Cavotec System Installation
Depending upon geographic location, Cavotec is able to support our customers as a main contractor, sub contractor or a product supplier.
Cavotec Dabico
Cavotec Dabico has led the market for in-ground fuel systems for aircraft for over four decades from when the first airport hydrant fuelling systems were designed and installed. Customising products to meet the demands of customers is one of our specialities.
Cavotec Fladung
Cavotec Fladung has been a pioneer of airport ground support equipment specialising in in-ground utility systems – including our pre-compressed air (PCAir) system – mobile caddies, aircraft cables, connectors and tow-bars and cable coilers.
Cavotec INET
Cavotec INET US Inc. is an industry leader in its field and has a proud history of being at the forefront of new technological applications to increase efficiency, environment and safety at airports. Established in 1967, and headquartered in Fullerton, California, we design, manufacture and install stationary and mobile aircraft servicing equipment. Via Cavotec’s domestic and international sales and field support offices, we supply solid state frequency converters (400Hz, 28VDC, 270VDC) & motor generators, pre-conditioned air and power generation systems.
Cavotec Meyerinck
Cavotec Meyerinck, based in Germany, supplies a wide range of fuelling systems, fluid and surge control, and loading terminal products for the aviation sector. In addition, we manufacture similar solutions for the petrochemical and food & beverage industries
Via S. Balestra 27 - CH-6900 Lugano, Switzerland
46.00767598881008, 8.95815850825727
www.cavotec.com/
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Our Top 10 Favorite Places We Stayed on our RTW
10/07/2015 globegazers Leave a comment
We’ve finished our RTW trip. We get a lot of questions about our favorite things on the trip, so we’ve decided to start a new series called “So, What Was Our Favorite…” We visited 29 countries on our RTW: Egypt (just 1 day), South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe (just 1 day), Namibia, Germany (just 1 day), Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Ireland, USA, Myanmar, Singapore, Indonesia (just Bali), Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Macau, and Nepal.
This edition will cover our top 10 favorite places we stayed around the world. These are not in order of preference, instead they are in the order in which we visited them.
When making this list, we found that how much we enjoyed a place had less to do with the actual accommodations (though certainly it helped when we felt comfortable) and more with the experience or vibe of a place. We loved places that gave us unique insights to the culture of the area, or places where we were able to meet a lot of like minded travelers to create connections.
Amber Tree Lodge, Cape Town, South Africa
The Amber Tree was a really wonderful place to stay in Cape Town. It had pretty comfortable beds in the dorms with substantial lockers, a full kitchen and an awesome common area. The vibe there was also just perfect for us, laid back, fun, but not a full party. We met a lot of really great people there, and had enjoyable evenings hanging out with travelers from all over the world! In addition, it was in a pretty great location – at the foot of Table Mountain, which made for great views from the balcony. It is also not too far a walk from the famous Long Street in Cape Town.
Pension Oaza, Levoca, Slovakia
We really enjoyed this pension in the small town of Levoca. We had a very large and comfortable room. We had plenty of space to spread out, a refrigerator and microwave, and our very own bathroom! The woman who owned the pension was kind and offered us homebaked goodies. She also told us to grab some of her many tomatos growing in her garden. It was quite a nice location too, located midway between the main bus station and old town.
Agria Retur Panzio, Eger, Hungary
This pension was extremely pleasant. We had a pretty sizable room with a private bathroom, and some skylights above our bed. There was a shared kitchen and meal area that was quite pleasant. We were only a few minutes walk from Old Town and the town Minaret was practically right outside our door! In addition, the lady owner was so kind and really interested in making sure that we felt at home. We felt as if she wanted to take us under her wing as a mother figure!
Apartments Samardzic, Kotor, Montenegro
When we arrived at the Apartments Samardzic, we almost immediately decided we wanted to extend our stay. That certainly bodes well for an accommodation! We had a nice queen-sized bed, a good bathroom, a kitchenette, a big living room, and our favorite feature: a view over the bay. We spent most of our afternoons just relaxing the in the living room, looking out over the bay and catching up on things. The kitchen was convenient and the bathroom was comfortable. The hosts live right next door, and were always very kind whenever we had a question.
Our own comfortable living room!
Enjoying the terrace
Ana’s Rest House, Berat, Albania
We were thrilled with our time at Ana’s in Berat. The guesthouse was quite new and comfortable. The bed was large and lovely. There was a small common area which we frequented and met several other interesting tourists. In addition, there was a lovely patio with a stunning view of Berat which we enjoyed on more than one occasion. We also lucked out with the new worker there. He was a native of Berat and was starting a burgeoning tour business. He was around all the time and we really enjoyed a lot of discussions with him from everything from books to American politics to Albanian history. After a lively and informative day with our guide, and several evening/breakfast conversations, he found out that Della was a teacher and he expressed his deep interest in teaching as well. He also was adamant that Della have a chance to see Albanian schools in action. Not knowing what to expect, we said that might be cool. He called a friend, a Peace Corps volunteer from Maryland, who worked in an alternative high school in Berat. This opened the door for us to spend the morning with the Peach Corps volunteer discussing his job and then an hour in his classroom where he works with a partner Albanian teacher to teach English to the students, the equivalent of seniors in the US. We really enjoyed and benefited from our stay at Ana’s!
pizza for lunch on the patio
Eucalyptus Hotel, Patara, Turkey
We were the only guests at this hotel as it was down season in Turkey. But, to be honest, that was part of the charm. We had a comfortable, pretty large room. The hotel provided breakfast every morning as part of the price. They also cooked dinner to order. All meals were served on a lovely outdoor patio which beautiful and comfortable Turkish style. The couple that ran the hotel was very kind and we did get a chance to chat with them a few times when they served us our meals. The owner also drove us to and from the bus stop at no extra charge which was a welcome and necessary service in the down season. We also made good friends with the cat at the hostel. We think they called her “Kedi,” which means kitten in Turkish. She would always join us for meals and follow us back to our room when we headed up.
The patio at the Eucalyptus Hotel
Yoe Yoe Lay Guesthouse, Mandalay, Myanmar
We can’t rave enough about this place! If you are going to Mandalay, you should stay there, no question. The level of service is amazing: everything is done with a smile, the provided breakfast is large and you have to fight to keep from getting extras and the facilities are nice, clean and commodious. The owner, who everyone calls “Mama,” is amazingly kind and generous, and will go out of her way to make you feel at home. She is so sweet, and wants to make everyone her children. On our last day there, she took us down the street to a restaurant, stuck around to make sure that we got excellent service, and then absolutely insisted on paying for our meal. She wouldn’t take no for an answer! We were overwhelmed by her generosity. Also, this place seems to attract a nice crowd of like-minded travelers, and we made a lot of fun connections just hanging out in the common area each night.
Della with “Mama” – the head of our amazing guesthouse – Yoe Yoe Lay
Payogan Homestay, Ubud, Bali
We actually didn’t find this place, our friend Phill (who is currently on his own RTW – check his blog here!) did when we joined him for our holiday in Bali! We are so glad that he did! The homestay’s owner is the amazingly gracious Ketut. It is slightly outside the town of Ubud and is within the complex of Ketut and his family’s home. Ketut makes sure that you are comfortable and well cared for! He also is an excellent tour guide for sights surrounding Ubud. Make sure to ask for his special pancakes for breakfast! In addition, he is heavily involved in his local temple and made sure to get us involved too. We were so lucky to experience a “birthday celebration” for that temple which meant several evenings of activities. Ketut and his family made sure that we had the correct clothing so we could attend and experience everything. We were so grateful for the opportunity!
Our homestay
Our wonderful hosts. Ketut is in the middle
Golden Time Hostel 2, Hanoi, Vietnam
There are three locations for the Golden Time throughout Hanoi. We loved Hostel 2, though it was really more like a hotel. The best part about the Golden Time was the friendly staff that work at the front desk. Tony and Ahn, a married couple, always greeted us by name and with a smile. There was always coffee, tea and bananas set out as well, which was refreshing after a long day of sightseeing. The included breakfast also had a good selection. The rooms were nice and spacious, so we slept well. The location was close to the main tourist attractions but not right in the center of the hubbub.
Posing with Ahn, the friendly proprietor at Golden Time Hostel 2
Hotel Bright Star, Kathmandu, Nepal
Hotel Bright Star is unique on this list, as we believe we were some of the last people to stay there. It was severely damaged in the earthquake on April 25. We will always remember the kindness and generosity that the owner of this hotel showed us both before and after the earthquake. This is a passage about the hotel from our blog Kathmandu: Before the Quake.
We didn’t get in until almost midnight, but the owner of our hotel, the Hotel Bright Star, had stayed up to check us in. We had a small room on the top floor – the stairs were a nice preview of what we expected to be a lot of uphill hiking on our trek.
This was only a preview of the generosity that the owner showed us during our three days in Kathmandu. He provided plenty of good advice, and walked us halfway to the tourist office (so we wouldn’t get lost) to pick up our trekking permits. That made it that much harder to see him again after the quake. We had left two bags at the hotel while trekking, and we went back into town on May 1 to pick them up. He said on the phone that he and his family were ok, but when we got there it was clear how close they had come to disaster.The hotel next door had collapsed during the quake, and all that was left was a pile of bricks and tangled wires. The owner, clearly shaken, told us that 10 people had died inside. We ran inside our hotel to get our bags, and it was clear that it was the first time that he had been back in. He didn’t want to linger, and neither did we; one of the walls of the lobby on the side of the collapsed building was bulging inwards. He said the rest of his family had been safely moved to Pokhara, but he would remain staying in a building down the street until all of the left baggage had been picked up. Hopefully the people who left their bags will return soon…
If you would like to read more about our experience during the Nepal Earthquake, click here.
We stayed at plenty other really good and interesting places around the world as well, so it was really hard to get this list down to 10! Still, it seems like this cream of the crop from all around the world is a good representation of the places we would like to stay on future travels as well.
RTW Timeline: First Half of the First Millennium BC
10/05/2015 globegazers 1 Comment
After seeing so many interesting sites and learning many facts about places all around the world, we thought it would be interesting to arrange the different places and events on a timeline to provide more of a context for the different highlights.
Our first installment in the timeline series covered events from the beginning of human history up to 1000 BC. This installment will cover from then up to 500 BC. During this time, one of the great civilizations emerge, and a deity is born.
776 BC – First Panhellenic Games in Olympia, Greece
The Greeks established a tradition of Panhellenic games, in which male athletes from all over the country would converge on a location and compete in contests of speed and strength. The most famous and the oldest were the games held in Olympia, which gave rise to the tradition we now know as the Olympics.
Around 600 BC – Sounion Kourous Carved
As the Greek population grew and the culture began to flourish, what we now call the Archaic Greek culture emerged. The hallmarks of the art of this period were standing figures carved out of stone; the male figure was called a kourous and the female a kore. We saw one of the more well-known Archaic kourous figures at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Sounion Kourous (male)
590 BC – Temple of Hera Built at Olympia
The Panhellenic Games held every four years at Olympia were not just an athletic competition. In addition, they functioned as a large religious festival. To support the religious activities, a large number of temples were built in an area called the sanctuary, or Altis. This temple was one of the first structures erected, and one of the first examples of a Doric temple. Today, it is used as the site where the Olympic flame is lit by sunlight reflected from a mirror.
Remains of the Temple of Hera
586 BC – First Pythian Games Held in Delphi, Greece
The games held at Olympia are the most famous, but the sanctuary to Apollo at Delphi also hosted a Panhellenic Games every four years. These games had the same athletic events as those at Olympia, and also had art and dance competitions.
The remains of the stadium from the Pythian Games (renovated during Roman times)
580 BC – “Argos Twins” Sculpture Created
This pair of kouros statues were sculpted in Argos, but were found in Delphi, where we viewed them at the archaeological museum.
The Twins of Argos
563 BC – Siddhartha Gautama Born
The man who would attain enlightenment and become the Buddha was born in Lumbini, Nepal around the middle of the 6th century BC. We didn’t visit this site, but we did see the influence of this event in the countless stupas, pagodas and wats that we visited all throughout Asia.
Mandalay, Myanmar: Our first encounter with a Buddha with LED illumination. Definitely not the last…
Luang Prubang, Laos
Sukhothai, Thailand: Looking up at Buddha
Kathmandu, Nepal: Image at Swayambhunath Temple
Phnom Sampeau, Cambodia
560 BC – Sphinx of Naxos Created
This is another famous piece of Archaic Greek art that we viewed at the archaeological museum in Delphi. This massive carving of the mythical creature was sent by the island of Delphi as a offering to the sanctuary in Delphi.
The Sphinx of Naxos
554 BC – Mahamuni Buddha Image Cast
Legend states that this bronze image of Buddha was cast in the kingdom of Arakan when the Buddha visited. It now resides in a special temple outside of Mandalay in Myanmar (Burma). Male pilgrims apply gold leaf to the image which has given it a large gold covering.
Males applying gold leaf
520 BC – Temple of Apollo Built on Aegina
We visited the island of Aegina as a day trip from Athens with Della’s family. We walked by the ruins of this temple to Apollo on our way to the beach, but couldn’t go in because it was closed for the day. All that remains of this temple is a solitary column that we were able to see from a distance.
The lone column remaining in the Temple of Apollo
As the first half of the first millennium BC drew to a close, the Greek culture began to reach its apex. In our next installment, we will travel through many of the relics of the Greek classical period that we were able to view.
Gliding Through Green Bay… on a Segway!
10/01/2015 09/29/2015 globegazers Leave a comment
We were happy that we got to visit some family in Green Bay, WI during the summer. Della’s extended family live there, so we visit fairly often. However, we don’t always get to be tourists!
This trip, Della’s uncle and aunt decided that there was a new activity that we just had to try. We were going to see historic downtown Green Bay… via Segway!
We had never ridden Segways before, and to be honest, had been a little annoyed by them zipping around everywhere in Prague. At the same time, we were quite curious what it would be like.
We chose to do a Segway the Fox short tour which was a quick 50 minute intro to Segways and downtown. In retrospect, we do wish that we had more time with the Segways because that 50 minutes included introduction, practice, and then a very abbreviated tour. It would have been nice to have more time to play around on the Segways, and definitely fun to get a more in depth tour of old Green Bay.
We were impressed with the area! We hadn’t experienced downtown Green Bay before and we thought it was very cute. We enjoyed gliding around to the museum, over the river, and through some of the newly bustling streets. Downtown Green Bay seems to have had a lot of new development during the recent years, so it was even entertaining for Della’s family who live there!
Excitement!
Group shot with the statue of Zachary Taylor, commander of Fort Howard for several years prior to being president
Learning how to correctly mount and dismount the segway
Group shot at the museum
Our guide giving us some info
Other Things to Do in WI
We enjoyed a visit to the National Railroad Museum as well. It was a large complex with multiple interesting exhibits. It also houses several full historic trains which you can enter and explore. We had fun learning more about the Union Pacific Big Boy, which was the world’s largest steam locomotive.
The museum with full size trains to explore
Riding the narrated train
Eric became the engineer
The Big Boy
In addition to the exhibits, the museum offers a video about the history of the Big Boy, as well as a narrated train tour around the grounds.
We probably would have enjoyed looking at the museum in a little more depth, but this ended up being a slightly different kind of museum trip. Della’s cousins have some young children who joined us. It was refreshing to look at the museum through the eyes of kindergartners and to feel their excitement during the train ride and through exploring the full size display trains. However, it did change our normal museum pattern! It was a fun way to spend an afternoon, with activities for adults and children!
We also took the weekend to visit Della’s relatives’ land “up north.” We visited the lovely lakes near St. Germain which is about a three hour drive northwest of Green Bay. We spent time biking through the area, enjoying the scenery, and swimming and water skiing the lakes.
Overall, it was a wonderful trip to a familiar state. We hope to explore Green Bay as tourists even more next time we’re there!
Past Posts Select Category Albania Bali Belize Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Budget Burma/Myanmar Cambodia Canada China Connections Croatia Czech Republic Dancing Around the World Earthquake Egypt Fast Forward Friday Flashback Friday Flying Cheaply Germany Greece Guatemala Hungary Iceland India Ireland Japan Laos Moments of Misery Montenegro Monthly Update Namibia Nepal Nicaragua Personal Photos Poland RTW RTW Planning Self Drive Safari Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Small Comforts South Africa Sports Fan Abroad Thailand Traveling Kiddo Turkey USA Vietnam Zimbabwe Zumba Round the World
A Hot Day in Halifax 11/22/2019
Kindred Spirits in Prince Edward Island 09/13/2019
Fun Days Exploring the Bay of Fundy 09/06/2019
Marvelous Maine (Mane-O, Mane-O!) 08/30/2019
Hello, Boston! 08/21/2019
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What 3.25 Billion Site Visits Tell Us About Google, Facebook, and Where Different Niches Get Their Traffic
Kyle ByersUpdated October 3, 2019
I recently analyzed 3.25 billion website visits to find out:
How much do different industries rely on Google and Facebook?
What are the other main traffic sources for the top sites in those industries?
Which social media networks send the most traffic to each industry?
And what are the largest traffic drivers overall, on average?
Thanks to data from SimilarWeb, the following report is filled with information that should be useful to anyone who competes for traffic online.
Let’s start with some key takeaways and then get into the charts and details.
Top Takeaways and Stats
1. The niche that is most reliant on Google is Health and Medical, with 87.85% of its traffic coming from search.
2. The niche that is least reliant on Google is Crypto, with 45.74% of its traffic coming from search.
3. Facebook delivers 65.36% of all social media traffic: more visits per month than all other social networks combined.
4. Instagram drives very little traffic: under 1% overall across all niches. Even fashion and beauty brands that were launched by Instagram influencers (e.g. Kylie Cosmetics) receive less than 5% of their monthly visits from Instagram — while search brings in about 10 times as many.
5. The niche that is most reliant on Facebook is Business and Marketing, which gets 13.52% of its traffic from the network.
6. Facebook is the most important social network for every niche except two: Design and Development (for which the top network is YouTube) and Crypto (for which it is Twitter).
7. Google drives 8 times more traffic than all social media networks combined.
8. Search is the single largest traffic source for every niche, and in most industries it drives the majority of the web traffic.
9. The average top blog gets 66.47% of its traffic from search, of which 99.77% is organic and only 0.23% is paid.
10. Reddit drives over 3 times as much traffic to blogs as YouTube.
Keep reading for more details and charts, or click here to download the full report for future reference.
Note: for each niche in this study, I analyzed a basket of top sites that get a large proportion of their traffic to their blogs. So while these findings are relevant to each industry in general, they should be especially useful for content marketers, SEOs and bloggers.
Individual sites can be seen in the “Details by Niche” section below, and more information on study method is shown at the end of this report.
How Much Do Different Niches Rely on Google?
What Are the Most Important Social Networks for Each Niche?
What Are All the Traffic Sources for Each Niche?
What Are All the Traffic Sources Overall, Across All 12 Niches?
Details by Niche
Study Method
Since over 90% of searches happen on Google, we can see how reliant on (or vulnerable to) Google different sites are by looking at how much of their traffic comes from search.
In the “Details by Niche” section in this report, you’ll also be able to see this information for each individual site we studied.
But right now, let’s take a bird’s-eye view and compare the data by industry.
As you can see, the range goes all the way from 45.74% to 87.85%, with most niches getting over half their traffic from search.
Depending on the industry, this may represent a big opportunity or a big risk.
Search is the biggest driver of traffic across the entire Internet — if you don’t take advantage of that, you’re surely leaving money on the table.
But at the same time, Google has continually kept more and more of its traffic for itself, with less than half of Google searches now resulting in clicks through to other websites.
So if you over-rely on Google, you may be building your business on quicksand.
Expert reaction:
“The contrarian advice good SEOs typically give is ‘Don’t rely on SEO. Diversify your traffic sources.’ The verticals most dependent on Google search are the most vulnerable. And indeed, we’ve seen both medical and travel sites exposed to huge business risks this year as Google has targeted dozens of medical sites, and made bolder plays with their own flight and hotel offerings.
Also interesting to note that the sites with the largest dependency on search are also in verticals where Google has the easiest time answering questions. Apparently, Google isn’t too good yet at answering crypto or real estate queries. But if I were in those industries, I’d keep one eye looking back over my shoulder.”
– Cyrus Shepard, Founder, Zyppy.com
Like search, social networks offer a lot of opportunity for sites to grow their traffic.
Also like search, social networks can present a lot of risk.
For example, Facebook is now directly competing against the dating sites that used to spend millions on Facebook Ads (and were also gradually squeezed out of using them due to Facebook’s stricter rules for that industry).
More broadly, Facebook has continually reduced brands’ reach with their own followers, forcing them to either pay for advertising or lose most of their visibility.
And faster-growing social networks like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are designed from the ground up in a way that makes it difficult to drive traffic to external sites.
As a result, as you can see below, none of those three make it into the top 5 social networks for any niche in this study:
“Instagram started to become hugely popular with marketers around 2016, mostly because it had become so popular with users, but also because its newsfeed algorithm at the time was very engagement-friendly for brands.
Today the platform is experimenting with killing publicly viewable like counts on posts, which I’m sure has some sound business reasoning behind it, but on the surface, this change reads like a move away from vanity metrics. Of course, if you’re going to focus on the true business value that a social network has to offer to marketers, traffic referrals will be a key aspect of that. But Instagram has very few spots where marketers can post clickable links – it’s basically just inside stories and bios.
So it’s interesting to see a list of top performing social networks – especially one that includes vertical-specific data on travel, photography, fashion and food, all of which are especially huge on Instagram – and for Instagram to not appear at all. The reason for this is obviously the lack of clickthroughs from Instagram to websites, which is what this list measures, but what are marketers to learn from the elephant in the room?
Does Instagram’s omission suggest that we might do well to consider de-emphasizing Instagram as a marketing channel? Should we maybe stop thinking about traffic referrals as being such an important metric?
These are hardly new questions – fears over the dangers of ‘digital sharecropping’ on Facebook proved to be well founded when organic reach for publishers was basically killed altogether a few years back. But seeing all this data in context definitely gives us a good excuse to reevaluate objectives and emphases.“
– Ben Jacobson, Marketing Strategy Consultant
What Are the Most Important Social Networks, Overall?
Here is the average breakdown of the top 8 social networks across all niches overall (again, note the absences of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok):
Interestingly, StatCounter’s worldwide data (across all types of sites) over the same period shows Pinterest with a much higher share of social traffic, at 15.5%.
This may indicate that Pinterest works better for sites that aren’t as reliant on blogging, or for industries that weren’t covered in this study (for example, reference sites and news publications).
Where Do Different Niches Get Their Traffic?
As I mentioned earlier, search — which really means Google, thanks to its 90%+ search market share — is the #1 source of traffic for every single niche in this study.
In fact, Google drives over 8 times more traffic to the sites in this study than all social media networks combined.
But some industries rely much more on social media and other traffic sources than others, as you can see here:
For social media reliance, Business and Marketing tops the charts with 18.05% of its traffic coming from social networks — followed by 11.58% for Fashion and Beauty.
At the other end of the spectrum, Health and Medical gets only 1.08% of its traffic from social, while for Design and Development it is 1.36%.
That seems to make sense: how often do you talk about your medical issues on social media?
However, I would have expected higher proportions of social traffic for Personal Finance (which is 3.87%) and Travel (4.34%), since from personal experience there seems to be a lot of popular/viral content in those niches.
I’m also surprised that Real Estate doesn’t get more of its traffic from search: out of all the niches, it has the highest percentage of Direct traffic at 42.08%.
Although “Direct” may also include other untracked traffic sources, to me this still indicates that Real Estate has some of the strongest brands and is one of the least susceptible to algorithm changes or competition from Google or Facebook (or other social networks).
Expert reactions:
“Regardless of niche, search still has a pivotal role to play. This is, of course, more prevalent in sectors like healthcare where “Dr Google” is a source of health advice to millions of us. While social does contribute to traffic profiles, it remains a small part for many of the biggest blogs in these niches.
I think, on the whole, what the graph highlights is how over reliant we could potentially become on one single traffic source. I’m an SEO, so I’m always going to lean on search to drive traffic. But as a website owner or small business owner, I’d much rather see traffic (and enquiries) coming from multiple varied sources. I think it’s a good practice for every website owner to analyse their traffic sources, produce graphs like this and look to diversify their traffic sources.“
– Stacey MacNaught, Founder, MacNaught Digital
“I’m fascinated by the break-down of traffic sources Health & Medical. The 87.85% contribution from search must be due to ‘Doctor Google,’ whereby people enter their symptoms in the search engine to receive medical advice or diagnoses.
Adding direct traffic to search comes to 97.76%, leaving virtually no share to the remaining traffic sources. I’m really surprised that social and referral barely register. For me, this signals opportunities.“
– Dennis Shiao, Marketing Consultant
What Is the Overall Breakdown of Traffic Sources, Across All 12 Niches?
And here is a closer look at the overall averages across all 12 niches.
“The dominance of search as a traffic source is not surprising, and it proves that search is still overwhelmingly the most common way people navigate the web.
What did surprise me a bit was that direct traffic was so far ahead of the remaining sources (particularly social). I believe this is a testament to the continued importance of branding, and it’s why direct traffic and branded searches are two primary KPIs I track for Page One Power’s content marketing efforts.
With that said, search is clearly still the primary channel for digital marketing and you need to be optimizing for search if you have a website. In fact, improving search performance can actually have a positive impact on branding and lead to more direct traffic (searchers recalling your brand after encountering it over and over in search) as well.“
– Andrew Dennis, Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Page One Power
Now it’s time to take a closer look at each of the 12 industries in this study individually.
This information should help you plan or tweak your marketing strategy, help you come up with content marketing ideas, and more.
In the following sections, you’ll see traffic breakdowns for each niche as well as for each site within it.
Or if you want to download a PDF of this full study to read later, just click here.
The technology niche is an absolute monster.
The tech blogs covered here receive a combined 130 million visits per month: The Verge, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, Hacker Noon and GeekWire.
Overall traffic:
As a whole, sites in the technology niche:
Rely on Google significantly less than average, with 47.92% of their traffic coming from search (vs. the all-niche average of 60.68%).
Get more social media traffic than average, at 7.73% of their total traffic (vs. 6.44% for all niches).
Get more referral traffic from other sites than average, at 5.85% (vs 3.64%)
But there’s massive variation between each individual site, as you’ll see shortly.
Social media traffic:
Although Facebook is the #1 source of social media traffic for tech blogs, at 38.68% of its social traffic it is a more minor contributor here than it is for most niches (the all-niche average for Facebook is 65.36%).
On the other hand, tech blogs get more than twice as much of their traffic from Twitter and Reddit as most blogs do, and their traffic from YouTube is significantly above average as well.
Traffic sources by site:
It’s always interesting to see how much variation there is between individual websites.
Of this group, Ars Technica is the least reliant on Google — with only 33.96% of its traffic coming from search — while a full 72.73% of Hacker Noon’s traffic is search traffic.
Hacker Noon is also notable for how little of its traffic comes from social media. At 2.56%, that’s about a third of the average for this niche.
Fashion and Beauty Blogs
The data sample for the fashion and beauty niche includes Elle, Refinery29, GQ, StyleCraze, and Vogue.com. (But in a minute, we’ll also look at a few newer sites that were started by Instagram influencers.)
Those five sites receive 72 million visits per month, combined.
Overall traffic sources:
Compared to all-niche averages, sites in the fashion and beauty niche tend to:
Rely more on search traffic, getting 66.54% of their traffic from search (compared to the all-niche average of 60.68%).
Also rely more on social media, getting 11.58% of their traffic from social networks (compared to the all-niche average of 6.44%).
Get significantly less direct traffic than most niches (17.60%, compared to the average of 27.49%).
Pinterest is a big standout for the fashion and beauty industry, driving 9.57% of its social traffic.
On the other hand, compared to the all-niche average, Reddit only drives about half as much of this niche’s social traffic.
I was surprised in general at how little traffic Instagram contributes to this niche, since there are so many fashion and beauty brands that have been launched by Instagram influencers.
However, most of the sites included in these numbers are brands that were established long before Instagram became popular.
So even though they aren’t a formal part of this study (or included in these charts), I also investigated a few “Instagram-based” brands to see how different their numbers might be.
Let’s look at the social media chart for the five main sites first and then I’ll show you my findings for those other sites.
As I mentioned, I also looked at three smaller brands that were either launched on Instagram or are based on Instagram influencer personalities to see how much Instagram contributes to their overall traffic.
Kylie Cosmetics (by Kylie Jenner) – 10.2% of total traffic from social, 46.51% of which is Instagram
The Blonde Salad (by Chiara Ferragni) – 4.46% of total traffic from social, 32.82% of which is Instagram
Good American (by Khloe Kardashian) – 11.22% of total traffic from social, 36.76% of which is Instagram
As you can see, Instagram is the top social media traffic source for all three of them…
But none of them gets more than 50% of their social traffic from Instagram.
And none of them gets more than 5% of their total traffic from Instagram.
Search, on the other hand, brings them about 10x – 47x as much traffic.
Kylie Cosmetics – 45.50% of total traffic from search (vs 4.74% from Instagram)
The Blonde Salad – 69.08% of total traffic from search (vs. 1.46% from Instagram)
Good American – 55.21% of total traffic from search (vs. 4.12% from Instagram)
So even for these Instagram-focused outliers, the network only accounts for a very small portion of their traffic.
Back to those five main fashion and beauty sites, here’s how their traffic breaks down by site.
Business and Marketing Blogs
To analyze the business and marketing niche, I expanded my approach a bit.
First, I analyzed the top 5 blogs in the space like I’ve done for all the others, as you’ll see in a moment.
But many of the top marketing blogs belong to sites that operate primarily as marketing tools: Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, for example.
Those sites all have very strong blogs — but would be excluded from this study because so many of their visitors come to use their tools instead of to read their blogs.
(And they don’t use dedicated blog subdomains, which would allow me to isolate their blog traffic.)
So for this niche, I covered a set of 5 top “pure blogs,” but also broke out a set of 5 top “tool sites with blogs.”
Finally, as it’s a space I’m passionate about, I also created a third pie chart that combines the traffic data from the first 2 groups as well as a group of 5 more of the most popular marketing blogs, to form a group of 15.
However, note that for the comparison and “all niche” charts presented at the beginning of this report, the 5 “pure blog” sites were the ones used to represent this industry.
Now let’s check out the data.
First, here are the traffic sources for 5 top business and marketing “pure blogs”: Business Insider, Mashable, HubSpot’s blog subdomain, Hootsuite’s blog subdomain, and Search Engine Journal.
Together these “pure blog” business and marketing sites get 232 million visits per month, consisting of:
Slightly less search traffic than average, with 57.95% of their traffic coming from search (vs. the all-niche average of 60.68%).
Much more social media traffic than average, at 18.05% of their total traffic (vs. 6.44% for all niches).
Less direct traffic than average, at 19.81% (vs. the all-niche average of 27.49%).
The 5 “tool” sites (SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Neil Patel, and Unbounce) get much more direct and email traffic than the “pure blogs” above, and much less from search and social media, as you can see below.
Another difference is their use of paid search advertising.
Throughout this traffic report, the charts I’ve presented do not break out organic search and paid search separately — because in almost every case the paid search accounts for under 0.10% of total traffic.
However, some of the marketing tool sites are an exception: SEMrush gets 3.75% of its search traffic from paid search ads, for Moz it is 2.39%, and for Unbounce it is 1.95%.
Finally, for a combined view of the overall space here is a chart that includes the first 10 sites we just looked at as well as 5 of the next most popular marketing blogs: Social Media Examiner, Search Engine Land, Backlinko, QuickSprout, and Copyblogger.
As you can see, the following chart is much closer to the “pure blogs” chart than it is to the “tool sites” chart:
Note: the rest of the charts we’ll see for this niche will cover the first, “pure blogs” group alone.
Comparing the business and marketing niche’s “pure blogs” social traffic to that of the all-niche averages, business and marketing gets:
More traffic from Facebook, at 74.95% compared to the all-niche average of 65.36%
About the same proportion of social traffic from Reddit and Quora as the all-niche average
More traffic from LinkedIn, at 4.14% compared to the all-niche average of 3.18%
Less traffic from Twitter, at 5.97% compared to the all-niche average of 10.03%
Much less traffic from Pinterest, YouTube and Pocket
The social media traffic profile of the “pure blogs” group (pictured below) is very close to that of the “top 15” group (not pictured).
On the other hand, the marketing “tool” sites (also not pictured) get much more traffic from YouTube, at 27.02% and much less from Facebook, at 42.22%.
And here is the site-by-site breakdown for the “pure blogs” group.
Again, note that the data for HubSpot and HootSuite are for their blog subdomains only.
The data sample for the real estate niche includes Realtor.com, Houzz, Curbed, RISMedia, and Keeping Current Matters.
Combined, these five sites receive 115 million visits per month.
Real estate blogs tend to:
Rely less on search traffic than average, getting 48.52% of their traffic from search (compared to the all-niche average of 60.68%)
Also rely less on social media, getting 2.95% of their traffic from social networks (compared to the all-niche average of 6.44%)
Rely much more on direct traffic than most niches (at 42.08%, compared to the all-niche average of 27.49%)
As I mentioned earlier, real estate has the highest percentage of direct traffic out of all the niches, at 42.08%.
This may mean that real estate is one of the least susceptible niches to algorithm changes or competition from Google or Facebook (even though Google still drives a large chunk of its traffic).
Real estate blogs also rely much more on advertising than most.
Of this niche’s search traffic, 97.52% is organic while 2.48% is paid. (For most niches, less than 0.10% is paid.)
And as you can see below, it also gets 1.75% of its traffic from display ads (compared to the all-niche average of 0.47%).
Real estate is another industry that gets a lot of traffic from Pinterest, at 8.94% of its social traffic (4x the all-niche average of 2.21%).
But Facebook is still by far the biggest driver of social traffic for real estate, at 72.70% (compared to the 65.36% all-niche average).
Here’s how the traffic breaks down by individual real estate blog:
Health and Medical Blogs
The five health and medical sites I looked at were Healthline, WebMD, Medical News Today, MindBody Green and Mercola Health.
This group is enormous, with 342 million visits per month between those five sites.
That’s roughly the combined populations of the United States and Canada each visiting one of these five sites every month.
Google’s treatment of the health and medical niche has been interesting to watch lately.
From April 2018 to August 2019, Google hammered many high-profile health and medical sites, for reasons that are not completely clear (but may be due to placing more emphasis on scientific consensus).
But despite the large impact of those changes, search remains the largest source of traffic for this niche by a wide margin.
At 87.85% of its traffic, the health and medical niche is more reliant on search traffic than any other niche in this study.
Compared to the all-niche average, health and medical blogs are:
Much more reliant on search traffic (87.85% vs. 60.68%)
Much less reliant on direct (9.91% vs 27.49%), social (1.08% vs 6.44%), and referral traffic (0.61% vs 3.64%).
Although health and medical sites get less social traffic than any other niche in this study, one thing they have in common with sites in other niches is that most of their social traffic comes from Facebook.
On the other hand, they get much more of their social traffic from YouTube than the all-niche average (14.26% vs 2.66%).
They also get about half as much of their social traffic from Twitter and Reddit compared to the all-niche average.
As you can see below, the “blogs” subdomain of Mercola Health is a major outlier in the group, as well as in this study overall, since most sites get the majority of their traffic from search.
The overall Mercola domain as a whole (not included in the chart) has a traffic profile that is somewhat more similar to the others, but still different enough to call out (note: these figures are for August 2019):
5.9M visits/mo
30.73% search
6.16% social
1.11% referral
53.12% direct
8.86% email
0.01% display ads
Aside from Mercola, the other top sites in this niche have similar traffic sources:
Food and Recipe Blogs
The five food and recipe blogs I studied were Kitchn, Serious Eats, Simply Recipes, Food52, and Minimalist Baker.
