 kayani doctrine kayani doctrine built four - evolveStar Search - Doctrine 2 and codeigniter 2, how to use generated code

Doctrine 2 and codeigniter 2, how to use generated code

stackoverflow.com - 2012-06-27 07:24:50 - Similar - Report/Block

Working a few months with CodeIgniter, newbe with Doctrine. I work recently with https://github.com/wildlyinaccurate/Code Igniter-2-with-Doctrine-2 as the base and defining entities from mysql table/columns with generate_classes() function ( application/libraries/Doctrine.php, called once before constructor ends, comment it after entitie...

Doctrine Cli WIndows

stackoverflow.com - 2013-03-26 01:28:42 - Similar - Report/Block

I am having some trouble configuring doctrine orm on windows 8, php 5.4. I have installed Doctrine using Composer. I have followed the docs to the letter but when I run any commands, php vendor/bin/doctrine orm:schema-tool:create for example, my command line just outputs SRC_DIR="`pwd`" cd "`dirname "$0"`" cd "../doctrine/orm/bin" BIN_TAR...

Tappi and Kayani brother

siasat.pk - 2013-05-15 07:31:04 - Similar - Report/Block

It is now openly said that General Kayani brother is business partner of Tappi. Generals in real-estate business—WikiLeaks missing stories released * President Zardari demanded Rs2 billion from real-estate tycoon Malik Riaz.... * Malik made Gen. Kayani’s brother business-partner on Presidential threats... * ISI chief owns many commerci...

Symfony2 & Doctrine2 PDOException without description

stackoverflow.com - 2012-04-13 13:26:02 - Similar - Report/Block

I wanted to use this code, and it break on flush() without any exception message: 1. at PDOStatement ->execute (null) in ../vendor/doctrine-dbal/lib/Doctrine/DBA L/Statement.php at line 131 2. at Statement ->execute () in ../vendor/doctrine/lib/Doctrine/ORM/Pers isters/BasicEntityPersister.php at line 237 3. at BasicEntityPersister...

Zend Framework 2 - How to configure bjyauthorize for Doctrine

stackoverflow.com - 2013-03-13 10:05:02 - Similar - Report/Block

The bjyauthorize doc says that there is a way to configure it for Doctrine. By default, it provides simple setup via config files or by using Zend\Db or Doctrine ORM/ODM (via ZfcUserDoctrineORM). But the module itself doesn't contain any entities and I didn't found how to set it up. Does anybody know a step-by-step tutorial for setting i...

How to configure Doctrine entities to handle compressed blobs in the database?

stackoverflow.com - 2012-03-08 11:54:15 - Similar - Report/Block

I'm using Doctrine 2 as an ORM to the database and i'm having an issue with compressed blobs. I'm storing text in a compressed blob column in the database. How can i specify this in the entity mapping xml config? I'm currently using type="blob" for this column but this isn't returning a string. I could use type="text" but this returns g...

No matching global declaration available for the validation root Symfony

stackoverflow.com - 2013-05-05 06:13:16 - Similar - Report/Block

I am trying to implemment doctrine annotations as XML, but i am getting this error: Element '{http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/or m/doctrine-mapping}doctrine-mapping': No matching global declaration available for the validation root This is my XML: and these are my extensions: $loader = new Loader\XmlFileLoader($container, new FileLocat...

Doctrine 2.2 HYDRATE_OBJECT extremely slow compared to HYDRATE_ARRAY

stackoverflow.com - 2012-06-09 18:54:36 - Similar - Report/Block

I'm struggling with Doctrine 2 performce when using HYDRATE_OBJECT . When I switch from HYDRATE_ARRAY HYDRATE_OBJECT , it takes nearly 10 times longer! I've used doctrine 2 and zend paginator as reference: $query = $em->createQuery($dql) ->setHydrationMode(\Doctrine\ORM\Abst ractQuery::HYDRATE_ARRAY) ->setParameter('x', 1); //...

how to set date in controller symfony

stackoverflow.com - 2012-05-31 16:59:09 - Similar - Report/Block

i have a field nammed "birthday" in doctrine entity. i wanna create an object to add to database using doctrine. inside the controller : $name = "John Alex"; $birthday = "11-11-90"; $student = new Student(); $student->setName($name); $student->setBirthday(strtotime($birt hday); but when i try to persist i get this error Fatal error:...

Doctrine 2 inject data to loaded models

stackoverflow.com - 2012-02-24 21:43:53 - Similar - Report/Block

I have a Doctrine 2 model which has a relation to a file system model (MogileFS) which I've implemented using a model/mapper approach. What I'm trying to accomplish is to lazy load the non-doctrine model from a Doctrine 2 entity, and inject a mapper object into this model while doing so. Example: use Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Pagination\Paginato.. .

Service DependencyInjection in Symfony2

stackoverflow.com - 2012-03-22 14:06:51 - Similar - Report/Block

I need to move my model from controler methods. so I got help to make it as a service. service by itself works but i need to be able to connect to doctrine and kernel from inside of this service. at first I wanted to enable doctrine but went to problems. How can I make this working? I've followed docs and got this code. I have no idea why...

Zend Framework, Doctrine Help needed

stackoverflow.com - 2009-12-10 06:02:59 - Similar - Report/Block

i am following the tutorial from http://www.zendcasts.com/introducing-doc trine-1-2-integration/2009/11/ i have a doctrine.php that "bootstraps?" doctrine ... sry i dont really fully understand the tut yet // Define path to application directory defined('APPLICATION_PATH') || define('APPLICATION_PATH', realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/..

evolveStar Join

How can I run a doctrine 2 migration commandline without interaction?

stackoverflow.com - 2010-08-10 11:28:25 - Similar - Report/Block

How can I run a doctrine 2 migration command without interaction? Currently I have following command which runs on the setup of my Unit Tests. But It always prompt for a Yes/No user input, even when I use the -no-interaction option. $input = new Symfony\Components\Console\Input\ArrayIn put( array( 'migrations:migrate', '-configuration'...

How to modify the structure of a production database with symfony 1.4

stackoverflow.com - 2012-03-25 00:18:13 - Similar - Report/Block

Problem: I have a symfony project with a database full of production data I want to change its structure (add/drop a table or add/drop/change an existing field) How do I do that without wiping my database ? Because when you change your schema.yml, you need to doctrine build --all if you want your changes to take place in the database, an...

Problem with MATCH AGAINST in Doctrine

stackoverflow.com - 2010-11-21 17:09:26 - Similar - Report/Block

I found that if I use MATCH AGAINST in Doctrine with WHERE syntax does not replace the parameters passed. For example if I run the following code q = Doctrine_Query::create() ->select('*') ->from('TourismUnit tu') ->where('FALSE'); if ($keywords) { $keywords_array = $this->parse_keywords($keywords); for ($i...

Limit recursion of entities in Doctrine ORM

stackoverflow.com - 2013-06-02 12:34:26 - Similar - Report/Block

I am using Symfony's Doctrine 2 ORM with MySQL with mapping like this class A { /** @ManyToOne(targetEntity="B") */ private $b; class B { /** @ManyToOne(targetEntity="C") */ private $c; I want to make a query which returns object of class A and B but without object of C. $query = $entityManager->createQuery(" SELECT a FROM \A a left...

Symfony2 + Doctrine2 + SQL Server - Transaction Support

stackoverflow.com - 2012-05-17 19:44:49 - Similar - Report/Block

I'm developing a private enterprise application in Symfony2 that connects to a SQL Server instance. I've had lots of problems when dealing with SQL Server but so far I've managed it, until now. I'm using FreeTDS + DBLib to connect to the SQL Server instance, and this driver does not support transactions. This leads me to the following pro...

Return selected columns from a query in Doctrine 2/ZF

stackoverflow.com - 2012-03-11 18:23:26 - Similar - Report/Block

I am using Doctrine 2 to manage my entity and Zend_Auth to manage authorisation. I can easily get a full details of a user using $user = $this->em->getRepository('Entities \User')->findOneByUsername($username) ); I successfully authorise, and then want to store the user so that I can access certain details $storage = $auth->getS...

Doctrine DQL: erroneous sql generation (?)

stackoverflow.com - 2012-06-16 21:44:19 - Similar - Report/Block

I'm haveing big troubles while developing a quietly advanced DQL query for a tiny DMS: The schema: DmsObject is a superclass for which two subclasses exist (document and folder) UserRights and GroupRight (which are associative entities in the db, pointing respectively to user and group tables). User and Group represent (obvious) the dms "...

Possible to generate entity class based on YML file?

stackoverflow.com - 2012-04-20 00:14:52 - Similar - Report/Block

I'd like to create an entity class based on meta data stored in a YML file. Is this (easily) possible? I've been digging around the Doctrine library, and found Doctrine\ORM\Tools\EntityGenerator Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\ClassMetadataInfo , but I haven't quite figured out how to properly use them, or even if they're they classes I should be u...

