text:
Astronomers Elaborate on Options to Reduce Impact of Satellite Megaconstellations
New reports explore technical and policy actions to mitigate the impacts of light pollution from planned satellite megaconstellations, which threaten to severely interfere with ground-based astronomical observations and cause other environmental and cultural harms.
Satellite constellation tracks captured in a photo of Venus.
(Image credit – Torsten Hansen / IAU)
The American Astronomical Society and the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab released a set of reports on Oct. 29 that flesh out policy options for reducing light pollution from planned satellite "megaconstellations," which threaten to undermine the viability of ground-based observatories. The reports were produced by four working groups assembled through the organizations' SATCON2 workshop this summer, which convened astronomers, satellite operators, and other stakeholders. (AAS is an AIP Member Society.)
Together, the reports present frameworks for enhancing oversight of commercial satellites, with one working group arguing that constellations should be subject to formal environmental impact reviews. They also stress the importance of continued collaboration between astronomers and the satellite industry as well as engagement with Indigenous groups and others who have not typically been consulted in such discussions.
To facilitate future work on the matter, which the authors estimate will require "many person-years and millions of dollars," they also call for organizational structures with dedicated staff and access to legal counsel. An executive summary of the reports explains, "Thus far, interactions between astronomy and industry on the satellite constellations issue have been carried out pro bono in the 'spare time' of individuals. While this has been adequate initially, it is not sustainable as new issues are identified and more operators begin developing and launching satellites."
'SatHub' to formalize satellite tracking
Reports from working groups on "observations" and "algorithms" discuss ways to implement recommendations from the first SATCON workshop, which called for coordinated efforts to characterize satellite constellations, track their locations, and develop software applications that help subtract satellite trails from observations.
Arguing that satellite observing campaigns to date have been "poorly funded and do not scale effectively," the observations group proposes creating a "SatHub" that would serve as a "one-stop shop" for data on satellite properties and orbits, software tools, and training resources. An Orbital Solutions Portal within the hub would allow satellite operators to provide data on positions in a standardized format at a recommended eight-hour cadence.
The group envisions SatHub as a global endeavor that could potentially be coordinated through the International Astronomical Union's planned Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference. IAU approved the creation of the center in April and expects to select a host institution for it this month.
The group anticipates funding for the hub could come from federal agencies such as NSF and NASA, international partners, and satellite operators, among others. It "strongly" suggests that satellite operators fund the Orbital Solution Portal, "as having access to a wealth of data products and a means to request coordinated observations from astronomers will directly benefit industry partners."
More broadly, the group stresses, "The implementation steps in this report require significant overall resources on as fast a timescale as possible. It is one thing to write down what must be done, and it is another to secure funding and direct appropriately skilled individuals to carry it out."
Views vary on requiring environmental reviews
The remaining two working groups addressed issues beyond the scope of the first SATCON workshop, examining existing state, federal, and international policies, and consulting with a broad range of stakeholders to inform proposals for new regulatory frameworks. The "policy" group included several representatives from satellite companies, while the "community engagement" group considered perspectives of amateur astronomers and dark sky enthusiasts, environmental organizations, and Indigenous communities, among others.
The community engagement group makes the case for space to be formally defined as part of the environment under federal and international law. It notes that there are a wide variety of environmental impacts associated with the launch, operation, and deorbit of satellites, including emissions of greenhouse gases and chemicals, contamination from debris, and potential disruption to animal migration patterns
In addition, the group frames the night sky as a natural resource that belongs to and affects the wellbeing of all people. As such, it argues policymakers and satellite operators have a duty to consult impacted stakeholders, especially Indigenous communities and others who have "historically been excluded from the power structure and decision-making regarding space activity," stating that "many communities see the unchecked actions of space actors as colonization expanded to a cosmic scale during a time of global crisis."
The group further observes that the U.S. is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, a binding agreement that establishes space as a "global commons," and it suggests satellite operators have a "duty to consult" affected nations and persons. Turning to U.S.-specific legal frameworks, the group also argues that satellite constellations should be subject to review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires agencies to assess the environmental impacts of certain activities that require their approval.
Currently, the Federal Communications Commission, which licenses satellite constellations, requires environmental impact statements under NEPA only under limited circumstances which do not apply to satellites in orbit. By contrast, the Federal Aviation Administration applies NEPA more broadly and regards light pollution as a trigger for NEPA review.
The policy working group's report likewise explores the option of expanding application of NEPA, and notes there was dissent within the group on the matter. For instance, it states, "Some authors of this paper pointed out that requiring [environmental reviews] for satellite licensing in the U.S. could result in satellite operators abandoning the U.S. licensing system. In counterpoint, access to the U.S. market is likely to be viewed as attractive."
The report presents ways of amending regulations to require environmental reviews, such as by defining the natural environment to explicitly include "Earth's orbital space," while also noting objections to that approach. "The concern was raised that this change will upend U.S. policy distinguishing between the Earth environment and the space environment with unpredictable consequences," it states.
The idea of expanding NEPA to encompass satellite constellations has attracted some attention in Congress, where earlier this year Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) asked the Government Accountability Office to review the subject.
"Although we are enthusiastic about the increased broadband access these satellite constellations might enable, astronomers are concerned that launching thousands of bright satellites into space, as the FCC has approved doing, will interfere with their scientific research," they wrote, suggesting that FCC's decision to generally exempt satellite systems from NEPA reviews should be revisited.
At a recent National Academies event, the SATCON2 workshop organizers noted that they briefed the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on their reports on Oct. 19, including the proposal for the FCC to require environmental reviews. The community engagement group leaders also noted they recommended to OSTP that the U.S. should reaffirm its commitment to the Outer Space Treaty's principle of space as a global commons and that NASA should establish an Office of Indigenous Affairs. AAS plans to continue promoting the SATCON2 reports through additional agency and congressional briefings as well as at townhall sessions at scientific conferences.
Andrea Peterson
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Q: Scrolling wrapped text in an ion-list I've been working on a list with scrollable content, but after several tests I found that the scollbar is considering only the image but not the wrapped text for item size. This causes truncating content at the bottom of the page.
Here's my code:
<ion-content ng-controller="categoriesCtrl" ng-switch on="categories.length > 0" has-bouncing="false">
  <ion-refresher on-refresh="updateCategories()">
  </ion-refresher>

    <ion-list type="card">

{{category.name}}

{{category.description}}

    </ion-list>

</ion-content>

this is what I got, cannot scroll any further

Solutions?