This basket of sites gets 41 million visits per month.
The food and recipe industry’s traffic sources are probably the most similar to the all-niche averages than any other industry in this study.
Compared to the all-niche average, food and recipe blogs are:
Somewhat more reliant on search traffic (at 65.61% of their total vs. 60.68% for the all-niche average)
Somewhat less reliant on all other traffic sources, including direct, social, referral, email and display ads.
While the overall traffic picture for food and recipe blogs may be very similar to the all-niche averages, the social traffic breakdown is anything but.
Like most niches, Facebook is still the largest source of social traffic for food and recipe sites — but at 37.17%, it is much less important to food and recipes than it is for most niches (the all-niche average for Facebook is 65.36%).
On the other hand, Pinterest makes up a much bigger proportion of food and recipe blogs’ social traffic than usual, at 33.42% (compared to the all-niche average of 2.21%).
YouTube is another notable contributor, at 8.29% (more than triple the all-niche average).
The five fitness blogs covered in this study were Runtastic, Muscle andFitness, Breaking Muscle, Ben Greenfield Fitness, and Fit Bottomed Girls.
Combined, these websites pull in 12 million visits per month.
Compared to the all-niche average, fitness blogs get:
Less search traffic, at 48.79% of their total vs. 60.68% for the all-niche average
More direct traffic, at 37.61% of their total vs. 27.49% for the all-niche average
More social media traffic, at 8.35% of their total vs 6.44% for the all-niche average
Half as much referral traffic and twice as much email traffic compared to the all-niche average
Fitness blogs rely more on Facebook than most other industries (79.13% for fitness vs. 65.36% on average).
They also get about 2.5x as much of their traffic from YouTube as the average.
I was so surprised by the low proportion of Instagram traffic (at 0.001%) that I included it in the chart below, even though with that small of a number it would normally be lumped in with “Others”.
Design and Development Blogs
Design and development blogs covered in this study included Sitepoint, the Node.js Blog, Smashing Magazine, David Walsh Blog, and Webdesigner Depot.
These websites get 24 million visits per month, combined.
Compared to all-niche averages, design and development blogs get:
More search traffic, at 69.47% of their total traffic (vs. 60.68% for the all-niche average)
Somewhat less direct traffic, at 23.01% of their total traffic (vs. 27.49% for the all-niche average)
Much less social media traffic, at 1.36% of their total (vs 6.44% for the all-niche average) — less than every other niche in this study except health and medical
More referral traffic from other sites, at 5.65% of their total (vs. 3.64% for the all-niche average)
Design and development is one of only 2 niches in this study for which Facebook is not the top social media source (the other is crypto). At 21.48%, Facebook’s contribution to this niche’s social media traffic is about 1/3 of the all-niche average.
Factor in the fact that only 1.36% of design and development blogs’ overall traffic is driven by social media, and it’s easily the industry that is least reliant on Facebook.
However, YouTube makes up a much bigger proportion of its social media traffic than average, at 35.43% (compared to the 2.66% all-niche average).
Stack Overflow is a unique and significant contributor as well, at 8.07% of this niche’s social traffic.
Here are the traffic details for each individual design and development blog:
Personal Finance Blogs
The personal finance niche is represented by Money Under 30, Wise Bread, Financial Samurai, A Wealth of Common Sense, and Of Dollars and Data.
Together, they get a little over 6 million visits per month.
Sites in the personal finance niche tend to:
Rely more on Google than average, with 67.78% of their traffic coming from search (vs. the all-niche average of 60.68%).
Get less direct traffic than average, at 20.73% of their total traffic (vs. 27.49% for all niches).
Get less social media traffic than average, at 3.87% of their total traffic (vs 6.44% for all niches).
Social traffic to personal finance blogs is much more evenly distributed among the top handful of social networks than is the case for most niches — the pie chart below almost looks like actual pie slices.
Compared to all-niche averages, personal finance blogs get:
Much less of their social traffic from Facebook, at 27.34% (compared to the all-niche average of 65.36%).
Almost twice as much of their social traffic from Twitter, at 18.87% (compared to the all-niche average of 10.03%).
Much more traffic from YouTube, Quora, and Pinterest.
The photography blogs covered here receive a combined 34 million visits per month: Digital Photography Review, PetaPixel, Fstoppers, Digital Photography School, and The Phoblographer.
Blogs in the photography niche tend to:
Get less traffic from Google than average, with 49.39% of their traffic coming from search (vs. the all-niche average of 60.68%).
Get more direct traffic than average, at 39.39% of their total traffic (vs. 27.49% for all niches).
Get slightly more social media traffic than average, at 7.40% of their total traffic (vs 6.44% for all niches).
Photography blogs get about the same amount of traffic from Facebook and Reddit as other niches.
But photography blogs also get:
Nearly 4x as much YouTube traffic, at 10.03% (compared to the all-niche average of 2.66%).
Less Twitter traffic, at 6.60% (compared to the all-niche average of 10.03%)
More Pinterest traffic, at 2.79% (compared to the all-niche average of 2.21%)
The travel niche is represented by the following blogs and sites: Lonely Planet, The Points Guy, Nomadic Matt, View From the Wing, and Adventure Journal.
Combined, they get about 25 million visits per month.
Sites in the travel niche typically:
Get more traffic from Google than sites in other niches, with 72.60% of their traffic coming from search (vs. the all-niche average of 60.68%).
Get less direct traffic than sites in other niches, at 19.25% of their total traffic (vs. 27.49% for all niches).
Get less social media traffic than sites in other niches, at 4.34% of their total traffic (vs 6.44% for all niches).
Here’s how travel blogs compare to all-niche averages in terms of traffic from social networks:
Facebook and Twitter: slightly above average, at 73.33% and 12.80%, respectively (compared to the all-niche averages of 65.36% and 10.03%, respectively).
YouTube and Pocket: significantly above average, at 4.18% for YouTube (compared to the all-niche average of 2.66%) and 1.69% for Pocket (compared to the all-niche average of 0.71%)
Reddit and Pinterest: significantly below average, at 3.80% for Reddit (compared to the average of 8.95%) and 1.57% for Pinterest (compared to the average of 2.21%)
Cryptocurrency Blogs
I was tempted to include cryptocurrency in the finance or tech category of this online traffic study.
Then I saw the volume some of these sites get:
At over 8 million visits per month, CoinDesk alone is more than three times as popular as any personal finance blog.
Combined, the five sites in this study — CoinDesk, News BTC, Bitcoin News (subdomain), The Coinbase Blog (subdomain), and Coinspeaker — receive 13 million visits per month as of this writing.
Compared to sites in other niches, sites in the cryptocurrency niche typically:
Get much less traffic from Google, with only 45.74% of their traffic coming from search (vs. the all-niche average of 60.68%). This is one of the few niches that gets less than half its traffic from search.
Get much more direct traffic, at 37.52% of their total traffic (vs. 27.49% for all niches).
Get much more referral traffic, at 9.60% of their total traffic (vs 3.64% for all niches).
Along with design and development, crypto is one of only two niches in this study whose #1 social traffic source is not Facebook. At only 21.02% of its social traffic, Facebook brings in about a third as much traffic for crypto as it does for the average niche.
And Crypto is the only niche for which Twitter is the biggest social network, at 52.55% of its social traffic — 5x the all-niche average.
YouTube is also a much bigger contributor to this niche than it is to most, at 10.50% (vs. the all-niche average of 2.66%).
And this is the only niche for which the encrypted messaging app Telegram is a top-6 social media contributor.
Note: the Coinbase Blog subdomain gets most of its “referral” traffic from its parent site.
Study Method and Conclusion
This research was conducted in August and September 2019, based on 3.252 billion visits to English-language websites across the months of May, June, and July 2019.
The data source was SimilarWeb, whose worldwide data-collection methods can be found here.
Special thanks to Detailed.com for providing lists of top blogs, which greatly aided with website selection for this study.
And I’d love to hear your thoughts.
What did you think of this research?
Did anything in particular jump out at you?
Leave a comment below to let me know.
You can also download this full report for future reference by clicking here.
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66 thoughts on “What 3.25 Billion Site Visits Tell Us About Google, Facebook, and Where Different Niches Get Their Traffic”
Brian Dean says:
Super interesting study, Kyle! The stat that jumped out to me was that Google sends 8x more traffic than all social media combined. It didn’t necessarily surprise me. But it was interesting to see just how much traffic Google sends vs. FB, Twitter etc.
Kyle Byers says:
Thanks, Brian! I had the same feeling about that stat — not super surprising, but still a powerful comparison.
I think marketers are in a bit of a catch-22 right now: Google has been getting more and more difficult to squeeze visits out of, but it’s still the biggest traffic source by far.
The 'Staunch says:
Google seems to be sending massive traffic to almost all niches. Especially the niches that requires high value contents. I am currently working in the niches to find out the one that works perfectly with me
Very interesting piece. I have been ignoring Reddit for a long time. Your study tells me I am missing out on an opportunity. Thanks for that.
It can be a great source of traffic for sure. Thanks for commenting, John.
Ashley Helmson says:
This is all so interesting and in-depth!
I do have one question, Kyle: do the “search” numbers in your graphs include ads or are they just organic?
Aside from that question, one thing that jumped out at me was just how different the traffic sources for each niche are. Maybe it sounds obvious but I didn’t expect such big differences. Even down to the social network, like how some niches practically don’t get any traffic from Facebook while others get a lot. And how few visitors come from Instagram.
This info will be really useful to look back on for reference. Thanks for making it public!
Glad you found it useful, Ashley! The search numbers include both organic and paid, because paid search is only a miniscule portion — it’s 99.77% organic search vs. 0.23% paid search across all niches, and for most niches paid is under 0.10%.
For the niches that do have higher paid search numbers — for example, Real Estate — I’ve called it out in their specific sections. But even in those cases it’s in the low single digits.
That makes perfect sense, thanks Kyle!
Shivansh Bhanwariya says:
That’s a fantastic study, Kyle! I was really thinking that Reddit is not going to work…but I’m super fascinated by the figures and bars. I don’t want to quit Reddit, now! Great piece of content. Appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. ♥
Thanks for saying so, Shivansh — glad you enjoyed it! I’ve found that Reddit can be a good source of traffic for sure, as long as you understand how to engage with the audience there (which can be tricky).
Piergiorgio Zotti says:
Very interesting post! Thanks
Glad you enjoyed it, Piergiorgio.
Very interesting study! I see that Instagram tends to be a minor referrer, but I wonder if in certain niches — such as fashion & beauty — it’s playing a stronger role in brand discovery that eventually drives a consumer to seek out (or click on) the brand in search.
Thanks, Brenda!
Yes I think that’s fair to say. To go along with your point, these stats also doesn’t necessarily speak to how much of the original launch traffic may have come from Instagram.
E.g. just because Kylie Cosmetics only gets 4.74% of its traffic from Instagram now, vs. about 10x that from search, doesn’t mean it could have launched successfully by focusing purely on SEO from the start.
Awesome work and information! One Question- When you were defining the industries, did Entertainment (performers/creatives) fall into one? Or was that not an industry you chose to focus on?
Thanks, Gabrielle! I just didn’t focus on it this time. But I may update this study at some point to include more industries.
It’s great to see the actual numbers in this study! I didn’t think the traffic percentages would vary this greatly between industries.
I found it really interesting that the overwhelming amount of traffic for medical and healthcare sites is coming from Google. Since that is our agency’s SEO specialty, I’ll definitely be linking to the graph in this article when I write future blog posts!
I was surprised by that too, David. Glad you found it interesting — thanks!
Martin G says:
Hey Kyle, thanks for all the data analyzed. Great written content and very well graphically displayed. My feeling and my research have confirmed all the data. It’s still an important strategy to use google and search engines.
Cheers Martin.
Absolutely. Thanks for commenting, Martin.
Kimi Phan says:
Super helpful report Kyle! I’m currently in Travel and Fitness industry and this data seem right with me. I also try to diversify traffic from Facebook/Youtube and a new player like tiktok as well.
Happy to hear it, Kimi! Let me know how it goes.
Jeremiah Williams says:
Wow. Very useful and insightful post. I wonder how long it took you to compile and analyze all that data.
Thanks, Jeremiah. It took a lot of work but it helped that the data was so interesting :).
Majia says:
Really overwhelmed info…..I would definitely use all this info for my blog
It’s a lot to take in, I know. Thanks for the comment and let me know how it goes, Majia!
Craig Cole says:
Really interesting research. Thanks for sharing Kyle.
Glad you enjoyed it, Craig.
Netrananda says:
Awesome information, but surprised the percentages of traffic from Reddit to technology blogs. Information’s are forcing me to take the opportunities of Reddit. Thanks…
Reddit can be a great traffic source for sure. Thanks for the comment, Netrananda.
Really informative stats. I would agree in the design niche that YouTube is key. It tends to bring more traffic than most would ever consider.
Interesting, thanks Patrick.
BitcoinExchangeGuide says:
nice collection of insights and perspectives, think your crypto analysis is pretty spot on
Tim J says:
Search blows away Social…. on the RE side why was ZILLOW not used? I would say its the same as Realtor.com
Hi Tim, I excluded Zillow because such a large proportion of its traffic comes from people using its interactive maps, getting Zestimates on their homes, etc. (I wanted to focus on sites that get a more substantial portion of their traffic from blogging.)
Yay! Data driven, evidence based business advice for us bloggers/niche website builders. I’m sooo over ‘experts’ telling me how crucial insta et al is to my business when I just couldn’t see/find the data backing up their point.
Same here, James! That’s part of what inspired me to do this research. Real data is so valuable for making decisions.
Really nice study, I’m definitely going to refer my clients to this blogpost.
I’ve been trying to convince them to focus on SEO and their website itself to generate more search traffic.
The discussion so often goes to them thinking that they need to be present and post on social media.
That is, of course, still true, they need to be present on social media, especially on Facebook as this study shows.
But this study clearly shows to me that the effort some put on social media doesn’t give them the return as to getting eyes on your website, which is where they can convert a visitor into a lead or customer.
Thank for the effort Kyle
Thanks for the comment, Robert — very true.
This is really great information. Thank you for compiling and sharing! It didn’t surprise me that search is still the top traffic source overall as this is the reason people use search engines – to connect with information/products/services when they don’t have a direct source in mind or they are looking for something new.
Do the social media numbers include traffic from advertisements on social media?
You’re welcome, Anna! It took a lot of work so I’m glad people are getting value from it. Yes social media ads are included within social.
Orlando Sydney says:
Great research. It’s not often I see Photography get included in these. Thank you.
The photography blogs mentioned are for news and education websites. I wonder if the same applies to more speciality niches in the photography genre?
I moved away from socials and focused more on web a while back (Social traffic 7.41% to websites). Appears to have been a worthwhile strategy.
SERP pages are getting cluttered and more zero clicks. Do I move some of my focus to local print? my next question to ponder.
Cheers for the post.
Thanks Orlando, glad you enjoyed it. It sounds like you’ve made the right move so far, but testing other traffic sources is always a good idea too. Let me know how it goes!
Ilan Finer says:
This is an epic study. I was very pleased to learn that Google and Facebook are still the leaders. And I’m sure this will also be the situation in 2020 and 2021.
Because even Instagram, as popular as it got lately, still didn’t put up a fight in terms of the ability to drive traffic.
Thanks for the epic study you’ve done and shared with us!
I’m glad you enjoyed it, Ilan! And I agree.
Hi, Kyle.
Can you help me out with Reddit as a traffic source? Above, you have it included with the social sources. I get that to a certain extent. However, couldn’t it also be argued that Reddit traffic is referral rather than social at its source? What are your thoughts: Is Reddit Social or Referral and why?
Hi Tim, my data source, SimilarWeb, classifies it as social so I did too. (Google Analytics does as well.)
But I see your point: the lines around what is a social network have gotten pretty blurry.
Justin Thomas says:
Awesome study with great use of visuals, Kyle! Love the idea behind this site, will be back regularly! Question – how accurate do you think the paid social data is here? Do you think the FB data includes insta?
Thanks, Justin! The data contains separate breakouts for IG and FB. I consider it fairly accurate but it doesn’t take into account indirect traffic (e.g. effects of spreading awareness which then lead to searches). Here are some details on how SimilarWeb collects its data.
Lee Bagley-Bramwell says:
Thank you for sharing this info very insightful. is the data set used worldwide or just specific countries?
Sure thing, Lee. The traffic is worldwide.
Brizzo says:
is a great blog. I will share it with all my marketer’s friends in China
Thanks Brizzo, I appreciate it.
Nilabh says:
Waw, awesome study with great use of visuals, Kyle! Google remained the no#1
Thanks, Nilabh 🙂
Hamza Hashim says:
You have shared amazing strategies. Thanks for sharing this amazing piece of guide and I hope it will also help me to increase my website traffic.
Thanks Hamza, let me know how it goes.
Zeeshan says:
Just amazing case study already share in my blogging groups’ Thanks.
Shameem Reza says:
Wow, Amazing information Kyle. I took 35 minutes to complete whole article and feels like I got to know really a lot of information. Thanks
Thanks Shameem, I’m glad you got so much out of it.
Lambarona says:
Great… absolutely fantastic data for so many industries. Thanks to you very much.
Billmah says:
This analysis is great, and I am certainly going to use this info to scale my business. Thank you so much.
I am definitely linking to this blog, when I create my post.
Thanks, good luck and let me know how it goes.
Thanks for the marvelous data! I quite enjoyed reading this post, it was a great study. I am subscribing to your blog and definitely will come back for your next post.
I want to encourage you to continue your great posts, have a nice weekend!
Thanks, Dolly. I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Copyright © GrowthBadger 2020. All Rights Reserved.
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Appeals for restraint as Ukraine’s presidential race turns nasty
13 April 2019 | 2:58 pm
Ukraine’s presidential candidate, who led the first round of presidential polls, Volodymyr Zelensky (C), speaks to media as he leaves a private clinic after a blood test in Kiev on April 5, 2019 to prove he does not abuse alcohol and drugs ahead of a second-round runoff on April 21. (Photo by Genya SAVILOV / AFP)
Ukraine’s interior ministry on Saturday called on a comedian tipped to become the country’s next president and his incumbent rival not to exacerbate tensions ahead of a run-off in a high-stakes election.
Nerves are starting to fray as polls show the comic and actor Volodymyr Zelensky easily defeating President Petro Poroshenko for the leadership of a country seen as the biggest frontier between Europe and Russia.
After the first round of voting — in which the 41-year-old political novice outshone the 53-year-old president — the gloves have come off, with the rivals trading barbs and sparring bitterly on television.
“We are approaching the final phase of the election campaign and the atmosphere in society is tense,” Ukraine’s deputy interior minister Sergiy Yarovyi said in a statement.
“The mood of open hostility between the candidates is being stoked,” he added, calling on both teams and their supporters not to play dirty.
“Do not rock the boat ahead of the second-round of voting.”
This week police launched a criminal probe after a video emerged online of Zelensky being hit by a truck.
The video ended with a line of white powder — possibly cocaine — being snorted through a rolled-up bank note, an apparent allegation of drug abuse.
Zelensky’s campaign pointed the finger at Poroshenko’s team, which has denied involvement.
Trading insults
In a testy phone exchange between the rivals broadcast live on television this week, Zelensky refused to debate Poroshenko before next Friday, repeatedly interrupting him.
He then hung up on the Ukrainian president, leaving Poroshenko speechless.
Many were taken aback at the sight of a humiliated leader, with his long-time rival Yulia Tymoshenko recording a video address.
“While fighting for the right to become president , do not destroy the honour and pride of the status of the president,” said the former prime minister, who came third in the first round of voting.
“It’s necessary to remain human,” she added.
Poroshenko has called his rival a “clown” and a “puppet” of oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, who owns the channel that broadcasts the entertainer’s shows.
Support for the comedian among voters has doubled to 61 percent since he won the first round on March 31, according to the Rating pollster.
Poroshenko garnered 24 percent, in a sign that Ukrainians are fed up with mainstream politics, war with Kremlin-backed rebels, poverty and corruption.
Both men have also undergone drugs tests at Zelensky’s insistence to prove they do not have a substance abuse problem.
Ukraine’s leader has been eager to spar with Zelensky and suggested they hold a policy debate on Sunday.
Zelensky said he was ready to face off with Poroshenko at the country’s largest stadium on April 19, two days before the run-off vote.
ukraineVolodymyr Zelensky
There are prospects to break records on new track at Edo Sports Festival, says Alli
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FG to partner building professionals on standards
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D’Tigress
D’Tigress emerge highest climbers in latest FIBA ranking
6 Oct 2018 Sport
D’Tigress have moved up 15 places in the latest FIBA Women’s ranking to 19th spot in the world after their 2018 World Cup heroics.At the last world cup, Nigeria became the first African team to win more than 1 game in a single World Cup tournament, and also advance to the quarterfinals of the competition.
FIBA Ranking: D’Tigress emerge highest climbers, now placed 19th
D’Tigress have moved up 15 places in the latest FIBA Women’s ranking to 19th spot in the world after their 2018 World Cup heroics. At the last world cup, Nigeria became the first African team to win more than one game in a single World Cup tournament and also advance to the quarter finals of…
D’Tigress emerges as eighth best team at FIBA Women World Cup
Seen as one of the teams at the Tenerife 2018 FIBA Women World Cup just there to make up the numbers, Nigeria’s D’Tigress were the revelation of the just concluded championship, where they finished as the eight best team in the world.
D’Tigress walk tall despite heavy defeat to USA
29 Sep 2018 Sport
Nigeria’s female basketball team, D’Tigress, were inflicted a heavy defeat of 71-40 by World No 1, USA, in their quarterfinal game at the on-going FIBA World Championship in Spain yesterday, but the Nigerians bowed out with their heads high.
Valiant D'Tigress fall to USA in FIBA Women's World Cup quarterfinal
After winning the first quarter, D' Tigress succumbed to a resurgent USA in the quarter-final of the FIBA Women's W0rld Cup in Tenerife, Spain. The United States of America's women basketball team shook off an inauspicious start to qualify for the semi-final with a 71-40 win over D'Tigress. Ezinne Kalu led D'Tigress with eight points,…
D’Tigress, Nigeria’s basketball heroes defying the chaos at home
On Tuesday, for the first time ever, Nigeria’s female basketball team, D’Tigress, secured qualification beyond the Group Stage of the ongoing FIBA Women’s World Cup.
AFA remembers early days as D’Tigress battle U.S.
Nigeria’s rise in women basketball is not a happenstance. The victory over Greece on Wednesday that put the D’Tigress into the quarterfinals of the on-going FIBA Women World Cup in Tenerife...
D’Tigress’ fairy-tale run continues as Nigeria downs Greece to qualify for quarterfinals
Nigeria’s D’Tigress yesterday continued their Cinderella run in the ongoing FIBA Women Basketball World Cup with Greece their latest victim.
D'Tigress into quarterfinal after dramatic end against Greece
It was a tense, pulsating, yet thrilling end to the match at Santa Cruz de Tenerife. D'Tigress clinched a quarter final berth with the slimmest of margins in the quarterfinal qualifying fixture against Greece. Despite Greece leading into the final 20 seconds of the game, Nigeria battled to the dramatic finish. Three seconds to the…
Buhari congratulates history-making D'Tigress
President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated Nigeria’s women basketball team, D’Tigress, who recorded their second -straight win at the ongoing FIBA Women’s World Cup in Spain with a hard-fought 75-70 victory over Argentina. Buhari, on his official twitter handle, @MBUHARI, posted the congratulatory message on Tuesday night. The President said the nation was proud of their…
D’Tigress make history, beat Argentina to qualify for second round
Nigeria yesterday defeated Argentina at the on-going FIBA Women World Cup to become the first African team to get to the business end of the world’s biggest ladies’ basketball event. The victory was expected following the D’Tigress’ exploits against Turkey on Sunday...
It’s win or burst as Nigeria faces Argentina today
Nigeria did the unexpected on Sunday when the D’Tigress defeated Turkey at the on-going FIBA Women World Cup in Tenerife, Spain.
Police in Kaduna deny killing 30, abducting 100 persons
6 mins ago Nigeria
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Six die, seven injured in Ogbomoso road crash
We taught Ivory Coast how to breed, cultivate cocoa, says FRIN ex-boss
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Quantum Physics For Babies (Board Book)
Author: Chris Ferrie
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Incorporated
Imprint : Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Dimensions : 0.75000mm X 8.00000mm X 8.00000mm
Author : Chris Ferrie
Series : Baby University
Bind : Board book
Library of Con LOCSH : 2016057598
Illustrations : full colour illustrations
Simple explanations of complex ideas for your future genius
Written by an expert, Quantum Physics for Babies is a colorfully simple introduction to the principle that gives quantum physics its name. Babies (and grownups ) will discover that the wild world of atoms never comes to a standstill. With a tongue-in-cheek approach that adults will love, this installment of the Baby University board book series is the perfect way to introduce basic concepts to even the youngest scientists. After all, it's never too early to become a quantum physicist physicist
Baby University: It only takes a small spark to ignite a child's mind.
It only takes a small spark to ignite a child's mind.
"Ferrie delivers a cleanly designed introduction to how matter and energy interact on an atomic level." - Publishers Weekly
Chris Ferrie is a physicist, mathematician and father of three budding young scientists. He obtained his doctorate in Mathematical Physics from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada and currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Chris believes it is never too early to introduce children to the wild and wonderful world of physics!
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Gliwice-Silesia 2019
Eurovision Events
Malta to announce finalists tonight
Posted 26 June 2015 at 11:52 CEST
The 20 finalists for the Malta Junior Eurovision Song Contest will be announced tonight, broadcaster PBS has announced.
The announcement will be made on PBS' website, with the names of those that have made it to the live show.The national selection itself takes place in 11 July in the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta. This show will be used to select the singer that will represent Malta at Junior Eurovision, and then song will then be decided internally with the artist, their representatives, and music experts. Tickets for the national selection have also gone on sale, and can be purchased by clicking: here.
Malta won the competition in 2013, and then hosted the event last year in the Marsa Shipbuilding!
tags Malta national selection Junior Eurovision News 2015 Announcement
Destiny Chukunyere to represent Malta in Sofia!
Tonight: Malta Junior Eurovision Song Contest!
20 Maltese participants for national selection announced
Get updates in your inbox!
The Junior Eurovision Song Contest is organized by the European Broadcasting Union, the world's foremost alliance of public service media, representing 116 member organizations in 56 countries and an additional 34 Associates in Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas.
© EBU 2002-2020. All rights reserved.
Website by Scrn.
This website uses cookies to provide you with a better user experience. Further information on cookies and how we use them is contained in the Cookies section of the Privacy Notice & Cookie Information. By continuing to actively use this website, you agree to our use of cookies.
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Diablo 1 – Rogue Class
Written by medievaldragon on January 1, 2002 . Posted in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Uncategorized
Warrior | Rogue | Sorceror
The Sisters of the Sightless Eye are a loosely organized guild shrouded in mystery amongst the peoples of the West. These highly skilled archers employ ancient Eastern philosophies that develop an inner-sight that they use both in combat and to circumvent dangerous traps that they may encounter. Known only as wandering Rogues in the West, the Sisters conceal their secret affiliation by posing as simple travelers. Many pompous fools have made the mistake of underestimating these steel nerved women in combat and paid a terrible price for their vanity.
The strange events transpiring in Khanduras have caught the attention of many of these Rogues. They have come from as far as the Eastern dunes to test their skills against the dark evil that is said to be lurking in Tristram. It is also believed that untold riches wait to be discovered among the ruins of the Horadrim monastery.
Although not as powerful in close combat as the Warrior, the Rogue is the undisputed master of the bow. A skilled Sister can send a stream of arrows at an opponent, each fired with a seemingly careless precision. The innate sixth sense that all Rogues seem to possess also allows them to sense trapped fixtures, and aids them in attempts to disarm these traps.
Copyright 1996 by Blizzard Entertainment
Diablo and Battle.net are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
Diablo 1 – Warrior Class
The Warriors of the lands of Khanduras are well trained in all of the weapons of war. Ranging from crusading paladins to unscrupulous mercenaries, Warriors can be found wherever there is conflict amongst their countrymen. Many of these adventuresome men joined with King Leoric’s army and went to battle against the Northern kingdom of Westmarch. As the fires of war burned themselves out, these Warriors returned home to find their kingdom in shattered disarray.
Dark rumors of the mysterious demise of King Leoric abound and the evil that lurks within his Cathedral has drawn many Warriors to Khanduras seeking fortune and glory. Though they were warned by the people of Tristram, a few of these brave souls have ventured into the chaotic labyrinth beneath the old church- never to be heard from again?
Whether they are driven by valor, honor, madness or greed, new Warriors arrive in Tristram every day, ready to challenge the dark unknown that awaits them beneath the earth.
The Warrior is the strongest and toughest of the three available Classes, and he excels in the art of close combat. His primary weakness is that his extensive physical training has left little time to develop more than a rudimentary knowledge of magic. The extended periods of time that most Warriors spend away from their homes and civilization requires that they learn to repair their own weapons and armor, although their skill is no match for the talent of a true blacksmith.
Sir Lothar: Stormwind History
Chronicles of the War in Azeroth
A treatise of the events leading to the war between Mankind and the Orcish hordes as related by Sir Lothar, Knight of the Realm
Note: This is straight from the Warcraft: Orcs and Humans Game Manual
I am Sir Lothar, Armsman to the Brotherhood of the Horse, and a warrior in the King’s service. I feel it necessary to inform you of the events that have led us to this time of conflict. The tale of our battle with the Orcs begins some forty years in the past. I tell you of these things so that you might glean some understanding of our plight, and gain insight into our enemy. As a student of history and battle, I have found that only through understanding the past can we make well thought decisions for the future.
All has been peaceful for many generations, and the reign of King Wrynn III is a prosperous one. The constant bickering and infighting that marred the rules of former Kings has no place in the court of Wrynn. The child sorcerer Medivh is born of a coupling between the Court Conjurer and a mysterious traveler. After the child is born, the woman disappears, and the baby is taken into the court as a ward of the kingdom.
The child Prince Llane is born to King Wrynn and Lady Varia. This is their first and only offspring, but the birth of a son marks the continuation of their line. It is a grand day in the kingdom that is celebrated by great feasts and tournaments. King Wrynn proclaims the day to be a time for festival for the duration of his rule, and to mark the occasion gives each citizen of Azeroth one gold sovereign.
The marking of the Age of Ascension from childhood to adulthood is one of great anticipation for both parent and youth. Medivh attains that time and is expected to be given the title as Apprentice Conjurer to the Court. On the eve of this occasion, the boy’s sleep is troubled by dark dreams of figures giving chase through deep chasms. Waking in a cold sweat, Medivh makes his way to the bedchamber of his father. As the conjurer reaches out to touch his fevered brow, a burning fire ignites in the child’s eyes. This backlash of power must have reached as far as Northshire Abbey, for within the hour over one hundred clerics arrived at the castle.
Only by combining their abilities with the powers of the conjurer were one hundred enough to contain Medivh. As magiks unimagined poured forth from him, the boy screamed in unholy pain at the energies that were channeling through him. Hours passed, perhaps even days, for time seemed to stand still as the onslaught grew in fury.
Then, as simply as one snuffs a candle, both father and son crumpled into a heap. The Conjurer laid dead, drained of all life, and only the faintest breath escaping his lips. After long discussion, the King and the Abbot of Northshire agree that Medivh should be taken to the Abbey for the safety of both child and kingdom.
Llane reaches his Age of Ascension, and the full station of Prince of Azeroth is bestowed upon him. At this ceremony, tens of thousands of devoted subjects come to offer their wishes of support and long life. During the evening feast with the family, and those close to the crown, a cold wind began to chill the air. A gentle breeze at first, it grew in intensity, until the doors to the great hall were blown off their hinges. As the guests leaned into the wind, a figure entered, riding the winds like some great bird of prey.
The torches set about the great hall ignited with the blue flame and the visage of Medivh was revealed. As he set down in front of the King’s table, the guard sprang to their feet. A mere pass of his hand kept them motionless – frozen in their places. The sorcerer, now a man, explained that his years of sleep had ended. The years of constant tending from the clerics of Northshire Abbey enabled him to gain control over his powers. When his spirit and body became attuned, he awakened himself, and set out to Stormwind Keep at once. Medivh explained that he had come to repay the court for the kindness it had shown to him while he was in their keeping, and to acknowledge the occasion of the Ascension ceremony for Prince Llane.
From within his flowing cloak he produced an hourglass, crafted of deepest obsidian, with sands as white as undriven snow. The young Prince looked closely, but although the sand seemed to constantly sift from top to bottom, the lower half never filled, and the top never emptied. Medivh claimed that these sands represented the people of the kingdom, and so long as the glass never emptied, the reign of King Wrynn would not fail.
Six years passed, and the land slowly grew sick. Crops began failing in the richest soils of the kingdom. Children were stricken ill and never fully recovered. even the moods of the subjects of Azeroth seem dark. The weather would become unseasonably cold during harvest, and the summer sun scorched the earth and made working out of the shade almost unbearable. Neither cleric nor conjurer could fathom what could be the cause of this change in the lands. More and more people became disheartened, and what once would have been looked over, now caused bitter argument.
During a bleak morning, Prince Llane rushed to his father’s side, carrying the hourglass. During the night, the sands had run down from the top, and it was near emptied. King Wrynn took the glass into his hands, and a chill ran through the very core of his being. As the last sands trickled to the bottom of the glass, a great crashing sound was heard at the gates of Stormwind Keep. Suddenly, the grounds were filled with hideous creatures. gross deformities, a cruel reflection of humanity, they swarmed over the King’s guard and tore them to shred. King Wrynn sent Llane and Queen Varia with an escort of knights to Northshire Abbey, promising to call for them when the foul beasts had been destroyed. That day has not yet come.
At the age of twenty years, Llane is pronounced King of Azeroth. His task is clear – to rid the lands of these creatures. The few that have survived battle refer to themseves as Orcs. When questioned, they will tell little else, and prefer death to releasing information. They are cruel, sadistic and vile – making no distinctions between soldier or child, warrior or woman. They will slay anyone who they encounter without a second thought. The only humans who do not fall to the Orcish blade are those who are taken to the swamps that have festered in the east, where the Orcs have made their encampments. What they do with these people is unknown, though the worst is feared for none have ever returned.
Nearly ten years of skirmishes and raids along the Borderlands have kept the people of Azeroth wary, but the Orcish hordes had been beaten back into their swamps. King Llane has found that the Orcs, though incredibly strong and vicious, were seldom well trained in combat, and always disorganized. This has been the key to holding them at bay, and is the weakness he hopes to exploit in the future. The mystery that no Cleric or Conjurer had found the answer to, though, is the origin of the creatures.
In the tenth year of his reign, King Llane is visited by the mysterious traveler (Aegwynn)*. She has come to the King with a warning that she hopes will aid him in his fight against the nemesis to his land. the coupling between the King’s Conjurer and herself was intended to created a child that she could pass her knowledge and power onto before leaving this place. she did not count upon other forces in this world, and others, that would seek to dominate the child. He was now become a beacon to mystic power.
She sought him out only a fortnight before, and found that the powers that course through his veins have twisted him, making him insane. Realizing the threat he now posed, she was forced to attempt to destroy him. He all but slew her.
The battle left both combatants drained, but Medivh held enough power to banish her from his sight, and command her never to return. His magiks were strong enough that even she cannot break this bond, and so can offer no aid in his downfall. The traveler also informs King Llane that it was Medivh who was responsible for the coming of the Orcs to Azeroth. During the battle with his father, he inadvertently opened a gateway to the domain that they, and many other foul creatures, call home. The Orcs are disciples of chaos, however, and not even Medivh has the power to control them.