How to select randomly with doctrine

stackoverflow.com - 2012-05-26 01:51:24 - Similar - Report/Block

Hi Here is how I query my database for some words $query = $qb->select('w')->from('DbEntities \Entity\Word', 'w')->where('w.indictionary = 0 AND w.frequency > 3')->orderBy('w.frequency', 'DESC')->getQuery()->setMaxResults (100); I'm using mysql and I'd like to get random rows that match the criteria, I would use order...

doctrine: QueryBuilder vs createQuery?

stackoverflow.com - 2010-04-20 23:07:05 - Similar - Report/Block

in doctrine you can create DQL in 2 ways: QueryBuilder: $query = $em->createQuery('SELECT u FROM MyProject\Model\User u WHERE u.id = ?1'); EntityManager::createQuery $qb->add('select', 'u') ->add('from', 'User u') ->add('where', 'u.id = ?1') ->add('orderBy', 'u.name ASC'); i wonder what the difference is and which you sh...

Hints and tutorial with Symfony2 Doctrine?

stackoverflow.com - 2012-02-20 06:41:19 - Similar - Report/Block

I am practising with symfony2, I have completed the Symblog Tutorial And Now I have stated creating my own small application. I have created a registration form and Login form. Now I have a lot of doubts about the doctrine queries set, I have never used an MVC architecture. How to write these queries and where I need to write them. Do I n...

execute php app/console doctrine:schema:update from controller symfony 2

stackoverflow.com - 2012-03-06 18:27:43 - Similar - Report/Block

I want to execute this command php app/console doctrine:schema:update from the controles without use php function, Any comment will be use full to me. Thanks!!!...

Doctrine 2: How to search for an entity by its association's value?

stackoverflow.com - 2012-03-29 22:55:01 - Similar - Report/Block

Let's say I have an Account entity, and an AccountData entity (which stores some less used properties, like gender, etc). The relationship between Account and AccountData is one-to-one, and the Account "owns" AccountData. I'm trying to figure out, using Doctrine 2 / Symfony 2, how to pull up an Account according to a property in AccountDa...

Unusual 1452 error with Doctrine

stackoverflow.com - 2012-06-18 19:11:06 - Similar - Report/Block

I'm currently breaking my head on a 1452 error (using Symfony2 with doctrine). Here is the case: I have 3 tables, Location, Concert and CD, and as expected a Concert take place at a Location, and a CD is related to a Concert, that's including some foreign keys. Here is the SQL queries generated by doctrine to create the database: CREATE T...

Why is mongoCursor-> key() causing php to crash?

stackoverflow.com - 2012-06-07 01:18:32 - Similar - Report/Block

I'm trying to run the test suite for doctrine\mongo-odm on my local machine. Php crashes with no error messages (when I say crash, I mean crash, the php process terminates) on the is test: Doctrine\ODM\MongoDB\Test\Functional\Fil esTest::testFiles The test has the following content: public function testFiles() $image = new File(); $image...

How to get the greatest of two values in Doctrine?

stackoverflow.com - 2013-02-26 06:48:37 - Similar - Report/Block

How would you do this using Doctrine Query Builder? SELECT p, GREATEST(p.price1, p.price2) AS price This fails: $queryBuilder = $this->repository->createQueryBuilder('p ') ->addSelect('p, GREATEST(p.price1, p.price2) AS price') ("[Syntax Error] line 0, col 10: Error: Expected known function, got 'GREATEST'")...

Event-based extension of query builder in Doctrine repository

stackoverflow.com - 2012-05-22 10:51:07 - Similar - Report/Block

I have a Doctrine entity which is loaded by module . The page is a nested set provided by the Gedmo Doctrine Extension . The module has another model Metadata , 1:1 related to a page. I would like to join the metadata directly when loads the tree. So inside module $em->getRepository('My\Entity\Page')- >getRootNodes(); This loads a...

Doctrine - How to print out the real sql, not just the prepared statment?

stackoverflow.com - 2010-01-19 18:15:34 - Similar - Report/Block

We're using Doctrine, a PHP ORM. I am creating a query like this: $q = Doctrine_Query::create()->select('id' )->from('MyTable'); and then in the function I'm adding in various where clauses and things as appropriate, like this $q->where('normalisedname = ? OR name = ?', array($string, $originalString)); Later on, before execute()...

Doctrine2 migrations inside Symfony2 throw Exception on index creation

stackoverflow.com - 2013-03-20 09:50:49 - Similar - Report/Block

The problem With no previous migration pending I run: app/console doctrine:migration:diff app/console doctrine:migration:migrate I got this error: ALTER TABLE session ADD CONSTRAINT FK_9955C22EA76ED395 FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES user(id) Migration 20130320103822 failed during Execution. Error SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can...

ManyToOne mapping with Doctrine and undefined index warnings

stackoverflow.com - 2012-07-05 16:36:58 - Similar - Report/Block

I'm sure there's a simple solution to this, but I can't fathom what's going on. I have an entity called a Payment and two other entities called Household has many Payment s and and a Household has many Payment s. This is all mapped as unidirectional manyToOne relationships of the Payment using YAML, like this (hopefully this is in lin...

Doctrine MongoDB Referencing and Inheritance

stackoverflow.com - 2013-04-20 19:41:36 - Similar - Report/Block

I am having problems with Doctrine MongoDB ODM. Scenario is very simple (I think). I have set of documents with COLLECTION_PER_CLASS inheritance model (Base, Product, etc). This all works well and I can persist objects as usual. /** * @ODM\Document(collection="content_base") * @ODM\InheritanceType("COLLECTION_PER_CLA SS") */ class Base...

Save a file as a BLOB with Doctrine

stackoverflow.com - 2012-04-30 16:35:05 - Similar - Report/Block

I use Symfony2 with Doctrine 2.2.2 and a Oracle Database. I want to save a file as a BLOB in the Oracle DB. I wrote a costum Type for Doctrine to have a BLOB Type. It look's like this: class Blob extends Type const BLOB = 'blob'; public function convertToPHPValue($value, AbstractPlatform $platform) return (is_resource($value)) ? stream_g...

How to access the Entity Manager inside of the KnpMenuBundle?

stackoverflow.com - 2012-02-27 13:18:26 - Similar - Report/Block

Do Many-To-Many relationships required a "join entity" in Symfony 2 / Doctrine?

stackoverflow.com - 2012-05-08 01:36:56 - Similar - Report/Block

I am starting to understand how Symfony 2 and Doctrine handle many to many relationships, but I am stuck on something, that I seem to have read differing opinions on. Let's say I have an Author entity and a Book entity...with a many-to-many relationship between them. In my database, I represent this with three tables, an authors table, a...

Generated doctrine entities for specific tables

stackoverflow.com - 2012-04-27 18:31:02 - Similar - Report/Block

I am working on migrating a legacy enterprise app to Symfony2. When it is all done we will have dozens of tables. Each application uses a subset of the tables, and we want to keep the tables in 3 databases, not one database per Symfony bundle. Is it possible to use the doctrine command line tools to generate metadata and entities for just...

[Doctrine] Une jointure créée une boucle de Select

developpez.net - 2013-02-22 11:54:04 - Similar - Report/Block

Bonjour, J'ai un petit souci avec une requête que j'ai implémentée dans une classe repository (je précise que je débute en Symfony2 et Doctrine). Je vous expose le problème : ce qui pour moi ne représentait qu'une requête est traitée en 5 requêtes SQL par Doctrine. Voilà le code de ma fonction : Code: public function findHobbiesByUser(\Mc...

[Débutant] Symfony2, Doctrine Jointures

developpez.net - 2013-05-04 09:52:10 - Similar - Report/Block

Bonjour, Je me prends la tête avec le DQL depuis plusieurs jours et je n'avance plus ! Alors j'essaie de créer un système d'articles pour un blog. J'ai donc deux tables : BlogArticles et BlogComments Je souhaiterais donc faire un simple LEFT JOIN sur la table comment de type 'articles.id = comments.article_id', et c'est là ou je bloque. J...

XAMPP и Doctrine - PHP: Фреймворки

cyberforum.ru - 2013-04-24 08:04:40 - Similar - Report/Block

Здравствуйте дорогие друзья, появилась перенести проект с Денвера на XAMPP, на денвере он работал нормально, а вот когда перенес на XAMPP появились проблема php начал ругаться на ф-цию mkdir выдавая такой варнинг. Warning: mkdir(): No such file or directory in D:\xampp\htdocs ctual-test\config\Bootstrap.php on line 182 А у меня там Код: p...

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DEEP within Madagascar, more than 1,300 square miles of rainforest continue to breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen every day, helping to keep the planet cool. That may not seem like a big achievement for a bunch of trees, but elsewhere around the world tropical forests like this one are being felled to make way for timber and mining operations, cattle ranches and, increasingly, sugar and palm oil plantations to fuel the world’s growing thirst for ethanol.

So how did this particular rainforest — a tropical paradise whose canopy teems with rare lemurs and serpent eagles — avoid destruction? Its survival is the fruit of one of the first experiments in carbon ranching: allowing polluters to make up for their greenhouse gas emissions by paying third world countries like Madagascar to preserve their tropical forests. Madagascar uses the money it gets from multinational corporations to safeguard the forest and pay for poverty reduction programs.

Programs like this represent the world’s best hope to save vanishing tropical forests and avert global climate catastrophe. It’s vital that the senators and representatives now racing to create new climate legislation include incentives for carbon ranching. Otherwise they will not come up with the comprehensive solution that’s needed to address the climate crisis. Despite all the attention paid to China’s industrial pollution splurge, that country’s inefficient factories, power plants and vehicles don’t contribute as much to global warming as the destruction of the world’s tropical forests does.