A: It appears you're using a combination of the <ion-list> directive with the list CSS elements. Try using the <ion-list> with <ion-item> directive.
<ion-list>
  <ion-item class="item-text-wrap item-thumbnail-right">

Name

{{description}}

  </ion-item>
  <ion-item class="item-text-wrap item-thumbnail-right">

Name

{{description}}

  </ion-item>
</ion-list>

Here's the working demo.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Lectures from world leaders of crucial research topics in Information Engineering intended to highlight trends and perspectives of important research areas. The primary target audience is postgraduates, postdocs, and faculties in general engineering, including undergraduates who are interested in careers in information engineering in the future.
If you have a question about this list, please contact: Rachel Fogg; Fumiya Iida; Dr Ramji Venkataramanan; Dr Timothy O'Leary. If you have a question about a specific talk, click on that talk to find its organiser.
2 upcoming talks and 5 talks in the archive.


CAPE TOWN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The South African government on Monday released a draft Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) that abandons a previous deal to build costly nuclear plants by 2030.
The draft plan confirms that the deal to build nuclear plants has now been shelved in favor of cheaper, cleaner sources of energy like wind, solar, gas and hydro-power.
The government under former president Jacob Zuma had been working on a deal, allegedly with Russia, to build nuclear reactors at a cost of 1 trillion rand (about 70 billion U.S. dollars). That deal would provide for 9,600 megawatts (MW) of nuclear power as part of the energy landscape by 2030.
The opposition and environmental groups strongly oppose the deal which they say is unaffordable and would entail corruption.
The IRP, released by Energy Minister Jeff Radebe, includes the following new additional capacity by 2030: 1,000 MW from coal, 2,500 MW from hydro-power, 5,670 MW from solar power, 8,100 MW from wind, and 8,100 MW from gas.
"This approach... provides the necessary policy certainty while creating the space for all of us to engage in detail on the impending energy transition and the options available to us as South Africa," Radebe said.
The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomed the policy shift.
"The fact of the matter is that we never needed new nuclear plants, and we didn't have the money to build them. On this score, the new draft IRP is a substantial improvement on the old one," the DA said.
"We are moving towards cleaner, renewable energy and away from the corrupt nuclear deal," the party said. "This is something to be welcomed."
The government invited the public to put their input into the draft IRP in a 60-day period.
"We urge you not to wait for the 60 days but to provide us your written comments and proposals with supporting data or evidence where possible as soon as you have them ready to help minimize the time to finalize the IRP and therefore create policy certainty," Radebe said.
/ 05. Building bike with...wood? Chinese carpenter did it!