Although the battle has Medivh in a greatly weakened state, the traveler warns that there will be a time when Azeroth will be forced to deal with him. Her parting words to the King were of her hope that the sorcerer would not become so strong, by that time, that the whole of this world would suffer.
Stirrings of war now come from the swamps. The attacks upon our settlements, once scattered and poorly executed, have become more organized. The King has found it necessary to send footmen and archers to protect settlements along the Borderlands. Rumors of the rising of a great Orcish Warchief have been heard about the land. He is heard to be a harsh leader who has gathered the feuding Orcs under one banner. King Llane’s scouts and spies have found him to be as cunning as he is bloodthirsty. This foul creature’s name is Blackhand, and his control of the Orcish hordes could spell doom for Azeroth. The King has ordered me to seek out new recruits to train in the druiments of combat for the time has come to call upon the people of Azeroth and prepare the kingdom for war.
Note: Be warned that there could seem to be some mistakes in the original lore. Blizzard Entertainment makes changes to the lore to accommodate new content and lore in future games like Warcraft II, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.
To read the storyline of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans with Medivh as main character, we recommend reading the great novel pocketbook Warcraft Archive which reprinted Warcraft: The Last Guardian —written by Jeff Grubb, writer known by many fans of Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and Magic the Gathering Ice Age, Starcraft: Liberty’s Crusade, among other books.
Aegwynn* – Former Guardian of Tirisfal, Mother of Medivh, who defeated Sargeras in Northrend 800 centuries ago. The Court Conjurer, father of Medivh, was named Nielas Aran.
Diablo Pocket Books Store
Written by medievaldragon on December 31, 2001 . Posted in Store, Uncategorized
Warcraft | Starcraft | Diablo
Diablo: The Sin War, Birthright
Diablo: The Sin War, Scales of the Serpent
Diablo: The Sin War, The Veiled Prophet
Diablo Archive
Compiles: Demonsbane, Legacy of Blood, The Black Road, and The Kingdom of Shadow
Diablo: Legacy of Blood
Diablo: The Black Road
Diablo: The Kingdom of Shadow
Diablo: Moon of the Spider
Starcraft Pocket Books Store
Starcraft: The Dark Templar, First Born
Starcraft: The Dark Templar, Shadow Hunters
Starcraft: The Dark Templar, Twilight
Starcraft: Liberty’s Crusade
Starcraft: Shadows of the Xel’Naga
Starcraft: Speed of Darkness
Starcraft: Queen of Blades
Starcraft Archive: An Anthology
[Collection contains: Uprising, Liberty’s Crusade, Shadows of the Xel’Naga and Speed of Darkness]
Starcraft Ghost: Nova
Starcraft: I, Mengsk
(Pocket Books – Dec 2008)
Starcraft: Heaven’s Devils
(Dec 1, 2009)
Starcraft Ghost: Spectres
Warcraft Pocket Books Store
Below are the book-novels available to all Warcraft lore fans. The books expand the Warcraft Universe, and most of the content and quests in World of Warcraft are based on details from these books. Among them is Durnholde Keep where Thrall grew up as a slave may be read in Warcraft: Lord of the Clans. Tower of Medivh in Kharazhan from Warcraft: The Last Guardian, Rhonin’s adventure in Grim Batol during the Second War may be read in Warcraft: Day of the Dragon, and its sequel War of the Ancients Trilogy features Queen Azshara, the Highborne, Malfurion, Tyrande and Illidan. You can purchase these books by clicking on the images.
Warcraft: Day of the Dragon
War or the Ancients Trilogy, book one: Well of Eternity
War or the Ancients Trilogy, book two: Demon Soul
War or the Ancients Trilogy, book three: The Sundering
War of the Ancients Archive
Compiles all 3 books
World of Warcraft: Rise of the Horde
Warcraft: The Last Guardian
World of Warcraft: Tides of Darkness
World of Warcraft: Beyond the Dark Portal
Warcraft: Lord of the Clans
Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor
(PDF – PC Only)
World of Warcraft: Cycle of Hatred
Warcraft Archive
Compiles 3 books: Last Guardian, Day of the Dragon and Lord of the Clans
World of Warcraft: Night of the Dragon
World of Warcraft Vol. 1
DC Comics (Wildstorm)
Issues# 1-7
World of Warcraft: Arthas
World of Warcraft: Ashbringer Hardcover
Warcraft RPG Books Store
The d20 system-based Warcraft RPG Books—were developed by Luke Johnson, Game Developer of White Wolf Publishing and his team. Chris Metzen participated as Creative and Rule Design Assistant. The books offer a great deal of official Warcraft Lore. Not only d20 gameplay. Make sure to read the table of content of each book. You can order Warcraft RPG Books in hardcover or eBook PDF version. The RPG books in PDF format are Electronic Books that you can download and read from your desktop at a cheaper price. You require Adobe Acrobat Reader. We chose this eBook supplier because fans may pay via Paypal or via Credit Card for convenience—which is cool for international fans. Mac and Linux users may now download Warcraft RPG Books with no hassle. (Now PC/Mac/Linux compatible)
Product Name Paperback eBook (PDF)
Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game
WarCraft: Alliance & Horde Compendium
Front Cover | Content List
WarCraft: Magic & Mayhem
WarCraft: Lands of Conflict
Warcraft: Manual of Monsters
Warcraft: Shadows & Light
World of Warcraft the Roleplaying Game
World of Warcraft: More Magic and Mayhem
World of Warcraft: Lands of Mystery
World of WarCraft: Alliance Player Guide
Front Cover | Content List | Hill Dwarves Sample
World of WarCraft: Horde Player Guide
World of WarCraft: Monster Guide
World of WarCraft RPG: Dark Factions
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Get ahold of these Blizzard Licensed Starcraft II T-Shirts and show your pride and love for Starcraft to friends. Just click any of the images below to visit the J!NX store and proceed to add T-Shirts to your shopping cart. Simply click the tabs on the top tagged as: Men or Women; to choose your gender. Want more T-Shirt Designs? Visit the J!NX Store. Prices vary depending the T-shirt size from: $17.99 – $20.99
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Article Withdrawal Policy
International Journal of Computer Engineering in Research Trends (IJCERT) is having ISSN 2349-7084 (online), Monthly Open-access, Multidisciplinary, Peer-Reviewed,Scholarly online fully Referred international journal, being published in the months of January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October November, December by IJCERT PUBLICATION HOUSE Hyderabad (Telangana), India since year 2014.
IJCERT recognizes the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and librarians and attaches the highest importance to maintaining trust in the authority of its electronic archive.
IJCERT Policy
It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the editor of a learned journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal shall be published. In making this decision the editor is guided by policies of the journal’s editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship. Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as is possible. However, very occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances. In all cases, our official archives at the National Library of the Netherlands will retain all article versions, including retracted or otherwise removed articles.
This policy has been designed to address these concerns and to take into account current best practice in the scholarly and library communities. As standards evolve and change, we will revisit this issue and welcome the input of scholarly and library communities. We believe these issues require international standards and we will be active in lobbying various information bodies to establish international standards and best practices that the publishing and information industries can adopt.
Only used for Articles in Press which represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like), may be “Withdrawn” from Science Direct. Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with a HTML page and PDF simply stating that the article has been withdrawn according to the IJCERT Policy on Article in Press Withdrawal with a link to the current policy document.
Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication.The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by IJCERT:
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The 5G Rollout is Absolutely Insane
By Electromagnetic Sense Ireland - (updated 12/4/2019)
5G technology is being rolled out across the world without any pre-testing for short or long-term health effects.
In the past few weeks, councils and decision makers in the following regions have called for a moratorium on the 5G roll-out due to health effects – Brussels, Rome, Florence and Swiss Cantons of Vaud and Geneva. Plus actions taken by some US Citylocal governments to slow the deployment of 4G/5G antennae.
See Also : Takebackyourpower.net – 5G The Dominoes are Starting to Fall
“The 5G Rollout is Absolutely Insane” Dr Martin Pall
5G is the next generation of wireless technology – to be used for faster internet, the IOT (Internet of Things), smart cities and buildings, Smart Grid, transport infrastructures, connected and autonomous vehicles, drones, and for interconnecting new technologies and networks etc. 5G technology is being rolled out across the world without any pre-testing for short or long-term health effects. Despite evidence that existing wireless technology causes adverse health effects, our governments and decision makers are sanctioning what scientists and experts warn will be a serious health crisis. The 5G network will involve the installation of millions of antennae, as well as thousands of transmitting satellites in space.
The 5G deployment proposes to add frequencies in the microwave spectrum in the low- (0.6 GHz – 3.7 GHz), mid- (3.7GHz – 24 GHz), and high-band frequencies (24 GHz and higher) for faster communications. In some cases it will include the higher millimeter wave frequencies never before used for internet and communications technology.
VIDEO - I
Millimeter waves are in the High Frequency Range and these higher frequencies do not travel far and are blocked by buildings, so the high-band systems will have to use a dense network of fixed antennae outdoors every 300 meters as well as indoor systems. These will be placed on existing infrastructure, street furniture, lamp posts , poles and even under manholes. 5G will provide faster speeds (up to 100 times) and higher capacity transmissions to carry the massive amount of data that will be generated from the Internet of Things (IoT), driverless cars, smart cities and towns, traffic management, in hospitals and businesses, drones etc.
5G technology, like the 2G, 3G, 4G telecommunications systems, has not had pre-market testing for short or long-term health effects despite the fact that people will be exposed continuously to this further radiation. The addition of these 5G radiation frequencies to an already complex mix of wireless frequencies, will contribute to a negative public health outcome from both physical and mental health perspectives.
Currently in Ireland five mobile and internet service providers have space on the country’s 3.6GHz spectrum band, which has been identified as a primary band suitable for the introduction of 5G in Europe. This is just the beginning, as further spectrum bands are to be auctioned in the near future – 700MHz and 26GHz. See ComReg website for more details.
NOTE: 5G is not the same as 5GHz. 5G stands for 5th Generation technology and will use different frequencies as mentioned above. 5GHz is one of two frequency signals (as well as 2.4GHz) used in your typical wireless wifi routers/modems – which you can turn off or disable! 5g-mobile-network-is-different-from-5ghz-wifi/
Millimeter wavelengths – between 30GHz and 300GHz (at high intensity) have been used in military applications in active denial systems (non-lethal crowd control weapons).
Some research on non-thermal effects has shown that millimeter wavelengths target cell membranes and have adverse biological effects as well as clinical effects such as cataracts, immune system alterations and physiological effects on the heart and blood pressure. Betzalal et al (2018) have demonstrated that the sweat glands which are coiled structures in the upper layers of the skin can act as antenna receiver for 5G sub-THz band wavelengths.
Study: Human Sweat Ducts Act As ‘Antennas’ For 5G Radiation
See Here for 55 Published Literatures o 5G High Frequency, Gigahertz RF (millimeter wave)
Wildlife and the Environment
Environmental effects of existing RF radiation have also been ignored. 5G will massively increase the microwave and millimeter wave radiation in our environment, and will have a detrimental effect on wildlife and trees. 5G will substantially increase exposure to radio–frequency electromagnetic fields RF-EMF, that has already been proven to be harmful for humans, animals and the environment.
Trees and foliage can also interfere with and impede RF signals, and higher frequencies more so. A White Paper from Surrey University UK demonstrates this and the necessity that tree height be at least 3 metres less than base station (or antennae/cell) height to provide reliable signal coverage.
With thousands of extra antennae to be installed for 5G, how many trees will get in the way and have to be cut down?
Please sign and share
In September 2017 the EU 5G Appeal, signed by more than 180 scientists and doctors from 35 nations was submitted to the European Commission demanding a moratorium on the increase of cell/mobile antennas for planned 5G expansion. Concerns over health effects from higher radiation exposure include potential neurological impacts, infertility, and cancer.
“We the undersigned scientists and doctors recommend a moratorium on the roll-out of the fifth generation, 5G, for telecommunication until potential hazards for human health and the environment have been fully investigated by scientists independent from industry. 5G will substantially increase exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) on top of the 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, etc. for telecommunications already in place. RF-EMF has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment…” READ FULL APPEAL HERE
In 2018, an International Appeal to Stop 5G in space and on earth was launched and to date (3/4/2019) has over 63,000 signatures from scientists, doctors, building biologists, engineers, citizens from at least 168 countries
VIDEO - II
Risks from 5G include:
Damage to the eyes – cataracts, retinal damage
Severe sweating
Skin damage
Immune system disruption
Metabolic disruption
Neurological disturbance
Leakage of blood brain barrier
Damage to sperm
Increased risk of cancers
Depression and suicide
Collapse of insect populations, the base of food for birds and bats
Rise in bacterial resistance and bacterial shifts
Damage to plants and trees
Dr. Martin Pall To The NIH: “The 5G Rollout Is Absolutely Insane.”:
Here is what some experts are saying about 5G:
“The new 5G wireless technology involves millimeter waves (extremely high frequencies) producing photons of much greater energy than even 4G and WiFi. Allowing this technology to be used without proving its safety is reckless in the extreme, as the millimeter waves are known to have a profound effect on all parts of the human body.” –Prof. Trevor Marshall, Director Autoimmunity Research Foundation, California
“The plans to beam highly penetrative 5G milliwave radiation at us from space must surely be one of the greatest follies ever conceived of by mankind. There will be nowhere safe to live. –Olga Sheean former WHO employee and author of ‘No Safe Place’
“It would irradiate everyone, including the most vulnerable to harm from radiofrequency radiation: pregnant women, unborn children, young children, teenagers, men of reproductive age, the elderly, the disabled, and the chronically ill.” —Ronald Powell, PhD, Letter to FCC on 5G expansion
“Along with the 5G there is another thing coming – Internet of Things. If you look at it combined the radiation level is going to increase tremendously and yet the industry is very excited about it…. they project 5G/IoT business to be a $7 trillion business.” -Prof. Girish Kumar, Professor at Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Bombay
“However, no matter what the future research will show, the 5G technology will be by then fully deployed and without any possibility of reverse because the whole future life of the humanity will be based and dependent on the functioning of the 5G radiation-emitting devices. This is a unique situation in the history of the human kind when the whole human population will be exposed to man-made devices emitting non-ionizing radiation that was insufficiently tested before deployment.
What is and what will be the responsibility of the scientists, decision-makers and industry leaders who permit deployment of insufficiently tested technology that will affect us all? The answer is simple – no responsibility… because if any health problems will show up in the future, these will most likely take tens of years of time to manifest and, by then the persons that currently enable deployment of insufficiently tested radiation-emitting 5G technology will be retired or the proverbial “six feet under”. Dariusz Leszczynski, PhD, DSc
“The risks to health from non-ionizing electromagnetic fields are controversial.
However, the scientific evidence that indicates grave dangers continues to grow: increase in the risk of cancer, infertility, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, electrohypersensitivity…
In recent years we have seen accusations by citizens groups and by scientists, researchers and experts (independent of industry) about conflicts of interest of the committees that decide on the permitted levels to which the entire population is exposed.
According to many experts more and more research points to the necessity to upgrade the classification of radio frequency radiation as a carcinogen to 2A or even to 1.
(Mobile telephony, WiFi, cordless telephones…) This together with evidence of important non-thermal biological effects reinforces the need to apply the precautionary principle in relation to lowering the levels of exposure, with special attention to the most vulnerable groups such as children.
In contrast, the march toward 5G technology involves a radical increase of levels of electromagnetic pollution. Therefore 180 doctors and scientists from 36 countries have written a letter to the European Union demanding a moratorium on its implementation.
Meanwhile the industry tries to make its message about lack of harm prevail through large investments in the media and in ill-concealed lobbying.
We think this at least merits a profound public debate.”
VIDEO - III
Arthur Firstenburg cellphonetaskforce
MORE INFORMATION on 5G DANGERS :
What you need to know about 5G Wireless and Microcells
Scientist & Doctors call for Moratorium on 5G Roll-out
Small Cells, Mini Cell Towers, Wireless Facilities And Health: Letters From Scientists On The Health Risk Of 5G
5G And The IOT: Scientific Overview Of Human Health Risks
What you don’t know about 5G but will find out when its too late
5G and The Internet of Things
5G Exposed
5G: Great risk for EU, U.S. and International Health! Compelling Evidence for
Eight Distinct Types of Great Harm Caused by Electromagnetic Field (EMF)
Exposures and the Mechanism that Causes Them – Prof Martin L Pall
New paper on 5G: Towards 5G communication systems: Are there health implications?
The 5G Mass Experiment – Investigate Europe Publications
Physicians for Safe Technology – 5G Communications Science
Hundreds of birds dead during 5G experiment in The Hague, The Netherlands
Factual Microwave Radiation Research Consumers Need To Know Before Embracing 5G
Radiation from Cell Phones, Wifi Are Hurting the Birds and the Bees; 5G May Make It Worse
The Problem With 5G Even a Computer and Technology Publication is reporting about safety concerns of 5G. (Update Sept 2018. This article was removed a few weeks after publication and the author fired.
Original article can now be read HERE)
5G – 11 Reasons to be Concerned – Lloyd Burrell
10 Reasons for MEPs and Policitions Everywhere to Oppose 5G
5G – A Toxic Assault on the Planetary Web of Life
5G and The Internet of Things – A Trojan Horse – Paul Héroux, Ph.D., Professor of Electromagnetic Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University
The Looming Health Risks of 5G Technology – Frasier, Frasier & Hickman, Attorneys at Law
New 5G Cell Towers and Smart Meters to Increase Microwave Radiation – Invade Privacy
More on 5G Health Effects – Environmental Health Trust
5G – From Blankets to Bullets – Arthur Firstenberg
Amplified EMFs coming to your neighbourhood soon – 5G – Dr Mercola
5G wireless telecommunications expansion: Public health and environmental implications
Frightening Frequencies: The Dangers of 5G & What You Can Do About Them – Eluxe Magazine
Citizens Up in Arms Against 5G Wireless Technology Roll-Out: Are Their Concerns Justified? – Lloyd Burrell
“5G Wireless Radiation Violates Human Rights and Nuremberg Code of Ethics!”
Arthur Firstenberg – 5G from Space (audio)
Letter to Elon Musk from concerned German scientists
Dr Naomi Wolf on 5G
Everything You Need to Know About 5G - (EXCEPT THE HEALTH EFFECTS)
VIDEOS ON 5G
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN IRELAND
5G IS A WAR ON HUMANITY
Waking Times The first eight months of WWII with no fighting was called The Phoney War. Using millimetre waves as a fifth-generation or 5G wireless communications technology is a phoney war of another
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Lady Deena II
$45,000 - $51,750 / WEEK
YACHTLENGTH 101.00 Ft
TOTALCREW 5
RATESFROM $45,000
Hargrave
5.10 Feet
Wash Basins: 6
Pref. Pick-up: Ft Lauderdale
Other Pick-up: Nassua
Jacuzzi: Yes
Fuel Consumption: 50
Winter Area: Caribbean Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Caribbean Leewards, Florida
Summer Area: Bahamas, Florida
Salon Tv/VCR: Yes
Sat Tv: WiFi onboard. Two options:
1. Marina WiFI when docked in a marina with WiFI 2. Cell signal 4G WiFi when in range of a Bahamas Telecom Company (BTC) service tower.
The cell signal WiFi is billed at $35 per 15GB top up
AV - Crestron multimedia platform. Apple TV. Bluray. SiriusXM radio. Satellite TV. Fusion player on flybridge. Televisions in every stateroom room, Main Salon, Galley. Portable TV for Pilot House, Aft Deck, Fly bridge.
# DVDs/Movies: Yes
Deck Shower: Yes
BBQ: Yes
Generator: Yes
Guests Smokes: no
Crew Smokes: Inq
Pets Aboard: No
Pet Type: -
Guest Pets: No
Wave Runners: 2
Floating Mats: Yes
Captain: Esteban Yanez - Captain Esteban has over 15 years in the yachting industry and over 70,000 nm. He has been the captain on board yachts from 78' to 170. Esteban is from Ecuador and is tri-lingual speaking Spanish, English and Italian. He is grateful to have a profession that allows him to enjoy his love of the sea. His interest include free diving, surfing and celestial Navigation.
Esteban is also a musician, he plays the guitar, mandolin, ukelele, banjo, bass, percussion & drums. Once LADY DEENA II is tied up for the evening you may be able to persuade him to serenade you with the mandolin!
Chef: Jaclynn is from Upstate New York. Her love and passion for the culinary arts started at a very young age. She found out quickly that she loved to work with her hands and create dishes that left people raving about her food with a smile on their face. In 2016, Jaclynn took a 3 month trip to Europe to explore and study different types of cuisine in their most authentic form. She also studied French culinary for 4 weeks at Tante Marie Culinary Academy in Woking, England where she gained new knowledge and was able to perfect what she was already familiar with. Over the last five years, Jaclynn has worked as both permanent and freelance chef for many people, taking absolute delight in preparing both beautiful and delicious dishes for her guests and crew.
Mate: Patrick Nolan - Born and raised on Long Island, New York, Patrick has always had a love for the ocean, and a passion for fishing. He began his maritime career at an early age, working at a marina whilst still at school for 2 seasons. Patrick then moved on to work on commercial fishing vessels for two years and completed a degree in Marine Technology at Kingsborough. He has been in the industry for six years and since has completed his 100 ton Captains license and dive master. Patrick is also a keen motorcyclist, crazy about fishing, diving and loves to watch movies in his spare time.
Stewardess: Kaylee Milligan- Kaylee comes from New Mexico and is a recent graduate on Recreational Sports and Management from Dixie State University in St. George, Utah, where she also was intercollegiate tennis athlete. She is a strong, independent young lady and has joined Lady Deena’s program since March. Her energy and disposition are a great addition to the team.
Kaylee take great pride in her work and is a pleasure to be around. Our guests love her.
Stewardess: Chelsea Marie Mercede- Chelsea is a Florida native. She began her yachting career in 2013 after graduating from Florida State University where she majored in Nutrition and Dietetics. She also comes from a real estate background and currently is a licensed Florida Realtor. Chelsea is an amazing, young and energetic stewardess but you’ll often see her helping outside. She has a deep love for the ocean and is a very experienced Kite boarder and instructor and world traveller. Chelsea is a wonderful addition to our team and her experience, strong work ethics and soft demeanor are of great value for the program.
Caribbean Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Caribbean Leewards, Florida
Bahamas, Florida
Hold/Option:
Booked:
Unavailable:
Feb 2021 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
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Beauty Supply Store Accused Of Racial Profiling, Locked Innocent Black Teens In Store
This case of mistaken identity for a group of wanted shoplifters shows that even in 2020, we still all look alike to some folks.
By HelloBeautiful Staff
It’s no secret that shopping while Black is a real and traumatic thing that too many of us encounter out there in those retail streets. But this story truly takes the cake.
According to WAVY-TV, a group of young Black teens got locked into a beauty supply store in Virginia when they were believed to be a group of wanted shoplifters.
See this case of mistaken identity was a result of a group of young Black girls stealing more than $1000 worth of goods from the Coco Beauty Supply in Chesapeake, Virginia on Dec. 28. Rightfully wanting to seek justice, the owner took a screenshot of the robbers he caught on tape and circulated flyers around the mall.
Now, this wouldn’t have been a problem if folks had the ability to recognize that not all Black girls look alike. But alas, here we are.
Fast-forward to Jan. 3, when a completely different group of Black teens, including Reubin Houston’s 16-year-old daughter, were minding their business, grabbing some lunch at a nearby Subway.
After a Subway employee saw them and instantly thought “THOSE ARE THE CROOKS!,” they called security. Shortly after, the girls noticed a guard started following them as they left the Subway and entered the beauty supply store, some three storefronts down. After they purchased a hairbrush, the store’s manager told them they couldn’t leave.
“My daughter asked them, ‘Why? why can’t we leave?’ She says you’ll find out,” Houston said about the girls’ interaction with the manager. Apparently, that’s when the police were called.
But when the officers arrived to the scene and quickly investigated the situation, they determined that the teens WERE NOT the robbers the owners were looking for, prompting the manager to apologize. But Reubin Houston wasn’t going to take his daughter’s mistreatment lying down.
He, in turn, filed a police report claiming the group was racially profiled.
“I’m personally thinking everybody is going to be a suspect if you have braids and weave and you’re Black. I mean, even the kids are suspects now. I guess mine was,” Houston told WAVY, adding, “My daughter and her friends won’t ever forget about that.”
The police stressed that the girls should never have been locked inside the store in the first place and “are consulting with the city commonwealth’s attorney to see how to move forward, including the possibility of abduction charges,” WAVY noted.
However, a section of Virginia Code says that stores like Coco Beauty can detain shoplifting suspects up to an hour if there is probable cause to believe a theft has occurred. But be clear: That wasn’t the case for these young girls at that moment.
We will be watching this story and providing updates as they become available.
With All These Foundation Shades, An Ulta Makeup Artist Still Told A Black Woman Her Skin Was ‘Too Dark’ To Color Match
Electric Chair! Black Twitter Drags Vanity Fair Writer For Calling Blue Ivy Ugly
Days Before Her Murder, Baltimore Salon Owner Told Police ‘I’m Scared For My Life’
Beauty Supply Store Accused Of Racial Profiling, Locked Innocent Black Teens In Store was originally published on hellobeautiful.com
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Home Tags Netflix
Tag: Netflix
Ted Sarandos Will Receive Golden Slate Award
The California Film Commission will be presenting the chief content officer of Netflix, Greek-American Ted Sarandos, with the Golden Slate Award. The award is presented to...
John Stamos Pays Tribute to ‘Fuller House’ Cast as Series Wraps
Joanna Kalafatis - Nov 21, 2019
The "Fuller House" gang just taped their finale for Netflix and members of the cast, including John Stamos, paid tribute to their TV family...
Producers Guild to Award Netflix Chief Ted Sarandos Its Top Honor
The Producers Guild of America announced on October 25 that it will bestow its most prestigious honor, the Milestone Award, on Netflix chief Ted...
Michael Chiklis to Star in Adam Sandler Netflix Halloween Comedy
Adam Sandler is putting together a Halloween-themed comedy for Netflix which is set to star Emmyaward-winning actor Michael Chiklis. The film follows Sandler, as Hubie...
“Murder Mystery” Starring Jennifer Aniston Debuts on Netflix
Joanna Kalafatis - Jun 14, 2019
"Murder Mystery", a new comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, is available on Netflix as of June 14. Don't be fooled by the title;...
Netflix Takes a Stand Against Georgia’s Passage of Anti-Abortion Laws
Joanna Kalafatis - May 28, 2019
Ted Sarandos, the Chief Content Officer (CCO) of Netflix, is the only major studio head to take a vocal stand against the new passage...
Trailer Released for ‘Wine Country’, Starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler
Joanna Kalafatis - Apr 13, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpie0Mt4p1w The former SNL power duo of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are back, and can be seen in the recently released trailer for the...
Dave Bautista to Star in Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead”
Joanna Kalafatis - Apr 6, 2019
Wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista continues to line up major acting parts, this time taking on a starring role in Zack Snyder's "Army of the Dead"...
Netflix Orders New Greek Mythology Animated Series, “Gods & Heroes”
Joanna Kalafatis - Mar 12, 2019
Netflix is creating a new animated series set in the vivid world of Greek mythology, titled "Gods & Heroes." The series was created by Greek brothers...
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Archive for the ‘Jon Liebman’ Category
HSN Is Getting Quirky, Brillstein Gets A Plug: You Figure It Out
HSN is partnering with Quirky to showcase innovative products created by the collaborative efforts of the Quirky online community, the home shopping network said Tuesday.
Got that?
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Quirky.
You know more than the Homeshoppingista then (what else is new?).
Quirky’s founder and CEO Ben Kaufman will feature Quirky’s products on HSN Jan. 29 and 30, and monthly thereafter.
“Partnering with a forward-thinking brand like Quirky further reinforces our commitment to new product development and innovation,” HSN CEO Mindy Grossman said in a canned statement. “It’s exciting for us to offer our customers unique solution-oriented ideas that Quirky has developed into compelling products.”
Quirky, which launched in June 2009, brings two new consumer products to market each week, “by enabling a fluid conversation between a global community and Quirky’s expert product design staff,” the press release says. WTF?
The release continues, “Each Quirky product solves a problem and carries a great story of the inventors who made it happen. Revenue is shared with those who help bring each product to life.”
Here is Kaufman’s explanation about how, and why, he started his company.
Kaufman is “pumped,” just like any self-respecting, casually clad Web executive would be. Kaufman loves the word “pumped”: He uses it in both his video and in the HSN/Quirky press release.
“We are pumped about this partnership,” he said in his canned statement. “Reaching the massive HSN audience is just one more step in our goal of making invention accessible to all with a great idea — and that’s everyone. HSN customers will now have the opportunity to share their ideas and develop awesome new products of their own.”
Kaufman is some salesman. He convinced his parents to re-mortgage their house and lend him $185,000 to start his company. Ida and Jim would never have gone for that one from us.
Quirky’s high-powered talent agency/manager, Brillstein Entertainment Partners, even got its two cents in, if you can beleive it.
“Our vision is to marry Quirky’s unique online social product development network with the incredible reach of HSN’s interactive shopping experience,” said Jon Liebman, CEO of Brillstein Entertainment Partners. “We’re all excited about this partnership because it’s a great example of what happens when Internet and television meld.”
Yes, the ol’ Internet/TV mind meld!
All products appearing on HSN have gone through Quirky’s rigorous community evaluation process where inventors and critics alike take product ideas from concept to completion.
HSN is offering all would-be entrepreneurs the opportunity to submit their product ideas for consideration on hsn.com’s product submission page.
Here’s the official boilerplate on Quirky, for dummies like us:
Quirky, a social product development company founded in June 2009, makes invention accessible by partnering with creative people around the world to bring new products to life. Each week, Quirky engages its online community to collaborate in all aspects of product design and development – from ideation all the way to packaging. Quirky brings two brand new consumer products to market every week and shares the revenue with all of the individuals who were influential in bringing these products to life.
Tags:Ben Kaufman, Brillstein Entertainment Partners, HSN, Jon Liebman, Mindy Grossman, Quirky, The Homeshoppingista
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Rich Goes To Bat For Moniece, Fizz Apologizes To Kamiah & More: #LHHH Season 2 Reunion Recap – Part 1
The #LHHReunion is finally here! Don't miss PART 1 this MON + 8/7c! https://t.co/zjxTGzYRQ9
— Love & Hip Hop (@LoveHipHopVH1) November 24, 2015
Season 2 of Love And Hop Hop Hollywood has easily been one of the most multi-faceted, explosive and emotional in the history of the Love and Hip Hop franchise to date, and tonight, the cast came face-to -ace to relive it all during part 1 of their reunion.
As is common with every reunion show, tonight’s airing began with plenty of shade, surprise revelations and tears, and ended with the early stages of a cast-wide brawl that erupted right on stage. Let’s get into the highlights from part 1 of the Love And Hip Hop Hollywood, Season 2 Reunion Show.
Host Nina Parker opens up the show by pointing out that Omarion and Apryl are not present for the reunion show and Fizz reveals that they are not in attendance because Omarion is busy touring and would rather focus on his music.
The show begins with a look back at Princess and Ray J’s storyline. When Nina asks Princess whether or not she and Ray are actually engaged after Ray gave her a ring on the season finale, she confirms that they are in indeed the early stages of their engagement. Ray J and Princess both clarify what led to her being arrested following their hotel confrontation. Princess says Ray J was supposed to have left their hotel room to find her something to eat and when he didn’t return, she went looking for him. Ray J says he got a call from some friends who told him to meet them in another room at the hotel and insists that he planned to only stop by for “10 minutes,” but got sidetracked.
Ray J goes on to reveal that because he was on probation at the time of the incident, the police arriving in the midst of he and Princess’ altercation was not good. Princess says she was then arrested because she refused to cooperate with the police to tell her side of the story when they arrived, but says the charges against her have since been dropped. The topic of Ray J leaking stories to the press leads to a brief argument between he and Teairra before the subject then turns to Teairra and Princess’ short-lived friendship.
Moniece looks starlted as Nina replays a “check yourself” clip of her insulting Princess following her fight with Teairra. When Princess then confronts Moniece about her tendency to speak ill of her in interviews despite them not having a relationship of any kind, Moniece says Princess made comments about her son and her parenting during the altercation with Teiarra that triggered a negative reaction. Princess continues insulting Moniece and takes things a step too far by claiming that Moniece “doesn’t even have a roof over her head.” Teairra attempts to come to Moniece’s defense by insisting that she does, in fact, have a place to live, but Moniece decides to leave the stage while fighting back tears. The discussion on the stage continues with Ray J proclaiming that Moniece only “talks a lot of sh*t” to people she feels she can pick on (like Princess.)
Rich then comes to Moniece’s defense insisting, that as long as Moniece is with him, she’ll have a roof over her head, while also criticizing Princess for attacking her living situation. Ray J becomes defensive over Rich’s response to Princess’ comments, but Rich ignores him and continues to defend Moniece, adding that she does have custody of her son and is currently working on co-parenting with Fizz. Fizz then jumps in to co-sign Teairra’s comment that Moniece actually does have a place to live.
Moniece returns to the stage, along with her mother Marla, to revisit her storyline with Rich. Rich says he was attracted to Moniece because of her good vibes and attractive appearance. Monice says that despite Rich’s previous relationship dealings on the show, she realizes that everyone has a past. For that reason, she says she decided to judge Rich on how he treated her rather than how he was with other women in the past when pursuing a relationship with him. When Nina asks Moniece’s mother Marla why she trusted what she’d read on the internet about Rich rather than reserving her judgement for when she actually met him in person, she says she never imagined that her questions about him would be offensive given that much of his “dirt” is public knowledge, as it has played out publicly on previous seasons of the show. Rich responds by saying while he doesn’t feel that Marla is entirely wrong in her approach to dealing with their situation, he thinks her delivery could use some work. He also reveals that contrary to popular belief, he actually pays $3,000 a month in child support.
Moniece clarifies her real intentions for telling Fizz that she was still in love with him, insisting that she did so because she never truly had the chance to gain closure from their relationship the first time around, as she was investing all of her energy into fighting for the chance to be a mother to her son. Moniece also says she felt she didn’t have time to grieve her break up with Fizz at the time of their split, which is why she chose to let him know about her lingering feelings during the video shoot. In short, she says her motivation for telling Fizz about her feelings had nothing do with wanting to give their relationship another shot.
When Nina asks Rich his thoughts on Moniece’s claims that her conversation with Fizz was really about closure and not about wanting to reunite with him, he reiterates how he did the right thing by Moniece “every step of the way” in anticipation that their relationship would last. However, he also says that while he loves Moniece and has never had a problem with making that known, he also points out that even when love is apparent, things don’t always work out.
The conversation then turns to the current status of Moniece and Rich’s relationship. Moniece says that they had been in the process of repairing their relationship and that Rich had even told her again that he wanted to marry her in the midst of them working things out. While she admitted to things still being shaky between them at present, Moniece says she was surprised to hear Rich declare that they are not together earlier in the reunion show. When asked to clarify what he meant by saying they aren’t together, Rich maintains his previous statement, insisting that things will need to change before they can officially get back together.
When Nina asks Fizz whether or not he thought Rich’s interest in Moniece was genuine, things get heated as Nikki jumps in with some new information about an e-mail sent by Rich to Fizz. Nikki insists that Fizz should speak up with the truth about Rich’s intentions with Moniece in order to protect her as the mother of his child.