Reversing tropical deforestation could be surprisingly cheap and easy because it can be driven by simple economics. Right now, it’s worth more to a logging company or a peasant to convert the rainforest to stumps or soybeans than it is to leave that rainforest intact. One hectare (about 2.5 acres) of forest cleared and converted to ranchland or crops produces a piece of land worth, on average, $200 to $500. But that’s nothing compared to the value of preserving the rainforest as a sponge for carbon dioxide.

On European markets, the right to emit one ton of carbon dioxide trades today at more than $20. With each hectare of intact rainforest storing around 500 tons of carbon dioxide, that means that each hectare has a value of $10,000 as carbon dioxide storage, far more than the value of even the most productive tea or soy plantation.

Continue reading the main story

As a recent World Bank report put it, “Farmers are destroying a $10,000 asset to create one worth $200.” To the farmer or agribusiness corporation, of course, that makes perfect sense, because that $10,000 is all theoretical. It can’t put food on the table or deliver dividends to shareholders.

Credit Cathie Bleck

That’s got to change — or we could see the rapid disappearance of much of the world’s remaining tropical forests and the oxygen and animal habitat they provide.

The indigenous people who make the world’s forests their home are retreating in the face of agricultural expansion. Their interactions with loggers, miners and ranchers are destroying their cultures and bringing disease to their communities. By providing powerful incentives to leave the forests intact, carbon ranching can allow these people and their cultures to survive as well.

Carbon ranching would also be a good way to bring the developing world into the effort to reduce emissions. A coalition of “rainforest nations” led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica has indicated it will participate in carbon ranching projects without demanding any increase in foreign aid.

Corporate polluters also like carbon ranching because conserving rainforest is often cheaper than reducing their own emissions. Some, like Mitsubishi in Madagascar, are already doing it voluntarily because they want to be seen as supporting environmental efforts and anticipate that future legislation will let them get credit for it. Crucially, support from business guarantees that the idea will get a hearing in this polluter-friendly White House.

Indeed, the Bush administration has already financed some relatively small tropical forest conservation projects — most recently forgiving $24 million of Guatemala’s debt in exchange for that country’s putting the money toward conservation. So carbon ranching may provide a rare piece of common ground for the president and Congress.

To be effective, however, any legislation must include certain safeguards. First, no polluter should be allowed a free pass on cleaning up its own industrial pollution just because it protects rainforest — saving tropical forests should be part of the climate equation, not the whole equation.

Second, if a company pays to protect a forest that for whatever reason ends up getting destroyed anyway — as the politics or economics of the tropical country change — both the company and the country should face strict financial penalties. That would provide a powerful incentive to make sure those forests stay protected.

Time is short. The world’s rainforests are shrinking. With global temperatures rising rapidly, it’s essential that Congress and President Bush act quickly before the vast forests that cool the planet disappear forever.

Continue reading the main story


Year of Short Fiction Part 4: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Two Letters of Wallace Stevens

Even if there had been a crescent moon
On every cloud-tip over the heavens,
Drenching the evening with crystals’ light,

One would have wanted more-more-more-

Some true interior to which to return
A home against one’s self, a darkness

An ease in which to live a moment’s life,
The moment of life’s love and fortune,
Free from everything else, free above all from thought.

It would have been like lighting a candle,
Like leaning on the table, shading one’s eyes,
And hearing a tale one wanted intensely to hear,

As if we were all seated together again
And one of us spoke and all of us believed

Using Poetry to Improve Prose

Examining Pro’s Prose Part 12

Who knew one sentence could contain so much?

Year of Giant Novels Part 9: What I’ve Learned

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

Moby-Dick –  Herman Melville

The Way of Kings – Brandon Sanderson

Ulysses – James Joyce

Seveneves – Neal Stephenson

2666 – Roberto Bolaño

The Eye of the World – Robert Jordan

Tonal Consistency in Fantasy Writing

Today I’m going to discuss a topic that ranges from extreme, blatant violations to subtle, accidental slip-ups and why they matter. The language of fantasy writing is much harder to get right than many “literary fiction” writers give it credit for. In fact, I’d say it is much, much harder than novels set in modern times on Earth.

Let’s start with Shannara, because I recently decided to watch the MTV series based on The Elfstones of Shannara.

Major spoilers for the books; minor spoilers for the TV series.

Shannara puts a clever twist on the fantasy setting. Instead of it being some mystical past, Terry Brooks made it a futuristic world. The implication is that a nuclear war happened, destroying technology, and then the radiation mutation of people became elves, gnomes, goblins, humans, etc. I think this is described in one of the “prequel” trilogies/books, but I never read them to be sure.

The number one concern when doing something like this is consistency. Some people might not like this change up because it violates genre conventions, but I could care less. If something is done consistently, then you should be allowed to do it.

The series does a pretty good job at keeping everything consistent with this setting. For example, the hero has to journey to a place called Safe Hold. We find out that this is the Sa(n) Fr(ancisco) (G)old(en Gate Bridge), where the sign has the letters smudged out and disfigured to create the words: Safe Hold. This is a pretty neat discovery, fully consistent with the setting.

But consistency of setting isn’t the only type of consistency. There is also something I’ll call tonal consistency. Despite being the future, the tone of the series keeps to a traditional fantasy tone. This means no guns, no modern music, and so on. This is where the TV series is at its worst. When guns appear in an episode, it is big shock that totally pulls you out of the tone up to that point. When modern music and a video projector appear, you lose the suspension of disbelief for the tone.

As I’ve already said, you can put all of this stuff in your fantasy setting if you want. The problem isn’t the breaking of a genre convention. The problem is that the reader/watcher has experienced hours of this world and seen no evidence that such things exist. There must be consistency from the start (or done for very deliberate and good reason).

These types of errors occur in a lot of period fiction, but no single example is usually enough to ruin anything. The problem is that you can only lose the tone of a work a certain number of times before you get pulled totally out of the atmosphere it tries to create. It’s mostly a subconscious thing that you probably don’t even notice until it’s too late to get back into the mood.

Let’s talk about some more subtle examples that are the reason this is so hard to do well. The language itself can be the source of these consistency problems. One obvious one is using the word “earth” when the characters don’t know about the planet Earth.

It is so easy to accidentally do this (not actually from Shannara): “Wil dug into the ground and felt the warm earth fall between his fingers.” You can pretend that the narrator has “translated” this for the reader. The word here is technically synonymous with “soil” or “dirt” and not referencing the name of the planet. But then why take the risk? Just use “soil” or “dirt” if that is what you mean. If the characters haven’t heard of Earth the planet, then they wouldn’t be using the word “earth” ever. Period.

The way this usually sneaks in is with similes and metaphors. “The pieces fit together like clockwork.” Wait a minute. Does this world have clocks? Are they precisely put together? “An emotional roller coaster.” Really? This world has roller coasters? Idioms can be problematic as well. “When hell freezes over.” Does anyone in the setting believe that hell is normally full of fire and brimstone?

Those ones slip in but are usually pretty obvious and easy to catch if you’re paying attention to it. The truly nefarious ones are when a word is perfectly ordinary and not a noun referring to something that doesn’t exist, but it’s etymology contains something that doesn’t exist. Wow these are subtle, but a great fantasy writer will make every effort to weed these out as well for consistency of tone.

Here’s one: quixotic (this is actually used in The Scions of Shannara, which I started reading, inspired by the show). It means foolishly impractical in the pursuit of ideals. But wait a second. The only reason it means that is because of Don Quixote. So if this book doesn’t exist in your setting, this word also doesn’t exist.

I’m torn on whether this is appropriate in Shannara. Since we know the book did exist, it seems okay. But still, it seems to conflict with the tone, since the prequels hadn’t been written yet, and we aren’t supposed to know it’s okay.

Measurement tends to be a judgment call. I could go either way. English and metric units definitely ruin consistency of tone, but this might be one of those “lesser of two evils” situations. If there is an easy way out, for example, use “two-day walk” instead of “eighteen miles,” always go with that. Sometimes you have to get creative enough that it ends up causing more confusion than it’s worth. My rule is to avoid precise measurement in that case, but there may be situations where it is needed.

As a final note, I’ll say this can go too far. Every writer has to decide for themselves where the cutoff is. Is “stoic” okay even though it originates from the ancient Greek school of philosophy Stoicism? I draw the line with these cases by allowing a third person narrator to use them if that narrator is clearly not someone in/from the world. A character is not allowed to think or say words that originate from a culture that didn’t exist in their setting.

Along the same lines, what about “philosophy?” The word itself is borrowed from Greek, and so if Greece doesn’t exist on their world, does this break tone? I’d say that’s going too far. Both narrators and characters are allowed to say borrowed words as long as the word isn’t in reference to a concrete person, place, movement, etc. You have to realize that most words in English are borrowed or have pretty clear traces from other languages, so you can’t remove all of these for practical reasons.

Anyway. Sorry for spoiling anything. The series got me thinking about this topic, and I realized I had never written about it.

Year of Giant Novels Part 5: Ulysses

In the previous posts in this series, I’ve taken off with the assumption that most people reading will have a familiarity with the giant novel. This time I’ll start from the basics. Ulysses is one of those books that many people have heard of but probably still can’t tell you much about.