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text:
I Was a Teenage Rent-a-Frankenstein
Written by Tom Bradley
(from Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch, Dog Horn Books, 2010)
Section one takes place in a house trailer in the Salt Flats west of town, probably not technically Salt Lake City.
Section Two is set among the small businesses in the area around Second East and Second South
Section Three happens in a duplex in a lower-middle-class neighborhood on one of the "east benches" partway up the side of Mount Olympus, around 2500 East and Thirty-Third South.
...it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived...
--Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Years ago, fresh-faced and pretty much normal, my favorite cousin, Pynn Barkdull, went on a Mormon mission to Salem, Massachusetts. After serving out the appointed two years, he came back on the Greyhound appearing every bit as wholesome as when he'd left, admirably concealing the fact that he could see and feel fiery blisters erupting from his flesh, and could hear, inside his own skull, the tormented screeches of every witch that had ever been hanged or pressed in that town.
Once ensconced in his parents' house trailer, way out in the middle of the Salt Flats, Pynn took to his bed, and begged to be administered the secret Mormon laying-on-of-hands ceremony. Refused this drastic measure on the grounds that he was "just a tad tuckered out, an' re-quired nothin more 'n a few days snoozin in the ol' fart sack," Pynn took matters into his own mysteriously white-gloved hands.
With a histrionic gesture of his long arm, he scooped the big blue jar of Noxema cold cream and the decorator box of facial-quality tissue off his night stand, and perched his Princess extension in their place. He proceeded to place hundreds of long distance calls to the administrative offices of various sacred denominations represented in the Salt Lake City yellow pages, inquiring as to going rates for castings-out and other such esoteric services.
Scientologists, Rosicrucians and Roman Catholics began chartering small buses out into the white desert, and challenging each other to grotesque showdowns in the purple back bedroom of the Barkdull family's modest mobile home. Such theological measures, combined with various over the-counter downers, brought my cousin a few minutes of sleep when the sun was well up and I was around to hold his shrouded hand. But, judging from Pynn's moaning dreams, it finally became obvious, even to his brain-dead father, that professional medical attention was needed, if not downright custodial care.
Papa Barkdull had no help from his wife, my auntie, Pynn's mama--the woman whom we all secretly called Death Lady. She couldn't handle any emotion other than her own barely sublimated pansexual lust, and spent all her time avoiding her unhappy son at choir practice in the local prayer hall, where she was star soprano soloist on account of her preternatural vibrato. But eventually, Papa Barkdull, unassisted, was able to convince "Crazy" Pynn that he ought to spend some time in Our Lady of Sorrows' psych ward.
"Them cat-lickers, they's used to dealin with deep feelins 'n stuff," explained Papa.
Soon, "Crazy" Pynn got bored in the pastel loony bin and started spilling his guts to the various orderlies and janitors and junkies at Our Lady's. He had a fairly horrible story to tell, which he corroborated by removing the silken gloves he'd worn ever since getting off the Greyhound.
It seemed that Pynnie's companion on the mission--a Vietnam-vet and native of this very desert, in fact, who bore the odd given name Streckfuss--had tried deliberately to drive the poor boy mad through psychological torment and even physical cruelty. Pynnie, with what seemed chillingly to resemble glee, displayed evidence of ritual scalding and shackle blisters on his body. His hands and feet looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon's flippers, the skin melted along the phalanges and solidified in hideous brown webs of scar tissue. When pressed, however, he was unable to produce a single cigarette burn. They were Mormons, after all.
The law was called in, for even a self-effacing old desert hound-dog like Papa Barkdull couldn't overlook a disservice this blatant. They extradited Pynn's companion from Salem, where he had set up housekeeping in a seventeenth-century garret and surrounded himself with adherents to a quasi-religious sect of his own co-devising: a polygamist coven featuring old ladies and orgiastic anal rituals, Streckfuss acting as Prophet, Seer and Revelator.
The judge, in pronouncing his verdict, observed that this sort of heretical behavior was a rapidly growing trend among Mormon proselytizers throughout the world. He cited the recent misadventure of the young missionary stationed in England, who claimed to have been followed clear across the Atlantic, forcibly chained down for weeks on end, and repeatedly raped by a certain Dairy Princess from Centerville, Utah. And, when a reporter from the National Enquirer asked, "How on earth does a female rape a male? How does a man get coerced into intercourse without at least his consent, if not his cooperation?" the boy explained, "She used her mouth first." And everybody went, "Oh." Next question.
Well, the judge (not surprisingly a good Brother of the Church himself), said that he'd decided to make an example of Pynn's companion, this young Streckfuss, to put a stop to these lurid shenanigans that were interfering with God's work all across the face of the earth and so embarrassing the General Authorities. He put Streckfuss away in Utah's for-real insane asylum: not a ferny upstairs ward staffed by bleeding-heart mackerel snappers, such as the place where Pynn went, but the bona-fide, thorazine-steaming, state-run clink in the uncharted outskirts of Provo.
Actually, the depiction of "Crazy" Pynn as pure victim might have been more useful to the Barkdulls' lawyers than it was accurate. Nobody seemed to notice that Exhibit-A, the original copy of the Massachusetts coven's bizarre charter, was not only written in the "victim's" florid penmanship, but in his fancy-shmancy rhetorical style as well. Where had Pynnie gotten his webs on all that empurpled vocabulary, that architectonic syntax? From the same dark, grisly, potent place where children in exorcism movies derive their British accents, maybe?
In any case, the court elected to penalize the culprit's father as well, just for good measure. Coincidentally a "Bishop" of the church, this old gentleman was reputed to enjoy dim and peculiar ties to the Barkdull clan. (This was not all that astonishing, as everyone was dimly and peculiarly tied through plural marriage.) Streckfuss' father was forced to pay my cousin a dozen or so thousands of dollars, plus court costs. There were whisperings that the "Bishop's" elevated, yet shadowy, ranking in the sacred hierarchy had helped him get off so lightly.
With the small fortune in emotional damages, plus a couple bank loans, "Crazy" Pynn was able to open up his Hollywood Monster Hobby Shoppe in Salt Lake. It turned out to be quite a successful experiment in creative entrepreneurship. And while it stood, the Shoppe was neither bombed or boycotted, nary a Mormon booger wiped on the plastic cobweb-festooned front window. Evidently, the "Bishop" was too ashamed, or too busy, or had simply forgotten, to wield his influence to wreak retaliation on the snitch who got his son Streckfuss in such Dutch.
In his locally famous store, "Crazy" Pynn stocked easy-to-assemble scale models of the Blob, icky rubber tarantulas, etc., all those witchy things that make children wince a bit, but don't hurt them or give bad dreams from which they can't readily awaken. My favorite retail items were the hundreds of monster masks which my cousin stacked and strung everywhere. I used to loiter near the cash register and watch these things writhe with their own animation, like a plague of toads and locusts, a spontaneous generation of morbidity.
They were the expensive kind, shaped to cover the whole head and neck, molded every conceivable vomity shade and texture, with tufts of real human hair embedded at odd spots, sprouting rankly from the sides of these disembodied noggins. The masks must have been designed by medical students with minds sickened from extended intimacy with cadavers. They looked like the portraits in the Syphilitic's Museum in Liverpool; or the pregnant corpses you can sometimes see discarded in north African mule pens; or the bubonic plague victim crumpled in the lower left corner of Grunewald's "Temptation of Saint Anthony," with his rictus-smile, blue epidermis, and exploding scarlet navel.
Supreme harelips throve and blossomed beyond mere oral cavities, splitting whole noses into single-nostriled tubes of plastic monster-snot. Graying, greening skin sunk around empty orbits with blackened lids flapping loose. Wormlike veins erupted from the underbellies of eyeballs that hung on red strings over cheeks bursting with custardy matter. These were clinically accurate representations of the penultimate state of all flesh, the transitoriness of connective tissue, the religion-engendering horror of impermanence, caught for all eternity in non-biodegradable latex. They were time machines that gave me a look at my future self.
Here in my cuzzie's store resided timeless art that would be slippery, resilient and whole when the Isenheim Altarpiece was carbon jam between the toe-claws of some post-World War III gamma mutant. These rubbery false faces heralded the demise of Homo sapiens as a species, its mongrelization, its miscegenation, its regressive breeding into swamps and tar-pits.
Speaking of which, a certain amount of nepotism soon crept into the administration of the Hollywood Monster Hobby Shoppe. Though I hadn't quite yet fully blossomed into the magnificent stature which I enjoy today, Cousin "Crazy" Pynn came up with a way to employ the six-foot seven-inch, two-hundred-and-eighty-three-pound, fifteen-year-old me.
In response to a waking dream he experienced one afternoon in the stock room, my new boss inaugurated the very popular Marauding Beastie Service ("Hire 'em out! Scare your loved ones dead!"). He gainfully employed a downright regiment of burly, immature dope fiends such as me, a whole generation of junior Karloffs, Lugosis and Chaneys. Pynn used to pump us full of that good old-fashioned Purple Haze and make us available to working-class Mormons with poorly developed senses of humor who wanted family members traumatized. It was sort of an escort service to and from hell, and I turned out to be one of the more sought-after Frankensteins.
This job, as one may well imagine, involved the pubescent me in a zillion zany, madcap misadventures, to be sure, which I am unable recall at this very instant--except to say that the most memorable of these gigs provided me not only with my first in-person glimpse of labia minora, but also with a hairline crack in the base of my skull which still sometimes twinges a bit when I--
But, here. Allow me to demonstrate.
I'm the patchwork corpse, jerry-rigged, galvanized, and duly dispatched by The Modern Prometheus. Layers of barf-green latex slide along cold sweat. My huge jacket smells of mothballs. I'm standing in the dark willowy back yard of a stranger's duplex, which is fastened, cystwise, halfway up the side of an oversized mountain that rims the Mormon "Zion."
The house key in my hand writhes like a centipede. Through the lace curtain I see a squared circle glowing orange and turquoise. Howard Cosell's mouth is bobbing up and down; and, coming out of his mouth, trilling, perfectly in synch, is the squeaking voice of an electric meter drilled into the red brick wall beside my ponderous green head.
I see a lady's robed legs cross and uncross in front of the TV--a Mormon plumber's mother-in-law whom I've been assigned to scare to death. If she loses control of her bladder and bowels both, there'll be a tip in it for me, and maybe even a nice bonus. Pynnie's got some Clear Light back at the shoppe. I take a growling breath--
And then, all at once, the wiseacre razzer, the color announcer to my ball game, my logorrheic consciousness, shuts up. All verbiage is cleared away from a yellow sky, for the length of time it takes to blink once.
I snap to, flat on my ass in a Doberman pinscher's horse meat-reeking supper dish, all four limbs and twenty digits cold and numb, tingling, no circulation.
Oddly, my employer, my pimp, is seated very close to me on the plumber's patio. Pynnie is adjusting the silver-painted rubber bolt that seems to be screwed into the side of my neck. He's saying, "Did you know that Death Lady wet-nursed Streckfuss?"
Before I can say "Huh?" or "Who's minding the store?" my boss cousin reaches into his pocket and produces something trim and metallic. "See my new toy?" he says, holding up a tiny piece of electronic equipment, a genuine Sony micro-cassette recorder. He cradles it in an ungloved web, and coos, "I'm real proud of it."
He clicks the thing on, and it makes sounds that might be tentatively identified as emanating from some sordid zoo's chimp house at feeding time. But, no, Pynn explains that the recording was made in the master bedroom of a certain particle-board mobile home in the middle of a nearby wasteland.
"I concealed this apparatus, secret and nifty, in my parents' laundry hamper," says Pynn over the ape noises. "Smell?"
It is offered up to my nose, but politely declined.
"Turn it down." I whisper. "What if the plumber's mother-in-law hears?"
"Weren't you paying attention?" snickers Pynn, turning it up. "She's already scared dead. Forget about her. Listen to your auntie and uncle instead. They're getting comfortable."
At the time this recording was made, Mama and Papa Barkdull seem to have been playing the gamy-wamies of middle-aged people who can no longer do a whole lot of bona-fide pair-bonding.
"Where'm I gonna pinch?" yowls Death Lady over the one-inch speaker dangling by a strap from her son's disfigured wrist.
"Don'tcha do that to me nope-nope-nope," replies my uncle.
"Crazy" Pynn has the whole routine committed to heart. Mr. and Mrs. Barkdull's shared moment of connubial pleasuring is preserved for posterity not only on micro-cassette, but in the kinesthetic memory of their sole spawn and heir. He mouths their grimaces, and pantomimes the otherwise unimaginable actions that must've produced the fleshy splorts and rubbing sounds. He throws himself into one, then the other character, like a borderline-non-compos-mentis TV comic. "Laugh at me, or I promise you I will die," he shrieks in ear-splitting body language. He squawks and squirts and grunts along with his fons et origo.