Fizz then begins to explain and reveals that during their conversation, Rich questioned whether or not Fizz was interested in rekindling things with Moniece in light of her unresolved feelings for him. Fizz then says that after he told Rich that he had no interest in pursuing another relationship with Moniece, Rich was disappointed, suggesting that it could have been “his way out” of things with Moniece. Rich doesn’t comment on his e-mail to Fizz, but does close out the segment by proclaiming that he doesn’t need anyone’s help exiting a relationship that he no longer wants to being.
Amber, Miles and Milan are joined on stage by Amber’s sister and Miles’ sister as they relive their storyline. Both Amber and Miles are moved to tears while re-watching the footage from when Miles told Amber and his family the truth about being gay. After watching the replay, Amber reiterates her feelings of embarrassment and hurt over learning that Miles kept the truth from her given their close bond not only as lovers, but also as “best friends.” She also points out again that she felt the most betrayed for her 12-year-old daughter Zoe, who views Miles as a father figure. Miles apologizes to Amber again, but also says he didn’t feel at ease telling her despite them being best friends. He says that because she’s not a man, a Black man or a rapper, he didn’t feel that she would fully understand his dilemma. When Nina asks Milan if he understands the difficulty of Miles’ position, he says that he does and speaks briefly on how hard it is for anyone in the African-American community to come out given the “stigma” around homosexuality in the culture. Both Miles and Amber’s sisters reveal that in spite of the situation, they all still consider each other to be family.
Fizz is put in the hot seat over his previous dealings with Kamiah. He insists that he wasn’t actually referring to Kamiah as an appetizer when he made the infamous comment just before they parted ways, but rather using a metaphor to attempt to better illustrate the situation. He apologizes to Kamiah for the comment, saying that if he had a daughter, he wouldn’t want her referred to as such. Nikki chimes in and says she also felt it was disrespectful. When asked about the current status of their relationship, Nikki says she and Fizz are still dating, but breaks down in tears as she reveals that she was unable to fully invest in their relationship having lost her brother earlier in the year.
The conversation then turns to Kamiah moving her things into Fizz’s house while he was out of town and her comment about his sex not being up to par. Fizz says he allowed Kamiah to stay at his house while he was away due to a tense family situation that she was going through at home, but did not offer her a key as an indication of their relationship progressing beyond what it was. Kamiah agrees that there was a miscommunication about her time living at his home but doesn’t elaborate further. The segment ends with Fizz continuing to insist that Kamiah “knows his sex was good,” after she apologizes for venting to Jason Lee about their drama.
The final part of the reunion show focuses on Monience’s mother Marla accusing Moniece of not putting her son first in her life. After the cast watches a montage of scenes about the topic, Moniece attempts to explain her position but is repeatedly interrupted by Brandi, Shanda and Amber, who all continue forcefully “remind” Moniece that her child must come first at all times. To no surprise, Moniece becomes fed up with all of the women ganging up on her about her parenting skills and when she attempts to silence them, Brandi and Shanda begin to attack her.
Ohhh boy. Check back next Monday for part 2 of the LHHH season 2 reunion show to see how it all ended.
Rich Goes To Bat For Moniece, Fizz Apologizes To Kamiah & More: #LHHH Season 2 Reunion Recap – Part 1 was originally published on theurbandaily.com
#LHHReunion , Amber , break-ups , Fizz , hollywood , LHHH , love and hip hop , Milan , Miles , moniece , nikki , reality couples , reality show , reality TV , reunion , Rich Dollaz , Teairra Mari
20 Hot New Artist From Atlanta [GALLERY]
TeeJayx6 Explains Black Air Force Activity & Claims…
Listen To These Songs When Your Confidence Needs…
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Degree of Response to Homeopathic Potencies Correlates with Dipole Moment Size in Molecular Detectors
by Steven J. Cartwright
Homeopath Steven J. Cartwright originally discovered that potentized substances can be detected by solvatochromic dyes. In this paper he extends the list of substances that interact with potencies and can act as indicators of them.
Degree of Response to Homeopathic Potencies Correlates with Dipole Moment Size in Molecular Detectors: Implications for Understanding the Fundamental Nature of Serially Diluted and Succussed Solutions
DiagnOx Laboratory, Cherwell Innovation Centre, Upper Heyford, Oxon, United Kingdom
CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Homeopathy 2018; 107(01): 019-031
The Faculty of Homeopathy
Background The use of solvatochromic dyes to investigate homeopathic potencies holds out the promise of understanding the nature of serially succussed and diluted solutions at a fundamental physicochemical level. Recent studies have shown that a range of different dyes interact with potencies and, moreover, the nature of the interaction is beginning to allow certain specific characteristics of potencies to be delineated.
Aims and Methods The study reported in this article takes previous investigations further and aims to understand more about the nature of the interaction between potencies and solvatochromic dyes. To this end, the UV-visible spectra of a wide range of potential detectors of potencies have been examined using methodologies previously described.
Results Results presented demonstrate that solvatochromic dyes are a sub-group of a larger class of compounds capable of demonstrating interactions with potencies. In particular, amino acids containing an aromatic bridge also show marked optical changes in the presence of potencies. Several specific features of molecular detectors can now be shown to be necessary for significant interactions with homeopathic potencies. These include systems with a large dipole moment, electron delocalisation, polarizability and molecular rigidity.
Conclusions Analysis of the optical changes occurring on interaction with potencies suggests that in all cases potencies increase the polarity of molecular detectors to a degree that correlates with the size of the compound’s permanent or ground dipole moment. These results can be explained by inferring that potencies themselves have polarity. Possible candidates for the identity of potencies, based on these and previously reported results, are discussed.
solvatochromic dyes – aromatic bridged amino acids – molecular detectors – dipole moments – homeopathic potencies
Previous studies have demonstrated that solvatochromic dyes show significant changes in their UV-visible (US-vis) spectra under a range of conditions in the presence of homeopathic potencies.[1] [2] The approach taken in the current article has been to extend those investigations to include compounds that are not strictly solvatochromic but embody some crucial components of solvatochromic compounds in an attempt to further understand the molecular features necessary for dye–potency interaction. The methodology employed has been one in which a substantial number of aromatic compounds have been screened, the only requirements of the compounds tested being water solubility and an electron delocalised bridge between two polar groups. Surprisingly, it has been found that π-conjugated zwitterions respond to serially-diluted and succussed solutions. This discovery has revealed the existence of a large class of molecular detectors, which are in some ways superior to solvatochromic dyes for investigating potencies. For instance, π-conjugated zwitterions exhibit responses to potencies which, in one case, is the largest so far seen, and together with their relatively easy availability and potential for endless variations of structure, means specific aspects of the potency–dye interaction can be teased apart in some detail. As a consequence, several structural features necessary in order for compounds to be molecular detectors can now be delineated, and in turn several inferences can be made about the fundamental physicochemical nature of potencies.
Experimental Protocol
Experimental protocol is essentially as described previously.[1] [2] However, some minor improvements have been made and these are shown in [Fig. 1]. On obtaining potency and control solutions in 90% ethanol from the pharmacy, a 100-fold dilution was performed into reverse osmosis water (ROW) using standard amber moulded glass bottles from the same manufacturing batch. Exact material compatibility in terms of any leachates was established by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) at this stage. A further 100-fold dilution of each solution was then made into high density polyethylene (HDPE) bottles. These bottles were then stored separated by a minimum of at least 1.5 m.
Fig. 1 Experimental protocol employed in this study (see text and Materials and Methods for details). HDPE, high density polyethylene.
Assays involved taking 50 μL of each solution and adding these aliquots to 2.95 mL of pre-prepared dye solution. Both control–dye and potency–dye solutions were then placed in black film canisters as described previously.[2] Difference spectra were run at intervals up to a maximum of 20 days. A total dilution of (100 × 100 × 60), or 600,000-fold, therefore occurs between solutions obtained from the pharmacy and solutions used for assays. Furthermore, as control and potency solutions approached depletion, ROW was added to both HDPE containers to replenish stocks. Over the course of the current studies both solutions have been replenished several times, resulting in a further c.100-fold dilution of the potency solution without any diminution of its effectiveness.
Assays have also been performed in which samples from the preceding amber molded glass bottles have been used, and no difference has been observed from results obtained from taking samples from the following HDPE bottles ([Fig. 1]). This indicates that leachates from amber molded glass bottles have no effect on results. The protocol outlined in [Fig. 1] has, therefore, been used as a precaution rather than as a necessity.
Unless otherwise stated Glycerol 50M has been used throughout this study. This has allowed comparisons to be made between all dyes, both in this study and in previous studies. At infrequent intervals, different potencies of Glycerol and potencies of other homeopathic medicines have been tested on the molecular detectors described in this article to ensure the methodology is not somehow specific to Glycerol 50M.
6-amino-2-naphthoic acid (ANA), 4-aminobenzoic acid (ABA), 4′-amino-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-carboxylic acid (ABPA), methylene violet (Bernthsen) (MV), coumarin 343 (C343), β-cyclodextrin (β-CD), cucurbit[7]uril (CB7), citric acid/sodium citrate, sodium dihydrogen phosphate/disodium hydrogen phosphate, boric acid/sodium borate and sodium N-cyclohexyl-3-aminopropanesulfonate (CAPS) were obtained from Sigma Aldrich UK and were of the highest purity available.
5, 6-diamino-naphthalene-1, 3-disulfonic acid (DANDSA) was obtained from Molekula, UK.
4-pyridinium phenolate (4PP) was synthesised and provided by WuXi App Tec (Hong Kong) Ltd. Structure and purity were confirmed by NMR.
The provenances of Brooker’s merocyanine (BM), bis-dimethylaminofuchsone (BDF), phenol blue (PB), and 2, 6-dichloro-4-(2, 4, 6-triphenyl-pyridinium-1-yl)-phenolate (ET33) are as stated previously.[1] [2]
ROW was used throughout this study and had a resistivity of 15MΩcm (checked daily).
Disposable high purity UV-transparent cuvettes (Brand GmbH) with stoppers were used throughout and are described previously.[1] Disposable four-sided optically transparent fluorescence cuvettes (Brand GmbH) made of the same material as the UV cuvettes, with stoppers, were used to record fluorescence spectra.
Solution Storage
As in previous studies [1] [2] dye solutions were made and stored in HDPE bottles and allowed to equilibrate overnight before use. All dye solutions were stored in the dark as a precaution against light-induced degradation. This was deemed unnecessary but continued as a practice to ensure compatibility with previous studies.
Dyes were made up in buffers at concentrations sufficient to give an absorbance of between 0.5 and 1.5. Buffer solutions in which dye was dissolved were at a concentration of 20 mM throughout.
Homeopathic Potencies and Control Solutions
Glycerol 50M along with other potencies of glycerol were obtained from Helios Homeopathy Ltd, Tunbridge Wells, UK. All the results presented in this study were performed with Glycerol 50M.
Thirty microlitres of potency (in 90% ethanol) was diluted into 3.0 mL of ROW in an amber moulded glass bottle provided by the Homeopathic Supply Company Ltd, Bodham, UK. This ‘diluted’ aqueous potency was then further ‘diluted’ by transferring 30 μL into 3 mL of ROW in a 5 mL HDPE bottle. This final ‘HDPE’ potency solution was then used in assays ([Fig. 1]).
Control solutions were either un-medicated and un-succussed 90% ethanol obtained from Helios Homeopathy Ltd and diluted 100-fold as above into amber moulded glass bottles from the same batch as that used for potency dilutions, or control solutions consisted simply of ROW added to amber molded glass bottles from the same batch. As with potency solutions, a further 100-fold ‘dilution’ was performed into ROW in a 5 mL HDPE bottle, and this solution was used in assays ([Fig. 1]).
Final control and potency solutions in HDPE bottles were stored separated by a minimum of at least 1.5 m at room temperature in black plastic film canisters (Geo-Versand, GmbH, Germany).
Leachates from both potency and control bottles prior to dilution in HDPE bottles were analyzed by ICP-OES (Oxford-Analytical Ltd, Bicester, UK) and found to be at the same (<3μM) level for all elements tested (Ca, Mg, Si, K, Na, B, Fe). Dilution into ROW in HDPE bottles would then be expected to dilute those leachates to a < 0.03 μM level. A further 60-fold dilution occurs on addition of potency or controls to assay solutions.
UV-vis spectra were recorded on a Shimadzu UV-2600 double-beam spectrophotometer.
Fluorescence spectra were recorded on a Shimadzu RF-6000 spectrofluorophotometer. Buffers were prepared using a Hanna pH210 microprocessor pH meter.
Difference spectra were performed as follows. A total of 2.95 mL of buffered dye solution were pipetted into each of two Brand UV cuvettes with stoppers and the spectrophotometer set to zero across the wavelength range used for scanning (typically c.300–800 nm for solvatochromic dyes and 220/230–600 nm for aromatic bridged amino acids). Fifty microlitres of control solution was then added to the reference cuvette and 50 μL of potency solution added to the sample cuvette ([Fig. 1]). Cuvettes were inverted three times to mix and then scanned (t = 0). After the initial scan, both cuvettes were placed in separate black plastic film canisters (Geo-Versand, GmbH) to exclude all light and kept under these conditions between any subsequent scans. Scans were normally performed at t = 0 minutes, 10 minutes, 40 minutes, 100 minutes, c.200 minutes, c.6 hours, and c.12 hours after mixing. Subsequent scans were performed at intervals of days after mixing up to a maximum of 20 days.
Normal (non-difference) scans of dye solutions with potency or control solutions added were against ROW, which had been zeroed beforehand.
All assays were performed in 20 mM buffered solutions. Buffers used were citrate (pH 3–7), phosphate (pH 6–8), borate (pH 8–10), and CAPS (pH 10–11).
Fluorescence spectra were performed using Brand disposable four-sided optically transparent fluorescence cuvettes (Brand GmbH) made of the same material as Brand UV cuvettes. Separate fluorescence spectra were recorded of dye–control and dye–potency solutions transferred from assays in Brand UV cuvettes so spectra could be directly compared with UV-vis spectra at a set time.
Compounds Used in the Current Study
All of the compounds used in the current study are water soluble and this was one of the main criteria in selecting chromophoric reagents for their suitability. Structures of all compounds are given in [Fig. 2]. Six of the compounds— Methylene Violet (Bernthsen) (MV), Coumarin 343 (C343), Bis-dimethylaminofuchsone (BDF), 4-pyridinium phenolate (4PP), 2, 6-Dichloro-4-(2, 4, 6-triphenyl-pyridinium-1-yl)-phenolate (ET33) and Brooker’s merocyanine (BM) are solvatochromic (see Appendix for definition); the first three being positively solvatochromic and the last three negatively solvatochromic. The other four compounds shown are essentially non-solvatochromic: that is their transition dipole moments are minimal.[3] They are members of a class of compounds comprising amino acids with an aromatic bridge. There exists very little in the literature on this type of compound. What is available pertains to 4-aminobenzoic acid.[4] [5] [6] Aromatic bridged amino acids consist of amino and carboxylic or sulfonic acid groups attached at opposite ends of a delocalised core of electrons. As with solvatochromic dyes, an electron or electron density is free to move between the two ends of the molecule under the influence of an appropriate stimulus. Unlike solvatochromic dyes, however, solvent polarity has little effect on the relative stability of the compounds’ ground and exited electronic states, and light does not cause a spatial movement of electrons. In principle, proton transfer can also occur with certain aromatic bridged amino acids, and this feature along with the other properties of this class of compound will be discussed in relation to the results obtained with potencies.
Fig. 2 Structures of molecular detectors used in this study. From top left: Methylene violet (Bernthsen) (MV), coumarin 343 (C343), Brooker’s merocyanine (BM), 4-pyridinium phenolate (4PP), 2, 6-dichloro-4-(2, 4, 6-triphenyl-pyridinium-1-yl)-phenolate (ET33), Bis-dimethylaminofuchsone (BDF), 6-amino-2-naphthoic acid (ANA), 4-aminobenzoic acid (ABA), 4′-amino-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-carboxylic acid (ABPA), 5, 6-diaminonaphthalene-1,3-disulfonic acid (DANDSA).
The amino acids with an aromatic bridge used in this study include 6-amino-2-naphthoic acid (ANA), 4-aminobenzoic acid (ABA), 5,6-diamino-naphthalene-1,3-disulfonic acid (DANDSA) and 4-amino-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4′-carboxylic acid (ABPA). While all four compounds respond to potencies with significant changes in their UV-vis spectra, results with DANDSA are of particular interest, as they provide the largest and most unusual spectral changes so far seen with any compounds, and provide insights into the potency–dye interaction which complement and add to those seen with the six solvatochromic dyes MV, C343, BM, 4PP, ET33 and BDF.
N ≥ 5 for all spectra discussed below. Where spectra are shown, error bars have been omitted for clarity. [Table 1] provides pKa and dipole moment data for all the dyes tested along with their degree of response to Glycerol 50M and summarises the more detailed information given below.
Table 1 Ground or permanent dipole moments and transition dipole moments together with ionisation constants (pKa values) for compounds used in this study, with references
Abbreviations: ABA, 4-aminobenzoic acid; ABPA, 4′-amino-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-carboxylic acid; ANA, 6-amino-2-naphthoic acid; BDF, bis-dimethylaminofuchsone; BM, Brooker’s merocyanine; C343, coumarin C343; ET33, 2, 6-dichloro-4-(2, 4, 6-triphenyl-pyridinium-1-yl)-phenolate; DANDSA, 5, 6-diamino-naphthalene-1,3-disulfonic acid; MV, methylene violet (Bernthsen); 4PP, 4-pyridinium phenolate; PB, phenol blue.
a pKa values determined spectroscopically (this study).
b Dipole moment values estimated according to established principles.[16]
c Percentage change in dye spectra under the influence of potency is a combination of steps one, two and three (see text for explanation).
Assays at pH Values ≈ dye pKas
Methylene Violet (Bernthsen)
[Fig. 3] shows a typical series of difference spectra of MV ± potency at intervals up to 11 days (50 μM dye, 20 mM citrate buffer pH 4.0). What is striking is the size of the spectral changes, constituting c. 7% of the total absorbance of the dye (OD = 1.0 at 614 nm). As with previous studies[1] [2] the difference spectrum is slow to appear but is then relatively stable over long time periods. The decrease at 614 nm is consistent with potency promoted protonation and loss of monomer. MV is conformationally inflexible ([Fig. 2]) and this may be a factor along with its high dipole moment (≥18D[7]) in conferring a high degree of response to potencies. Fluorescence studies have confirmed that potency promotes MV aggregation (fluorescence spectra show a decrease in fluorescence intensity in the presence of potency).[7] [8]
Fig. 3 Difference spectrum of 50 μM MV in 20 mM citrate buffer pH 4.0 with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette. Spectra correspond to t = 0, t = 10 minutes, t = 100 minutes, t = 260 minutes, t = 4 days and t = 11 days after mixing (see text for details). MV, methylene violet (Bernthsen).
Coumarin 343
Coumarin 343 is a structural analogue of MV and shows spectral differences very similar to the latter dye but with a decrease at 427 nm ([Fig. 4]). The difference spectra shown are of 50 μM dye in 20 mM phosphate buffer pH 7.0 ± potency. The changes observed are 4 to 5% of the total absorbance of the dye (1.6 at 427 nm). The inclusion of C343 in this study is important because of its smaller dipole moment relative to that of MV, although like MV, it is structurally inflexible. Difference spectra again are slow to develop and fluorescence studies show that potency promotes C343 aggregation.
Fig. 4 Difference spectrum of 50 μM C343 in 20 mM phosphate buffer pH 7.0 with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette. Spectra correspond to t = 17 minutes, t = 150 minutes, t = 12 hours and t = 7 days after mixing (see text for details). C343, coumarin C343.
Brooker’s Merocyanine
[Fig. 5] shows difference spectra of 90 μM BM in 20 mM borate buffer pH 8.5 ± potency with 10 mM β-CD[9] present. Again large, slowly appearing, spectral changes are seen under the influence of potency, constituting finally some 8% of the total absorbance of BM at this pH (OD = 1.4 at 465 nm). Importantly, in the absence of β-CD, the spectral changes are considerably reduced and very variable. β-CD is a molecular encapsulator which has a two-fold effect. First, it prevents any aggregation of BM and second it rigidifies the dye molecule. Its Kassoc for BM is c.2 mM,[10] so BM is likely to be fully encapsulated at the concentration of β-CD used in the assays. The fact that difference spectra are so much larger and more stable with encapsulation suggests rigidification of BM improves its response to potency. BM is known to isomerise easily[11] and is, therefore, an intrinsically mobile molecule, which may preclude easy interaction with potency. The spectral changes seen in [Fig. 5] are consistent with potency-induced protonation of BM.
Fig. 5 Difference spectrum of 90 μM BM in 20 mM borate buffer pH 8.5 containing 10 mM β- cyclodextrin with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette. Spectra correspond to t = 0, t = 100 minutes, t = 200 minutes, t = 385 minutes, t = 12 hours and t = 14 days after mixing (see text for details). BM, Brooker’s merocyanine.
4-Pyridinium Phenolate
This negatively solvatochromic dye is the simplest example of the pyridinium phenolates, of which ET30 and ET33 have already been examined.[1] [Fig. 6] shows a series of difference spectra of 100 μM 4PP at pH 8.5 in 20 mM borate buffer ± potency over time. Changes are again slow to appear and constitute c.3% of the total absorbance of the dye (OD = 0.5 at 375 nm) at their maximum. As with MV and BM, the spectral changes seen are consistent with potency-induced protonation.[1] [12]
Fig. 6 Difference spectrum of 100 μM 4PP in 20 mM borate buffer pH 8.5 with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette. Spectra correspond to t = 0, t = 10 minutes, t = 40 minutes, t = 100 minutes, t = 12 hours and t = 2 days after mixing (see text for details). 4PP, 4-pyridinium phenolate.
6-Amino-2-Naphthoic Acid
Like DANDSA below, 6-Amino-2-Naphthoic Acid (ANA) is a π-conjugated amino acid and not solvatochromic. Nevertheless [Fig. 7] shows a series of spectra of 200 μM ANA in 20 mM citrate buffer pH 3.5 ± potency. The decreases at c.315 nm and 250 nm are consistent with slow protonation induced by potency. Spectral changes constitute c.3 to 4% of the total absorbance of ANA (OD = 0.8 at 315 nm).
Fig. 7 Difference spectrum of 200 μM ANA in 20 mM citrate buffer pH 3.5 with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette. Spectra correspond to t = 0, t = 10minutes, t = 40 minutes, t = 100 minutes, t = 200 minutes and t = 4 days after mixing (see text for details). ANA, 6-amino-2-naphthoic acid.
5,6-Diamino-Naphthalene-1,3-Disulfonic Acid
[Fig. 8] shows a series of spectra obtained of 100 μM DANDSA in 20 mM citrate buffer pH 4.0 ± potency. Initial spectra reveal decreases at 405 and 268 nm, with increases at 343 nm and 250 nm. These changes are consistent with potency-induced protonation. Over longer time periods, new difference peaks appear at 415, 393, and 298/305 nm, all associated with dye aggregation. This conclusion is confirmed by fluorescence spectroscopy where fluorescence intensity decreases in the presence of potency. The total changes in absorbance of DANDSA in the presence of potency amount to 8 to 10% of overall absorbance (OD = 0.2 at 415 nm), meaning this compound is the most sensitive reporter so far discovered.
Fig. 8 Difference spectrum of 70 μM DANDSA in 20 mM citrate buffer pH 4.0 with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette. Spectra correspond to t = 0, t = 100 minutes, t = 220 minutes, t = 7 days and t = 18 days after mixing (see text for details). DANDSA, 5, 6-diamino-naphthalene-1,3-disulfonic acid.
DANDSA demonstrates the first clear evidence that potency is initially acting to change the pKa value of a molecular reporter, which is then followed by changes in aggregation levels, rather than by acting directly on aggregation levels. These results are discussed below in relation to a proposed common mechanism of action of potencies on all molecular reporters so far examined.
4-Aminobenzoic Acid (ABA) is the smallest and simplest molecule examined for the effects of potency. Surprisingly perhaps, despite its size, it also demonstrates changes in its UV spectrum in the presence of potency with a decrease in absorbance at c. 292 nm in 20 mM citrate buffer pH 3.5. This change constitutes c.1% of the total absorbance of ABA and is consistent with potency-induced protonation. It is significant that ANA, a molecule that differs from ABA only in the length of its aromatic bridge ([Fig. 2]), and consequently its dipole moment, should respond more strongly than ABA. The importance of this structural difference between ANA and ABA in relation to their ability to respond to potencies is discussed below.
4′-Amino-[1, 1′-Biphenyl]-4-Carboxylic Acid
4′-Amino-[1, 1′-Biphenyl]-4-Carboxylic Acid (ABPA) is a structural analogue of ANA in which the naphthalene ring is replaced by a biphenyl electron delocalised bridge. Difference spectra, ± potency in 20 mM citrate buffer pH 4.2 show a decrease at c.305 nm and an increase at c.270 nm, consistent with potency-induced protonation. Overall absorbance changes constitute c.2% of total absorbance. This lower number compared with that found for ANA may reflect the conformational mobility of ABPA compared with ANA, an issue already mentioned in relation to BM, and discussed in more detail below.
The above results from eight different molecular reporters demonstrate that potencies interact with a range of structural forms to produce significant spectral changes. Several compounds, and particularly DANDSA, have indicated that there are, however, at least two steps involved in the production of these spectral changes. The first involves potency-induced protonation. As solutions are buffered and it is known that ordinary pH indicators show no response to potencies,[2] together with the slow appearance of spectral changes over hours, this suggests some kind of electron density shift occurs across the molecules resulting in altered pKa values.[13] [14] This conclusion has already been deduced from results obtained with BDF in a previous study.[2] The current study has provided further evidence that this indeed may be the case. If potencies are producing a pKa change in molecular detectors, then a preceding step involving some kind of electron density movement across the molecules may well be the primary form of the interaction between potencies and molecular detectors.
This possibility can be tested in the following way. If assays are performed at pH values well away from the pKa value of compounds, then protonation/deprotonation is not possible, and the putative step two is silenced. If molecular encapsulators such as β-CD[9] or cucurbiturils[15] are added to solutions to prevent any aggregation of compounds, then step three is also silenced. Any spectral changes in the presence of potencies are then likely to be attributable to an earlier, possibly primary, step.
The following results pertain to assays performed at pH values >> pKa values and in the presence of molecular encapsulators with dyes MV, BDF, BM, 4PP and ET33. It should be noted here that only solvatochromic dyes are capable of showing sufficient spectral changes due to spatial electron movement and so amino acids with an aromatic bridge cannot be tested for this step directly.
Assays at pH Values >> Dye pKas
Positively Solvatochromic Dyes MV and BDF
[Fig. 9] shows difference spectra (right) obtained with 50 μM MV in 20 mM borate buffer pH 9.0/10 mM β-CD ± potency at t = 100 and 220 minutes. A peak at 629 nm is evident. The λmax of a control solution of MV in the same β-CD/borate buffer is at 617 nm (left) and this is attributable to monomer, with a shoulder at c.574 nm to dimer. The new peak at 629 nm in the presence of potency can, therefore, be confidently assigned to a form of monomer. Positively solvatochromic dyes display bathochromic shifts in their spectra with increasing stabilisation of the excited (more charged) state ([Fig. 10]). It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that potency is stabilising something similar to the excited state of MV in which the opposite ends of the molecule are becoming more formally charged.
Fig. 9 Difference spectra of MV in 20 mM borate buffer pH 9.0 containing 10 mM β-cyclodextrin with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette. Spectra correspond to t = 100 minutes and t = 220 minutes after mixing. Maxima are at 629 nm (right-hand curves). Control solution of MV in the same β-cyclodextrin buffer (left-hand curve). Maximum is at 617 nm. See text for details. Spectra are not to scale. MV, methylene violet (Bernthsen). Fig. 10
Potencies are postulated to interact with and stabilise the ground (more polar) state of negatively solvatochromic dyes (left) and the excited (more polar) state of positively solvatochromic dyes (right).
A comparable result to that with MV is seen with BDF in 20mM borate buffer pH 9.0/10 mM β-CD ± potency. In this case, a new peak appears at 583 nm compared with the λmax of a control solution of BDF in the same buffer which is at 567 nm. Again, potency seems to be stabilising a more polar form of BDF. This can only occur if an electron density movement has occurred toward the carbonyl moiety of BDF, as previously suggested may be happening.[2]
Negatively Solvatochromic Dyes BM, 4PP and ET33
[Fig. 11] shows a difference spectrum of 50 μM ET33 in 20 mM borate buffer pH 8.5/10 mM β-CD ± potency. While the differences are small, they nevertheless show a hypsochromic shift in the presence of potency with a decrease at 470 nm and an increase at 373 nm. The λmax of a control solution of ET33 in the same buffer is at 407 nm. In contrast to results seen with the positively solvatochromic dyes BDF and MV, potency is inducing a hypsochromic shift in the spectrum of ET33. Negatively solvatochromic dyes display hypsochromic shifts in their spectra with increasing stabilisation of their ground (more charged) state ([Fig. 10]). It seems, therefore, that in the presence of potency the ground state of ET33, which is already charged, is having its polarity increased even further.
Fig. 11 Difference spectrum of ET33 in 20 mM borate buffer pH 8.5 containing 10 mM β- cyclodextrin with control added to the reference cuvette and Glycerol 50 M added to the sample cuvette showing a decrease at 470 nm and an increase at 373 nm (bottom curve). Spectrum corresponds to t = 210 minutes after mixing (see text for details). Control spectrum of ET33 in the same buffer containing 10 mM β-cyclodextrin shows an absorbance maximum at c.407 nm (top curve). Spectra are not to scale. ET33, 2, 6-dichloro-4-(2, 4, 6-triphenyl-pyridinium-1-yl)-phenolate.
Similar results have been obtained with 4PP and BM. [Table 2] shows a summary of the results obtained with all five dyes. It would appear from these results that potency is preferentially interacting with, and intensifying, the charged forms of both positively and negatively solvatochromic dyes.
The effect of potency on dye spectra in the presence of β-cyclodextrin and at pH values >> the pKa of dyes. Left-hand column gives dye maxima in control solutions of buffer/β-cyclodextrin; the right-hand column shows the effect of potency
Dye β-CD[c]/control β-CD[c]/potency
BDF[a]
pH 9.0 λmax 567 nm New peak at c.583 nm
MV[a]
BM[b]
pH 11.0 λmax 456.5 nm Decrease at c.495 nm
Increase at c.390 nm
4PP[b]
pH 11.0 λmax 367 nm Decrease at c.400 nm
Increase at c. 330 nm
ET33[b]
pH 8.5 λmax 406.5 nm Decrease at c.470 nm
Abbreviations: β-CD, β-cyclodextrin; BDF, bis-dimethylaminofuchsone; BM, Brooker’s merocyanine; ET33, 2, 6-dichloro-4-(2, 4, 6-triphenyl-pyridinium-1-yl)-phenolate; MV, methylene violet (Bernthsen); 4PP, 4-pyridinium phenolate.
a Positively solvatochromic dyes.
b Negatively solvatochromic dyes.
c β-cyclodextrin concentration 10 mM/buffer concentration 20 mM (pH 8.5 and 9.0 borate; pH 11.0 CAPS).
The current study has considerably extended the range of compounds that respond to homeopathic potencies. Solvatochromic dyes now seem to be a sub-group of a larger class of compounds known as π-conjugated dipoles demonstrating interactions with serially diluted and succussed solutions. These include amino acids with an aromatic bridge (π-conjugated zwitterions). The presence of a large dipole moment, electron delocalisation, polarizability (the ability for electron density to shift across the molecule under an appropriate stimulus) and molecular rigidity seem to be general requirements in compounds for significant interactions with potencies to take place. Two particular compounds of this wider class which are readily available and provide significant spectroscopic responses to potencies are ANA and DANDSA, the latter demonstrating changes in its spectra of 8 to 10% over time.
[Fig. 12] shows a plot of percentage change in dye spectra versus dye dipole moment. Some uncertainty exists over the ground or permanent dipole moment size for several compounds used in this study as their values are not available in the literature, but reasonable estimates can be made according to established principles.[16] Despite these minor uncertainties in dipole moment size, the general trend is clear. The larger the size of the dipole moment of a compound, the larger the response to potencies appears to be. PB, examined previously,[1] has the smallest ground dipole moment and produces the smallest response. Conversely MV, BM, and DANDSA have the largest dipole moments and produce the largest responses. In addition, comparing ABA with ANA, where the only difference is the distance between charged moieties, and hence dipole moment, a threefold increase in response is seen.
Fig. 12 Plot of percentage change in dye spectra versus dye ground or permanent dipole moment for solvatochromic compounds (upper plot) and non-solvatochromic compounds (lower plot) used in this study. 4ABA, 4-Aminobenzoic acid; ABPA, 4′-amino-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-carboxylic acid; ANA, 6-amino-2-naphthoic acid; β-CD, β-cyclodextrin; BDF, bis-dimethylaminofuchsone; BM, Brooker’s merocyanine; C343, Coumarin 343; DANDSA, 5, 6-diamino-naphthalene-1,3-disulfonic acid; MV, methylene violet (Bernthsen); PB, phenol blue; 4PP, 4-pyridinium phenolate.
The slow appearance of spectra ([Figs. 3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]) and the correlation between detector polarity and degree of response suggests some kind of synergistic process or resonant interaction taking place between detector and potency in which the polarity of both are gradually strengthened. The success and magnitude of such an interaction may well depend upon several factors (see below).
Several other insights emerge from [Fig. 12]. It is clear that in contrast to the ground or permanent dipole moment, the transition dipole moment (the difference between ground and excited states) is not an indicator of response to potencies and there does not appear to be any correlation. For instance, amino acids with an aromatic bridge such as ANA and DANDSA have negligible transition dipole moments, yet demonstrate responses. Pyridinium phenolates all have very large transition dipole moments of c. 20–22D[3] [17] yet display modest spectral changes ([Table 1]).
Dipole moment size may not be the only determinant underlying response to potencies, however. MV is a conformationally rigid molecule compared with, for example, 4PP, which has a similar dipole moment, and yet there exists a significant difference in the magnitude of their responses to potency. Furthermore, BM is conformationally mobile and produces modest and very variable responses, and yet on encapsulation, which renders it more rigid, response increases considerably. These results may indicate that molecular rigidity is required for potencies to effectively engage with molecular detectors. Additional evidence for this proposition comes from results with C343 where response to potencies is greater than for 4PP and ET33 ([Table 1]).
Using a range of compounds, both solvatochromic and non-solvatochromic, has not only demonstrated that specific molecular features (large dipole moment, electron delocalisation, polarizability and molecular rigidity) appear to be important for interactions with potencies to take place, but it has also revealed that several steps are involved in the production of spectral changes indicative of these interactions.
Results pooled from all 10 compounds reported in this study indicate that there are three steps in the interaction between potencies and molecular detectors that produce the spectral changes seen. While not all steps are separately observable in all compounds so far tested, it seems likely that these steps are a common feature given the number of overlaps between results. [Table 3] summarises results for all compounds investigated and reported herein.