Ulysses takes place over a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom. In fact, June 16 is called Bloomsday, and celebrations happen around the world in commemoration of the novel. I went into Ulysses knowing this much. What I hadn’t realized is that Stephen Dedalus, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is given equal weight as a main character.

It is written in stream-of-consciousness style. People have probably heard this novel is “unreadable,” and this is the reason why. It’s not so much that the events of the day are mindnumbingly boring (this is true!), but that the prose itself is impenetrable. I’ve worked my way through many, many works of literature people have called unreadable and never found them to be so. This one actually is.

Unlike Proust, whose stream-of-consciousness prose is thoughtful and elegant, Ulysses fully embraces the utter chaos that is the human mind. Here’s a sample:

Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother’s money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. Encore deux minutes. Look clock. Must get. Ferme. Hired dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons. Bit all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that’s all right.

And on and on and on it goes: for 260,000 words. There are ways to ground yourself though. And that’s what I’d like to spend the rest of the post talking about.

The name of the book is Ulysses in reference to the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. The novel is divided into sections, and one can supposedly correlate sections of The Odyssey with sections in Bloom’s day. But why? And should you care? We have to take a step back and put the book in context to answer this question.

Ulysses is often considered the perfect culmination of all modernist literature. Modernism as a movement is sometimes considered to have started all the way back with Madame Bovary (1856) but didn’t fully come into realization until the devastation of World War I.

There was a vast turning inward. The classics like War and Peace or The Odyssey or Great Expectations all had grand sweeping plots, rigid forms and structures, and a focus on beautiful language to show these things. Modernism rejected these notions.

I think it’s very hard for us to understand the feeling in Europe after WWI, but once can try to empathize with the sense of futility. We’re all small. People’s lives didn’t seem to matter. There weren’t heroes. There weren’t illusions of being able to change the course of history. The classic form of the novel probably seemed a dangerous fantasy. The world was chaos and unpredictable not structured and clear.

All right. So what on Earth does this have to do with Ulysses? The one takeaway from the title is that this novel is self-aware of what it is doing. It says: Bloom’s ordinary day is the heroic journey of our time. Maybe in the past, people could be worried about saving the world. In our time, an ordinary person trying to make it through an ordinary day is just as grand a struggle.

Depressing. I know. For me, the only way to make it through this book is to get rid of trying to figure out how individual sections parallel The Odyssey. Also, give up on there being any sort of plot to follow (though the wikipedia page is quite helpful on this front). The main thing is to dive into the difficult prose and think: yes, this is how real people think, it is chaotic, and somehow we manage to get through it everyday.

So is this novel worth it? In my opinion: definitely not. As a perfect embodiment of the modernist movement, it is an extremely important historical work. As a work for scholarly study, it will give endlessly. As a giant novel people should read, it is a nightmare.

If this type of thing interests you, read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf instead. It is the exact same idea, an ordinary person’s ordinary day in the modernist style, but it is infinitely easier to read and much, much shorter.

Examining Pro’s Prose, Part 9

First off, Happy 8 Year Blogging Anniversary!

Although David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite writers of all time, I’ve put off examining his prose until this late in the series. I did this on purpose, because the writers we have looked at “follow the rules.” They use clean, minimalist prose. It’s easy to see and articulate why it is good. It’s what we should all learn to do before developing our own styles.

I know this is a bit of controversial advice. Many people say to develop your own style from the start and not waste time trying to emulate famous writers. It’s not so much that I think one should be able to emulate it, but that one should understand what makes simple prose effective before layering in complexity.

I’ve read about how DFW taught writing and believe he took this same approach. You can’t build a house without a foundation. I think that if anyone tries to write in the way of DFW without first understanding the basics, it will come off as a complete mess. So consider yourself warned, but do whatever you want.

To borrow a term from Greg Carlisle, DFW’s prose has an elegant complexity to it. The point of this post is to try to get at what this could mean (though Carlisle was referring to the overall structure of Infinite Jest with that term). His prose still has the elegance of the previous writers from this series but with a layered complexity built on top of it.

Here is a sentence we get early on in Infinite Jest:

The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I’ve come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me.

Most people should be able to read this and understand it on the first time through. This should strike you as strange. It begins with the placement of a person, followed by an 18-word descriptive appositive (containing further qualification after the relative pronoun), continues the first part, and ends with a 21-word, nonessential comma clause descriptor.

Normally, a creative writing instructor would mark this as too long and confusing structurally to be read easily. So why does it work here? That question is hard to answer, because we don’t have earlier, unedited versions to compare it to. The best way to get a sense of its workings is to try to think of some changes and see how it makes things worse.

One thing we could do is eliminate this business about the smile. The passage as a whole would read more easily. But the phrase “impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material” is too good. This sentence is on the first page of the novel, and that phrase, in particular, sets the tone of the novel perfectly.

Think about that phrase for a second. There’s something very dark about it. It implies the person is forced to smile constantly (“fixed”), but who does not smile often (the stamp of the smile reverts to the original shape because of the “uncooperative material” aka his face). At the same time, the description is so unique and striking, it almost comes off as comical. And this perfectly describes the tone of the novel. It’s dark, yet almost comical.

So we can’t eliminate that part. We could always break it off into its own sentence, but again, it just doesn’t seem important enough to do that. The subordinate flow we get by sticking it into an appositive fits its importance.

In the next part, could we eliminate “lately” without losing anything? I’d say yes. This fits with the rule: eliminate adverbs. On the other hand, we’ve basically gone all-in on the wordiness, so it might be better to ask: does it sufficiently detract from the meaning to remove it? I’d say no.

It fits the wordy flow to leave it in, and we have to imagine there were other ones that were cut, considering it is the only adverb in the entire passage. Think about the alternative and more wordy “something stamped hesitantly into uncooperative material.” The adverb there really does add a few too many unnecessary words to make the image appear in your head. It gets a touch too confusing.

The last clause begins by reiterating “the type.” This acts to reground the reader. It reiterates the subject of the clause, and we could imagine many ways to phrase it that doesn’t make it this clear.

In conclusion, the structure of the sentence may be complex, and the word count makes it look excessively wordy, but DFW keeps the excess to a minimum like we’ve talked about before. He also keeps each segment fully self-contained so that there is no confusion about the subject at each point. The basics of clear writing are still there underneath the added complexity.

Homework: Try the same type of analysis with this sentence from a later section (hint: it might have lots of places it could be cleaned up, but has the voice changed? is the tone intentionally different? does context matter?).

If it’s odd that Mario Incandenza’s first halfway-coherent film cartridge — a 48-minute job shot three summers back in the carefully decorated janitor-closet of Subdorm B with his head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-treadle — if it’s odd that Mario’s first finished entertainment consists of a film of a puppet show — like a kids’ puppet show — then it probably seems even odder that the film’s proven to be way more popular with E.T.A.’s adults and adolescents than it is with the woefully historically underinformed children it had first been made for.

Examining Pro’s Prose Part 8

Today we’ll look at some prose from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I couldn’t put this off forever; any series about prose would be remiss to skip Fitzgerald.

Many writers these days pop out 120,000 word novels every year. The Great Gatsby clocks in at about 47,000 words and was finely tuned over three years. This careful attention to prose is exactly the type of thing we should be looking at in this series of posts.

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I’m pretty sure I read this book in high school, maybe 14 or 15 years ago. I may have just studied some plot summary handout, though. In the years since then, I’ve attempted to read it maybe five more times. I’ve failed every single time. Something clicked this last attempt, and I thought the book was brilliant.

This book is hard! It’s shocking that this is a standard for high school students. Structurally, it jumps around a lot. It is half the length of a standard novel yet has twice as many main characters. Nick, Daisy, Gatsby, Tom, Jordan, plus several other minor characters all have fully realized backstories, personalities, and relationships with each other.

The way Fitzgerald achieves this is with extraordinarily economic prose. Pretty much everything in the novel serves two or three functions (as we’ll get to shortly). The point of view is brilliantly chosen. The narrator is telling of events that happened in his past. This gives an intimacy from the narrator being there and knowing the characters, while at the same time serves a distancing function.

I wish this “partially involved narrator” was used more. It was quite refreshing. The narrator also served to complicate the structure, because we hear the events as Nick learned of them, rather than chronologically. The shaky timeline serves a dual purpose: it reiterates that this is all in Nick’s memory, and it heightens the sense that Gatsby is running out of time.

Let’s get to the prose. Here is an early description passage of a place between Long Island and New York City. This place has huge significance in the later parts of the novel.

It starts with a simple declaration to give the reader a picture then em dashes to more detail. It starts a metaphor: it isn’t just a valley but a farm for ashes. This makes sense, because the town is industrial and produces the ash. We immediately get a simile that the ash grows like wheat, staying consistent with the farm metaphor.

The picture is brilliant. We can almost feel it growing and covering everything. We get a few details, but these details are enough to paint a huge picture: ridges, hills, grotesque gardens, houses, and chimneys.

The sentence closes with a description of the people. The phrase “transcendent effort” here is so unique and unexpected. It creates a sense that these people require great will just to move in this oppressive ash. How do the men move? “Dimly” and “crumbling” evoke both the mood of the town but also keeps the description consistent with ash, which is also dim and crumbling.