The dobie pinscher into whose supper dish my ass is wedged begins to howl and snarl from the shadows in which it is, with any luck, securely chained.
Soon enough, the locutions of my auntie and "unker," inarticulate enough under less passionate circumstances, degenerate into pure white noise. In response, Pynnie dives to his belly on the patio flagstones and slithers like a jack rabbit partly squished on a salty highway. He sizzles saliva froth all over my Frankenstein-booted insteps, and makes his beautiful golden face as ugly as the less popular monster masks, with gawks intended to impersonate each of his parents in turn.
"Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood," says Leo Tolstoy, but in a different context.
Pynnie even looks up once and shoots me a chillingly accurate imitation of the trademark sneer which Death Lady produces while soloing at Sunday meetings in the prayer hall, a rictus of greasy rut that nearly puts the fear in me. He shoves a few fused fingers into the corners of his rosebud mouth and yanks masochistically down.
"Isn't this almost too disgusting?" he laughs, and snaps the micro- cassette recorder off just as my uncle starts making ejaculation sounds. Pynn gets up off this perfect stranger's patio, sets his hair straight, and dusts himself off.
At this point I feel I simply must demur. From between my brown-painted cadaver-lips I say, "But, Pynnie, Those sorts of gamy-wamies are what made you."
After a stunned pause, he murmurs, "Sweet Jesus, I never thought of it that way." He hunkers back down next to me, and tries to say more, but his voice cracks. He turns and looks, glassy-eyed, at his reflection in the doggy's water dish, then at his shiny red shoes.
"You have a cousin," Pynn says absently. "I mean besides me. An honorary cousin, I should say. Not a blood cousin, but a milk cousin. Suckled at the same blessed paps that suckled me. Did you know? My former missionary companion? Streckfuss?"
"Stop lying."
Pynn gives off a look of offended piety.
"Tell the truth," I say.
Pynn takes on a homiletical tone of voice. "What a 'Bishop' wants," he informs me, "a 'Bishop' gets."
"And he wanted your hideous mom's nipple sauce curdling in his only son's belly?"
"It's well-known fact. Local lore. If you didn't spend all your time hulking around Gomorrah in full make-up, you'd already know this."
"Well, yeah. But rental tits? I thought that was just way down south, back in the old days, with former slaves--I mean, you know."
Pynn leans against the plumber's fly-screened porch door and says, "Are you ready to hear what that old hireling milch-cow used to do to the 'Bishop's' boy? I remember this, even though I was just a small child myself, because she always made me watch and even assist sometimes. You know the old line: 'Hand me the Handi-Wipes, Pynnie, our wee-wee Streckie-boy spilled!'
"You see, she had contractually obligated herself to the most powerful Mormon around, but Mama was too busy with sacred church work and choir practice to fix the baby solid food. So she kept him nursing far beyond the weaning time prescribed by our northern industrialized culture. This had the added advantage of extending the pay period. Plus she liked the twitches it gave her uterus to have a little man tugging away at her areolae. 'Tightens me up for your ol' Papa's salami,' is what she used to sizzle in my face as she suckled the customer, and I couldn't figure out what in the world she was talking about, lunch or what?
"And li'l Streckums was thinking about lunch, too. He was a growing boy, hungry for some solid meat for his bones and muscles to develop on. Sometimes he forgot himself, lulled two-thirds unconscious by the breast anyway, and he sank his razor-sharp rattler teeth into the Death Lady.
"And she screamed the filthiest words I have ever heard. She never, ever swore other times, because she was such a good religious woman, the first-string soprano soloist in the prayer hall choir. But at feeding time it was 'Why, you filthy li'l rim-jobbing, smegma-gulping clit-twirler!' And she raked my future missionary companion's cheek with her fingernails until he opened his mouth to cry and she could slide her teat back out to the safety of her under-wire bra, bleeding, and that would be the end of Streckfuss' nurture for that particular day.
"She'd supplement this jejune diet with saltine crackers. That was his only solid food besides wrinkled dug-flesh, and he'd only get them when Mommy was sure he was cutting a new tooth, a ragged hole in his gums. He would jam that salt cracker in his little rosebud mouth, my client baby brother, and scream in agony, but couldn't stop chewing because he was so ravenous. And mama would watch with no expression at all on her face. Sometimes she'd press a hand or two between her thighs and glance at me.
"She'd pump the stranger full to bursting with that awful red sugar-water from a baby bottle. Then she'd swathe her head in a brown terrycloth imitation animal hide with bottle caps tinkling all over it, and prance around our mobile home, making noises and faces intended to mock our daddy, who was out steadfastly operating his backhoe somewhere in the wilderness. And she'd make my baby un-brother laugh and laugh until he peed that red sugar water all over his diapers. And then she would encourage me to help her heap scorn on Strecky-Wee-Wee for being a pants-pissing baby, followed by more salty things for the wounds in his mouth. 'Breakfast for Streckfuss! Breakfast for Streckfuss!' she'd warble at full vibrato.
"And when he got constipated from all this malnutrition and turmoil, Mommy sodomized our patron's son with a Vaseline-coated pencil eraser. 'To get them ding-dang contractions going,' is what she explained while making me watch.
"You know, just the standard behavior that females engage in whenever we're haplessly placed in their charge, the basic mewling and puking stuff, the usual monster-making that only a poorly toilet-trained fag like me and a connoisseur of unattractiveness like you would care to bring up in polite company.
"She used to walk bare-naked in front of my li'l Streckums and me. She'd scratch herself and bend over, pretending to pick up something. She'd have us lie in bed with her and play rub-the-backs. Neither of us learned to wipe our bummy properly until seventh or eighth grade, and only then by trial and error, 'cause Mama always did it for us. She deliberately misinformed us just to see our little eyes widen in amazement: she told us that the daddy peed in the mommy's belly button and then there was a baby. And she'd massage her bosoms like we weren't there, cuz. She used to have us three bathe together, me and my pseudo-sibling and her. And, pretending to teach us personal hygiene, she'd pull our foreskins, which were never removed like all the other boys' in gym class. She swore up and down it was for laudable anti-Semitic reasons, but it was actually just so she could tweak them twice a week for nearly a decade and a half. That's why she named me, her first-born, like she did. You know, to sound like 'penis'? I, at least, must have enjoyed it, because I always called, 'Mama, will you bring me a towel?' clear up until I was seventeen, even after she'd stopped pulling my pynnie 'cause I was a man with hair of my own and she was religious and in the choir. She's the soprano soloist, you know? First string, of the whole prayer house choir? I think that shows a certain amount of serious application, don't you?"
He looked imploringly out of the corner of one eye.
For some peculiar reason of my own, I suddenly felt like laughing in my cousin's face. But I didn't. That would be cruel--but not cruel enough. Not for the Marauding Beastie, not tonight. So, instead of laughing, I delved deep into myself and conjured up an ultimately cynical, latently queer notion to utter in an undead voice, to make things even more difficult for my poor blood-cuzzie. I loved this guy, always had. But, you know, what the hell?
"Pynnie," I said, taking the golden forearm and gazing into the clear, bewildered eyes. "We are all of us sprung from feces. We are like those mushrooms I got growing in my bathroom: rank things, sprouted temporarily in a hard white place that was intended just for defecation."
I was about to add, "We're just waiting in this laundry hamper of an earth for a giant angel to come pluck and gobble us for his own recreational purposes, which have nothing to do with us as persons," or something anticlimactic like that--but, at that moment, Pynn's thumb made a little spasm and flipped on the Sony micro-cassette recorder, just long enough for us two tall youngsters to hear the splatter and plop of Mama Barkdull's cackling, orgasming and singing the first few bars of "Whoa Promise Me."
"Shit is what we're sprung from," I insisted. "Unlovely and unloving shit."
"I know," choked Pynn in despair.
I celebrated this conceit, and such a pithy, almost aphoristic expression thereof, with a few death-embracing lungfuls of the most common combustion-supportive air pollutant in modern urban zones, adulterated liberally with the world's major greenhouse gas.
As for Pynn, he actually started crying. Quiet sighs and hiccoughs. Catching his tears like little black lagoons in the webs of either hand, and wiping them away, bravely, like a sad, pretty girl, he cried, Pynnie did. And I felt like a hireling mutant whore.
"I'm sorry."
"I know," repeated Pynnie, much more firmly. "It's okay." He understood, better than most people would. He smiled, and offered me a tiny windowpane, a bonus.
A note from the author--
The key is in the epigraph from Mrs. Shelley: "It became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived." That is, of course, Doctor Frankenstein describing the monster he has made. Or, rather, not describing it.
This is a story about monster-making. Streckfuss makes Pynnie's hands into Creature from the Black Lagoon-type flippers. Pynnie turns his cousin into Frankenstein's monster. And, of course, Auntie Death Lady is the champion original source of monstrosity. She is the mother-werewolf who starts it all, with her pair of nurslings.
Mother Nature is not a "host of golden daffodils." She's an abyss, a fanged maw. Get too close to the lip, and lose everything. The catamite clergy of the Syrian goddess Atargatis lived under the divine compulsion to hack away at themselves in public with swords and knives. The orgiastic sisterhood of Bacchantes went into such frenzies that they could dismember wild animals and uproot trees with their fingernails. One of their club, Agave, tore her own son's head clean off. And let's not forget the sorceress Medea, who diced her own brother and slaughtered her children.
Dante pictured Hell's denizens fearlessly and well. But, as it says in the epigraph, even he could not have "conceived" (procreational pun intended) the monsters in this story, because he lived in pre-psychoanalytical days. Freud, for better or worse, placed squarely and explicitly into our awareness the concealed hellaciousness of the nuclear family.
There's no regulating this delicious, horny hell, which we face every night at the dinner table, no imposing orderly relationships upon it. Even the presumably sun-drenched Olympian deity Hera was sibling to her own spouse. Hercules, being Zeus' son, must be Hera's nephew, even while serving as her stepson. And then Hera adopts him and gives him her daughter to wed--who is, obviously, his cousin. These are the disorderly undertones of procreation itself, which our monotheistic tradition has tried to hide under the stainless robe of that confirmed bachelor, Jehovah.
But my story doesn't take place in Judeo-Christendom. It is set in Mormondom, which is not the same thing at all. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, in making his presidential bid, protested too much. He kept saying, "It's not a cult," pleading wholesome Protestantism, lying through his capped teeth.
When Streckfuss' dad, the Mormon "Bishop," is first mentioned, we are told--
"...the old gentleman was reputed to enjoy dim and peculiar ties to the Barkdull clan. (This was not all that astonishing, as everyone was dimly and peculiarly tied through plural marriage.)"
We are in a waterless place, populated with religious fanatics whose lawless "family romances" intertwine and writhe in dark knots, like snakes with their tails in their mouths. The precise relationship of Streckfuss and Pynnie is unclear, and it's not unlikely that the "Bishop" did more than merely pay Death Lady to let the little creature gnaw on her withered dug.
It's no coincidence that my sophisticated literary Jewish friends at the University of Utah called this suburban desert region "Bum-Fuck Egypt," and refused to go anywhere near it.
Salt Lake City itself suppurates on the shores of a Dead Sea, just like Sodom and Gomorrah. Get in your car and drive more than an hour in almost any direction, and you are in the middle of a landscape indistinguishable from the wilderness where John the Baptist gagged down his locusts, and Christ got buttonholed by Satan.
Have you ever seen "Carnival of Souls," the cult flick made in the early sixties by Herk (I've forgotten his last name)? It's about a woman who drowns and goes to hell. Where did he choose to shoot it? On the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
As you can see, we are in deep waters here: prehistory, the Age of Isis, when people lived in the full awareness of Nature's cruel, chaotic might.
Poor Pynn and cousin, with their male crania full of quaint Purple Haze and Clear Light! They bravely try to scare the Mother (in-law) dead. They do the work of Abraham and his sons: drawing some order out of this cyclical flux, by fastening a linear penis of grammar and syntax onto it. They have to impose words and logic on this gargantuan mother's sheer appetite, by talking about her. Our narrator gets his windowpane bonus at the end, because he has listened to Pynnie's narrative of infantile trauma, like an analyst to his analysand.
Our boys have looked into the abyss, and faced down snake-haired Medusa, and not been turned to stone. They have gotten perilously close to being sucked into the ravenous anarchistic lubed-up snatch, the vagina dentata of that cannibalistic thing known as Mama and Auntie and Wifey and Wet Nurse. The very patio to which they cling is fastened like an uterine cyst to a big mother mountain that overshadows the Mormon "Zion." But with words they save each other. Toward the end our narrator makes an explicit declaration of love for his gay cuzzie. Pynnie finally stops crying, and smiles and speaks in a firm voice.
Location: 2500 E 3300 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84109
Contributor: Tom Bradley
Tom Bradley