Table 3 Steps involved in the interaction of potencies with compounds used in this study. Step 1 requires solvatochromic dyes to be seen; pHs >>pKa (or pHs < < pKa) silence step 2; encapsulation silences step 3
Abbreviations: ABA, 4-aminobenzoic acid; ABPA, 4′-amino-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-carboxylic acid; ANA, 6-amino-2-naphthoic acid; β -CD, β -cyclodextrin; BDF, bis-dimethylaminofuchsone; BM, Brooker’s merocyanine; ET33, 2, 6-dichloro-4-(2, 4, 6-triphenyl-pyridinium-1-yl)-phenolate; DANDSA, 5, 6-diamino-naphthalene-1,3-disulfonic acid; MV, methylene violet (Bernthsen); 4PP, 4-pyridinium phenolate.
a Not investigated.
b BDF pKa1 represents BDF + H+↔ BDF-H+ and pKa2 BDF + OH–↔ BDF-OH–.
c Relative aggregation levels observable by resonant light scattering (this study).
d Relative aggregation levels observable by fluorescence spectroscopy (this study).
e Relative aggregation levels observable by UV-vis and fluorescence spectroscopy (this study, see text for more details).
Step one appears to involve a primary interaction between potency and molecular detector, resulting in an electron density shift. This step is observable with positively and negatively solvatochromic dyes. Both are made more polar—the former having their excited (charged) state stabilised, and the latter having their ground (charged) state stabilised.
Step two follows on from step one and is a consequence of it. Any electron density shift in a delocalised system will cause a change in one or more of any ionisable groups attached to that system.[14] For all compounds assayed, changes in pKa values are seen. For amino acids with an aromatic bridge, this is the first observable step as these compounds do not have the spectral characteristics of solvatochromic dyes and hence step one is silent. While not solvatochromic, aromatic bridged amino acids, which are zwitterionic,[13] produce significant interactions with potencies. These results taken together suggest that potencies preferentially interact with polar species, rendering them more polar. Indeed, the more polar the detector, the more effect potency seems to have ([Fig. 12]).
Step three results from step two. Any change in pKa values and hence degree of protonation will affect aggregation levels, as the forces driving aggregation include ionic as well as hydrophobic interactions and hydrogen bonding.[18] Step three is most clearly separately observable with DANDSA, but is also apparent with compounds such as BDF and MV.
A final observation may have some relevance to the discussion that follows. A previous study has found that sustained light exposure inhibits the BDF–potency interaction, and continuous irradiation results in no observable spectroscopic difference between dye–control and dye–potency solutions.[2] This observation has now been extended to include 4PP, ET33, BM, MV and ANA. In all cases, no effect of potency is seen with any of the above compounds on continuous irradiation (usually at the absorbance maximum of the dye). Short exposure to light (i.e., during assay in the spectrophotometer) has little effect, so continuous exposure is necessary to fully inhibit the dye–potency interaction. In addition, any loss of spectroscopic differences from medium term light exposure to dye–potency solutions can be reversed by placing solutions in the dark.
Consequently, to avoid complications created by light exposure, and as described in the Materials and Methods, all dye–potency and dye–control incubations are performed in the dark and assays performed at intervals, with incubations being returned to black film canisters in between assays.
Curiously, however, irradiation of potency solutions themselves appears to have no deleterious effect, at least over the short term. In addition, all aromatic bridged amino acid–potency solutions are scanned down to at least 230 nm, and often 220 nm, when assayed. This is well into the UV region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and yet no obvious loss of potency strength has been observed. It may be that potencies are far more robust than previously thought and that any UV-induced inactivation is slow and requires multiple exposures.
Why potency solutions themselves appear to be immune to light exposure and yet dye–potency interactions are sensitive remains unclear at this stage. It is likely, however, to be saying something fundamental about the physico-chemical nature of potencies.
Returning to dipole moment size and degree of response in relation to the putative step one above, it would seem that the larger the dipole moment of molecular detectors, the larger the response to potencies. This implies that potencies require polarity to interact, and on interaction increase the polarity of detectors proportionately. This in turn suggests potencies themselves must have polarity to result in this kind of interaction, as has been put forward previously.[2] Any proposal as to the possible physico-chemical nature of potencies must, therefore, include polarity in the proposal.
Several well-known facts about potencies are perhaps worth reconsidering at this point.
The first is that potency solutions are prepared and stored as water–alcohol mixtures, often with the proportion of alcohol present as high as 90%.
Second, homeopathic potencies are dispensed most usually in the form of tablets. Both of these facts argue against water as being the source of potencies, but allow for the possibility that water, alcohol, and lactose may be carriers.
Third, potencies can be administered by olfaction. Indeed, Hahnemann and many of his colleagues and followers used this method.[19]
Finally, both trituration and succussion have a feature in common, and that is friction. Both grinding and vigorous shaking are forms of friction, or the action of one surface against another.
Combining the above observations–namely, that potencies have polarity, potencies are created by friction, potencies may be administered by olfaction, and water, alcohol, or lactose are unlikely to be the source of potencies (but may be carriers)–it is difficult to avoid the possibility that potencies might be some form of non-thermal plasma,[20] however improbable that may seem. Non-thermal plasmas are produced by friction. Indeed, both triboplasma (plasma produced by grinding)[21] and cavitation plasma (through violent shaking of solutions and bubble implosion) are well-documented phenomena.[22] Plasmas are composed of free ions and as such become highly polarised under the influence of electrical and magnetic fields.[20] If such plasmas were stable, they could be administered by olfaction. That plasmas emit light may also be relevant to the observation that some curious relationship exists between potency action and the necessity to keep light excluded from dye–potency solutions.
The improbability of the suggestion that potencies may be non-thermal plasmas carried by polar vehicles, such as water, alcohol and lactose, lies however in the transitory nature of, and the high levels of energy required to sustain plasmas for any length of time.[20] Nevertheless, there have been several proposals over the years, including recently,[23] that potencies and plasmas share much in common and that succussion does, momentarily, produce plasma. Clearly more would need to be done to strengthen or discount the possibility that potencies may be some form of non-thermal plasma.
The present study has demonstrated that a wide range of compounds under the general category of π-conjugated dipoles respond to homeopathic potencies. These include solvatochromic dyes as well as amino acids with an aromatic bridge (π-conjugated zwitterions), which carry formal charges at either end of their delocalised systems. This greatly extends the number of molecular detectors available and has provided valuable insights into the fundamental nature of potencies. Solvatochromic dyes now appear to be a sub-set of a much wider group of compounds sensitive to serially succussed and diluted solutions. The necessary requirements for sensitivity to potencies appear to be electron delocalised systems that have a large permanent or ground dipole moment, together with the ability of the system to be polarised, meaning their electron density is free to move spatially across the molecule under the influence of appropriate stimuli. The larger the permanent or ground dipole moment of such compounds, the more they are polarised in the presence of potencies. In addition, molecular rigidity appears to be an important structural component of molecular detectors and improves responsiveness further.
Amino acids with an aromatic bridge demonstrate significant responses to potencies, and results with these compounds, particularly DANDSA, have confirmed and extended those reported previously with solvatochromic dyes. The large dipole moments and molecular rigidity of these π-conjugated zwitterions appear to be responsible for their responses to potencies.
Using a combination of extensive screening of potential molecular detectors of different structures, molecular encapsulation with β-CD and assaying at pH values both near pKas of compounds, as well as at pH values far removed from their pKa values, has revealed that the generation of difference spectra proceeds in three steps. The first step appears to involve the primary interaction of potency and molecular detector, producing a shift in electron density across the molecule. This step can be detected using solvatochromic dyes, which are encapsulated with β-CD and assayed ± potency at pH values well away from the pKa value of the dye. Positively solvatochromic dyes exhibit a bathochromic shift in their spectra, indicating stabilisation of the dyes’ excited (and more polar) state, while negatively solvatochromic dyes exhibit a hypsochromic shift in their spectra, indicating stabilisation of the dyes’ ground (and more polar) state.
The second step can be detected in all compounds assayed at pH values ≈ pKa values and is the result of the first step. Electron density shift in step one results in a change in pKa values and protonation levels, which produce spectroscopic changes characteristic of each compound.
The third step can be most clearly seen with the molecular detector DANDSA owing to the very different spectra of aggregated and disaggregated material, and where a change in protonation levels leads much more slowly to enhanced aggregation of the compound in the presence of potency. The third step can also be discerned with MV and BDF, using a combination of UV-vis and fluorescence spectroscopy ([Table 3]).
Finally, it has been proposed that the possibility that potencies are some form of non-thermal plasma should at least be entertained, despite the obvious objections that such a proposal raises. The apparent polarity of potencies, their generation through friction, their storage in ethanol/water mixtures and on lactose, together with the observation that they can have their clinical effect through olfaction, argues against any kind of standard pharmaceutical formulation and points more towards an electromagnetic identity for potencies. The observation that dye–potency interactions are inhibited by light only further emphasises this possibility.
Non-thermal plasma: A partially ionised gas at room temperature in which electrons are free and not bound to any atom or molecule. Plasmas exhibit many interesting properties including sensitivity to, and the generation of, electromagnetic fields, collective behaviours, dissipative structures, coherence and self-organisation. Plasmas also have electron oscillation frequencies.
π-conjugated dipole: A molecule in which there is a higher electron density at one end than the other and where both ends are connected by an electron bridge of delocalised or free electrons. A π-conjugated zwitterion is where the electron density disparity between each end of the molecule is such as to have become formal positive and negative charges. Electron density is free to move along the length of π-conjugated dipoles under the influence of appropriate stimuli, such as electromagnetic fields.
Solvatochromism: The ability of a chromophoric compound to change colour with a change in solvent polarity. This is due to a difference in the dipole moment between the ground and excited states of the chromophore and involves a spatial movement of electron density along the length of the molecule under the action of an appropriate stimulus such as light. Solvatochromic compounds are π-conjugated dipoles and as such are also sensitive to the presence of electromagnetic fields.
No source of funding had any influence on the design, analysis, interpretation or outcome of the research contained within this manuscript, nor on the writing of the manuscript.
Funding for this work is gratefully acknowledged from The Homeopathy Research Institute, UK; Standard Homeopathic Company/Hylands, USA and The Tanner Trust, UK.
1 Cartwright SJ. Solvatochromic dyes detect the presence of homeopathic potencies. Homeopathy 2016; 105: 55-65
2 Cartwright SJ. Interaction of homeopathic potencies with the water soluble solvatochromic dye bis-dimethylaminofuchsone. Part 1: pH studies. Homeopathy 2017; 106: 37-46
3 Reichardt C, Welton T. Solvent effects on the absorption spectra of organic compounds. In Solvents and Solvent Effects in Organic Chemistry. 4th ed. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH; 2011: 365-367
4 Thayer MP, McGuire C, Stennett EM. , et al. pH dependent spectral properties of para-aminobenzoic acid and its derivatives. Spectrochim Acta A Mol Biomol Spectrosc 2011; 84: 227-232
5 Halpern A, Ramachadran BR. The photophysics of ρ-aminobenzoic acid. Photochemistry and Photobiology 1995; 62: 686-691
6 Gainer A, Stevens JS, Suljoti E. , et al. The structure of ρ-aminobenzoic acid in water: studies combining UV-vis, NEXAFS and RIXS spectroscopies. 16th International Conference on X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS16); Journal of physics conference series 2016; 712: 1-4
7 Jara GE, Solis CA, Gspooner NS. , et al. An experimental and TD-DFT theoretical study on the photophysical properties of methylene violet (Bernthsen). Dyes and Pigments 2015; 112: 341-351
8 Ronzani F, Trivella A, Bordat P. , et al. Revisiting the photophysics and photochemistry of methylene violet (MV). J Photochem Photobiol Chem 2014; 284: 8-17
9 Davis F, Higson S. Cyclodextrins. In Macrocycles Construction, Chemistry and Nanotechnology Applications. New York, NY: Wiley; 2011: 190-244
10 Holt JS, Campitella A, Rich A, Young JL. Spectroscopic characterization of the binding and isomerization cycle of merocyanine with α-, β-, and γ-cyclodextrins. J Incl Phenom Macrocycl Chem 2008; 61: 251-258
11 Steiner U, Abdel-Kader MH, Fischer P, Kramer HEA. Photochemical cis/trans isomerisation of a stilbazolium betaine. A protolytic/photochemical reaction cycle. J Am Chem Soc 1978; 10: 3190-3197
12 Gonzalez D, Neilands O, Rezende MC. The solvatochromic behaviour of 2- and 4-pyridiniophenoxides. J Chem Soc, Perkin Trans 2 1999; 4: 713-717
13 Albert A, Sergeant EP. Zwitterions (Dipolar Ions). In The Determination of Ionization Constants. London: Chapman and Hall; 1971: 76-81
14 Perrin DD, Dempsey B, Serjeant EP. pKa Prediction for Organic Acids and Bases. London: Chapman and Hall; 1981
15 Davis F, Higson S. Cucurbiturils. In Macrocycles: Construction, Chemistry and Nanotechnology Applications. New York, NY: Wiley; 2011: 325-368
16 Minkin VI, Osipov OA, Zhdanov YA. Dipole Moments in Organic Chemistry. New York, NY: Springer; 1970
17 Niewodniczański W, Bartkowiak W. Theoretical study of geometrical and nonlinear optical properties of pyridinium N-phenolate betaine dyes. J Mol Model 2007; 13: 793-800
18 Wyn-Jones J, Gormally J. Aggregation Processes in Solution (Studies in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry 26). Amsterdam: Elsevier; 1983
19 Hahnemann S. Organon of Medicine. 5th and 6th eds
20 Meichsner J, Schmidt M, Schneider R, Wagner HE. Nonthermal Plasma: Chemistry and Physics. Boca Raton: CRC Press; 2013
21 Nakayama K. Triboemission, triboplasma generation, and tribochemistry. In: Wang QJ, Chung YW. , eds. Encyclopedia of Tribology. New York, NY: Springer; 2013: 3750-3760
22 Nikitenk SI. Plasma formation during acoustic cavitation: toward a new paradigm for sonochemistry. Adv Phys Chem 2014; 2014: 173878 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/173878
23 Hibou F. Could the study of cavitation luminescence be useful in high dilution research?. Homeopathy 2017; 106: 181-190
Steven J. Cartwright, PhD
DiagnOx Laboratory, Cherwell Innovation Centre
Upper Heyford, Oxon, OX25 5HD
Chemical action or chemical/molecular bonding takes place among alcohol/lactose and substances used for making homeopathic remedy Chemical action or chemical/molecular bonding takes place among alcohol/lactose and substances used for making homeopathic remedy ...
Solvatochromic Dyes Detect the Presence of Homeopathic Potencies In this groundbreaking study, the author reports that Solvatochromic dyes, probably by virtue of oscillating dipoles, have the ability to change color in the presence of potentized homeopathic remedies. Thus, they provide a simple and versatile method for the detection of homeopathic potencies. ...
The Dynamic Philosophy -Galvanic Response to High Potencies The author responds to Dr. Hathaway and some other homeopaths who were skeptical of the higher potencies. He offers a letter from Dr. Bernhardt Fincke (inventor of the Fincke Potentizer) in which Dr. Fincke shares his research into high potencies using galvanic skin response. This...
Higher potencies vs. Lower Potencies in Homeopathy Higher potencies vs. Lower Potencies in Homeopathy...
Steven J. Cartwright
My professional background is in molecular biology with a PhD from Edinburgh University, followed by fellowships and positions in medical research at the Universities of California, Santa Cruz and Oxford. When I came across homeopathy in 1984 I realised instinctively that not only was this an important therapy, but an understanding of its underlying mode of action would have implications far beyond homeopathy itself.
Consequently I trained at the College of Homeopathy in London and the School of Homeopathy in Devon, leaving mainstream research and setting up in practice at the Summertown Clinic in Oxford in 1988, and gaining registration with the Society of Homeopaths the following year. Since 2009 I have been carrying out experimental work on homeopathic medicines at the Cherwell Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire.
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Harold’s causing a stir
by Sabrina Hornung | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) | Beer Snob | February 6th, 2019
The 1,290 square-foot garage that was once Main Avenue Auto has generated a lot of buzz for good reason. Harold’s on Main is Moorhead’s newest watering hole and the attention is all in the details. With its dark wood paneling, green vinyl booths, decadent wallpaper and red-votive-candle-lined horseshoe-shaped bar. It’s aesthetically reminiscent of a cozy mid century lounge or supper club.
Plus with their spacious and ultra stylish bathrooms we predict that they may become Fargo-Moorhead’s number one selfie spot with their luxe wallpaper and gold-toned sculptural swan-shaped faucets.
One thing patrons may notice is the lack of televisions in the space; there is a digital projector on hand for special occasions. “We don’t plan on using it all that often though. We may do big games here or there, maybe the Oscar’s and stuff like that. This is more about atmosphere, music and hanging out with friends,” bar manager Aaron Hanson said. Hanson is a veteran of the FM bar scene. You may recognize him from behind the bar at Monte’s or the HoDo.
When putting Harold’s cocktail menu together Hanson wanted it to cover both ends of the bar spectrum and include beautifully handcrafted cocktails as well as three dollar Hamm’s beers. The cocktails are named after the bar’s owners. For example, “Papa Pancho” is named after Rob Pope, “Cozen’s friend” after Eric Odness, “The Har Mar” named after Shaun Tillman and “The Dirty Preston” named after Preston Olson, etc.
Harold’s was named after owner Eric Odness’s grandfather Harold, who was a local Hamm’s delivery driver. His work shirt from which the bar’s logo was derived hangs proudly on the wall.
Along with the closeness of good company, music is a distinct part of the bar’s identity, considering the owners’ musical roots: Odness (Ageist, Primitive Weapons, The Wanted), Rob Pope (Spoon, The Get Up Kids), Sean Tillman (Har Mar Superstar), Frank Bevan (Freedom Fighters), and Preston Olson (Dirty Preston). There won’t be live music within the space nor a jukebox, though they do take pride in their killer playlists.
Rob Pope and Eric Odness have known each other for years; in fact, they co-own two bars in Brooklyn -- Goldie’s and Lake Street. Odness is originally from Moorhead and wanted to open a bar in his hometown for years. Though based in New York, he will be overseeing operations remotely.
Fargo-Moorhead piqued Rob Pope’s interest shortly after Spoon played at the Fargo Theatre a few years back. Odness elaborated, “He (Pope) texted me the next day, like ‘Oh my god dude, we had so much fun in Fargo last night. I love that place. We should open a bar there!’ ” Odness went on to say, “Someone I already opened a bar with suggesting it kind of gave me a little turbo-boost. I’ve wanted to do it forever but if somebody else backs me...yeah, let’s go for it.”
Odness gained a foothold in the music and bar world during the time he spent in Minneapolis, bartending and booking shows at the Dinkytowner. Around this time he met Sean Tillman through his childhood friend and now business partner Preston Olson. Eventually he and Tillman lived in New York at the same time and Odness played bass for Har Mar.
Olson is a Moorhead native who currently lives in New Jersey. When asked how he felt about opening a bar in his hometown he said, “So happy to open a bar with these guys, some my oldest friends from childhood, most of them I met right here in Moorhead and just a few blocks from my earliest memories. Being a toddler and sneaking free donut holes at Hornbachers. Riding my BMX bike to Save A Buck, a tiny gas station/arcade. Blizzards at Dairy Queen, high school senior photos at Haney’s. Then later seeing amazing bands at Ralphs. All of it along Main Avenue in Moorhead. Now, there’s Harold’s On Main. We want to give back to our hometown that gave us so much.”
There’s a lot of talk about Harold’s filling in the social gap that Ralph’s Corner left behind in the Moorhead bar scene when it closed in 2005. We couldn’t help but ask Odness why Ralph’s left such an impression on him. “For me, it was my first bar, everyone has a lingering love for the first bar they frequented in their younger years. It was kind of a mecca for awesome music. Graphic designers and all kind of artistic oddballs hung out there. You didn’t necessarily feel welcome downtown back then. There were just a lot of sports bars where we weirdos didn’t fit in that well. Everyone was welcome at Ralph’s. It was pretty sweet.”
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‘2019 second hottest year on record’: EU’s climate monitoring service
Abhimanyu Chakravorty
The Indian Express 8 January 2020
As per the data released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), worldwide temperatures last year were second only to 2016. (Representative image)
2019 was the second hottest year on record and ended the hottest decade in history, the European Union's climate monitoring service announced Wednesday. As per the data released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), worldwide temperatures last year were second only to 2016, in which temperatures were boosted 0.12 degrees Celsius by an exceptionally strong El Nino natural weather event.
The data suggested that the average temperature in 2019 was only a few hundredths of a degree below the 2016 level. The last five years have been the hottest on record, and the period of 2010-2019 was the hottest decade since records began, C3S said.
Globally temperatures in 2019 were 0.6 Celsius warmer than the 1981-2010 average. Earth's temperature over the last five years was 1.1C-1.2C warmer than pre-industrial times. Last year was Europe's hottest ever.
Head of C3S Carlo Buontempo said that 2019 has been another exceptionally warm year, in fact, the second warmest globally in our dataset, with many of the individual months breaking records.
2019 was just 0.04C cooler than 2016, which saw temperatures boosted by a once-in-a-century strength El Nino. C3S also said that atmospheric carbon concentrations continued to rise in 2019, reaching their highest levels on record.
Last year, the United Nations had said that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions needed to come down 7.6 per cent each year to 2030 in order to limit temperature rises to 1.5C. In fact, the latest United Nations Emissions Gap Report 2019 had also presented unfavourable climate news: There’s a yawning gap between ‘what countries have committed and what they actually require to do to limit greenhouse gas targets’. In essence, the emissions report says that greenhouse gases (GHGs) rose over 1.5 per cent a year over the last decade.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has also warned that going beyond 1.5 degrees celsius means the “bringing of eve wider-ranging and more destructive climate impacts” including storm and heatwaves.
2020, too, started on a sombre note as it witnessed climate-related disasters such as the fires pulverising Australia and massive flooding killing scores of people in Indonesia.
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Restrictions lifted from most parts of Kashmir, private vehicles on roads in Srinagar
Free Press Journal 11 September 2019
Srinagar: Restrictions were lifted from most parts of Kashmir on Wednesday and some areas in Srinagar city witnessed an increased presence of private transport leading to traffic jams but schools remained closed and public transport was off the roads, officials said.
The city witnessed increased movement of private vehicles on Wednesday leading to traffic jams at several places on the Karan Nagar-Batamaloo-Lal Chowk-Dalgate axis, the officials said.
They said few auto rickshaws and inter-district cabs were also seen plying in some areas of the city. The officials said restrictions have been lifted from most areas of the valley, but security forces continued to be deployed to maintain law and order.
The restrictions were re-imposed in parts of the valley on Tuesday to prevent any procession in the city and elsewhere in the valley on the tenth day of Muharram. The curbs on the movement of people in some parts of the valley are imposed every year on the eight and the tenth day of Muharram to prevent any processions.
Restrictions were first imposed across the Kashmir on 5 August when the Centre announced its decision to abrogate Article 370 of the Constitution and bifurcate the state into two Union territories. The restrictions were lifted in phases from many parts of the valley as the situation improved with passage of time.
However, the authorities have been imposing restrictions in vulnerable areas of the valley every Friday, apprehending that vested interests might exploit the large gatherings at big mosques and shrines to fuel protests.
Friday prayers have not been allowed at any of the major mosques or shrines in the valley for the past one month now. Meanwhile, normal life remained severely affected in Kashmir due to shutdown which entered 38th day on Wednesday.
Markets and other business establishments remained closed, while public transport was off the roads across the valley, the officials said. The efforts of the state government to open schools have not borne any fruit as parents continued to keep children at home due to apprehensions about their safety.
Most of the top-level and second rung separatist politicians have been taken into custody while mainstream leaders including three former chief ministers - Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti - have also been either detained or placed under house arrest.
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India Newzstreet Media
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Manipulation of the potassium channel Kv1.1 and its effect on neuronal excitability in rat sensory neurons
Xuan Chi Xian, Grant Nicol
Potassium channels play a critical role in regulating many aspects of action potential (AP) firing. To establish the contribution of the voltage-dependent potassium channel Kv1.1 in regulating excitability, we used the selective blocker dendrotoxin-K (DTX-K) and small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeted to Kv1.1 to determine their effects on AP firing in small-diameter capsaicin-sensitive sensory neurons. A 5-min exposure to 10 nM DTX-K suppressed the total potassium current (IK) measured at +40 mV by about 33%. DTX-K produced a twofold increase in the number of APs evoked by a ramp of depolarizing current. Associated with increased firing was a decrease in firing threshold and rheobase. DTX-K did not alter the resting membrane potential or the AP duration. A 48-h treatment with siRNA targeted to Kv1.1 reduced the expression of this channel protein by about 60% as measured in Western blots. After treatment with siRNA, IK was no longer sensitive to DTX-K, indicating a loss of functional protein. Similarly, after siRNA treatment exposure to DTX-K had no effect on the number of evoked APs, firing threshold, or rheobase. However, after siRNA treatment, the firing threshold had values similar to those obtained after acute exposure to DTX-K, suggesting that the loss of Kv1.1 plays a critical role in setting this parameter of excitability. These results demonstrate that Kv1.1 plays an important role in limiting AP firing and that siRNA may be a useful approach to establish the role of specific ion channels in the absence of selective antagonists.
Journal of Neurophysiology
https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00437.2007
Kv1.1 Potassium Channel
Sensory Receptor Cells
Small Interfering RNA
Potassium Channels
dendrotoxin K
Xian, X. C., & Nicol, G. (2007). Manipulation of the potassium channel Kv1.1 and its effect on neuronal excitability in rat sensory neurons. Journal of Neurophysiology, 98(5), 2683-2692. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00437.2007
Manipulation of the potassium channel Kv1.1 and its effect on neuronal excitability in rat sensory neurons. / Xian, Xuan Chi; Nicol, Grant.
In: Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 98, No. 5, 11.2007, p. 2683-2692.
Xian, XC & Nicol, G 2007, 'Manipulation of the potassium channel Kv1.1 and its effect on neuronal excitability in rat sensory neurons', Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 98, no. 5, pp. 2683-2692. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00437.2007
Xian XC, Nicol G. Manipulation of the potassium channel Kv1.1 and its effect on neuronal excitability in rat sensory neurons. Journal of Neurophysiology. 2007 Nov;98(5):2683-2692. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00437.2007
Xian, Xuan Chi ; Nicol, Grant. / Manipulation of the potassium channel Kv1.1 and its effect on neuronal excitability in rat sensory neurons. In: Journal of Neurophysiology. 2007 ; Vol. 98, No. 5. pp. 2683-2692.
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abstract = "Potassium channels play a critical role in regulating many aspects of action potential (AP) firing. To establish the contribution of the voltage-dependent potassium channel Kv1.1 in regulating excitability, we used the selective blocker dendrotoxin-K (DTX-K) and small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeted to Kv1.1 to determine their effects on AP firing in small-diameter capsaicin-sensitive sensory neurons. A 5-min exposure to 10 nM DTX-K suppressed the total potassium current (IK) measured at +40 mV by about 33{\%}. DTX-K produced a twofold increase in the number of APs evoked by a ramp of depolarizing current. Associated with increased firing was a decrease in firing threshold and rheobase. DTX-K did not alter the resting membrane potential or the AP duration. A 48-h treatment with siRNA targeted to Kv1.1 reduced the expression of this channel protein by about 60{\%} as measured in Western blots. After treatment with siRNA, IK was no longer sensitive to DTX-K, indicating a loss of functional protein. Similarly, after siRNA treatment exposure to DTX-K had no effect on the number of evoked APs, firing threshold, or rheobase. However, after siRNA treatment, the firing threshold had values similar to those obtained after acute exposure to DTX-K, suggesting that the loss of Kv1.1 plays a critical role in setting this parameter of excitability. These results demonstrate that Kv1.1 plays an important role in limiting AP firing and that siRNA may be a useful approach to establish the role of specific ion channels in the absence of selective antagonists.",
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N2 - Potassium channels play a critical role in regulating many aspects of action potential (AP) firing. To establish the contribution of the voltage-dependent potassium channel Kv1.1 in regulating excitability, we used the selective blocker dendrotoxin-K (DTX-K) and small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeted to Kv1.1 to determine their effects on AP firing in small-diameter capsaicin-sensitive sensory neurons. A 5-min exposure to 10 nM DTX-K suppressed the total potassium current (IK) measured at +40 mV by about 33%. DTX-K produced a twofold increase in the number of APs evoked by a ramp of depolarizing current. Associated with increased firing was a decrease in firing threshold and rheobase. DTX-K did not alter the resting membrane potential or the AP duration. A 48-h treatment with siRNA targeted to Kv1.1 reduced the expression of this channel protein by about 60% as measured in Western blots. After treatment with siRNA, IK was no longer sensitive to DTX-K, indicating a loss of functional protein. Similarly, after siRNA treatment exposure to DTX-K had no effect on the number of evoked APs, firing threshold, or rheobase. However, after siRNA treatment, the firing threshold had values similar to those obtained after acute exposure to DTX-K, suggesting that the loss of Kv1.1 plays a critical role in setting this parameter of excitability. These results demonstrate that Kv1.1 plays an important role in limiting AP firing and that siRNA may be a useful approach to establish the role of specific ion channels in the absence of selective antagonists.
AB - Potassium channels play a critical role in regulating many aspects of action potential (AP) firing. To establish the contribution of the voltage-dependent potassium channel Kv1.1 in regulating excitability, we used the selective blocker dendrotoxin-K (DTX-K) and small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeted to Kv1.1 to determine their effects on AP firing in small-diameter capsaicin-sensitive sensory neurons. A 5-min exposure to 10 nM DTX-K suppressed the total potassium current (IK) measured at +40 mV by about 33%. DTX-K produced a twofold increase in the number of APs evoked by a ramp of depolarizing current. Associated with increased firing was a decrease in firing threshold and rheobase. DTX-K did not alter the resting membrane potential or the AP duration. A 48-h treatment with siRNA targeted to Kv1.1 reduced the expression of this channel protein by about 60% as measured in Western blots. After treatment with siRNA, IK was no longer sensitive to DTX-K, indicating a loss of functional protein. Similarly, after siRNA treatment exposure to DTX-K had no effect on the number of evoked APs, firing threshold, or rheobase. However, after siRNA treatment, the firing threshold had values similar to those obtained after acute exposure to DTX-K, suggesting that the loss of Kv1.1 plays a critical role in setting this parameter of excitability. These results demonstrate that Kv1.1 plays an important role in limiting AP firing and that siRNA may be a useful approach to establish the role of specific ion channels in the absence of selective antagonists.
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Chai With Manju
INDIA New England News
Home Bollywood I wish as women we value ourselves each day, says Vidya Balan
I wish as women we value ourselves each day, says Vidya Balan
Mumbai–Actress Vidya Balan feels that women should value themselves each day so that they do not need women’s day to celebrate their achievements and strengths.
The actress was interacting with the media at a panel discussion on ‘Women Shaping the Narrative in Media & Entertainment’ on International Women’s Day on Friday here.
Over the question of changes that she wants to see in the lives of women working in the film industry, Vidya replied: “I won’t just talk about the film industry. I wish, as women, we should value ourselves little more each day so that someday we will not need women’s day to celebrate our achievements and strengths.
In the past few years, the Hindi film industry has seen many successful female centric movies like ‘Kahaani’, ‘Pink’, ‘Piku’, ‘Tumhari Sulu’, ‘Mardaani’, ‘Raazi’ amongst others.
Sharing her views on female centric movies in Bollywood, she said: “I think it used to happen before also but then it was happening in ‘fits and spurts’. But at present, female centric cinema is growing slowly and steadily. The more success these kinds of films would get, the more they would be made.”
“There will be a time when people will just go to cinemas to watch the film without thinking whether it’s a male centric or a female centric film and that’s where we are heading. There are lots of faces who are responsible for this change. I think there are lots of stories waiting to be told,” she said.
When asked, how she is celebrating International Women’s Day, Vidya said: “I am celebrating women’s day by working and celebrating with the women who are celebrating themselves, who are living their lives to their fullest potential, unapologetically and I think there is no better way to celebrate any day than this way.”
Replying on who is an inspirational figure in her life, Vidya said that there is not a single woman. “I feel every woman who is trying to lead her life on her own terms is an inspiration to me,” she said.
On the work front, Vidya will next be seen onscreen in Telugu film “N.T.R: Kathanayakudu” and Hindi film “Mission Mangal”. (IANS)
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WALTHAM, MA--The India Initiative and the Hassenfeld Immersion Program AT Brandeis University will screen Aadhaar, on January 24, 2020 starting at 5:30 pm. The...
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515-223-5119 info@ineda.com
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WOMEN’S EVOLVING ROLES AT THE DEALERSHIP AND ON THE FARM
by INEDA Staff | Nov 15, 2016 | Articles, Human Resources, Women | 0 comments
[Source: INEDA, 11.2016 | Keywords: Women, Dealer, Recruiting]
Denise Nelsen has been with AgDirect since its inception in 1998 as part of her 25-year career in the Farm Credit system. The York, Nebraska-based territory manager said that while it was her dream job from day one, working in a male-dominated industry wasn’t always easy.
“I felt like I sometimes needed to know more than the guys did, just to prove myself and to prove that I knew what I was talking about,” said Nelsen, who has worked with machinery dealers in Nebraska throughout her career and is retiring at the end of 2016.
The farm machinery business has changed a lot in the time Nelsen has worked with Farm Credit Services of America and AgDirect. Women’s roles are evolving in this sector just as they are in others around agriculture. Today, that means in many cases, women who have grown into more management roles on farm operations around the country are the ones making financial decisions, oftentimes working with one of the growing number of financial officers and territory managers in the farm financial sector.
“Women play such a bigger role. They’re working in a male-dominated career and they’re very successful at it,” Nelsen said. “With my job in equipment financing, I’m dealing with more and more women. They know the finance side of the business very well.”
Industry-Wide Challenges
Challenges like the ones Nelson said she faced early in her career — those based on her gender — may be lessening as more women take on different roles traditionally held by their male counterparts. But stereotypes and double-standards still exist. That’s not to say they can’t be overcome, much like how Nelson said she had to do early on in her career.
“Some women farmers and ranchers have mentioned hurdles to performing certain tasks that were essential to their operation not because they were physically or emotionally incapable, but because others would not acknowledge the women’s authority over their own farms or ranches,” said Kristin Reynolds, Ph.D., a food systems scholar at The New School in New York City, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
One way to positively counteract these types of pressures women face and the stress they cause is peer networking. Such activity – connecting with other women facing similar challenges – can yield constructive ways to offset stereotypes and empower women taking the reins of farms or ranches.
“Women’s agricultural networks may consist of a small group of local women farmers or ranchers who get together informally to talk about farm or ranch management, or even more personal issues at their operations. Or, they can be more formal community or regional groups that hold regular meetings for focused discussion of technical or regulatory issues in agriculture,” Reynolds said. “Networks can facilitate information exchange and have been found to be helpful to women who balance the many pieces involved in a sustainable agricultural livelihood.”
The Future of Women in Agriculture
In the decades since she began working in the agricultural financing industry, Nelsen says she’s watched the number and diversity of women’s role in agriculture grow by leaps and bounds. These evolving roles women play in the day-to-day management on many U.S. farms and in other farm businesses are changing how others in the farm sector – like farm machinery dealers – conduct business.
“Many who sell and service farm machinery have learned that it is the woman who has the details of the farm finances, and she is keen on knowing return on investment,” said eastern Iowa farmer, speaker and advocate for women in agriculture, Jolene Brown. “She also understands if it fits into the cash flow. She is the one who will take out the emotion to be assured it is a good business decision.”
Along with that growing trend of women’s leadership on the business management side of agriculture — in farms and machinery dealerships alike — will come a change in mindsets that posed a challenge to Nelsen in her early days working with farmers on machinery financing.