In one sentence, Fitzgerald gave us all the description of the town we would need for the whole book. He achieved this through consistency in his metaphor but also making the different parts of the description reinforce each other. He used adjectives that did work for both physical description as well as mood.

Lastly, the sentence itself has a type of melancholy to it through its pacing and length. By chaining together those “ands” between the commas, the cadence gets drawn out. It plods along, almost losing you as it does it. The reader drowns in the description like the people in the town are drowning in the ash.

Sentences like these don’t come on accident. It reads like almost careless, effortless writing, but on close examination like this, we can tell how much work actually went into it. Almost the whole novel is like this somehow!

Let’s do some more:

I chose this one, because I wanted to reiterate a point from the first one. “He came alive to me” is a simple declaration. The sentence could have ended there, but this would be the type of laziness that pervades less professional writing. If you’re just going to tell the reader something like this, you may as well not include it.

So the elaboration is the interesting part. He again chooses a metaphor: delivered from a womb. This is the point I wanted to emphasize. This consistency in metaphor is one the annoying things I find when critiquing new writers.

Maybe they strike upon some surprising idea like “womb of his purposeless splendor” (though I doubt it). How do you work it in? Tons of ideas might come to mind like “arrived from the womb” and so on. But of course, one has to look to the previous part of the sentence.

We have the phrase “to me.” Babies are “delivered” to people from wombs, so to stay consistent, this is almost the only choice. It is at this point that babies first cry and “come alive” (I am not making any sort of political statement here). The whole thing works as one consistent unit to both elaborate on the coming alive, reinforcing the metaphor, and having dual meanings.

Then there is the last part of the sentence: womb of his purposeless splendor. As in the first example, this is such a striking and unexpected phrase. Gatsby has been living in a womb of sorts, hiding away in his giant house without purpose, but it is certainly magnificent. Somehow those few words capture all of this. Now he is emerging from it and will have a purpose. It is, in fact, this very scene where Gatsby first reveals the purpose of everything.

We could go on like this all day. Notice we’ve only looked at two sentences. I guarantee that if you open the book to any random spot and find a single sentence, you’ll be able to keep doing this. The book is so tightly constructed that it boggles the mind.

Replies to Against Theory, Part 2

Continuing on with the responses to “Against Theory,” I was kind of excited to see that Richard Rorty wrote one. I’ve written about him on the blog, and he is one of my favorite philosophers. Here are my notes on Rorty’s “Philosophy Without Principles.”

Recall that the original Knapp-Michaels piece tried to take out E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Validity in Interpretation. The main point of Rorty’s piece is to identify the philosophical first principles from which such an (anti-Hirsch) argument could be made. For the record, Rorty disagrees with Hirsch but also think the Knapp-Michaels approach did not succeed.

Rorty begins by pointing out that not everyone agrees with their assessment that a random string of symbols appearing to be language has no meaning if there was no authorial intent. H.P. Grice is one person in this camp. There is a more subtle question that still leaves some room for theory: “Granted that the sentence means such and such, did its author use it to mean that on this particular occasion?”

Rorty takes what seems to be a radical view here. He claims that anything should be counted as language if a human construes it as such (he even includes “an arrangement of stars” as an example).

Recall that Rorty is a pragmatist, so basically he wants to say that Knapp-Michaels are being wildly unpragmatic with their view that we must always identify an author before considering something that looks like language to be language (i.e. have meaning). How do they know that the random symbols in the sand at the beach have no meaning if they come across them and can’t tell if it is an accident or intended?

Trying to identify intrinsic properties is futile in a pragmatic framework. Rorty wants to forget the question of what was intended and instead examine the language in various contexts and describe the advantages/disadvantages as such. We can never “know” the true authorial intent as a pragmatic matter anyway.

This view is clearly against Hirsch and an argument “against theory” (stop theorizing and interpret already!). But I’m not sure how he escapes the paradox that by describing why he feels this way, he has laid out the foundation for a pragmatic “theory” of interpretation. It’s a Catch-22. No one has the answer to why we should be pragmatic without the theory to back it up.

Rorty tries to escape these endless circles by appealing to Heidegger and Derrida. The philosophers who developed theory have skewed the debate by the terms they’ve deemed important enough to study: intention/meaning/etc. This jargon is in place because of tradition, and we should first ask if we have any reason to continue to go along with it.

We can’t argue against theory by using the language of theory. The vocabulary must be changed first, and vocabulary doesn’t change through arguments. It changes because a new vocabulary comes into usage and serves the discussion better.

Rorty takes the view that we shouldn’t stop teaching theory, because it gives philosophers the opportunity to discuss novels, poems, and essays with literature students. It is wrong-headed for Knapp-Michaels to think of teaching theory as some sort of indoctrination into a particular view of interpretation that skips out on the actual interpretation of texts (personal note: I don’t blame them if you think back to the New Critical climate in which the original essay was written).

Knapp and Michaels actually wrote a direct response to the Rorty article entitled “A Reply to Richard Rorty: What is Pragmatism?” So now we’ll look at that. First, they clarify that they are not against making critical arguments about a text. We can analyze texts without engaging in “theory.” The theory they attack is the attempt “to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without.”

Without going further yet, I have to insert my own reservations about this. I get the distinction, but they seem to run into the same epistemological problems they worry about in the original article. Sure, you can do some analysis, but I’m worried how you’ll know it makes any sense without some theoretical grounding. It’s sort of like saying: do math, no wait, stop formulating a theory, just manipulate the symbols, what do you mean you want to make sure you’ve done something legitimate?

Next they push back on the issue of “an author” vs “its author” (this was discussed last time). Knapp-Michaels reiterate that the same set of words authored by various people can have different meanings (one can’t help but think of Borges’ Pierre Menard here). This is because these are different texts. It is problematic to refer to the same text having different (even if fictional) authors.

Knapp and Michaels make a very strong case that the its/an distinction is irrelevant. When someone says “fire,” they could be talking about burning or discharging a weapon or terminating someone’s employment or any number of things. The only meaning that matters in interpretation is the one intended by the speaker. To even contemplate alternate meanings that “an” author could have meant is at best a masturbatory indulgence and at worst a complete waste of time.

Well, I think I’m done with this series of posts for now. I had planned on doing more, but I’m finding this quite tedious and exhausting. For now, I land somewhere in between the pragmatist and Hirsch viewpoints. On the pragmatic side, it does seem a waste to contemplate intentionless meanings. On the Hirsch side, we need some sort of foundation and theory to work out a range of valid interpretations (we get a range because we can never truly know the intention of the author).


Public Release:

Old leaves need to die in time or they will bring a plant down

University of Chicago Press Journals

In a study from the November issue of The American Naturalist, researchers Alex Boonman and co-workers from the Netherlands show that it is beneficial for plants growing in a dense stand to shed their oldest, lower leaves once these become shaded. By using transgenic tobacco plants that do not shed their lower leaves, they were able to show that shaded old leaves become a burden to a plant because they no longer photosynthesize but still require energy to be maintained.

Moreover, the nutrients in these leaves can be more usefully employed by the plant when re-allocated to new leaves at the top of the canopy, where more light is available and higher photosynthetic rates can be attained. Previously, theoretical modeling has been extensively used to investigate how plants should distribute their leaf area and nutrients to maximize their photosynthesis and fitness. However, a direct experimental test was lacking till now.

"Keeping up with the neighbors is important for plants in leaf canopies" Alex Boonman states, "because failure to project enough leaf area at the top of the canopy means that some other plant will do it, with shading and therefore diminished photosynthesis as the consequence." The transgenics, which were originally developed by Susheng Gan and Richard Amasino at the University of Wisconsin, indeed produced less leaf area in the upper canopy layer than normal plants and performed less well in competition exeriments.

Founded in 1867, The American Naturalist is one of the world's most renowned, peer-reviewed publications in ecology, evolution, and population and integrative biology research. AN emphasizes sophisticated methodologies and innovative theoretical synthesesâ€"all in an effort to advance the knowledge of organic evolution and other broad biological principles.

Alex Boonman, Niels P. R. Anten, Tom A. Dueck, Wilco J. R. M. Jordi, Adrie van der Werf, Laurentius A. C. J. Voesenek, and Thijs L. Pons, "Functional significance of shade-induced leaf senescence in dense canopies: an experimental test using transgenic tobacco." The American Naturalist: November 2006.


Bay Leaves Dried, daphne leafs greek, gourmet herbs, laurus nobilis, organic bay leaves, Sparta, Greece, 5gr

Dried bay leafs - Laurus nobilis - Bay Leaves or Daphne (Δάφνη) in Greek Leaves

The offer for 5 g. is the less quantity that you can always have in stock in your Cuisine. Leaves are very light and the above quantity often contains more than 15 ones.

Note : Reviews and Feedback from our Friends

Keep in mind that you'll use few leaves each time so you can calculate your own consumption.
If you have any questions about the leaves, or you need bigger quantity and if you want to create your own Greek Dish with the bay leaves, i 'll gladly share my traditional receipts with you.