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Precanceled 1969 Christmas stamp FDCs offer a challenge
USPS sends mass mailing of postcards with guidance for voting by mail
Sep 15, 2020, 2 PM
In early September the United States Postal Service sent a mass mailing of postcards that provide guidance on voting by mail. Both sides of the card are shown. The message side advises, "If you plan to vote by mail, plan ahead." The USPS has defended the
In early September, the United States Postal Service sent a mass mailing of postcards about voting by mail in the Nov. 3 elections. But before the cards began reaching their destinations, they came under fire from several state election officials who said the mailing ignores how voting works in their states.
"Appreciate the effort @USPS, but this could be confusing for California," said James Schwab, California chief deputy secretary of state, in a tweet.
He complained that the postcards stated that voters should request an absentee ballot "at least 15 days before Election Day."
Not so in California where ballots are automatically mailed to voters with return postage-paid envelopes, Schwab and other local officials noted.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold won a restraining order against the USPS after she sued the agency and accused it of mailing "false statements" to voters.
"We asked them to delay or just not send them in Colorado," Griswold told a TV station, "and they refused."
Colorado and California automatically send ballots to voters before elections.
Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer defended the mailing, which he said went to all 50 states and the District of Columbia at a cost of about $28 million.
"The intention of the mailer was to send a single set of recommendations that provided general guidance allowing voters who choose mail-in voting to do so successfully regardless of where they live and where they vote," he said.
"Our mailer was intended to be general all-purpose guidance on the use of the mail and not guidance on state rules," Partenheimer said.
The cards do contain the following warning: "Rules and dates vary by state, so contact your election board to confirm."
Partenheimer said the mailing was part of a "national omni-channel public information campaign in order to educate the American public about the Postal Service's role and to inform voters on what to expect if they choose to use the mail."
In addition to the postcard mailing, the campaign includes radio and TV spot announcements, signage in postal lobbies, and social media and online notices, Partenheimer said.
President Donald Trump repeatedly has attacked mail-in voting as leading to voting fraud. Partenheimer noted in his statement to Linn's that the mass mailing "neither encourages nor discourages mail-in voting."
In May the USPS became embroiled with the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the cost of mailing 128 million postcards warning about the coronavirus.
The USPS said that mailing cost the agency $28 million including postage and printing.
Sep 4, 2020, 3 PM
USPS inspector general voices ballot concerns
Trump criticizes two states for advancing vote-by-mail options
Apr 16, 2020, 8 AM
Unsent absentee mail ballots discovered in Milwaukee