2017 Iowa - Nebraska Dealers Assocation. All Rights Reserved. Web Strategy by Webspec Design
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"The Exonerated" by Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen
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← Wild in the City’s Netwalk, South Norwood Lake, Sep 8
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Plans to pedestrianise Croydon High Street can take a hike
Posted on August 30, 2017 by insidecroydon
CROYDON COMMENTARY: Is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to pedestrianise a short stretch of Croydon High Street really the answer to the town centre’s night time economy, as the council’s leadership seems to think? LEWIS WHITE, pictured right, doesn’t think so
The main street through Croydon is revealed on the map as being a game of four quarters: London Road at the top end, from Broad Green, with its bustling street full of veg shops, multiple pawn shops and kebaberies, and West Croydon Station; then there’s North End down to George Street, flanked by the Whitgift Centre, Centrale and the old Allders store; then there’s the High Street from George Street, under the Flyover, past Leon House, to the lights at Coombe Road; and finally there’s South End.
This is how Croydon High Street at the junction with Park Street, looks today
Some years back, North End was fully pedestrianised. Trees were planted, it was repaved, and all buses and cars excluded.
I hate to say it, but to me it feels very dead, a place to walk through but not linger in.
It has made me question the wisdom of full pedestrianisation for Croydon. I keep wondering if somehow, the council could have designed it to allow buses to pass along it, keeping public transport at the heart of the shopping area. Maybe in a few years, when all buses are electric-powered, we could reopen it to them keeping the current good air quality but adding back better accessibility and a bit of movement.
More recently, South End has received a similar street makeover, with new paving and lighting. I have to differ from Inside Croydon and several fellow loyal readers on this one, but I think that a good job has been done by the council design team on this area.
Lewis White believes this is an improvement to South End
And just finished a few months back, London Road has been landscaped, with trees, new paving, and improvements to the faces of buildings, including shop fronts and colourful paint schemes. Each time I pass along this street, I feel that the improvements have made it much more attractive and greener, and have taken away the former sad and run-down look of the street. I like it! I am also visiting it more, and buying things from the shops.
This leaves the High Street section looking very down at heel. The bit from George Street to Katharine Street is quite pleasant, but of course it is blighted by the adjoining semi-dead St George’s Walk precinct and blocks. From the corner of Katharine Street to the Flyover, it’s grimy and very greasy. Not a tree not a decent paving slab. It’s a grim and very unattractive gateway to Croydon.
Thinking about how one could make the High Street into an attractive street which would boost the prosperity of the shops here, I am not convinced that pedestrianisation of a small part of it will deliver a fraction of the desired vitality, or greening, which is desperately needed for the whole length. The High Street looks so crummy, it deserves major investment. It will then provide an attractive focus for existing and new shops, cafés, restaurants and businesses.
Having looked at the street many times, I feel that along the whole of the High Street, from George Street to the Katherine Street corner, the Flyover, and from there to South End, it should be possible to widen the footways on one or maybe both sides, and add small trees to create a “boulevard” effect, and to repave the footways and install new street lighting, all designed to deliver a much greener, livelier and more attractive High Street, that still allows for buses and necessary cars, but with more space for walking, and perhaps for pavement cafés.
The cost of all this would be substantial, and would need to be phased, but it would be worth the investment.
For the High Street, I would therefore like to see two things:
St George’s Walk. There’s widespread agreement: Something Must Be Done
First, from the council, full funding, and an overall streetscape masterplan for the High Street from George Street to the Flyover, and from the Flyover down to the lights at Coombe Road. At night, why not light the Flyover where it crosses the High Street, with coloured light, as has been done over many rail bridges in Southwark and at Waterloo?
Second, from the private sector, but encouraged by the council, a really good design for the redevelopment of St George’s Walk. The new, Chinese owners of the precinct appear to be focusing on the redevelopment into flats of the offices in what we still call the Nestlé Tower. But they are beginning to offer new leases on some of the vacant shop spaces in St George’s Walk, which, at least short-term, is bringing some life back into the place.
But longer term? Why not rip out the precinct to create instead a sheltered and sunny central new park. It could be called “St George’s Gardens”. It would perhaps be closed to the public after midnight, and opened at 7am, to prevent night-time access and the abuses that invariably accompany it. Yes, a private space, as the land is not in public ownership, but opened free to the public with around the inner perimeter, cafés, restaurants and retail shops could take the ground floor units.
The current appearance of the High Street as a whole is so drab, grey and dusty that it fails to provide an entirely welcoming gateway to Croydon town centre from the south. Now that London Road has been landscaped, the approach to Croydon from the North is much improved.
We now need to shift attention to the southern approach, and invest in streetscape revitalisation and greening.
Lewis White, who lives in Coulsdon, for many years worked as a landscape architect for local authorities in London
All articles on Inside Croydon offer an immediate right of reply through our moderated comments section
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7 Responses to Plans to pedestrianise Croydon High Street can take a hike
centralcroydon says:
I remember when North End was first pedestrianised. Before it was Block paved, buses were still going along North End with all other vehicles banned. There were several near misses with pedestrians walking in front of buses. Shortly after that it was paved and all vehicles banned. Sorry, but large pedestrianised areas and buses areas don’t mix well. However, the decision to pedestrianise the short section in the High Street is bonkers.
Tyrone Nicholas (@tyronen) says:
Er, have you actually BEEN to North End recently? The area between Whitgift and Centrale is perhaps the liveliest part of the entire borough. On weekends, families are out there shopping, ice cream and balloon vendors do a roaring business, there are sometimes even acrobats and other street performers. Yes, this is mostly footfall traveling between the two shopping centres, but so what? There’s nothing like it anywhere else in Croydon or even neighbouring boroughs.
Peter Rogers says:
And what I’d like to see is the return of cycle lanes, that old fashioned concept that nearly every other borough has embraced. Widening pavements is super but to what end? No more people will walk down them.
St Georges Walk is always going to be what it is – a 1960’s concrete carbuncle, it should be given over to social enterprises rent free and it might turn into somewhere ‘cool’ or it might just carry on being a 1960’s concrete carbuncle but if you don’t try you don’t know (and I do believe it’s in the artistic quarter or whatever they’re calling the closed down Fairfield Halls these days so automatically gets council purple boards)
David Hamilton says:
You would like to see buses still !! What a bonkers thing to say. Now I know Georges Walk is no picture but the Grants side of the road is rather nice.
I am all in favour of pedestrianizing the High Street. They could make the outdoor seating areas more generous, which is no bad thing. It will make the area a far more pleasant place to roam.
Frankly people are moaning for the sake of it.
sorry but there are outside cafe’s all along the high street, all local businesses like Nero’s , Pret and Starbucks. Who’s going to fill these giant pavements? KFC? McDonalds? And what if the soon to arrive super Westfield don’t like wide pavements?
I don’t want to sound like a one trick pony but why not cycle lanes like the ones we used to have?
Arno Rabinovitz says:
Nothing like it anywhere else in Croydon or even neighbouring boroughs? Try Tooting, which is bustling, buzzy and fun……..and minimally pedestrianised.
If the plan at the Park Street/High Street junction is that all vehicles can only go east up the one-way system in Park Street, (the opposite direction to now), how will they get to this junction and the shops in this part of the road, in the first place ?
The only way would appear to be that all cars, taxis, mini-cabs, delivery lorries etc. would have to come down George Street, in addition to those now, delayed by or delaying the trams, and what traffic congestion that could cause !
If the plan for Park Street to move the 13 southbound bus routes at 2 stops near the High Street to the Park Lane end, nearly opposite the 9 northbound bus routes stop, with up to 22 buses trying to overtake others at bus stops that are still picking up passengers, ( buses normally seem to come in convoys) , doesn’t this risk serious traffic congestion also, especially at rush hour, and possible gridlock back to Park Lane itself ?
Isn’t removing the pedestrian crossing between the two halves of St. George’s Walk, when there is planned to be so much more traffic there, a bad idea ?
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Showcasing some of the country’s newest properties
URBAN FARMER, DENVER
Urban Farmer is a family of restaurants with locations in Portland, Cleveland, Philadelphia and now Denver. They all stem from the concept of a modern, yet inviting locally-sourced steakhouse. The Urban Farmer backdrop is warm and elegant, yet quaint and rustic, visually telling the life story of the hardworking country farmer who marries the cosmopolitan art collector. The result is a space that is at once a restored farmhouse combined with an eclectically sophisticated art gallery. Every location of Urban Farmer, though inspired by the same unexpected couple, has its own twist that is uniquely original and authentic to the city it lives within.
Urban Farmer’s menu continues the theme of juxtaposition as it appeals to every taste, from simple to sophisticated. Having their own in-house butcher shop allows them to use their meticulously selected heritage-bred beef in the most creative manner possible, along with equally well-chosen, sustainably sourced poultry and seafood. The steakhouse is not solely focused on meat alone, offering also an array of flavorful, chef-inspired sides, soups and salads from the season’s abundance. Additionally, the beverage program complements the food and concept, taking its inspiration from early-American cocktail culture and proudly featuring local craft beers, a curated wine list, and spirits with fresh ingredients to give them a creative twist.
Torali Italian – Steak
The new Italian concept, located on the 12th floor of the Ritz-Carlton Chicago, is modern in approach and Italian in spirit, featuring a contemporary, chef-driven menu curated by Chef Gregory Elliot. Menu highlights include fresh pastas made in-house daily, prime and dry-aged meats, wild fish and seafood, and celebrated Italian classics with an elevated twist.
The Old World-inspired beverage program at the adjacent Torali Bar features both local and authentic Italian spirits and original cocktails, innovative house-made infusions, limoncello, beer and wine to complement the dining experience.
Venture past Torali Bar to find Rooftop at Torali, with breathtaking views of the city. This modern rooftop bar and lounge specializes in handcrafted cocktails and fresh Italian-inspired bites. It is open seasonally.
The Café, open all day, offers a sophisticated yet relaxed atmosphere and boasts specialty coffee from La Colombe, freshly squeezed juices, gourmet sandwiches and decadent desserts and pastries.
The Stateview Hotel, an Autograph Collection
The Stateview Hotel, part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, will be located on the Centennial campus of North Carolina State University. The hotel will offer an elevated level of technology and interactive spaces, a smart-style design and unique collaborative hubs. It will celebrate NC State by featuring news about the school’s accomplishments and by selling local products produced at the university.
The Stateview Hotel is looking forward to welcoming all types of visitors, from corporate business travelers to families and friends visiting NC State. Guests will enjoy the property’s small boutique setting next to Lake Raleigh and across the street from the Lonnie Poole golf course.
The hotel will have 164 rooms, 10,000 square feet of meeting space, and a restaurant and bar with an outdoor terrace overlooking Lake Raleigh. The Stateview Hotel is planning to open for business October 1, 2017.
Las Alcobas
A Luxury Collection hotel in the heart of Napa Valley, Las Alcobas is a historic resort aiming to refine the art of unforgettable hospitality. At Las Alcobas, you will be pampered with the warmth of a place called home, with service that exceeds all expectations.
The historic resort boasts 68 rooms and suites, all with gracious floor plans. A beautiful outdoor terrace and vineyard views complement nightly Spring Mountain sunsets. The property’s signature restaurant, Acacia House by Chris Cosentino, offers guests an upscale dining option with modern, seasonal menus paired with exquisite Napa Valley wines.
Morton’s The Steakhouse, Jacksonville
Morton’s The Steakhouse is excited to announce its new location inside the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront hotel.
“Morton’s The Steakhouse is one of the most recognizable and successful high-end steakhouses in the nation,” said Tim Whitlock, C.O.O. and Senior Vice President of Operations. “We are thrilled to join the Jacksonville community and look forward to offering guests an unrivaled dining experience with the finest cuts of beef in a sophisticated, dynamic atmosphere.”
The steakhouse’s alluring ambience welcomes an added sophistication that follows from the entry to the bar, and into the dining room. Guests are invited to enjoy handcrafted and high-tech cocktails at the polished black granite bar, complete with a sleek chrome liquor bottle display. Glamorous, black-patent crocodile leather booths occupy the dining room. Decorative glass within tiered light fixtures sparkles and reflects off smoked mirror columns. The restaurant boasts a sleek color palette featuring a mix of gray, black, brown and gold accents. The colorways are reflected in the circle motif carpet as well as in the wall coverings. Leroy Nieman’s art prints, which have long been a staple of the Morton’s brand, continue to be a colorful highlight in the restaurant.
In The Mix Magazine
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We are averaging 10,000 unique visitors and 17,000 total visitors a month. We always welcome user comments and feedback on our articles.
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UC Research Repository
Science: Theses and Dissertations
Search the UC Research Repository
All of the RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects
The effect of increasing speaking rate on acoustic and perceptual measures of nasality in hearing impaired speakers
thesis_fulltext.pdf (673.5Kb)
Dwyer, Claire
Thesis Discipline
Master of Audiology
Nasality is a common resonance disorder present in the speech of severely hearing impaired individuals (Hudgins, 1934). The likely cause has been attributed to structural or functional abnormalities of the velopharyngeal mechanism as well as deviations in pitch and loudness. In addition, hearing impaired individuals speak at a slower rate than normal hearing individuals which has been shown to exacerbate the presence of nasality in their speech (Colton & Cooker, 1968). The purpose of this study was to determine whether deliberate increases in speaking rate would serve to decrease the amount of nasality in the speech of severely hearing impaired individuals. The participants were 11 severe to profoundly hearing impaired students, ranging in age from 12 to 19 years (mean = 16 years). Each participant provided a baseline speech sample (R1) followed by three training sessions during which participants were trained to increase their speaking rate. Following the training sessions, a second speech sample was obtained (R2). Acoustic and perceptual analysis pf the speech samples obtained at R1 and R2 were undertaken. The acoustic analysis focused on changes in first and second formant frequency bandwidth (BW1 & BW2). The perceptual analysis involved 21 naïve listeners rating the speech samples (at R1 & R2) for perceived nasality. Findings indicated a significant increase in speaking rate at R2. In addition, a significantly narrower BW2 frequency and lower perceptual rating score was obtained at R2 across all participants, suggesting a considerable decrease in nasality as speaking rate increases. The influences of speaking rate changes on the functioning of the velopharyngeal mechanism are discussed. In addition, the clinical implications of the findings are explored.
nasality
speaking rate
Science: Theses and Dissertations [3607]
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Mineral Resources & Exploration
Regional Infrastructure
Project Scoping Study
ADR FAQs
Piedmont Lithium Announces Maiden Mineral Resource
NEW YORK, June 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --
Maiden Mineral Resource estimate of 16.2 Mt @ 1.12% Li2O
Resource is based on 231 core holes and over 35,300 meters of drilling
Metallurgical test work ongoing, with pilot-scale testing commencing this month
Scoping Study for integrated lithium project expected in Q3 2018
Piedmont Lithium Limited ("Piedmont" or "Company") (ASX: PLL; NASDAQ: PLLL) is pleased to announce a maiden Mineral Resource estimate on its Core property of 16.19 million tonnes at 1.12% Li2O, containing 182,000 tonnes of lithium oxide (Li2O) or 450,000 tonnes of Lithium Carbonate Equivalent ("LCE") (the benchmark equivalent raw material used in the lithium industry). Approximately 52% or 8.50 million tonnes of the Mineral Resource is classified in the Indicated Resource category.
The Mineral Resource estimate has been prepared by independent consultants, CSA Global Pty Ltd ("CSA Global") and is reported in accordance with the JORC Code (2012 Edition).
Table 1: Mineral Resource Estimate for the Piedmont Lithium Project (0.4% cut-off)
Resource (Mt)
Grade (Li2O%)
Li2O (t)
LCE (t)
Indicated
Inferred
Piedmont's maiden Mineral Resource is the first resource estimate completed in over 30 years in the historic Carolina Tin-Spodumene Belt, which was the home of most of the world's lithium production and processing from the 1950s until the 1980s. The region continues to be the home to the US lithium processing facilities of Albemarle Corporation and FMC Corporation. The current resource is within our Core Property, which is 5 kilometres north of the historic Hallman-Beam mine (ex-FMC).
Piedmont is now focused on the completion of the Scoping Study which is expected in Q3 2018 and will reflect the Company's strategy of building an integrated lithium processing business based on proven, conventional technologies and benefitting from the inherent advantages of Piedmont's strategic North Carolina location, including;
Low cost power and gas
Cost-competitive, highly skilled local labour
Abundant transportation infrastructure
No camp or fly-in/fly-out requirements
Readily available and low-cost reagents
Proximity to low cost service infrastructure
Low state and federal taxes
No state or federal royalties or mineral tax
Strong local government support
Privately-owned lands
In addition to the maiden Mineral Resource estimate a new Exploration Target of 4.5 to 5.5 million tonnes at a grade of between 1.10% and 1.20% Li2O has been estimated by CSA Global within the Core Property. The potential quantity and grade of this Exploration Target is conceptual in nature. There has been insufficient exploration to estimate a Mineral Resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the estimation of a Mineral Resource.
Keith D. Phillips, President and Chief Executive Officer, said, "This high-grade maiden resource has surpassed our initial exploration target and represents an important milestone for Piedmont. The resource will underpin the upcoming Scoping Study, which we believe will reflect the significant advantages associated with our unique location. There are many interesting lithium projects being advanced around the world, but Piedmont has the only project based in the industrial heartland of the United States and the cradle of lithium production, with all the economic and strategic benefits that derive from that position. With regional exploration progressing and constructive conversations ongoing with numerous local land owners, we are optimistic that this initial resource will be just the beginning, and that Piedmont is well-positioned to develop a world-class, low-cost integrated lithium business in the United States."
For further information, contact:
Keith D. Phillips
Anastasios (Taso) Arima
E: kphillips@piedmontlithium.com
E: tarima@piedmontlithium.com
View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/piedmont-lithium-announces-maiden-mineral-resource-300666158.html
SOURCE Piedmont Lithium Limited
© 2020 Piedmont Lithium Limited. All Rights Reserved. ABN 50 002 664 4953.
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> Director > Heather Overton
Heather Overton
Heather oversees business and management operations and is responsible for coordinating all human resources and accounting functions.
Heather joined JAI in 2009 as business development assistant. For over a decade, her familiarity with both the firm and its clients has proven to be an invaluable asset.
Heather is an active community volunteer, working with educational organizations and other nonprofits. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology with a minor in statistics from the University of Tennessee and an Associate of Arts in social and behavioral sciences from Pellissippi State Community College.
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Janks Reviews
‘Finding Your Feet’ – Review
By Terryn Wood in Reviews 2 years ago
After 35 years of marriage, Sandra (Imelda Staunton) stumbles upon her husband Mike (John Sessions) in the cellar with their close friend Pam (Josie Lawrence) – Pam’s tacky red lipstick smeared across his face. And so it goes in the British comedy-drama from director Richard Loncraine, Finding Your Feet.
“It’s not what it looks like”, he yells. Funny. It looks an awful lot like he’s having an affair. It’s the eve of Mike’s retirement as police chief and they’re having a lavish party at their Surrey estate to celebrate his recent Knighthood. While discussing her new ‘Lady’ status, Sandra is excited to finally begin the life with her husband she’s been patiently planning for years. So you can imagine her devastation when she discovers that the affair has been going on right under her nose for five years.
With a lost sense of self and utterly heartbroken, Sandra runs to her sister Bif (Celia Imrie), who’s living in a small council flat in inner London. It’s here where the real story begins.
Ten years have passed since these two sisters last saw one another and those years have seen them move in very different directions. Sandra epitomises the upper class ‘kept’ woman. She’s rude, obnoxious, and thinks her needs are above all others. An unfortunate trait she’s passed on to her daughter Nicola (Marianne Oldham), who has a serious lack of compassion for her mother’s predicament. Bif (short for Elizabeth) on the other hand, is a free spirit who lives life to the fullest – albeit a little erratically. She has a contagious lust for life that sees her unapologetically going for the things she wants.
The town and Bif’s home are a waiting room of sorts for Sandra in the beginning. But something in her shifts and she embarks on a journey of rediscovery as the film progresses. With a little help from Bif and her curious circle of friends no less. Bif convinces Sandra to join her weekly dance class. As it turns out, Sandra had aspired to be a dancer in her youth but gave it all up when she became pregnant. Her husband was more focused on keeping up with the Joneses than allowing his wife to have any real agency.
In a break from the norm, Timothy Spall plays Charlie – the pot-smoking spirited love interest. Then there’s Jackie, played by the ever-entertaining Joanna Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous (1992-2012) fame. Jackie’s been married five times and has all the wit and sarcasm in the world that comes with it. Much to audience’s disappointment, there are too few scenes between Sandra and Jackie. David Hayman rounds out the inner circle as the gentle Ted who is learning to live after loss.
The story arc builds toward the group’s trip to Rome where they are to perform a dance routine on stage. It’s a very unrealistic and underwhelming climax, but thank goodness Finding Your Feet has strengths elsewhere. Most notably in the lead characters.
Each character beautifully represents a different facet of life as a 60-something. The challenges they face, although profoundly life-changing, don’t stop them from being open to new possibilities. Charlie, in particular, is caring for his wife as she heads into the advanced stage of Alzheimer’s. Still, every week he gets together with the team and busts out a little hokey pokey warm up with a spring in his step. There’s life in them yet.
Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft’s screenplay originally pandered heavily toward the comedic side. Loncraine, perhaps best known for My House in Umbria (2003), wisely leans more towards the drama in the finished product. A decision you’ll likely be grateful for as cheap laughs at the expense of old-timers is the only so-called comedy that makes the cut. The film does well in spite of these jokes because the authentic human drama cuts deep and resonates with audiences. Their life events could be on the cards for any one of us.
Finding Your Feet is slow to find its footing, but it’s far from the worst of its genre. The film is leaps and bounds above last year’s Hampstead (2017), which depicted a similar subject matter. The narrative takes a while to build up any genuine compassion for the characters, but it will get you there by the end – with a tear or two shed along the way.
Life’s complicated but don’t let that get in the way of living. That is the primary takeaway from Finding Your Feet. It is a poignant message wrapped up in a pleasantly entertaining package.
Fun Fact:
Timothy Spall and Imelda Staunton played husband and wife in The Love Punch (2013).
Terryn Wood
A film nerd who always finds a way to drop movie references into casual conversation.
Deserted Island Movie Collection: Anything from the brilliant mind of John Hughes.
Best Movie Snack: Popcorn... Wait... No.... Choc-Top.... I'm notoriously indecisive!
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‘Bombshell’ Delivers Powerful Performances – Review
‘Bloodshot’ Trailer 2 Gives Us More of a Technically Enhanced Vin Diesel
in Trailers
‘The Biggest Little Farm’ is Heartwarmingly Educational – Review
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Janks Reviews - The only opinion you can trust.
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Photo: Connie Sceaphierde
Nezu Shrine: One of Tokyo’s hidden gems
By Connie Sceaphierde, grape Japan
Home to over 9 million people, Tokyo is the world’s largest and busiest metropolitan city. Add an extra 2 million day tourists, and you can picture the chaos that ensues. High skyrises, multicomplex office buildings, restaurants and entertainment businesses make up the majority of the cityscape.
As you can imagine, with that many people walking the streets, and with so much concrete everywhere, it can be hard to find a tranquil place within the cities innermost borders.
Take a stroll in Ueno, however, and you might be surprised at the beauty that exists, tucked away just northwest of one of Tokyo’s busiest train stations.
Sure, you have the always green and welcoming Ueno Park and there is also the Ueno Zoo, which claims to be Japan’s oldest, but the special place I’m tempting you with is hidden just a little further north.
Just a few short minutes walk from central Ueno, you will find yourself approaching the quaint little neighborhood of Nezu. Here, you’ll already be noticing a huge difference from the huff and puff of central Tokyo. It is quieter here, and the air feels clearer.
Traditional wooden houses, atmospheric izakaya and nostalgic old sweet shops selling hard candies and sweet potato cakes are dotted around. Walking around here, you’ll start to notice you feel as if you have taken a leap back in time.
Make a left turn off of the main road, and you’ll find yourself standing on one of the quietest streets in Tokyo. At the bottom left-hand side of the street, there is a small sweet shop where you can pick up some classic Japanese hard candies and a little further up, sits a tea shop and a traditional pottery store.
Entering the shrine grounds
Take in the sights and then continue up the road for about 2 minutes and on your right you will suddenly become aware of a large torii gate inviting you in. Here marks the entrance of Nezu Shrine.
Heading inside the shrine grounds, you will find a traditional arched stone bridge crossing over a small stream of clear tranquil water.
Beyond that, an ancient wooden gateway signifies the entrance to the inner shrine buildings.
Just off to the left, small ponds housing Koi carp mark the outer gardens of the shrine and Vermilion torii gates line a pathway that winds through azalea bushes.
Seeing all of this, you will be wondering how you managed to get this shrine complex all to yourself.
There are no other tourists here, sure you might be sharing the grounds with some humble locals, and if you’re lucky there may be an ongoing traditional Japanese wedding happening at the shrine, but for the most part, it is peaceful here.
History of Nezu Shrine
Nezu Shrine is styled after Nikko’s Toshogu Shrine, a Ishi-no-ma-Zukuri type shrine, in which the worship hall and main sanctuary are interconnected under the same roof. The area of Nezu and the shrine itself, managed to escape disaster during the wartime air raids, and as they still stand, are a time capsule into the last century.
According to legend, the shrine was originally built in Sendagi, 1900 years ago during the 1st century by Legendary Prince Yamato Takeru. Although there are those who disagree with this, Nezu Shrine is still one of the oldest and most important shrines in Tokyo.
The current building has been standing since the mid 17th century, and has been designated as important cultural properties by the government.
During the Edo era, the shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, relocated Nezu shrine from its original home in Sendagi to its current location, to mark the occasion of him choosing his successor.
Senbon Torii vermilion torii gates line the pathway. Photo: Connie Sceaphierde
The Bunkyo Azalea Festival
Nezu Shrine springs into life every April, when the cherry blossom trees and thousands of azalea bushes bloom pink and white on the small hillside within the shrine grounds. With over 3,000 azalea plants and over 100 different varieties, the shrine becomes quite a spectacle in its spring colors. Crowds flock to the shrine for the Tsutsuji Matsuri, which is a large flower festival held from April to May, where visitors can enjoy taking in the beauty and walk through one of the most colorful shrines in Tokyo.
Nezu Shrine is located just a little northwest from the Ikenohata gate of Ueno Zoo, but the easiest way to access the shrine, is to take the Chiyoda line to Nezu station.
From the station take Exit 1 and turn left onto the main street. After walking for about 3 minutes, you should come to a second traffic signal which is signposted as “Nezu-Jinja-Iriguchi-intersection”. From here you want to make a left turn onto a quiet side street. Walk along the side street for another 2 minutes, and about halfway up the road, the entrance to Nezu shrine will appear on the right.
Read more stories from grape Japan.
-- A Festive Fusion of Japanese Culture and Dance Music at “MATSURI Presented by SUNTORY”
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https://grapee.jp/en/
© grape Japan
BigYen
Great, thanks for the article. I've been to Ueno almost every time I've been to Japan but never knew about this. Very few 17th century shrines still left standing in Tokyo. Bookmarked for the May 2020 itinerary.
Badge213
Nezu shrine is also one of the "10 shrines of Tokyo" a very nice place indeed.
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It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play. -- Dizzie Gillespie
Home / Discography / Rings Around the Moon - 2016
Rings Around the Moon - 2016
John Balikos Trio
“RINGS AROUND THE MOON” is the title of the second album of JOHN BALIKOS Trio, which actually is not a piano trio, but a quartet one. The fourth member of the band is the composer John Balikos. During the recording session, the musicians looked up into the sky and observed the spectacular view of the moon surrounded by luminous rings - the “Halo” phenomenon. The title fully reflects the underlying spirit of this music, which takes on a far-reaching aesthetic level through the masterly rendition of the three musicians as they unfold their material with unparalleled clarity and tenderness. Melodious compositions (Hidden Smile, Fulfilment, Sea’s Reflection, Bright River) bring to the fore a deeply introspective mood and a subtly lyrical approach not only to music but also to life itself. Composer and pianist Takis Farazis first encountered John Balikos on stage at a concert on the island of Paros, in 2013. Takis appreciated John’s compositions and they promised each other to record this material in the near future. Promises were kept, and Farazis imbued this recording with his characteristic sense of introspection and natural flow. Bassist Petros Varthakouris (who is familiar with John’s music, as they have been associates and friends for many years) and drummer Thanos Hatzianagnostou (who has recently joined the band) all embrace the same mood, sharing common ideas for music: the improvisational music is not just a team work, but a statement of equality by all means. “Music is a reason to live, a reason to hope… Without music, the world would have been a lost place” says the composer. Despite a serious handicap that has deprived him of being able to perform, John has managed to overcome adversity by focusing on teaching and composing.
John Balikos
Greek Jazz Discography 2016
More in this category: « ‘Voyager’ 2015 Jazzonline Critics'Poll 2015 »
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Chelsea get Cole and Cahill back for Basel
Champions League NewsChelsea injury news
By blue admin On Apr 24, 2013
Chelsea have still got eight games to play this season. That includes the Europa League final at the Amsterdam Arena in Holland on May 15th. To get there, the Blues have got to get past the Swiss side Basel that knocked Tottenham Hotspur out in the last round. They are a good side, but Chelsea are better and have got the added bonus of Gary Cahill and Ashley Cole returning from injury.
With those eight games being squeezed into the next three weeks, Rafa Benitez is having to manage the squad very carefully. The Spaniard is well aware that the fans and the club see finishing in the top four of the Premier League as the most important objective, with the Europa trophy being a nice cherry on top. The manager may feel differently, though, as he knows he will be moving on at the end of the season.
We have a game against Swansea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, so Cahill and Cole will be unlikely to play in both. The centre of defense is not such a problem, with John Terry, Ivanovic and David Luiz doing well. The left back situation is more tricky, although Ryan Bertrand has filled in admirable for Cole. I would prefer to keep Cole for the league games, at least as he is just coming back but expect Cahill to play tomorrow as we try to keep a clean sheet and set up the home leg nicely. That game next Thursday comes just three days before a trip to Manchester United, a game that could have a massive say on the top four, so we do not want to have too hard a game and certainly not extra time.
BaselBenitezBertrandCahillColeIvanovicLuizSwansea
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esterases (1) (remove)
Fachbereich Biologie (1) (remove)
Characterisation of esterase genes in the genomes of Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2) and Streptomyces avermitilis (2007)
Soror, Sameh
Esterases and lipases are widely used as industrial enzymes and for the synthesis of chiral drugs. Because of their rich secondary metabolism, Streptomyces species offer a relatively untapped source of interesting esterases and lipases. S. coelicolor and S. avermitilis contain 51 genes annotated as esterases and/or lipases. In this study I have cloned 14 different genes encoding for lipolytic enzymes from S. coelicolor (11 genes) and S. avermitilis (four genes). Some of these genes were over-expressed in E. coli. Three of the produced enzymes, which were produced by the genes SCO 7131, SCO6966 and SCO3644, were characterized biochemically and one of them was subjected for directed evolution. The gene estA (locus SCO 7131) was annotated as a putative lipase/esterase in the genome sequence of S. coelicolor A3(2), but does not have a homologue in the genome sequence of S. avermitilis or in other known Streptomyces sequences. estA was cloned and expressed in E. coli as a His-tagged protein. The protein was purified and could be recovered in its non-tagged form after digestion with factor Xa. The relative molecular weight was estimated to be 35.5kDa. The enzyme was only active towards acetate esters and not on larger substrates. It had a stereospecificity towards α-naphathylacetate. It was thermostable, with a half-life at 50C of 4.5 hours. Est A showed stability over pH range 5.5-10, and had optimum pH of 7.5. Its activity was drastically decreased when it was pre-incubated in 10mM PMSF, Cu+2 and Hg+2. It was not very stable in most organic solvents and had only slight enantioselectivity. Est A belongs to the HSL family whose founder member is the human hormone-sensitive lipase. I have developed a protein profile for the HSL family modifying the conserved motifs found by Arpigny and Jaeger (1999). Due to the presence of several HSL members with known 3D structure and good homology to Est A, I was able to make a homology model of Est A. Five different mutants of Est A were produced through site directed mutagenesis: W87F, V158A, W87F/V158A, M162L and S163A. The mutants M162L and S163A did not produce a significant change either in substrate specificity or enzyme kinetics. The mutants V158A and W87F/V158A could act on the larger substrates p-nitrophenylbutyrate and caproate and tributyrin. The mutant V158A had improved thermostability and its t1/2 at 50ºC increased to 24h. The affinity of V158A towards p-nitrophenyacetate increased 6-fold when compared with the wild type, whereas the affinity of W87F decreased 4-fold. Directed evolution of Est A was done through random mutagenesis and ER-PCR. A library of 6336 mutants was constructed and screened for mutants with a broader spectrum of substrate specificity. The mutant XXVF7 did show alteration in the substrate specificity of Est A. The mutant XXVF7 had 5 amino acids changes L76R, L146P, S196G, W213R and L267R. The gene locus SCO 6966 (estB gene) was cloned and expressed in E. coli as a His-tagged protein. It was not possible to remove the His-tag using factor Xa. The tagged protein had a molecular weight 31.9kDa. Est B was active against short chain fatty acid esters (C2-C6). Its optimum temperature was 30ºC and was stable for 1h at temperatures up to 37ºC. The enzyme had maximum activity at pH 8-8.5 and was stable over pH range 7.5-11 for 24h. It was highly sensitive for PMSF, Cu+2 and Hg+2. The enzymatic activity deceased in presence of organic solvents, however it was fairly stable for 1h in 20% organic solvents solutions. A third esterase was produced from the gene locus SCO 3644. This esterase was a thermosensitive one with optimum temperature of 35ºC. The three characterized enzymes included a thermophilic, mesophilic and psychrophilic ones. This indicates the high variation in the characters of Streptomyces lipolytic enzymes and highlighting Streptomyces as a source for esterases and lipases of interesting catalytic activity. This study was an initial trial to provide a strategy for a comprehensive use of genome data.
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Weekend Bloggers
Civility Rule
Res ipsa loquitur – The thing itself speaks
Columns, Criminal law, Politics September 1, 2019 September 1, 2019
James Comey Wants An Apology? This is Myth Becoming Madness
Below is my column on the recent Inspector General report on the conduct of James Comey in removing and disclosing FBI material after he was fired.
Here is the column:
Two years ago, former FBI Director James Comey came out with a book that celebrated himself as a paragon of “ethical leadership,” a subject that he later taught at the College of William and Mary. Comey declared, “Ethical leaders lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly the truth.” If that is the case, the new Justice Department inspector general report released on Thursday establishes that Comey is the very antithesis of the ethical leader he described. Comey was found to have violated both federal law and regulations for his own gain, and he made critical decisions that put personal over institutional interests.
Nevertheless, Comey released a statement portraying the scathing report as a type of victory and encouraged his critics to send their apologies to him. It was a “Captain Queeg” moment when myth borders on madness. Rather than rave about who stole his strawberries, as Queeg did in “The Caine Mutiny,” Comey claims someone stole a reputation that he tossed away two years ago. The report states that Comey not only knowingly violated rules governing all FBI employees, but his decisions “set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees.”
It details how Comey removed FBI memoranda and then used his friend, Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman, to leak the contents of one memo to The New York Times. Several of the memos were later found to contain privileged, sensitive or classified information. The FBI seized the memos and had to “scrub” the computer of Richman to remove the unauthorized material provided by Comey. The report also says Comey later acknowledged that some of the classifications were “reasonable.”
Of course, facts are largely immaterial in matters of mythology. When Comey removed FBI material and arranged for a leak to the media, the coverage stayed positive despite some of us noting that the “memos” removed by Comey were FBI material and potentially classified. At a minimum, he violated clear rules against leaking such information to the media, a curious decision for the person tasked previously with finding leakers. I noted that such leaks were entirely unnecessary, given other options for getting this information to investigators and to Congress.