Bay leaves are never eaten themselves and are really just used to add extra flavour to a number of dishes. Bay leaves can be used in the following ways:
Prepare a bouquet garni and add to soups, stews, casseroles and sauces,
Add to boiling water for shrimp, crab and other seafood,
Use in marinades for meat and fish,
Add to boiling water for shrimp, crab and other seafood,
Add to milk when preparing homemade rice puddings or other milk puddings.

Modern scientific research has confirmed numerous health effects of bay leaves, especially for diabetes and heart disease.
Scientists have found that bay leaves contain:
Enzymes that break down proteins and promote healthy digestion
Phytonutrients that help improve heart function
Compounds believed to aid in cancer prevention
And for those seeking to treat diabetes, the antioxidants provided by bay leaves aid in the absorption of insulin, which can have a powerful overall health effect.

Our Bay Leaves are gathered from our garden's house at my Father's Village "Serveika".
The Villlage stands at 600m height on Taygetos and our Bay trees (Daphne) gives us their marvelous leaves over decades.
It's a unique gift of our blessed land which i 'ld like to share with you.


Smith Fellows
Smith Fellow

Freshwater floodplains are some of the most biodiverse and productive ecosystems on the planet; yet, they are also globally threatened.  The two greatest stressors to floodplain ecosystems are altered hydrology (e.g., wetlands disconnected from the river) and non-native species.  Floodplain restoration projects are increasing, but they are often hampered by a narrow focus on a single species (e.g., economically-important fish) or habitat (e.g., river connections).  Successful conservation will require a more integrated approach that considers dynamics on multiple scales, from the species up to the entire ecosystem.

My research examines how altered hydrology and non-native species affect floodplain species, communities, and ecosystems in order to improve restoration outcomes.  I will use the Chehalis River Basin (Washington, USA) as a study system due to its extensive alluvial floodplain with both river-connected and disconnected wetlands where non-native fish and bullfrogs vary greatly in abundance.  The Chehalis River is targeted for a series of floodplain restoration projects, but stakeholders need a comprehensive understanding of how restoration decisions affect species, community, and ecosystem dynamics.  I will address these research needs by using occupancy models, field surveys, and experiments to evaluate how non-native species and altered hydrology affect native species assemblages, food web structure, and ecosystem productivity.  The results of my work will directly inform conservation efforts along the Chehalis River by providing stakeholders with information they need to identify and prioritize restoration actions.  More broadly, this whole-system approach to restoration will lead to more effective floodplain management globally.


Monday, March 8, 2010

HA! here is a card I did for Foreverinteractive, it is a hex card Homoricus-isus's???
something like that. the character can be changed into anything in the game, so its supposed to be playable like clay but not clay?... i was kinda confused with what the creature was when they described it to me, but they loved the image so I guess it was close. the creature had some strange phisical traits like Pop-eye arms and bulgy hip bones but it was fun to paint.


admin@podMarch 14, 2015

How to get complete customer satisfaction.

I was recently reading one of Napoleon Hill’s books entitled “The Laws of Success” when I came across one of his principles or concepts, which he states as, going the extra mile. It got me thinking whether or not I had been going the extra mile for my customers as well as my audience? The truth is that the concept or principle of going the extra mile is not new, and in fact it finds its roots in a biblical principle.

In Matthew champter 5 verse 41 of the Bible it says,

“And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him too.”

At this point, you might be asking yourself how does getting complete customer satisfaction have anything to do with the Bible?

On the face of it, you may be correct, but let’s dive into how we can apply the principle of going the extra mile as well as how important it can be to keeping and developing complete customer satisfaction.

What happens when you apply going the extra mile to your business or life work? One of the first principles which happens is your customers become happy because there is an unexpected and surprising result to their work or experience with you. This is important for a couple reasons, one of which is the almighty referral. Having customers that are happy will result in greater referrals, and once referrals are fostered, what you have essentially done is created free advertising, as well as an employee for life(in the customer), which has cost you nothing except for going the extra mile.

What does going the extra mile mean? I believe that going the extra mile has to do with carefully and analytically analyzing what it is your customers are asking for, and then over delivering on that ask. I could come up with several examples in specific industries or businesses on what over-delivering is, but the important part to remember is not whether you have offered them extra free goodies or additional services, but that you are listening to what their needs truly are, and you are providing what they may have not necessarily even asked for or understood that they wanted. This means you must be willing to sit down and analyze your experiences and interactions with your customers or audience.

Ask yourself, “What would I want if I was in their situation? What would frustrate me if I was in their situation? How would I want to be treated, and what would blow me away if I was dealing with my company?” Continually keeping these questions and others in front of you as you deal with and interact with your customers will help you know what it is they need.

I have read articles on what makes employees go the extra mile, or how to analyze what is making one individual or another go the extra mile. I believe the important aspect or principle here is that you focus less on the analytics of going the extra mile, and more on developing a culture and organization which allows your employees and yourself to always be focusing and looking how you can better serve and surprise your customers by giving them what they have not asked for.

Practically, it might be good to sit down and analyze what are some ways which you can go the extra mile with your customers. It’s very possible that you might have one, two, or three activities which can truly blow your customers away and turn them into a continual renewal referral source for you and your business.


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Dzogchen and Meditation
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Dzogchen and Meditation

In Buddhist perspective, there are three dimensions to our human existence traditionally called Body, Speech, and Mind. “Body” means our material body, the embodiment and encasement of our consciousness within a material vehicle moving about in the familiar physical world were we are engaged in the various activities of that world, especially in relation to other living beings also possessing material bodies. The Sutra discourses of the Buddha actually deal with all three of these dimensions of human existence, but the focus is on embodied consciousness, that is to say, our normal ordinary waking state of consciousness. The Sutra teachings are more concerned with this dimension of Body, especially our behavior and actions in terms of our interactions with other living beings. Therefore, there is much said here regarding ethics and morality and the rules of conduct that seek to prevent actions that would harm and cause pain to others. And the methods of the Sutras are often referred to as the path of renunciation. But the Sutra system is actually concerned with our whole dimension of embodied existence. This particularly refers to our embodied consciousness, that is to say, our everyday state of waking consciousness where we find ourselves encased within a material body. Therefore, the type of psychology elucidated in the Sutras is more concerned with the surface of consciousness and we may say that this Abhidharma psychology, which developed out of the Sutras, represents a phenomenology of consciousness.

The Tantra teachings, however, are much more concerned with energy and the transformations of energy. Therefore, the Tantra system is associated with our entire dimension of speech. Speech is sound and sound is energy and so Tantra refers to our whole dimension of energy as human beings. This means not only the sounds we make, but our breathing and our emotions as well. The word “Tantra” literally means continuity or continuum. What is continuous here is the emerging of energy in the form of thoughts and emotions out of the unconscious psyche. The term Tantra does not exclusively refer to sexual activity; sex is only one form of energy within human experience. Because of its emphasis on energy and sound, Tantra is also known as the Mantra system, where mantra is the creative power of sound and names to call phenomena into existence out of the pure potentiality of empty space. In itself, energy is without form, but it may be given form by means of ritual, incantation, and visualization. Moreover, energy has the characteristic that it can change and transform, so the methods of Tantra are said to represent the path of transformation. However, here in Tantra, the concern is not just with the manifestations of energy, but with the deep hidden sources of psychic energy, namely, the Nature of Mind. This psychic energy pertains to what we usually call the psyche or the soul. Therefore, the type of psychology associated with the Tantras might be called Buddhist “depth psychology”, where the focus is on the depths rather than the surface of the stream of consciousness.

However, the central concern of the Buddhist teachings is mind. Among these three dimensions of Body, Speech, and Mind, it is the latter that is most important and fundamental. Both bodily activity and the energy of the emotions depend on mind. Everything comes from mind. The Upadesha teachings of the Buddha and the Buddhist masters point directly to this mind that is the source. The focus of these instructions is the discovery within our immediate experience of this Nature of Mind and its capacity for awareness called Rigpa. The principal concern of both Dzogchen and Mahamudra is Mind, that is to say, the Nature of Mind. Here a crucial distinction is made between the mind (sems), our normal everyday thought process and waking state consciousness, and the Nature of Mind (sems-nyid), which is the source of our three dimensions of Body, Speech, and Mind. Our conscious thought process is changing from moment to moment; it is as fleeting as reflections seen on the surface of the water. But the Nature of Mind is outside and beyond time and conditioning. This distinction may be illustrated by the example of the mirror and the reflections that appear in the mirror. The Nature of the Mind is like the mirror and the mind or thought process is like the ever-changing reflections appearing in the mirror. In our normal waking state consciousness, afflicted with constant distractions, we live in the condition of the reflections, whereas in the state of contemplation we find ourselves in the condition of the mirror.

Because these phenomena that we call “reality” can only be known and experienced by mind, what is more fundamental to our existence than mind? But what is mind? What does it do? Where is it located? We are not dealing with some explanation or theory, but looking inward directly at our immediate experience. Just look inward and observe what we sense and feel. What do we find? Where is this mind? Is this mind something material, a mechanism or an entity or a substance? Or is the mind immaterial and insubstantial? If it is something, an entity or a mechanism, then where is it located? If it is a thing, it must have a location. Is it a little black box inside of us like the scientists say? Just look for this mind. Does it have a color or a shape? Is mind made out of something? If so, what is this mind stuff? Is it just the gray matter in the brain? Or is the mind just electro-chemical activity occurring in the brain and in the nervous system? Is the mind located inside the head, in our brain? Do we see our brain? Do we experience it directly? Electro-chemical activity—these are just words, but is that what we experience? Look at what we experience. Experience is always the touchstone. “Brain activity” is a concept and a theory, at best some readings on dials and graphs on a machine in a hospital ward. But is that us?