Hey there Chris here, hope you guys have enjoyed the run on the podcast as much as I have, and its sad to be taking a step away form the podcast, but Dan is more than capable of taking this to the next level. I will still be involved doing some back stage stuff and keeping up with the Facebook page, and patreon. I will still be doing these observing our thoughts as well. But with all that being said I would like to thank you for your guys attention and I look forward to the next chapter in my life.
You guys have created some life time memories for me, and the podcast has being an incredible show, something I will be proud of for my entire life. It's hard for when you first do this, it requires alot of time and physical effort. We have traveled all over the UK in regards to finding some of the greatest guests possible, and will continue to do that for you.
I have described my exit the best I could on the podcast, and cant wait to listen and follow Dan on his remaining journey with the podcast. I hope you are ready for some fantastic guests that the podcast has to offer, but i'm glad i'm leaving you with this powerful episode, and one which will truly make you aware of your own path.


Based in Beaverton, Oregon, Digimarc enables businesses and governments worldwide to enrich everyday living with the means to identify all forms of content, including audio, video, packaging, and imagery. We develop solutions, license intellectual property, and provide development services to global business partners across a wide range of industries. Digimarc holds a large and growing intellectual property portfolio that spans the breadth and depth of innovation in digital watermarking and content identification, with over 800 issued US and foreign patents.