Those points were met with furious objections from analysts who insisted that the memos were personal writings akin to diary entries. Legal expert and former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa said they constituted “personal recollections,” and Brookings Institution fellow and CNN legal analyst Susan Hennessey wrote that it is “hard to even understand the argument” for how his “memory about his conversation with the president qualifies as a record, even if he jotted it down while in his office.” When I wrote that the memos were covered by the Federal Records Act and by Justice Department rules barring their removal or disclosures, the arguments were dismissed by the experts on various cable networks.
When former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders described the conduct of Comey as “improper and likely could have been illegal,” she was given two “pinocchios” as having falsely accused him. Comey then turned to social media, much like President Trump, to further pump up his record. He started with tweets under pseudonyms but later put his own name on tweets showing him walking through forests or standing alone while quoting sources like the Bible, “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
Comey was building a personal brand, just like Trump, that culminated in his publishing his sensational book “A Higher Loyalty.” Once again, the media was as unrelenting as it was uncritical. Few outlets mentioned the concerns over a former FBI director rushing out a book soon after leaving office in a sharp departure from his predecessors. Comey became an instant millionaire with a book tour where he was essentially met with palm fronds and cries of “hosanna.” He knew that any final reckoning on his conduct would not come before months, if not years, of investigation.
The inspector general has confirmed what was clear and obvious. The memos were FBI material, and Comey did violate provisions of the Federal Records Act and FBI rules clearly barring their removal and disclosure. Moreover, the inspector general agreed that it was not necessary to guarantee an investigation into Trump. Investigations were ongoing and the report cites other “options” that Comey refused to use. The report concludes, “What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.”
Despite Comey’s spin, the Report did confirm that “Memos 2 and 7 contained small amounts of information classified at the ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ level.” In other words, they were classified at the lowest level but still nonpublic, classified material. They were not declassified under 2018. Of course, Comey did not know what classification would apply because he removed them before they were reviewed. Either way, as I said at the time, it was unlikely that he would be prosecuted on such a case and he knew it.
The reason Comey violated these rules was as obvious then as it is now. Leaking the memos was designed to improve his stature in the media, and it worked. Comey transformed himself into a badly needed hero to use against the villain Trump. He knew the memos would change the focus of media coverage to his new role as a federal government whistleblower.
Forgotten were prior calls for Comey to be fired by Democrats and Republicans alike for his poor judgment during the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her use of unsecured servers for communications. There was little need to discuss how the review by former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein found “serious mistakes” by Comey. It was no longer breaking news that Rosenstein also cited a long list of former attorneys general, federal judges and leading prosecutors from both parties who believed Comey violated his obligation to “preserve, protect and defend” the traditions of the Justice Department and the FBI.
Rosenstein also noted that Comey “refused to admit his errors,” including his obvious violation of “long standing Justice Department policies and traditions.” That was even before Comey decided to remove FBI material and leak information to the press, yet he is still refusing to admit his errors. Shortly after the inspector general report was released, Comey returned to spinning his conduct as somehow vindicated by the findings. He tweeted, “I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a ‘sorry we lied about you’ would be nice.”
Comey is referring to the Justice Department decision not to charge him with releasing classified information and no finding by the inspector general of an intentional release of classified, as opposed to sensitive, information. However, many of us who have been critics of Comey have long said that his prosecution was unlikely. Comey is relying on the fact that his memos were not found to have contained classified or sensitive information until after he gave the information to The New York Times.
The inspector general report says that, following the publication of the New York Times article, a classification review was conducted. The reason is that Comey never asked for such a review, any more than he asked for permission as a fired FBI employee to remove the material or leak it to the media. According to the report, senior officials stated they were “stunned” and “shocked” by Comey removing and disclosing the information.
Comey knows that, ultimately for him, none of this matters. He has magnanimously accepted the apologies that no one has offered and claimed vindication that appears nowhere in the inspector general report. That is simply the benefit of being the author of your own mythology.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
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148 thoughts on “James Comey Wants An Apology? This is Myth Becoming Madness”
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Why is it myth?
Anon1:
“Comey did not release anything to the public”
What a moron…and a coward to boot for all to see. C’mon kid, let’s see you defend the indefensible again. Seriously, what an obviously stupid thing to say.
Anon1 says:
Now, you prove that’s not true if you think it isn’t. That’s how it works
How “it works” is you post, I post, and others, if they care, read and judge for themselves.
The only serious question I have is “do you have a personality disorder?”
I forgot…my other question which you didn’t respond to is if you would meet me in Manhattan? Strictly for a kind chat just to understand…I might even pay for the drinks. Don’t worry, I don’t bite.
Ivan, I’d love to, but I left there decades ago and live about 1200 miles away. Thanks for the offer.
Independent Bob says:
How does it feel to want?
Trump does much the same or worse, releasing classified photos.
Paul C Schulte says:
David Benson – Trump can release what he wants. He is the top of the chain.
Yes Paul, but it is not our obligation to therefore approve of his actions.
Comey did not release any classified material.
Trump has repeatedly and ignorantly leaked classified information to the Russians and the world. So get off the high horse with Comey, who has done neither.
Anon1 – everything Comey released was considered Classified at the Confidential level, at least. That is the default position until it is declassified. Comey knows that.
Comey did not release anything to the public and no classified information in his memos were seen by the public.
Anon1 – I know you are pretending to be the Village Idiot, however Comey gave several memos to his friend “the public” who then released them to the media. At all times it was classified material. His friend “the public” and the media “the public” and their readers “the public” all had access to classified material thanks to Saint Comey.
No Paul, that didn’t happen. You are the public idiot.
You are lying and and it’s absurdly obvious:
Comey himself says he gave his “personal memos” regarding his interactions with the President to his friend Daniel Richman with the express purpose of having him leak the information therein to the press so as to instigate the appointment of a Special Counsel. Your statement that Comey “did not release anything to the public” is a flat out lie unless you want to argue about what the meaning of the word “is” is.
Please stop acting like a “public idiot.”
Comey’s claim that the leaked documents were “personal memos” wouldn’t have saved him from being fired by the FBI/DOJ.
The agreement Comey signed as an FBI employee states:
“all information acquired by me in connection with my official duties with the FBI and all official material to which I have access remain the property of the United States of America”
and that an agent…
“will not reveal, by any means, any information or material from or related to FBI files or any other information acquired by virtue of my official employment to any unauthorized recipient without prior official written authorization by the FBI.”
Anon1 is not acting, thats the sad part
I just asked him what his deal is after taking apart his lies and deceptions. I’m curious to see the response.
Ivan, none of the memos were released to the public. Comey took a picture of one of the memos – the Flynn memo – and sent it to his friend, instructing him to share the contents, but not the document, with NYTs. No classified information from any of the documents has been revealed to the public.
You are caught in a deliberate lie:
You said “Comey did not release ANYTHING to the public.” That is an obvious deliberate lie and your prevarication is obvious for everyone to see again. The documents themselves weren’t released to the public but information contained therein was.
This was in blatant violation of his employment agreement.
Why do lie and prevaricate like this? Are you paid to do this or are you just putting partisan politics over the truth?
Ivan – just the act of releasing them to his friend is an act of releasing documents to the public. One person makes up the public.
Ivan, Comey did not release anything to the public.
Information he released to his friend was intended to be released to the public.
That information did not include classified information.
PS Ivan is correct about Comey violating his employment agreement.
Trump can fire him again.
I’ve got a post up for you at the top of the thread…let’s continue 🙂
PS I know Comey got your boy in the presidency, but that doesn’t make him a saint.
Mr.Schulte,
Anon1 is not pretending.
The President has the lawful authority to release any classified material- that’s part of his job. On the other hand, What Comey did was commit a gross violation of FBI policy for which he would certainly have been fired had Trump not already done so as is made clear by the IG report which actually recommended criminal charges as well- if you want me to post the relevant, painfully clear passages from Comey’s FBI employment contract I will do so.
I can tell by your clever wording(here and elsewhere) that you know exactly what you are doing…prevaricating. It’s purposefully dishonest. I’m serious: are you paid to do this or are you just putting partisan politics over the truth because you hate Trump…or both?
Trump has stupidly revealed classified information to the Russians and the world for his own purposes. Comey has revealed no classified information to the public. That you think the former is just fine is a measure of your cultish devotion to Trump and willingness to defend and make excuses for anything he does.
Snopes agrees with Anon1.
https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-claims-that-225-snopes-rates-mostly-true
Snopes Rates Biden’s Claim That 2+2=5 As ‘Mostly True’
U.S.—Joe Biden recently made a strange claim: that 2+2=5. He was ridiculed for his gaffe after making the statement while speaking at an elementary school. The kids all said, “Hey, dummy! The answer is 4, not 5!”
But the crack squad of fact-checkers at Snopes quickly got to work on Biden’s incredulous claim. Their findings? Biden’s statement was actually “mostly true.”
“Sure, Biden got some key details wrong,” said Bob Snopes, founder of Snopes. “But the central concept of what he was saying, that two numbers put together make another number, was completely accurate. Sometimes two and two make four. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. It is not easy to become sane.”
The website’s 6,000-word defense/fact-check of Biden’s claim further pointed out that 80% of the answer was correct, and it’s only the one additional number that was a mixture of truth and falsehood.
As the event neared its conclusion, Biden claimed there were five spotlights lighting up the stage even though there were clearly four. One bald man in the back shouted, “There are four lights!” but was dragged from the room for reeducation.
Peg – LOL
Darren Smith says:
So, no answer as to what your deal is? What’s up? I live in NYC, it would be great to meet up one day and I’m free all the time. I just want to understand. I know you’re not accidentally acting dumb. That’s obvious.
you are acting dumb. Anon1 is employed by Correct the Record, paid to troll, lie and poke people like you
ewe dumba$$!
Anon1 – I know this is hard for you to conceive, however the President of the United States may reveal classified information to whomever he wants. He has the last say on classification.
Please explain how the President doing his job fully within the law(releasing any classified information he alone deems worthy) is worse than Comey committing an act that would have certainly lead to his firing by the FBI/DOJ had Trump not already done so?
This is absurd x XIII says:
Comey’s a pretentious, soulless, bureaucratic finagler. If they can find discrete criminal acts properly credited to his account, by all means prosecute. Every person involved in these capers needs to suffer.
pbinca says:
The bigger question for Comey is:
1. Why did you not trust the NYC Field Office to run the Midyear Exam and Crossfire Hurricane cases?
2. Any American citizen being “groomed” by Russian intelligence is, by the Standard FBI Operation Procedure, entitled to presumption of innocence and is coached privately on how best to deflect the foreign operator(s)…called a defensive briefing. Why did you choose not to give the Trump campaign a discreet defensive briefing in July 2016? Why did you depart from S.O.P? Was Trump afforded a presumption of innocence? Was there a lack of trust? Who decided that?
Tch, tch, Comey.
batousan2014 says:
>>He knew the memos would change the focus of media coverage to his new role as a federal government whistleblower.
And would spare him from any well-deserved criticism over his handling of the Clinton email inquiry, MemoGate, or how he personally profited from related infamy by snagging a book deal and a teaching gig. The man is a disgrace to the agency he once presided over and anything but a paragon of “Higher Loyalty.”
John Say says:
Turley makes the argument that Comey had other means of getting this information out – While True – even that is probelmatic. Whether Comey had other potentially more legitimate means to acheive the ends he desired. The ends – as well as all other less offensive means remain unethical.
To this day there remains absolutely no foundation for the investigations – apparently of the Trump, Rubio, Cruz and Clinton campaigns, that the FBI appears to have started in late 2015.
This entire sordid affair reflects TWO things:
The efforts of the prior administration, and holdovers to justify an investigation that to this day still does not have a foundation. Just to be clear, Mueller did not just find there was no evidence of collusion, he also found there was no basis beyond what the government knew in approximately September of 2016. At that time the Steele Dossier was “salacious and unverified” today it is “salacious and false”. Whatever it is it never reached the standard of evidence that should have been necescary for a warrant.
Yet as Mueller noted thousands of subpeona’s and warrants as well as a grand jury were convened.
ON WHAT BASIS ?
Are we going to sic the FBI on every politician or political campaign that is targeted by ugly rumors ? I know the 4th amendment has been nearly shredded – and this is just another example of how wrong that is. But I even the tattered shadow of itself that remains should not allow the Steele Dossier to serve as a justification for anything that requires a warrant.
That is problem number one – and that alone completely undermines any claim that Comey had other means – he did not – BECAUSE what he sought to do was UNETHICAL from the start. Turley’s argument is NOT that Comey could have ethically accomplished his purposes. Turley’s argument is that Comey could have used different unethical means to accomplish his purposes.
The 2nd problem is “Comey’s purposes”.
I do not normally encourage speculation into why people do things. We can not read minds. We should focus on ACTS. An act is a fact. It is right or wrong, it is legal or not.
But Comey’s purpose in his meeting with Trump at Trump tower requires inquiry – not because of some need to read minds, But because there is no possible legitimate purpose. And because in several instances Comey has admitted his desire to use his power as FBI director to do what is little more than spread gossip to the press.
It is not the role of the FBI director (or any in the executive branch) to “influence” elections, nor to cast judgement on the words, intentions, purported motives of elected officials. It is not their role to decide what gosip the public should here. Pretty much nothing that Comey has sought to assure that the public gain knowledge of is NOT a fact.
There are almost no verified facts in the Steele Dossier – and those are mundane and were already public. In fact the Steele Dossier appears to be a combination of facts that were previously reported in the press and fantasmagorical speculation arround those facts. The press had the Steele Dossier – if they wanted to print it – they could.
It was not ethical conduct – and likely not legal conduct for anyone in government to attempt to encourage the press to defame people using “salacious and unverified” gossip.
What Comey thinks the public needed to hear regarding his conversations with Trump – is NOT for the most part the FACTS of those conversation. It was Comey’s spin of those facts, It was Comey’s speculation regarding Trump’s intentions that Comey wanted made public – and that again is improper – unethical, regardless of the means.
Every single US citizen gets a voice regarding our elected officials. We express that voice on the first tuesday in november when we vote. Those of us who work in government may not use in any way the power of our offices to express our personal views regarding preferences for who should hold office.
Michael Aarethun says:
Finding out there was no evidence of collusion was done on the very first day, even earlier. When it may have become a criminal or near criminal act was when Meuller failed to simply say, “Collusion is not a crime’ and failed to do so. It is, to this day still not a day. However it backfired when far from uncovering what was intended it uncovered the criminal acts of not only the Clintons but various others in the Socialist Camp. yes i know they call themselves democrats and they call this a Democracy but like collusion both of those are false claims. That group to my knowledge has never been democratic by any means nor have we ever been a Democracy since The Constitution was accepted by 100 percent of the 13 nation states involved.
i’m on the side that saw how Comey made public statement that was not his right to make – that belonged to Loretta Lynch – and eith because he was incompetent or on purpose selected one part of the US Code that called for ‘intent’ as an element. the others did not do so. One left intent completely out and another stated a history of such actions were on their own proof of intent.
In point of fact he lied stating he could not prove intent then played stupid. and further went beyond the bounds of his office (various names misprision or malfeasance) in making the announcement and then we find violated further the regulations on handling classified documents.
It looks an awful lot like someone got bought off but not just to protect Hillary.
Michael is another who has not even bothered to read a summation of the Mueller Report and is also completely ignorant of it’s findings – it did not find “no collusion”).
As to Hillary’s “intent” with classified materials, no one has made that claim with any standing and it’s a necessary component according to the SC.
“…In Gorin v. United States (1941), the Supreme Court heard a challenge to a conviction of a Navy intelligence official who sold classified material to the Soviet Union on Japanese intelligence operations in the United States….
Justice Stanley Reed wrote the majority opinion and disagreed that the law was unconstitutionally vague, but only on the very narrow grounds that the law required “intent or reason to believe that the information to be obtained is to be used to the injury of the United States.” Only because the court read the law to require scienter, or bad faith, before a conviction could be sustained was the law constitutional. Otherwise, it would be too difficult for a defendant to know when exactly material related to the national defense. The court made clear that if the law criminalized the simple mishandling of classified information, it would not survive constitutional scrutiny, writing:
The sections are not simple prohibitions against obtaining or delivering to foreign powers information… relating to national defense. If this were the language, it would need to be tested by the inquiry as to whether it had double meaning or forced anyone, at his peril, to speculate as to whether certain actions violated the statute.
In other words, the defendant had to intend for his conduct to benefit a foreign power for his actions to violate 793(f).
Without the requirement of intent, the phrase “relating to the national defense” would be unconstitutionally vague. This reading of the statute has guided federal prosecutors ever since, which is why Comey based his decision not to file charges on Clinton’s lack of intent. This is also why no one has ever been convicted of violating 793(f) on a gross negligence theory….
…Members of the U.S. military have been charged with the negligent mishandling of classified material, but not under 793(f). Criminal charges in military court are brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not the Espionage Act (although violations of the Espionage Act can be charged under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in military court)…”
John Ford is a former military prosecutor and a current reserve U.S. Army Judge Advocate. He now practices law in California.
https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/why-intent-not-gross-negligence-is-the-standard-in-clinton-case/
Anon1 is a known troll and liar:
Until you address this lie, I will post your comment. It speaks for itself and for your nature.
Ivan, let me help you.
Comey did not release anything to the public.
That is a straight up lie that I’ll add to your posts when I see them. I did notice quite a number of people in the comments wondering what’s up with your b.s. It’s just what you do.
This is fun.
Anon1 – you do realize that Comey releasing it to his friend is releasing it to the public. The public can be one person. Just as publishing can be speaking to only one person.
1. of or concerning the people as a whole.
synonyms: popular, general, common, communal, collective, shared, joint, universal, widespread
“there is a great public demand for information on food”
2. done, perceived, or existing in open view.
“he wanted a public apology in the Wall Street Journal”
synonyms: known, widely known, overt, plain, obvious, in circulation, published, publicized, exposed
“Comey says he helped release details of his Trump meetings”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2017/live-updates/trump-white-house/james-comey-testimony-what-we-learn/comey-says-he-helped-coordinate-release-details-of-his-trump-meetings/?noredirect=on
Anon1 – your definition makes my point.
shared, joint,
synonyms: known, overt, plain, obvious, in circulation, published, publicized, exposed
Yay. Own it. It will be your brand for all to see and we’ll both have fun 🙂
Let’s just stop with “….Mueller did not just find there was no evidence of collusion,…”
No, he did not find that.
Next?
Anon is playing Simon Says again. Unless ‘Simon Says’ is said first nothing counts unless coming from the Washington Post or the NYtimes. That is a totally idiotic way of thinking.
Anon1 lies and deceives on purpose.
Come back when you’ve got something Ivan. You just got your a.. kicked.
Your lies and deceptions are everywhere for all to see:
Come back when you address the lie.
I know you have no explanation so you will dissemble once again. I will keep posting your own comment to your posts from now on so everyone knows what you are up to. Please feel free to do the same to me as we both know that this is a fight you can’t win. You may want to change your handle soon.
Ivan, I gave you a complete explanation, no holes, no wiggle, blunt facts.. Was there something you didn’t understand?
PS There wasn’t any fight.
Your words have no defense as is obvious for all to see. You have provided no explanation whatsoever. Otherwise, you would defend your comment here.
What do you want explained Ivan. Is English your 2nd language?
Under the name of Jan F. Anon said certain things and then denied them. I quoted what he had previously said. Jan F. (Anon) then ran away and a short time later reappeared under the name Anon trying to hide himself among the others. Ivan you have called Anon out and you are absolutely correct.
Anon1 – you are a legend in your own mind, however no were else, including here.
I feel your pain Paul.
Thanks Ivan. I think everyone including Anon realizes that, but he also states mistruths because he is ignorant and arrogant. So was Jan F. his former personality. Things don’t seem to progress for the better where Anon is concerned.
I don’t think he lies out of arrogance or ignorance(maybe I’m wrong?). It’s 100% considered and calculated and he’s not a troll just having fun. He seeks to misinform, distract, and deflect for political purposes. He would fit in perfectly in DC. I wouldn’t jump to saying that he’s a paid shill…I’m guessing he actually has a personality disorder.
mespo727272 says:
Comey is a cad as this article details brilliantly.
If you are a federal investigator your notes of any kind regarding that investigation are presumptively NOT PUBLIC.
It is at the very least improper and possibly illegal.
Turley and others have noted that historically such acts do not get prosecuted.
That is WRONG. If we are going to make a law – we MUST prosecute it. We PARTICULARLY must prosecute those who OPENLY violate it. AND those who were charged to enforce the law and still violate it.
One of the observations that Comey got close to correct regarding Clinton – is that we DO have different standards regarding classified material for different roles.
A soldier who commits even a small breach of low level information will likely face SEVERE consequences. A staffer at the Department of Commerce will not.
The director of the FBI is LAW ENFORCEMENT – the consequences should be HIGH.
As the IG noted Comey’s choice effected the entire FBI, its moral, its reputation, as well as creating a culture of ignoring policy and the law.
The consequences to Comey MUST be severe. that is a requirement to assure that no FBI director ever pulls this nonsense again AND to restore the reputation of the FBI AND to send a message that the culture of lawlessness that Comey fostered is at an END.
Other things in the IG report are even more damning. I am not precisely sure what crime was involved, but Comey’s use of the Steele Dossier in the President Elect Trump meeting, is absolutely unconscionable. That must never happen again.
We beleive that J. Edgar Hoover engaged in similar tactics – though primarily to enhance the power of the FBI, not for political ends as Comey did.
Regardless, we MUST send a message that this can not happen again.
It is the role of law enforcement to investigate allegations of crimes – NOT to create new crimes, not to find ways of blackmailing people.
Nixon formed the Plumbers BECAUSE the IRS, FBI, CIA, … would NOT go after his political opponents as he wanted.
What occured during the Obama administration is WORSE – because the instutitions of government were used for purely political purposes.
John, maybe you and Trump can sue Comey.
Mary – are you saying Natacha is bi? 😉
Paul how would you know in this forum? Natacha’s real name might be George Soros. Depends on who is really dong the writing with these or those who do not provide real names. In this case it could be French or Danish but not English or Russian. The grammatical rule we use in English is a person’s name may be spelled and pronounced any way they see fit much less their gender.
Michael Aarethun – actually, if Natacha were bi it would make her more interesting, 😉
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Tensor GSVD of Patient- and Platform-Matched Tumor and Normal DNA Copy-Number Profiles Uncovers Chromosome Arm-Wide Patterns of Tumor-Exclusive Platform-Consistent Alterations Encoding for Cell Transformation and Predicting Ovarian Cancer Survival
Preethi Sankaranarayanan ,
¶‡ These authors contributed equally to this work.
Affiliations Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America, Department of Bioengineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America
Theodore E. Schomay ,
Katherine A. Aiello,
Orly Alter
* E-mail: orly@sci.utah.edu
Affiliations Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America, Department of Bioengineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America, Department of Human Genetics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America
Preethi Sankaranarayanan,
Theodore E. Schomay,
Preethi Sankaranarayanan Theodore E. Schomay Katherine A. Aiello Orly Alter
The number of large-scale high-dimensional datasets recording different aspects of a single disease is growing, accompanied by a need for frameworks that can create one coherent model from multiple tensors of matched columns, e.g., patients and platforms, but independent rows, e.g., probes. We define and prove the mathematical properties of a novel tensor generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD), which can simultaneously find the similarities and dissimilarities, i.e., patterns of varying relative significance, between any two such tensors. We demonstrate the tensor GSVD in comparative modeling of patient- and platform-matched but probe-independent ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma (OV) tumor, mostly high-grade, and normal DNA copy-number profiles, across each chromosome arm, and combination of two arms, separately. The modeling uncovers previously unrecognized patterns of tumor-exclusive platform-consistent co-occurring copy-number alterations (CNAs). We find, first, and validate that each of the patterns across only 7p and Xq, and the combination of 6p+12p, is correlated with a patient’s prognosis, is independent of the tumor’s stage, the best predictor of OV survival to date, and together with stage makes a better predictor than stage alone. Second, these patterns include most known OV-associated CNAs that map to these chromosome arms, as well as several previously unreported, yet frequent focal CNAs. Third, differential mRNA, microRNA, and protein expression consistently map to the DNA CNAs. A coherent picture emerges for each pattern, suggesting roles for the CNAs in OV pathogenesis and personalized therapy. In 6p+12p, deletion of the p21-encoding CDKN1A and p38-encoding MAPK14 and amplification of RAD51AP1 and KRAS encode for human cell transformation, and are correlated with a cell’s immortality, and a patient’s shorter survival time. In 7p, RPA3 deletion and POLD2 amplification are correlated with DNA stability, and a longer survival. In Xq, PABPC5 deletion and BCAP31 amplification are correlated with a cellular immune response, and a longer survival.
Citation: Sankaranarayanan P, Schomay TE, Aiello KA, Alter O (2015) Tensor GSVD of Patient- and Platform-Matched Tumor and Normal DNA Copy-Number Profiles Uncovers Chromosome Arm-Wide Patterns of Tumor-Exclusive Platform-Consistent Alterations Encoding for Cell Transformation and Predicting Ovarian Cancer Survival. PLoS ONE 10(4): e0121396. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121396
Academic Editor: Jörg D. Hoheisel, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, GERMANY
Received: October 21, 2014; Accepted: January 31, 2015; Published: April 15, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 Sankaranarayanan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.
Funding: This research was supported by the Utah Science, Technology, and Research (USTAR) Initiative, National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) R01 Grant HG-004302 and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award DMS-0847173 (to OA). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
The growing number of large-scale high-dimensional datasets recording different aspects of a single disease promise to enhance basic understanding of life on the molecular level as well as medical diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. This is accompanied by a fundamental need for mathematical frameworks that can create one coherent model from multiple datasets arranged in multiple order-matched, column-matched, and row-independent tensors, i.e., tensors of the same number of dimensions each, with one-to-one mappings among the columns across all but one of the corresponding dimensions among the tensors, but not necessarily among the rows across the one remaining dimension in each tensor. Consider, e.g., the structure of the DNA copy-number datasets in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) [1, 2]. Profiles of tumor and normal tissues from the same set of patients have the structure of two matrices, i.e., second-order tensors, with a one-to-one mapping between the columns that correspond to the same set of patients, but not necessarily between the rows that correspond to the DNA copy-number probes with valid data in either the tumor or the normal dataset, and may be different. When the tumor and normal profiles are measured in replicates, e.g., by the same set of profiling platforms, then the structure of the tumor and normal datasets is that of two third-order tensors, of matched columns that correspond to the same sets of patients and platforms, and independent rows that correspond to the probes in either the tumor or the normal dataset.
The higher-order generalized singular value decomposition (HO GSVD) is the only simultaneous decomposition to date of more than two such column-matched but row-independent datasets, which is by definition exact, and which mathematical properties allow interpreting its variables and operations in terms of the similar as well as dissimilar, e.g., biomedical reality among the datasets [3, 4]. The HO GSVD generalizes the GSVD [5–12], which was demonstrated in comparative modeling of, e.g., patient-matched but probe-independent glioblastoma (GBM) brain tumor and normal DNA copy-number profiles from TCGA [13]. The modeling uncovered a previously unrecognized genome-wide pattern of tumor-exclusive copy-number alterations (CNAs). Prior to the modeling, DNA copy-number subtypes of GBM predictive of survival and response to chemotherapy were not conclusively identified [14, 15], and the best predictor of GBM survival was the patient’s age at diagnosis [16, 17]. Survival analyses [18, 19] showed and validated that the pattern is correlated with a GBM patient’s prognosis and response to chemotherapy, is independent of age, and together with age makes a better predictor than age alone. Segmentation [20, 21] of the pattern showed that it includes most known GBM-associated changes in chromosome numbers and focal CNAs, as well as several previously unreported, yet frequent CNAs. This suggested that the pattern is not only correlated, but also possibly causally coordinated with the GBM tumor’s pathogenesis. Previously unrecognized targets for personalized GBM drug therapy were also suggested, the tousled-like kinase 2 TLK2 and the methyltransferase-like 2A METTL2A [22–24]. The GSVD comparative modeling, therefore, resulted in new insights into the poorly understood relations between a GBM tumor’s genome and a patient’s survival phenotype.
The GSVD and HO GSVD, however, are limited to datasets arranged in second-order tensors, i.e., matrices. We define, therefore, a novel tensor GSVD, i.e., an exact simultaneous decomposition of two datasets, arranged in two higher-than-second-order tensors of matched column dimensions but independent row dimensions. The tensor GSVD factors or separates the pair of tensors into corresponding pairs of “subtensors”, i.e., pairs of outer products or combinations of a paired set of patterns each: patterns, one across each of the matched column dimensions, which are identical for both tensors, combined with one pattern across the independent row dimension of either one of the two tensors. The pairs of subtensors are of varying relative mathematical significance, i.e., the significance of one subtensor in a pair in the corresponding tensor relative to the significance of the second subtensor in the second tensor varies among the pairs of subtensors. We prove that the tensor GSVD extends the GSVD and the tensor higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) [25–28] from a decomposition of either two column-matched matrices or one tensor, respectively, to a decomposition of two order-matched, column-matched, and row-independent tensors [29]. We also show that the mathematical properties of the tensor GSVD allow interpreting the subtensors in terms of the biomedical similarities and dissimilarities between the two corresponding high-dimensional datasets.
We demonstrate the tensor GSVD in comparative modeling of patient- and platform-matched but probe-independent ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma (OV) tumor and normal DNA copy-number profiles from TCGA. Most of the tumors, i.e., >95%, are high-grade tumors [30]. OV accounts for about 90% of all ovarian cancers. Despite recent large-scale profiling efforts, the best predictor of OV survival to date has remained the tumor’s stage at diagnosis, a pathological assessment of the spread of the cancer numbering I to IV [31]. About 25% of primary OV tumors are resistant, and most recurrent OV tumors develop resistance to platinum-based chemotherapy, the first-line treatment for more than 30 years now [32]. Even though there exist drugs for platinum-based chemotherapy-resistant OV tumors, no pathology laboratory diagnostic exists that distinguishes between resistant and sensitive tumors before the treatment [33]. OV tumors exhibit significant CNA variation among them, much more so than, e.g., GBM tumors, and very few frequent CNAs typical of OV have been identified so far. We, therefore, model the profiles across each chromosome arm, and each combination of two chromosome arms, separately. The modeling uncovers previously unrecognized chromosome arm-wide patterns of tumor-exclusive and platform-consistent co-occurring CNAs.
By using survival analyses of the discovery and, separately, validation set of patients, as well as only the platinum-based chemotherapy patients in the discovery and validation sets, we find, first, and validate that each of the patterns across only the chromosome arms 7p and Xq, and across only the combination of the two chromosome arms 6p+12p (but not 6p nor 12p separately), is correlated with an OV patient’s prognosis and response to platinum-based chemotherapy, is independent of stage, and together with stage makes a better predictor than stage alone. By using survival analyses of only the > 95% patients with high-grade tumors, we find and validate that these patterns are also independent of the OV tumor’s grade. We observe three groups of significantly different prognoses among the patients classified by a combination of the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tensor GSVD classifications, suggesting a possible implementation of the patterns in a pathology laboratory test. Second, by using segmentation of the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq patterns, we find that the amplifications and deletions identified by these patterns include most known OV-associated CNAs that map to these chromosome arms [34], as well as several previously unreported, yet frequent focal CNAs [35–38]. Third, by using gene ontology enrichment analyses of the OV tumor mRNA expression profiles of the patients [39, 40], we find that differential mRNA expression between the patients, classified by any one of the three tensor GSVDs, is enriched in ontologies corresponding to one of three hallmarks of cancer [41]: a cell’s immortality in 6p+12p, DNA instability in 7p, and cellular immune response suppression in Xq. The differential mRNA expression of genes from these enriched ontologies that are located on any one of the chromosome arms is consistent with the CNAs across that arm. Genes that map to amplifications or deletions on any one pattern, are overexpressed or underexpressed, respectively, in the patients which tumor profiles are classified as highly similar to that pattern. The differential expression of all microRNAs and proteins that map to any one of the chromosome arms is also consistent with the CNAs across that arm.
Taken together, a coherent picture emerges for each of these previously unrecognized chromosome arm-wide patterns of tumor-exclusive and platform-consistent co-occurring alterations, suggesting roles for the DNA CNAs in OV pathogenesis in addition to personalized diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. In 6p+12p, loss of the p21-encoding CDKN1A and the p38-encoding MAPK14 on 6p, and gain of KRAS on 12p, combined but not separately, can lead to transformation of human normal to tumor cells [42, 43]. These transformation-encoding CNAs, together with deletion of TNF on 6p, and amplification of RAD51AP1 and ITPR2 on 12p, are correlated with a suppression of cell cycle arrest, senescence, and apoptosis, i.e., a tumor cell’s immortality, and a patient’s shorter survival time [44–55]. Note that there already exist drugs that interact with CDKN1A, MAPK14, and RAD51AP1, even though these genes were not recognized previously as targets for OV drug therapy [56]. In 7p, RPA3 deletion and POLD2 amplification are correlated with DNA repair during replication, i.e., DNA stability, and a longer survival time [57, 58]. In Xq, PABPC5 deletion and BCAP31 amplification are correlated with a cellular immune response, and a longer survival time [59].
Mathematical Method: Tensor GSVD
Discovery Datasets are Pairs of Column-Matched but Row-Independent Tensors
We selected primary OV tumor and normal DNA copy-number profiles of a set of 249 TCGA patients [2] (Sec. 1.1 in S1 Appendix, and S1 Dataset). Each profile was measured in two replicates by the same set of two DNA microarray platforms. For each chromosome arm or combination of two chromosome arms, the structure of these tumor and normal discovery datasets 𝒟1 and 𝒟2, of K1-tumor and K2-normal probes × L-patients, i.e., arrays × M-platforms, is that of two third-order tensors with one-to-one mappings between the column dimensions L and M, but different row dimensions K1 and K2, where K1, K2 ≥ LM.
The Tensor GSVD
We define, therefore, a novel tensor GSVD that simultaneously separates the paired datasets into weighted sums of LM paired “subtensors”, i.e., combinations or outer products of three patterns each: Either one tumor-specific pattern of copy-number variation across the tumor probes, i.e., a “tumor arraylet” u1,a, or the corresponding normal-specific pattern across the normal probes, i.e., the “normal arraylet” u2,a, combined with one pattern of copy-number variation across the patients, i.e., an “x-probelet” vx,bT and one pattern across the platforms, i.e., a “y-probelet” vy,cT, which are identical for both the tumor and normal datasets (Fig. 1, and Figs. A and B in S1 Appendix), (1) where ×a Ui, ×b Vx and ×c Vy denote tensor-matrix multiplications, which contract the LM-arraylet, L-x-probelet, and M-y-probelet dimensions of the “core tensor” ℛi with those of Ui, Vx, and Vy, respectively, and where ⊗ denotes an outer product.
Fig 1. Tensor generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) of the patient- and platform-matched DNA copy-number profiles of the 6p+12p chromosome arms.