What is it we actually experience? Can mind and consciousness operate and exist independently of the brain? Is it inside or outside the body? Is it inside the body or out there in space? Is it anywhere at all? Is the mind one and whole or is it made up of many parts? Where do we experience it? Where do we feel it? Is it everywhere or nowhere? Don’t answer with a concept or a theory--  just look! Is this mind you?

What is this mind? Is it our thoughts and ideas? Is it our feelings and our emotions? Is it our sensations? Is this mind a thing or a substance? Or is it a process, a process with constantly changing contents like a stream of water? Is it cognition or a thought process? Or is it awareness? What is mind and what is consciousness? What is consciousness and what are the contents of consciousness? Just observe and find out for yourself! Mind is not a substance or a stuff; it is not a thing, an entity, or a mechanism--  It is a process. It is a stream of constantly changing events occurring in varying degrees of consciousness. At times this consciousness is bright and focused, at other times dull and diffused, at yet other times subliminal, almost unconscious. What we conventionally call “our mind” is this individual stream of consciousness. This is what the Buddha discovered sitting beneath the tree and meditating.

When we look for the mind, what do we find? Where is it located? Thoughts fill our mind. Thoughts are events that arise in this stream of consciousness. But where are these thoughts located? Where do they come from? Where do they stay? Where do they go? Just look and observe. Is there one mind or many? What do we find? Do we find anything at all?

Yet there is always consciousness and awareness present. Here there is a process in operation rather than an entity or a substance. The mind is insubstantial, but this does not mean that the mind does not exist. When we look inside of ourselves and just observe, we find that there is only a stream of consciousness (T. shes-rgyud, S. vijnana-santana). The Buddha introduced this term long before William James did some hundred years ago. When we say “my mind”, this refers not to a thing or a vestment. Yet this stream of consciousness has a continuity and an individuality. Our stream of consciousness is separate from those of other people. There are individual streams of consciousness and individual mental processes. We are not all One Mind. If we were, as soon as one of us realized something, all of us would simultaneously realize it.

This stream of consciousness and its contents constitutes the Primary Level of our experience. Here we find our basic operating system, and it is both automatic and voluntarily. The other programs of perception, ego identification, and conceptualization all operate on top of this, on what we may call Levels 2, 3, and 4. The elementary events that occur in this stream of consciousness are called phenomena or dharmas. They are what we actually experience at the Base Level. But what we call reality is something constructed by complicated secondary and tertiary mental processes operating above the Base Level. Indeed, these very processes construct for us what we call “reality”, that is to say, our conventional common-sense everyday notions of what constitutes reality. But that is not what we actually experience. Our perceptions of reality are conceptual constructions. Thus, we live in our conceptual constructions of reality and not in reality itself. Thoughts and conceptual constructions all take time to form, even if that time is only a fraction of a second. Therefore, when our conscious dwells in them, we are living in the past and not in the present in terms of what we actually experience here and now.

Level 1 is the primary level of immediate experience in the present moment and the stream of consciousness. This is the pure phenomena of consciousness before judgment and concept comes into play. This is the moment of pure awareness or primary cognition (jnana, ye-shes) before the mind (manas, yid) comes into operation with its judgments and concepts. In a sense, we could say that this pure awareness is beyond the mind, at least in the sense that it occurs before the various mental processes of the mind come into operation. Sensation occurs at this primary level.

Level 2 is the secondary level at which the processes of perceiving, thinking, judging, and conceptualizing come into operation. Language and memory also come into operation here. Collectively these processes are known in Buddhist psychology as Samjna or functional perception. It is this meta-process that organizes sensation into a recognizable perception having an identity and a name. Collectively, the programs that accomplish this are known as Manas or the functional mind. In some ways this Manas may be compared to a computer with its basic operating system and word processing programs..

Level 3 is the tertiary level at which occur ego identification and emotional reactions. Ahamkara or ego identification is the process where we identify ourselves with each sensation, thought, or emotion that arise in consciousness. This false identification is then compounded by Atmagaraha or grasping at this fictitious “I” which does not belong to immediate experience. As a result, certain impulses, thoughts, and emotions arise out of unconsciousness as reactions to the perceptions constructed at the secondary level. These are known as samskaras or unconscious impulses. These impulses include both thoughts and emotions; they basically represent energy emerging from the unconscious. Action may occur at this point impulsively or there may occur a further elaborations in terms of thoughts and emotions.

Level 4 is the quaternary level at which the advanced programs are run, those relating to culture, social and personal interactions, as well as ethical considerations. Here commences the processes that elaborate thoughts, building the original perception into a concept and a thought construction. This is the meta-process of Vikalpa or discursive thought. It is on this plane that our consciousness usually dwells, the plane furthest removed from immediate experience in terms of time and space. When discursive thought is operating, the immediate experience is already long in the past. Therefore, our consciousness is living in the past, not in the present.

Manas or the functional mind runs like a batch of computer programs operating above the basic operating system. Manas is our human bio-computer and it may run oftimes on automatic. But a mechanical computer lacks consciousness and although we human beings are made of flesh and blood, we are not machines, but are self-conscious and aware. We humans are much more than a computer. A computer is merely a sophisticated tool, a very useful one, but even a very young child can do many things the most advanced computer cannot. The consciousness that operated in association with the perception process and the functional mind is known as Manovijnana or mental consciousness. It is this consciousness that is aware of thoughts and thought processes. In some ways Manas can function as a sense organ, being aware of mental events, but it also has the integrative function of organizing raw sense data into recognizable perceptions.

We may ask, what lies below or beyond this Level 1? That is Level 0 or what is called in Buddhist terminology Shunyata. This term literally means “emptiness”. But this does not mean just nothingness or mere absence. Rather, it means the pure potentiality for all possible manifestations. This level may be compared to an empty mirror that has the capacity to reflect whatever is set before it. Whereas the other levels, primary and above, are referred to as mind (sems), this level is referred to as the Nature of Mind (sems-nyid). The distinction between mind and the Nature of Mind are like the reflections and the mirror. This Nature of Mind has the capacity to be aware of whatever may arise or manifest. This capacity is called Rigpa or intrinsic awareness. Whereas Sutra meditation and Abhidharma psychology is concerned with the phenomenology of consciousness (Levels 1-4), Level 0 is accessed directly through Dzogchen practice.

The first thing we need to discover in meditation practice is something called mindfulness or mindful awareness. This is basic. Mindfulness is an awareness that is present together with our immediate experience, whether sensations, thoughts, or emotions. This awareness is not distracted or caught up in any secondary mental processes, but remains at the primary level of immediate experience.

The first exercise is called “mindfulness on breathing”. First sit down comfortably, on a cushion on the floor or on a chair, but making sure that the back is straight. This harmonizes the flow of psychic energy in the body. We will be sitting still and unmoving for a time. This is the opposite of our usual everyday habit of running around and being distracted. Relax and do some deep breathing in order to release stress and tension. But here we have relaxation with alertness, which is the opposite of being sleepy, drowsy, and dull. We are alert and fully awake. But sitting calmly and quietly.

We are not thinking about anything, but are open and globally aware. This is not absorption or trance or withdrawal of the senses. The senses are open and operating fully. This is what is meant by “clarity”. We ground and center ourselves just where we are in our immediate experience. Just be here now. This is like a tree, just being. It is nothing special. It is just sitting and being centered. It is not doing anything special. We are alert and aware without distractions. Distractions are what move us off center. They take us on a trip and we forget who and where we are. This just being present and aware is what is called mindfulness.

The classical Buddhist exercise for mindfulness is fourfold: there is mindfulness on bodily sensations, mindfulness on feelings and emotions, mindfulness on thoughts, and mindfulness of subliminal processes. Mindfulness is just being present. It is self-remembering, a remembering to be aware, a coming back to center again and again. It is necessary first to develop this mindful presence so that we can engage in self-observation or introspection. We can be easily distracted; that is our habit and we continuously impose our conceptions on what we experience. So, it is necessary to have a focus for our awareness.

In this case, we begin with the physical body and focus our attention and our full concentration on our breathing, just the sensations and sounds of our breathing. Breathing is part of our entire dimension of energy. Breathing links our body and our mind. It is a system that is both automatic and voluntary. In this case, we are just breathing normally with our eyes closed and sitting quietly. We simply focus on our breathing. If we become distracted or if thoughts arise, simply come back to focusing on our breathing. Just watch this breathing, be in this breathing. We are not thinking about our breathing or judging it. We just let it be without elaborations. This is known as Anuprana-smriti, practicing mindfulness again and again on our breathing. In this way, we can discover our awareness.

[Note: This is a partial transcript from the workshop entitled “Self-Discovery through Buddhist Meditation”, presented by John Myrdhin Reynolds at Phoenix, Arizona, on October 20, 2001.]