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대한민국이 이번 월드컵에서 몇승을 올릴 수 있을까요?
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Coco Chen is a Grade 12 student who has been studying at CISK for 5 years. She has received offers from world-class universities including the University of Hong Kong, University of Toronto and Western University.
Today CISK successfully hosted the third University Fair for senior students. Fourteen universities from Europe, North America and Australia came to the fair and their admission officers shared with all the students and parents about the courses, projects, strengths of the schools and admission requirements.
CISK 6th Summer Camp is Coming!!
The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme is a world renowned educational curriculum that is taught in over 4000 schools globally. The program was designed to prepare students for a successful future no matter the direction they choose. It aims to develop students who have a wide range of knowledge, students who flourish intellectually, emotionally, ethically and socially and who are capable of thinking critically and embracing the multi-faceted world around them.
The Diploma Programme is comprised of six subject groups and the DP core which consists of the Theory of Knowledge (TOK), Creativity, Action and Service (CAS) and the Extended Essay (EE). Through the DP core students reflect on the meaning of knowledge and how it is obtained and understood, undertake a community service project of their design, learn a new skill and complete a high level research essay on a topic of their choice to prepare them for university research and writing. Through their six subjects students will develop a wide breadth of knowledge while mastering the six essential approaches to learning that will ensure they are full prepared for their post-secondary educational plans.
What are the benefits of being associated with SJK, a private school in Ontario?
Our association with SJK means that CISK has benefitted from SJK's expertise in IB programming, resources and learning materials. Our affiliation with SJK allows our students an opportunity to study abroad at their campus in Ontario.
Does CISK accept students in the middle of the year?
CISK recognizes that families may move to Kunshan in the middle of the school year and is able to accommodate new students. We will make every effort to help late-entry students get adjusted to our school and the new surroundings, as quickly as possible.
Students attend school from 9.00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. from Monday to Friday. Students are expected to attend teacher supervised activities from 3:30 to 4:30 from Monday to Thursday.
How many students are in one class?
Our admission policies allow for an average of 20 students in each classroom. Nursery, Junior Kindergarten and Senior Kindergarten have two teachers in each classroom, one qualified native English speaking professional and one certified bilingual English assistant.
CISK recognizes and supports the privacy interests of all individuals, and we respect these interests when we collect and process personal information.
CISK gladly invites you to come speak with us, to tour our campus, to visit our spacious, vibrant classrooms as well as to speak with key people at our school. Appointments are recommended. Please feel free to stop by from Monday to Friday during our school hours 9:00am - 3:30pm to have a school tour.


The American Chemistry Council (ACC) offers expertise and resources for industry to comply with the EPA's Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) through its EDSP Consortia. Benefits include allowing companies to cost share and pool resources and providing technical expertise as well as day-to-day management of the compliance process. ACC can assist with technical issues, advocacy opportunities, policy issues, scheduling and the submission of interim and final reports.
EDSP Consortia activities can also include communicating with test order recipients and EPA, reviewing existing data, evaluating proposals, and selecting laboratories as well as execution and management of testing. ACC can assist with public communications, convey risk information and minimize unwarranted product de-selection.
EPA's EDSP consists of a tiered, hierarchical testing program. EDSP Tier 1 is comprised of a battery of assays focused on determining the potential of a substance to interact with components of the estrogen, androgen and thyroid hormone systems. EDSP Tier 2 consists of tests of reproduction and development in several different species to define dose response and adverse effects. At this time, EPA is only requiring Tier 1 screening. However, depending on results obtained, Tier 2 testing may be required later. EPA has yet to develop a decision framework for use in determining the profile of Tier 1 results that would trigger Tier 2 testing.
The genesis of the EPA EDSP was public concern that some substances may interfere with endocrine processes in humans and wildlife. In 1996, Congress directed the EPA, through the Food Quality Protection Act (Public Law 104-170), to develop the EDSP for evaluating the potential of substances to interact with the endocrine system to cause adverse health effects. When the law passed, EPA assessed the current state of the science and found that there were few, if any, scientifically valid screens and tests to use to study the potential endocrine activity of chemical substances. Therefore EPA initiated an extensive research and development program, composed of both basic and applied research, to develop, standardize and validate the necessary endocrine test methods.
Two HPV inerts (isophorone and acetone) agreed to conduct EDSP Tier 1 screening. The ACC Isophorone EDSP Consortium was formed in January 2010 to respond to the Tier 1 screening requirements. A two-year program was initiated to conduct the entire Tier I assays. Results are scheduled to be reported to EPA in January 2012.
For further information, please contact Bill Gulledge.