For each chromosome arm or combination of two chromosome arms, the structure of the tumor and normal discovery datasets ( 1 and 2) is that of two third-order tensors with one-to-one mappings between the column dimensions but different row dimensions. The patients, platforms, probes, and tissue types, each represent a degree of freedom. Unfolded into a single matrix, some of the degrees of freedom are lost and much of the information in the datasets might also be lost. We define a tensor GSVD that simultaneously separates the paired datasets into weighted sums of paired subtensors, i.e., combinations or outer products of three patterns each: Either one tumor-specific pattern of copy-number variation across the tumor probes, i.e., a tumor arraylet (a column basis vector of U1), or the corresponding normal-specific arraylet (a column basis vector of U2), combined with one pattern of variation across the patients, i.e., an x-probelet (a row basis vector of VxT), and one pattern across the platforms, i.e., a y-probelet (a row basis vector of VyT), which are identical for both the tumor and normal datasets (Equation 1). The tensor GSVD is depicted in a raster display, with relative copy-number gain (red), no change (black), and loss (green), explicitly showing the first through the 5th, and the 245th through the 249th 6p+12p x-probelets, both 6p+12p y-probelets, and the first through the 10th, and the 489th through the 498th 6p+12p tumor and normal arraylets. We prove that the significance of a subtensor in the tumor dataset relative to that of the corresponding subtensor in the normal dataset, i.e., the tensor GSVD angular distance, equals the row mode GSVD angular distance, i.e., the significance of the corresponding tumor arraylet in the tumor dataset relative to that of the normal arraylet in the normal dataset. The tensor GSVD angular distances for the 498 pairs of 6p+12p arraylets are depicted in a bar chart display, where the angular distance corresponding to the first pair of arraylets is ∼ π/4. For the 6p+12p combination of two chromosome arms, we find that the most significant subtensor in the tumor dataset (which corresponds to the coefficient of largest magnitude in ℛ1) is a combination of (i) the first y-probelet, which is approximately invariant across the platforms, (ii) the first x-probelet, which classifies the discovery set of patients into two groups of high and low coefficients, of significantly and robustly different prognoses, and (iii) the first, most tumor-exclusive tumor arraylet, which classifies the validation set of patients into two groups of high and low correlations of significantly different prognoses consistent with the x-probelet’s classification of the discovery set.
Construction.
Suppose that unfolding (or matricizing) both tensors 𝒟i into matrices, each preserving the Ki-row dimension, e.g., by appending the LM columns 𝒟i,:lm of the corresponding tensor, gives two full column-rank matrices Di ∈ ℝKi×LM. We obtain the column bases vectors Ui from the GSVD of Di [5–13], i.e., the “row mode GSVD” (2) Suppose, similarly, that unfolding both tensors 𝒟i into matrices, each preserving the L-x- (or M-y-) column dimension, e.g., by appending the Ki M rows 𝒟i,ki:mT (or the Ki L rows 𝒟i,kil:T) of the corresponding tensor, gives two full column-rank matrices Dix ∈ ℝKi M×L (or Diy ∈ ℝKi L×M). We obtain the x- (or y-) row basis vectors VxT (or VyT), from the GSVD of Dix (or Diy), i.e., the x- (or y-) column mode GSVD, (3) Note that the x- and y-row bases vectors are, in general, non-orthogonal but normalized, and Vx and Vy are invertible. The column bases vectors are normalized and orthogonal, i.e., uncorrelated, such that UiTUi=I.
The generalized singular values are positive, and are arranged in Σi, Σix, and Σiy in decreasing orders of the corresponding “GSVD angular distances”, i.e., decreasing orders of the ratios σ1,a/σ2,a, σ1x,b/σ2x,b, and σ1y,c/σ2y,c, respectively. We then compute the core tensors ℛi by contracting the row-, x-, and y-column dimensions of the tensors 𝒟i with those of the matrices Ui, Vx−1, and Vy−1, respectively. For real tensors, the “tensor generalized singular values” ℛi,abc tabulated in the core tensors are real but not necessarily positive. Our tensor GSVD construction generalizes the GSVD to higher orders in analogy with the generalization of the singular value decomposition (SVD) by the HOSVD [25–28], and is different from other approaches to the decomposition of two tensors [29].
Existence, uniqueness and special cases.
We prove that our tensor GSVD exists for two tensors of any order because it is constructed from the GSVDs of the tensors unfolded into full column-rank matrices (Lemma A in S1 Appendix). The tensor GSVD has the same uniqueness properties as the GSVD, where the column bases vectors ui,a and the row bases vectors vx,bT and vy,cT are unique, except in degenerate subspaces, defined by subsets of equal generalized singular values σi,a, σix,b, and σiy,c, respectively, and up to phase factors of ±1, such that each vector captures both parallel and antiparallel patterns (Lemma B in S1 Appendix). The tensor GSVD of two second-order tensors reduces to the GSVD of the corresponding matrices (Corollary A in S1 Appendix). The tensor GSVD of the tensor 𝒟1 ∈ ℝLM×L×M, which row mode unfolding gives the identity matrix D1 = I ∈ ℝLM×LM, and a tensor 𝒟2 of the same column dimensions reduces to the HOSVD of 𝒟2 (Theorem A in S1 Appendix).
The significance of the subtensor 𝒮i(a,b,c) in the tensor 𝒟i is defined proportional to the magnitude of the corresponding tensor generalized singular values ℛi,abc (Fig. C in S1 Appendix), in analogy with the HOSVD, (4) The significance of 𝒮1(a,b,c) in 𝒟1 relative to that of 𝒮2(a,b,c) in 𝒟2 is defined by the “tensor GSVD angular distance” Θabc as a function of the ratio ℛ1,abc/ℛ2,abc. This is in analogy with, e.g., the row mode GSVD angular distance θa, which defines the significance of the column basis vector u1,a in the matrix D1 of Equation (2) relative to that of u2,a in D2 as a function of the ratio σ1,a/σ2,a, (5) Because the ratios of the positive generalized singular values satisfy σ1,a/σ2,a ∈ [0, ∞), the row mode GSVD angular distances satisfy θa ∈ [−π/4, π/4]. The maximum (or minimum) angular distance, i.e., θa = π/4, which corresponds to σ1,a/σ2,a > > 1 (or −π/4, which corresponds to σ1,a/σ2,a < < 1), indicates that the row basis vector vaT of Equation (2), which corresponds to the column basis vectors u1,a in D1 and u2,a in D2, is exclusive to D1 (or D2). An angular distance of θa = 0, which corresponds to σ1,a/σ2,a = 1, indicates a row basis vector vaT which is of equal significance in, i.e., common to both D1 and D2.
Thus, while the ratio σ1,a/σ2,a indicates the significance of u1,a in D1 relative to the significance of u2,a in D2, this relative significance is defined, as previously described [12, 13], by the angular distance θa, a function of the ratio σ1,a/σ2,a, which is antisymmetric in D1 and D2. Note also that while other functions of the ratio σ1,a/σ2,a exist that are antisymmetric in D1 and D2, the angular distance θa, which is a function of the arctangent of the ratio, i.e., arctan(σ1,a/σ2,a), is the natural function to use, because the GSVD is related to the cosine-sine (CS) decomposition, as previously described [9], and, thus, σ1,a and σ2,a are related to the sine and the cosine functions of the angle θa, respectively.
Theorem 1. The tensor GSVD angular distance equals the row mode GSVD angular distance, i.e., Θabc = θa.
Proof. The unfolding of 𝒟i of Equation (1) into Di of Equation (2) unfolds the core tensors ℛi of Equation (1) into matrices Ri, which preserve the row dimensions, i.e., the LM-column bases dimensions of ℛi, and gives (6) where ⊗ denotes a Kronecker product. Because Σi are positive diagonal matrices, it follows that ℛ1,abc/ℛ2,abc = R1,a/R2,a = σ1,a/σ2,a. Substituting this in Equation (5) gives Θabc = θa. Note that the proof holds for tensors of higher-than-third order.
From this it follows that the tensor GSVD angular distance ∣Θabc∣ ≤ π/4, and that, therefore, the ratio of the tensor generalized singular values ℛ1,abc/ℛ2,abc > 0, even though ℛ1,abc and ℛ2,abc are not necessarily positive. It also follows that Θabc = ±π/4 indicate a subtensor exclusive to either 𝒟1 or 𝒟2, respectively, and that Θabc = 0 indicates a subtensor common to both.
Note that since the generalized singular values are arranged in Σi of Equation (2) in a decreasing order of the row mode GSVD angular distances θa, the most tumor-exclusive tumor subtensors, i.e., 𝒮1(a,b,c) where a maximizes θa of Equation (5), correspond to a = 1, whereas the most normal-exclusive normal subtensors, i.e., 𝒮2(a,b,c) where a minimizes θa, correspond to a = LM.
Discovery and Validation of CNAs Predicting OV Survival
We compute the tensor GSVD of the tumor and normal discovery datasets for each chromosome arm and each combination of two chromosome arms, separately (S1 Mathematica Notebook). For each arm or arms we examine the most significant subtensor in the tumor dataset, i.e., 𝒮1(a,b,c), where a, b, and c maximize 𝒫1,abc of Equation (4).
We, first, require the subtensor to be tumor-exclusive and platform-consistent: include the tumor arraylet u1,a that is the most exclusive to the tumor dataset, i.e., u1,1, as well as a y-probelet vy,cT of consistent, i.e., approximately equal copy numbers in both platforms. Second, we require the subtensor to be correlated with an OV patient’s prognosis in the discovery set of patients, i.e., include an x-probelet vx,bT that classifies the discovery set of patients into two groups of high (> 0.5 standardized median absolute deviation, i.e., sMAD, from the median) and low coefficients, of significantly (log-rank test P-value < 0.05) and robustly (throughout the range of ±0.1 sMAD around the cutoff) different prognoses (Fig. 2). Third, we require the subtensor to be correlated with prognosis in the validation set of patients, i.e., include an arraylet that classifies the validation set of patients into two groups of high and low Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients of significantly different prognoses, consistent with the x-probelet’s classification of the discovery set of patients (Fig. 3, and Sec. 1.3 in S1 Appendix). Note that the validation set includes 148 TCGA patients, mutually exclusive of the discovery set, with primary OV tumor profiles measured by at least one of the two DNA microarray platforms that were used to measure the discovery datasets (S2 Dataset).
Fig 2. Tumor-exclusive and platform-consistent DNA copy-number alterations (CNAs) correlated with ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma (OV) patients’ survival.
(a) Plot of the first 6p+12p tumor arraylet describes a pattern of tumor-exclusive and platform-consistent co-occurring CNAs across the combination of the two chromosome arms 6p+12p. The probes are ordered, and their copy numbers are colored according to each probe’s chromosomal band location. Segments (black lines) amplified and deleted include most known OV-associated CNAs that map to 6p+12p (black), including an amplification of KRAS and a deletion of PRIM2. CNAs previously unrecognized in OV (red) include a deletion of the p38-encoding MAPK14, and p21-encoding CDKN1A, and an amplification of RAD51AP1, a deletion of TNF, and focal amplifications of ASUN, ITPR2, and the 5’ ends of isoforms a and e, and exons 5 and 6 of SOX5. A high 6p+12p arraylet correlation is significantly correlated with a patient’s shorter survival time. (b) Plot of the first 6p+12p x-probelet describes the classification of the discovery set of patients into two groups of high (blue) and low (red) coefficients. A high 6p+12p x-probelet coefficient is significantly and robustly correlated with a patient’s shorter survival time. (c) Raster display of the 6p+12p tumor profiles, where medians of the profiles of the same patient measured by the two platforms were taken, with relative gain (red), no change (black), and loss (green) of DNA copy numbers. (d) Plot of the first 7p tumor arraylet describes a pattern of CNAs across the chromosome arm 7p. CNAs previously unrecognized in OV (red) include a focal deletion of RPA3 and an amplification of POLD2. A high 7p arraylet correlation is significantly correlated with a patient’s longer survival time. (e) Plot of the first 7p x-probelet describes the classification of the discovery set of patients into two groups of high (red) and low (blue) coefficients. A high 7p x-probelet coefficient is significantly and robustly correlated with a patient’s longer survival time. (f) Raster display of the 7p tumor profiles. (g) Plot of the first Xq tumor arraylet. CNAs previously unrecognized in OV (red) include a focal deletion of PABPC5 and an amplification of BCAP31. A high Xq arraylet correlation is significantly correlated with a patient’s longer survival time. (h) Plot of the first Xq x-probelet describes the classification of the discovery set of patients into two groups of high (red) and low (blue) coefficients. A high Xq x-probelet coefficient is significantly and robustly correlated with a patient’s longer survival time. (i) Raster display of the Xq tumor profiles.
Fig 3. Survival analyses of the discovery and validation sets of patients classified by tensor GSVD, or tensor GSVD and tumor stage at diagnosis.
(a) Kaplan-Meier (KM) curves of the discovery set of 249 patients classified by the 6p+12p x-probelet coefficient, show a median survival time difference of 11 months, with the corresponding log-rank test P-value < 10−2. The univariate Cox proportional hazard ratio is 1.7. (b) Survival analyses of the 249 patients classified by the 7p x-probelet coefficient. (c) The 249 patients classified by the Xq x-probelet coefficient. (d) The 249 patients classified by both the 6p+12p tensor GSVD and tumor stage at diagnosis, show the bivariate Cox hazard ratios of 1.5 and 4.0, which do not differ significantly from the corresponding univariate hazard ratios of 1.7 and 4.4, respectively. This means that the 6p+12p tensor GSVD is independent of stage, the best predictor of OV survival to date. The 61 months KM median survival time difference is about 85% and more than two years greater than the 33 month difference between the patients classified by stage alone. This means that the tensor GSVD and stage combined make a better predictor than stage alone. (e) The 249 patients classified by both the 7p tensor GSVD and stage. (f) The 249 patients classified by both the Xq tensor GSVD and stage. (g) KM curves of the validation set of 148 stage III-IV patients classified by the 6p+12p arraylet correlation, show a median survival time difference of 22 months, with the corresponding log-rank test P-value < 10−2, and the univariate Cox proportional hazard ratio 1.9. This validates the survival analyses of the discovery set of 249 patients. (h) Survival analyses of the 148 patients classified by the 7p arraylet correlation. (i) The 148 patients classified by the Xq arraylet correlation.
We find that each of the tensor GSVDs of only the chromosome arms 7p and Xq, and only the combination of the two chromosome arms 6p+12p (but not 6p nor 12p separately), uncovers a pattern of tumor-exclusive and platform-consistent co-occurring CNAs that is correlated with an OV patient’s prognosis in the discovery and, separately, validation set of patients.
Biological Results
Independent Chromosome Arm-Wide Predictors of OV Survival and Response to Platinum-Based Chemotherapy
To date, the best predictor of OV survival has remained the tumor’s stage at diagnosis [31] (Sec. 2.1, and Figs. D and E in S1 Appendix). Additional indicators, such as the residual disease after surgery, the outcome of subsequent therapy, and the neoplasm status, which is the last known status of the disease, are determined during treatment. No diagnostic exists that distinguishes between platinum-based chemotherapy-resistant and -sensitive tumors before the treatment [32, 33].
We find and validate, by using survival analyses of the discovery and, separately, validation set of patients, as well as only the 88% and 95% platinum-based chemotherapy patients in the discovery and validation sets, respectively (Fig. F in S1 Appendix), that each of the patterns, across 6p+12, 7p, and Xq, is correlated with an OV patient’s prognosis and response to platinum-based chemotherapy, is independent of stage, and together with stage makes a better predictor than stage alone.
We also find and validate that each of these three tensor GSVDs is independent of each of the additional standard indicators (Tables A and B in S1 Appendix). For example, survival analyses of the discovery set classified by the 6p+12p tensor GSVD into high and low x-probelet coefficients, and by pathology at diagnosis into tumor stages I-II and III-IV, give the bivariate Cox hazard ratios of 1.5 and 4.0, which are similar to the corresponding univariate ratios of 1.7 and 4.4, respectively [18]. Similarly, survival analyses of the validation set classified by the 6p+12p tensor GSVD into high and low arraylet correlation coefficients, and by pathology at diagnosis into tumor stages III and IV, give the bivariate Cox hazard ratios of 1.9 and 1.8, which are the same as the corresponding univariate ratios (Fig. G in S1 Appendix). This means that the 6p+12p tensor GSVD and stage are independent predictors of survival. Therefore, combined with any one of the standard indicators, each of the three tensor GSVDs makes a better predictor than the standard indicator alone (Figs. H and I in S1 Appendix). For example, the Kaplan-Meier (KM) median survival time difference of 61 months among the discovery set of patients classified by both the 6p+12p tensor GSVD and stage, is about 85% and more than two years greater than the 33 month difference between the patients classified by stage alone [19]. The KM median survival difference of 34 months among the validation set of patients classified by both the 6p+12p tensor GSVD and stage, is about 62% and more than one year greater than the 21 month difference between the patients classified by stage alone.
Note that while the discovery set of patients reflects the general OV patient population, with approximately 5%, 7%, 76%, and 12% of the patients diagnosed at stages I, II, III, and IV, respectively, the validation set reflects the high-stage OV patient population, with approximately 20% and 80% of the patients diagnosed at stages III and IV, respectively. The 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tensor GSVDs, therefore, predict survival both in the general as well as in the high-stage OV patient population. Note also that the discovery and validation sets each include mostly, i.e., > 95% high-grade, i.e., grades 2 and higher tumors. Tumor grade does not correlate with survival in either the discovery or the validation set of patients. Survival analyses of only the > 95% patients with high-grade tumors in the discovery and, separately, validation set give qualitatively the same and quantitatively similar results to those of the analyses of 100% of the patients in each set, respectively. The 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tensor GSVDs, therefore, predict survival in the high-grade OV patient population, and are independent of the OV tumor’s grade as well as the molecular distinctions between high- and low-grade OV tumors [30].
We observe three groups of significantly different prognoses among the discovery and, separately, validation set of patients, as well as only the platinum-based chemotherapy patients, classified by a combination of the three, i.e., 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq, tensor GSVD classifications, each of which is binomial (Fig. 4). In group A, a combination of a low 6p+12p x-probelet coefficient or arraylet correlation, and high 7p and Xq x-probelet coefficients or arraylet correlations is indicative of a patient’s significantly longer survival time and better response to platinum-based chemotherapy. In group B, the three combinations where just one of the three binomial classifications differs from that of group A, indicate shorter survival time and worse response to chemotherapy than those of group A. In group C, the four combinations where at least two of the three binomial classifications differ from that of group A, indicate shorter survival time and worse response to chemotherapy than those of group B as well as group A. For example, the KM median survival times of the discovery set of patients classified into groups A, B, and C are 86, 52, and 36 months, such that the median survival time of group A is more than four years greater than, and more than twice that of group C.
Fig 4. Survival analyses of the discovery and validation sets of patients, as well as only the platinum-based chemotherapy patients in the discovery and validation sets, classified by the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tensor GSVD combined.
(a) KM curves of the discovery set of 249 patients classified by combination of the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq x-probelet coefficients, show median survival times of 86, 52, and 36 months for the groups A, B, and C, respectively, with the corresponding log-rank test P-value < 10−3. (b) KM survival analysis of only the 218, i.e., ∼ 88% platinum-based chemotherapy patients in the discovery set, classified by combination of the three tensor GSVDs, gives qualitatively the same and quantitatively similar results to those of the analyses of 100% of the patients. This means that the combination of the three tensor GSVDs predicts survival in the platinum-based chemotherapy patient population. (c) KM curves of the validation set of 148 stage III-IV patients classified by combination of the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq arraylet correlation coefficients, show median survival times of 72, 57, and 33 months for the groups A, B, and C, respectively, with the corresponding log-rank test P-value < 10−3. This validates the survival analyses of the discovery set of 249 patients. (d) KM survival analysis of only the 140, i.e., ∼ 95% platinum-based chemotherapy patients in the validation set, classified by combination of the three tensor GSVDs.
This suggests a possible implementation of the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq patterns in a pathology laboratory test, where a patient’s survival and response to platinum-based chemotherapy is predicted based upon the combination of the correlations of the OV tumor’s DNA copy-number profile with the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq patterns.
Novel Frequent Focal CNAs Indicating Survival
OV tumors exhibit significant CNA variation among them, much more so than, e.g., GBM brain tumors [2, 13]. Very few frequently occurring OV CNAs have been identified to date.
We find, by using segmentation [20, 21], that the three tensor GSVD arraylets include most known OV-associated CNAs that map to the corresponding chromosome arms, and several previously unreported yet frequent CNAs in > 23% of the patients. For example, the 6p+12p arraylet includes two segments corresponding to the only known OV focal CNAs that map to 6p+12p, 7p, or Xq (Sec. 2.2 in S1 Appendix). One, a deletion (6p11.2), overlaps the 3’ end unique to isoform a of the DNA primase polypeptide 2-encoding PRIM2 [2]. The other, an amplification (12p12.1-p11.23), contains several genes, including the Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog KRAS, one of three human Ras genes, and the 5’ ends of isoforms b and d of the SRY (sex determining region Y)-box 5-encoding SOX5 [34], and is significantly (log-rank test P-value < 0.05, and KM median survival time difference ≥ 12 months) correlated with OV survival (S3 Dataset).
We also find that the three arraylet patterns include novel frequent focal CNAs (segments < 125 probes). Among these, four amplifications and two deletions are significantly correlated with OV survival (Fig. J in S1 Appendix). The amplifications flank the segment that contains KRAS. Two consecutive segments (12p12.1) contain the 5’ ends of isoforms a and e of SOX5, and exons 5 and 6, the first exons that are common to isoforms a, b, d, and e of SOX5 [35]. Two other consecutive segments (12p11.23) contain the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor type 2-encoding ITPR2, and the asunder spermatogenesis regulator-encoding ASUN. ASUN was discovered in a screen of expressed sequence tags on 12p11-p12, which DNA amplification correlated with mRNA overexpression in four human testicular seminomas and one ovarian papillary serous adenocarcinoma cell line, exemplifying human germ cell tumors [36]. ASUN and its homologs are essential for nuclear division after DNA replication in the HeLa human cervical cancer cell line, the frog, and the fly [37]. One deletion (7p22.1-p21.3) contains the replication protein A3-encoding RPA3. The other (Xq21.31) contains the cytoplasmic poly(A)-binding protein 5-encoding PABPC5, and the sequence tag site DX214 adjacent to translocation breakpoints observed in premature ovarian failure [38].
Possible Roles in OV Pathogenesis
We find, by using gene ontology enrichment analyses of the OV tumor mRNA expression profiles of the patients [39, 40], that differential mRNA expression between the patients, classified by any one of the three tensor GSVDs, is enriched in ontologies corresponding to one of three hallmarks of cancer [41]: cell immortality in 6p+12p, DNA instability in 7p, and cellular immune response suppression in Xq.
The differential mRNA expression of genes from these enriched ontologies that are located on any one of the chromosome arms is consistent with the CNAs across that arm (Fig. K in S1 Appendix, and S4 Dataset). Genes that map to amplifications or deletions on any one arraylet pattern, are overexpressed or underexpressed, respectively, in the patients which tumor profiles are classified, by the corresponding tensor GSVD, as highly similar to that pattern, i.e., patients of high x-probelet coefficients or arraylet correlations. The differential expression of all microRNAs and proteins that map to any one of the chromosome arms is also consistent with the CNAs across that arm (Sec. 2.3, and Figs. L and M in S1 Appendix, and S5 and S6 Datasets). A coherent picture emerges for each pattern, suggesting roles for the CNAs in OV pathogenesis in addition to personalized diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.
6p+12p. A cell’s transformation and immortality are correlated with a patient’s shorter survival.
The genes, which are significantly (Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon P-values < 0.05) differentially expressed between the 6p+12p tensor GSVD classes, i.e., in the patient group of high 6p+12p x-probelet coefficient or arraylet correlation, relative to the patient group of low coefficient or correlation, are enriched (hypergeometric P-values < 10−3) in the ontologies of cellular response to ionizing radiation (GO:0071479), and major histocompatibility (MHC) protein complex (GO:0042611). Most of the GO:0071479 genes are underexpressed, including the p21 cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor-encoding CDKN1A, and the p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase-encoding MAPK14, which map to a deletion > 45 Mbp on the telomeric part of 6p (6p25.3-p21.1). Also underexpressed is p38, the protein encoded by MAPK14. All GO:0042611 genes, including the tumor necrosis factor-encoding TNF, are underexpressed, and map to the same deletion. The one microRNA that is significantly differentially expressed between the 6p+12p tensor GSVD classes, and maps to the same deletion, is the splicing-dependent microRNA miR-877*, which is encoded by the 13th intron of the ATP-binding cassette subfamily F member 1-encoding gene ABCF1 [44]. Both miR-877* and ABCF1 are consistently underexpressed.
One of only two GO:0071479 overexpressed genes is the RAD51-associated protein 1-encoding RAD51AP1, which maps to an amplification > 9 Mbp on the telomeric part of 12p (12p13.33-p13.31) that is significantly correlated with OV survival. All four microRNAs that are differentially expressed between the 6p+12p tensor GSVD classes, and map to the same amplification, miR-200c, miR-200c*, miR-141, and miR-141*, are consistently overexpressed. The second protein that is significantly differentially expressed between the 6p+12p tensor GSVD classes is p27. Consistently, the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor CDKN1B, which encodes p27, maps to a 4.5 Mbp amplification (12p13.2-p12.3) that is significantly correlated with OV survival, and its mRNA is overexpressed. The mRNA encoded by KRAS is also overexpressed.
Note that while the 6p+12p pattern of CNAs is correlated with survival in the discovery and, separately, validation sets, neither the 6p nor the 12p pattern alone are correlated with survival. Indeed, experiments studying the conditions for the transformation of human normal to tumor cells indicate that cells, where both p21 and p38 are inactive, are susceptible to Ras-mediated transformation [42, 43]. However, the activation of Ras alone induces tumor-suppressing cellular senescence via the activities of either p21 or p38. The 6p+12p pattern, therefore, which includes the loss of the p21-encoding CDKN1A and the p38-encoding MAPK14 on 6p, and the gain of KRAS on 12p, encodes for cellular conditions that combined but not separately can lead to transformation.
In addition, p21 and p38 are necessary for p53-mediated cell cycle arrest [45] and apoptosis [46], respectively, in response to DNA damage. Overexpression of the p21-encoding CDKN1A is correlated with a low malignant potential of an ovarian tumor [47]. RAD51AP1 overexpression disrupts cell cycle arrest and apoptosis, can lead to cellular resistance to DNA-damaging cancer therapies, such as platinum-based chemotherapy, and may increase DNA instability [48]. TNF-induced apoptosis is correlated with downregulation of ITPR2 [49]. Overexpression of miR-200c, and miR-141, both of which putatively target the BRCA1 associated protein-1 oncosuppressor-encoding BAP1, is correlated with OV tumor growth, dedifferentiation, and invasiveness [50, 51]. Overexpression of the CDKN1B-encoded p27, which can promote cellular migration [52] and even proliferation [53], is correlated with a poor OV patient’s prognosis [54, 55].
Taken together, previously unrecognized co-occurring deletion of CDKN1A and MAPK14 on 6p and amplification of KRAS on 12p, which encode for human cell transformation, together with deletion of TNF on 6p, and amplification of RAD51AP1 and ITPR2 on 12p, are correlated with a suppression of cell cycle arrest, senescence, and apoptosis, i.e., a tumor cell’s immortality, and a patient’s shorter survival time. Note that there already exist drugs that interact with CDKN1A, MAPK14, and RAD51AP1, even though these genes were not recognized previously as targets for OV drug therapy [56].
7p. A cell’s DNA stability is correlated with a longer survival.
The genes that are significantly differentially expressed between the 7p tensor GSVD classes are enriched (hypergeometric P-value < 10−10) in the ontology of DNA strand elongation involved in DNA replication (GO:0006271). Most of these genes are overexpressed, including the DNA polymerase delta subunit 2-encoding POLD2 that is essential for DNA replication and repair, which maps to an amplification > 17 Mbp on the centromeric part of 7p (7p14.1-p11.2). Only two genes are underexpressed: RPA3 on 7p and the DNA ligase IV-encoding LIG4 on 13q. The interaction of p53 with the RPA3-encoded protein mediates suppression of homologous recombination (HR), the preferred cellular mechanism for DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair during replication [57]. LIG4 is essential for DSB repair via the more error-prone nonhomologous end joining pathway [58]. HR defects are thought to facilitate the significant CNA heterogeneity among OV tumors [2].
Taken together, previously unrecognized co-occurring deletion and underexpression of RPA3, and amplification and overexpression of POLD2 on 7p are correlated with DNA DSB repair via HR during replication, i.e., DNA stability, and a longer survival time.
Xq. Cellular immune response is correlated with a longer survival.
The genes that are differentially expressed between the Xq tensor GSVD classes are enriched (hypergeometric P-value < 10−6) in the ontology of antigen processing and presentation of peptide antigen (GO:0048002). Most of these genes are overexpressed, including the B-cell receptor-associated protein 31-encoding BCAP31, which maps to an amplification > 11 Mbp on the telomeric part of Xq (Xq27.3-q28). All three microRNAs that are differentially expressed between the Xq tensor GSVD classes, and map to the same amplification, miR-888, miR-224, and miR-452, together with the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) A receptor epsilon-encoding GABRE, which hosts mir-224 and mir-452 in its introns, are consistently overexpressed. Underexpression of miR-224 was implicated in OV pathogenesis [50]. PABPC5, which maps to a focal deletion on Xq, is suppressed upon viral infection [59].
Taken together, previously unrecognized co-occurring deletion of PABPC5, and amplification and overexpression of BCAP31 on Xq are correlated with a cellular immune response, and a longer survival time.
We defined a novel tensor GSVD, an exact simultaneous decomposition of two datasets, arranged in two higher-than-second-order tensors of matched column dimensions but independent row dimensions. We showed that the mathematical properties of the tensor GSVD allow interpreting its variables and operations in terms of the similar as well as dissimilar, e.g., biomedical reality between the datasets. We demonstrated the tensor GSVD in comparative modeling of patient- and platform-matched but probe-independent OV tumor and normal DNA copy-number profiles from TCGA. The modeling resulted in new insights into the poorly understood relations between an OV tumor’s genome and a patient’s survival phenotype. Three previously unrecognized chromosome arm-wide patterns of tumor-exclusive and platform-consistent co-occurring alterations were uncovered, across 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq, that are correlated with an OV patient’s survival and response to platinum-based chemotherapy, and are of possible roles in OV pathogenesis, and of a possible implementation in a pathology laboratory test for personalized OV diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.
Note that unlike previous analyses of the TCGA OV DNA copy-number data, notably by TCGA [2], our analyses were not limited to the 22 human autosomal chromosomes, and include the X chromosome. This is because the tensor GSVD, like the GSVD, comparatively—based upon the structure of the data—separates the matched datasets into uncorrelated, i.e., orthogonal patterns across the tumor and normal probes. Patterns of copy-number variation across the tumor probes that occur in the normal human genome, and are common to the tumor and normal datasets, such as the female-specific X chromosome amplification, are orthogonal to, and, therefore, are separated from the patterns that are exclusive to the tumor dataset. For example, the GSVD comparative modeling of patient-matched GBM tumor and normal copy-number profiles separated the prognosis-correlated GBM tumor-exclusive pattern from the female-specific X chromosome amplification as well as from experimental artifacts (or batch effects) due to experimental variations in, e.g., tissue batch, genomic center, hybridization date, and scanner, without a-priori knowledge of these variations.
Unlike recent approaches to the integrative modeling of different types of large-scale molecular biological profiles from the same set of patients, notably clustering [60, 61], our comparative modeling was not limited to tumor profiles, and included also patient- and platform-matched normal DNA copy-number profiles. This is because the tensor GSVD, like the GSVD, finds not just the similarities but, at the same time also the dissimilarities among the profiles without making any assumptions, except for the structure of the data: two third-order tensors, of matched columns that correspond to the same sets of patients and platforms, and independent rows that correspond to the probes in either the tumor or the normal dataset. The patients, platforms, tumor and normal probes as well as the tissue types, each represent a degree of freedom. Unfolded into two matrices or appended into a single tensor (or even unfolded and appended into a single matrix), some of the degrees of freedom are lost and much of the information in the datasets might also be lost. For example, SVD of the GBM tumor and normal profiles appended into a single matrix, while it is related to the GSVD of the data, would not separate the tumor dataset into patterns across the tumor probes that are orthogonal.
Additional possible applications of the tensor GSVD in personalized medicine include comparative modeling of two patient- and tissue-matched datasets, each corresponding to (i) a set of large-scale molecular biological profiles, e.g., DNA copy numbers, acquired by a high-throughput technology, e.g., DNA microarrays; (ii) a set of biomedical images or signals; or (iii) a set of cellular pathological observations, e.g., a tumor’s stage. Such tensor GSVD comparative models can uncover variations across the patients and tissues that are common to, possibly causally coordinated between the two aspects of the disease. In clinical settings, such tensor GSVD comparative models can determine an individual patient’s medical status in relation to all the other patients in a set, and inform the patient’s diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.
S1 Appendix. A PDF format file, readable by Adobe Acrobat Reader.
S1 Mathematica Notebook. Tensor GSVD of patient- and platform-matched tumor and normal genomic profiles.
A PDF format file, readable by Adobe Acrobat Reader. The corresponding Mathematica 9.0.1 code file, executable by Mathematica and readable by Mathematica Player, is available at http://www.alterlab.org/OV_prognosis/.
S1 Dataset. Discovery Set of Patients.
A tab-delimited text format file, readable by both Mathematica and Microsoft Excel, reproducing TCGA annotations of the discovery set of 249 patients. The tumor and normal profiles of the discovery set of patients measured by each of the two DNA microarray platforms, tabulating relative copy-number variation across the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tumor and normal probes, are available in tab-delimited text format files at http://www.alterlab.org/OV_prognosis/.
(TXT)
S2 Dataset. Validation Set of Patients.
A tab-delimited text format file reproducing TCGA annotations of the validation set of 148 patients. The tumor profiles of the validation set of patients, tabulating relative copy-number variation across the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tumor probes, are available in tab-delimited text format files at http://www.alterlab.org/OV_prognosis/.
S3 Dataset. First, Most Tumor-Exclusive Tumor Arraylets.
A tab-delimited text format file tabulating the segments of the first, most tumor-exclusive tumor arraylets computed by tensor GSVD of the discovery set of patients across 6p+12p, 7p, or Xq.
S4 Dataset. Differential mRNA Expression.
A tab-delimited text format file tabulating differential expression of 11,457 autosomal and X chromosome mRNAs in the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tensor GSVD classes. The mRNA expression profiles of 394 of the 397 patients in the discovery and validation sets are available in tab-delimited text format files at http://www.alterlab.org/OV_prognosis/.
S5 Dataset. Differential microRNA Expression.
A tab-delimited text format file tabulating differential expression of 639 autosomal and X chromosome microRNAs in the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tensor GSVD classes. The microRNA expression profiles of 395 patients are available in tab-delimited text format files at http://www.alterlab.org/OV_prognosis/.
S6 Dataset. Differential Protein Expression.
A tab-delimited text format file tabulating differential expression of 175 antibodies that probe for 136 autosomal and X chromosome proteins in the 6p+12p, 7p, and Xq tensor GSVD classes. The protein expression profiles of 282 patients are available in tab-delimited text format files at http://www.alterlab.org/OV_prognosis/.
We thank RA Horn for thoughtful discussions of matrix analysis in general, and the tensor GSVD in particular. We thank DDL Bowtell and MM Janát-Amsbury for useful notes on OV in general, and the molecular distinctions between high- and low-grade OV tumors in particular. We also thank RA Weinberg for helpful comments on the hallmarks of cancer in general, and the transformation of human normal to tumor cells in particular.
Conceived and designed the experiments: OA. Performed the experiments: PS TES KAA OA. Analyzed the data: PS TES KAA OA. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PS TES KAA OA. Wrote the paper: PS TES KAA OA. Proved mathematical theorems: TES OA.
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Chromosome mapping
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Is the Subject Area "Survival analysis" applicable to this article?
Is the Subject Area "Prognosis" applicable to this article?
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Cancer detection and diagnosis
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Gene mapping
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