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PhD researcher on Maintaining Moore’s law through functional scaling

Leuven - PhD
Meer dan twee weken geleden

Scaling has gone through difficult times where pitch scaling to reduce the footprint of the device has continued for many decades. However, scaling metal pitch is getting increasingly difficult as metal resistance increases substantially, and scaling of gate pitch has severe consequences on design of the device and source/drain.

In order to keep pace with the scaling trend without necessarily reducing critical feature dimensions it is mandatory to exploit the third dimension, hence staking multiple front-end layers and exploiting vertical transistors. However, although memory technology managed to exploit this evolution, a typical logic device is too random to directly make this evolution applicable as is. Therefore, the key for scaling is to scale functions instead of scaling gates and devices. Functional scaling revisits the general approach of using standard cell as primitive building blocks to build logic designs, attempting to build logic building blocks that are manufactured with a memory-like technology.

This Phd would focus on circuit and system designs from a functional scaling point of view. This may be by looking at various methods like stacking devices PMOS on top of NMOS etc. Exploration of various channel materials and device architectures would need to be considered. This may include 2D materials, vertical devices, lateral devices etc. A co-optimization of the circuit and device together with the technology will be key for making functional scaling possible.

Required background:

Device architecture, layout, circuit design.

Type of work:

20% literature, 40% design, 40% simulation.

Supervisor: Marian Verhelst

Daily advisor: Julien Ryckaert and Praveen Raghavan


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Close encounters with Mars

On 27 August 2003, Mars is less than 56 million kilometres away - approaching closer to our planet than it has done in over 60 000 years.

About the same time as this closest approach, Mars Express passes the halfway mark of its journey, in terms of distance along its trajectory. On 1 September 2003, as it hurtles through space at 10 800 kilometres per hour, the spacecraft will have covered over 242 million kilometres, half of the total of 485 million kilometres needed to arrive at Mars. Note that the distance travelled is not the same as the distance between the Earth and Mars.

At first glance, you might think that this time would be better than three months ago to launch a spacecraft to Mars, given the advantage of a shorter route. However, planning interplanetary journeys is more complicated than just taking account of the distances.

Playing catch up

This is because the planets are also moving in their respective orbits. If you want your spacecraft to rendezvous with another object in space, you must carefully time its launch so that the orbits overlap at some point in the future.

Imagine the Solar System as an athletics racetrack. If you were watching a 400-metres race from the centre of the track and wanted to intercept one of the runners taking part, you could simply chase the runner you want to catch. If you are fast enough, you might eventually catch up but only after using a lot of energy and travelling a long way.

A much better way to catch your athlete is simply to walk across the centre to the other side of the circular track. It is a much shorter distance and you use a lot less energy and time getting there. You calculate your walk so that you arrive at the other side of the track at the same time as they do. Too early and you are waiting for them. Too late and you have missed them completely - you would have to wait one lap until they came around again.

In spaceflight, straight-line paths do not exist for the same reason. All planets move in long, curved paths around the Sun in either circular or elliptical orbits. To reach Mars, the Mars Express probe is now on a trajectory, an arc-shaped path, which gradually makes its way outwards to intersect the orbit of Mars about six months after launch.

It is no coincidence then that the fleet of spaceprobes now travelling to Mars was launched within weeks of each other in 2003. Even with the relatively close positions of the planets, which would cut journey times, scientists still needed to calculate the shortest trajectory between the orbits of Earth and Mars. It makes sense that this occurs around the time of closest approach. Once the shortest path has been established, you can then work back to get the actual launch dates.

All in a row

Though Mars will be closest to Earth on 27 August 2003, ’opposition’ comes on 28 August 2003. Astronomers call the moment when the Sun, Earth, and Mars form a straight line opposition. Since we are closer to the Sun than Mars, this is also when we are overtaking Mars in our respective orbits.

At a distance of exactly 55 758 006 kilometres from Earth, the Red Planet will be brighter than Jupiter and all the stars in the night sky, outshone only by Venus and the Moon. You will not see anything gigantic in the sky, but you will be able to see Mars’s distinctive red-orange colour. Amateur astronomers with good-sized telescopes will be able to see some of the planet’’s features, such as the polar ice cap, dark surface features, and perhaps even storm clouds.

Interesting as this closest approach is, professional astronomers will be looking forward to even better things. Probes that orbit the planet have studied Mars and some spacecraft have even landed on it. Later this year, our knowledge will increase dramatically when the flotilla of spacecraft, including Europe’s Mars Express, approaches the Red Planet.

Mars Express will help to answer the questions of whether there has been water, and possibly life, on Mars. It will be mapping the Martian subsurface, surface, atmosphere, and ionosphere from orbit and by conducting observations and experiments on the surface.

Monica Talevi | alfa
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World War II swept across the globe. Like many companies, The Coleman Company did its part to support the war effort. Field troops were in dire need of a compact stove that could operate within a wide range of conditions in multiple theaters, weighed less than five pounds, could be no larger than a quart bottle of milk, and could burn any kind of fuel. Work commenced immediately to design and manufacture a stove that met the Army's strict specifications. The end product far exceeded anything that the Army had requested. World War II journalist Ernie Pyle devoted 15 news articles to the Coleman® pocket stove and considered it one of the two most important pieces of noncombat equipment in the war effort, the other being the Jeep.

In the decades that have followed, The Coleman Company adapted to the changes and trends in the business of outdoor recreation. We added coolers, tents and sleeping bags to our outdoor line . Hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, boating, swimming, four-wheeling, relaxing, tailgating…Being in the outdoors has so much to offer, and Coleman has everything to help you get out there.


Thursday, May 7, 2015

It's over? Now what?

As part of the IWSG, we're supposed to spend the first Wednesday writing about our writing insecurities.  Having just finished the A-Z blog post, which was like being in labor every day for a month, I almost feel like it's too much to write yet another post for awhile.

But in all seriousness, since students and school and assignments take up so much of my time, I'm now concerned that if I don't have something like the Challenge to push me on, I won't get the writing done that I want to.  I think most of us would agree that it's outside pressures that drive us forward most of the time and encourage us to better ourselves.  Otherwise, no one would change out of their sweatpants, and we'd all eat ice cream straight out of the carton for each meal.  Public accountability and shaming keep most of us moving ahead steadily because we don't have enough willpower to do it on our own.

Plus, writing is HARD, as I'm reminded by my students every single day.  "But miss, I don't like to write.  It's too hard!"  Luckily, or maybe unluckily for them, they have grades to keep themselves accountable.  I don't have that unless you want to start grading my posts in the comments sections. So, uh, please don't, at least not yet.

But if you have a suggestion for me on how to externally motivate myself to stay on a regular writing/posting schedule, I'm all ears.  Meanwhile, back to grading poorly written essays in which students inform me that I need to be more like Martin Luther King, Jr., who dreamed big and ended slavery in the U.S.  Or I should be like Einstein, who invented the lightbulb.


Write Wrong

Chris Piuma, word garbler

Forms of Grief

Sina Queyras · M×T

Sina Queyras: M×TThe title, M×T, is one side of a formula for grief: Feeling = Memory × Time. That formula is marked, as the cover is marked, by a multiplication sign. Emily Dickinson: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Here, great pains multiply, and formal feelings multiply—but feeling’s forms multiply as well. From sonnets to erasure poems, from anagrams to postcards: feeling uses familiar forms, but also nurtures new and not-yet-articulated forms. Such forms emerge from ordered materiality (letters, words, lines): Is feeling also material, countable and transformable? It must be material, if it is a product of multiplication. The sections of the books are divided by electrical diagrams for circuitry which might harness and control this emotional materiality, such as an “emotional overload sensor circuit”. And yet even after emotions are made material: “The dead are not firewood. They cannot be collected, ordered or made useful to the living.” Grief can be ordered, words of grief can be ordered, but you cannot order the dead. They will somehow manage to multiply beyond your taxonomies: they will somehow manage to order us to grief, which multiplies our words and forms.

Michael e. Casteels · sorrow is to row

If M×T is a copious anthology of forms of grief, sorrow is to row is a small and solitary form: a single poem, tucked inside a little sleeve pasted inside its cover. The book—a simple, handmade object, made in an edition of 26—requires you to find its small poem with a few protective layers; not an impossible task, but an intimate and familiar one. The emotions of the poem are here again made material in the book object, in the physical act of accessing the poem. Grief takes on another form, a single form that is still based on multiplying: The poem consists of a single phrase (“sorrow is to row your boat nowhere”, from bpNichol’s Martyrology) typed out several times. The lines are all the width of the title (in a monospaced typeface), but the repeated phrase is one letter longer than the width of the line. And so the poem begins “sorrow is to row / your boat nowher / e sorrow is to r / ow…” — and the phrase breaks differently each time. Enjambments multiply, the meanings hidden within words (the ‘ow’ in ‘row’) are revealed by the breaking. The repetition may seem to be heading nowhere, but at the point where the phrase’s phase would repeat the opening line, the poem ends—not nowhere, but at a point: the sudden mark of an ending, the period, the full stop.

Sina Queyras, M×T (Toronto: Coach House, 2014).

Michael e. Casteels, sorrow is to row (Kingston, Ont.: Puddles of Sky, 2014).

Collapsing language (still)

26 November 2014

Previously: Of Poetry Reviewing, and the Sea
Next: Utopia