text:
Q: Writing permission on android filesystems I should generate a .pdf file inside the android data folder to use the Java code below, with the permissions enabled in the XML manifest file. But when I run the code I have the following exception. The application has different permissions within the manifest, It should all be configured correctly, I state that the application I'm testing on an old Android 4. How can I solve this? and what is it due to?
Exception: error: java. I. FileNotFoundException: /data/my.pdf:
open failed: EACCES (Permission denied)
Code:
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE " />

    public static Boolean GeneratePDF(String base64) {
        Boolean ret = true;

        try {
       String direttorio=""+Environment.getDataDirectory().getAbsolutePath();
        final File dwldsPath = new File(direttorio + "/" + "my.pdf");
        byte[] pdfAsBytes = Base64.decode(base64, 0);
        FileOutputStream os;
        os = new FileOutputStream(dwldsPath, false);
        os.write(pdfAsBytes);
        os.flush();
        os.close();
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        System.out.println("\n Errore Generazione File: "+ex);
        ret = false;
    }
    return ret;

    }

A: you have to give Write permission at run time.
It can be achieved something as following...
public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity implements ActivityCompat.OnRequestPermissionsResultCallback{

  private static final int REQUEST_WRITE_PERMISSION = 111;

  @Override
  public void onRequestPermissionsResult(int requestCode, String[] permissions, int[] grantResults) {
    if (requestCode == REQUEST_WRITE_PERMISSION && grantResults[0] == PackageManager.PERMISSION_GRANTED) {
        GeneratePDF("your String name");
    }
  }

  @Override
  protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
    requestPermission();
  }

  private void requestPermission() {
    if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.M) {
        requestPermissions(new String[]{android.Manifest.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE}, REQUEST_WRITE_PERMISSION);
    } else {
       GeneratePDF("your String name");
    }
  }
}

A: Replace this line
String direttorio=""+Environment.getDataDirectory().getAbsolutePath();

To:
String direttorio= Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getAbsolutePath();
final File dwldsPath = new File(direttorio + "/" + my.pdf");

A: if you're using Android 6.0 and above,
there could be 2 ways:
1 if you're making only for demo purpose you can manually give permission to app
    by going in settings->apps->permissions. Then allow all permission which are
    required.
2 you've to implement runtime permissions so that user can allow it runtime.


The 3*** star superior hotel ASTRON is located in the heart of the city, on the graphic harbour of Kos . It operates all year round and offers a friendly and warm family atmosphere, and at the best relation of price and quality. Located just opposite the Medieval Castle , it offers our guests an excellent and spectacular view which travels you back to another time.


I saw a hair salon around the corner from the Exordium Apartments where I live. The sign outside was modern and appeared to be English friendly so I had high hopes. I went in for a wash and a dry. The shop was staffed by mostly men. They seemed intimidated when I walked in. One man walked over to the counter and attempted to help me. When I told him what I wanted, he scurried off and went straight to another guy to try to get him to translate what I'd said. While he was away, I used Google Translate. When I showed him, a lightbulb went off… "Oh! Shampoo and dry!" Must remember that for next time.
The actual process was quite interesting. The curling iron was placed on the floor while it was being heated up. I just laughed it off, but I won't go back. There are 10's of hair shops in the few blocks surrounding the apartment.
I found a great little place to get my nails done near our apartment in Ulsan. The owner is so sweet. She even speaks English, which was a surprise because the sign was only in Korean. The shop is on the second floor so if I couldn't read Korean, I never would have found such a wonderful nail shop. And did I mention she charts about $6.50?
There was a typhoon blowing through Korea on Tuesday so I had plenty of time to get some cooking done. It's been nice to have the time and to have a kitchen big enough to really cook. I've been making a lot of very tasty and healthy meals. We have also been doing a lot of juicing. We found kale in the store here and now I have become obsessed with juicing it. We also both tried quinoa for the first time and it's so yummy and very good for you!
Dave brought this home on Monday. They were just given them at work. Talk about perfect timing!


This week over at Heart2Heart Challenges, the challenge is to make anything but a card. It would be easy enought to make a page, but I thought I'd put together an accordion album for future gift giving.
I had two 4" square acrylic pieces, and I rounded the corners with my corner chomper. The book is easy enough to make. If you have 4" covers like I did, cut 2 strips that measure 3-3/4" x 12". Cut 3/4" off the strips making them 3-3/4" x 11- 1/4". Score both strips at 3-3/4" and 7-1/2" Mountain fold both strips and overlap and adhere the end of one strip to the beginning of the next. Then adhere them to your cover. Easy peasy!
I made this flower by using my Slice Basics 1 card. I cut (5) 2" flowers, (1) 1-1/2 inch flower and 2 leaves. From there I laid them out and lightly misted them with water. I crinkled them into little balls and set them aside. When dry, I inked the edges of the flower with matching ink (Crystal Blue, Sweet Leaf, and Sorbet), and put them together with a brad. Very easy and very pretty!
I am tired, girlies! I have had an extremely busy week, and my week isn't over yet. Lots to do and just not enough time in a day. I'm sure you can all relate to this at one point or another! I went scrapping today with a friend (and had a blast!), but I didn't feel like I had any mojo, so I guess I'll put my things away and try again this weekend. I have Sunday off, so I am looking forward to crafting some more then.
Have you entered my challenge yet over at Sketches4All? Head on over there and see if you can create a page with my sketch. I'd love to see you enter for the chance to win!!
I hope everyone has had a great week so far, and that you are looking forward to a fabulous weekend!
Gorgeous, gorgeous and GORGEOUS! Love that big flower!
Wonderful papers, and such a nice gift idea. Great job sweetie!
LOVE IT, Brenda!!! Thanks for playing along!
This is so pretty, love that flower!
So gorgeous. Altered items are just so pleasant to see once complete.
Love the colors & that yummy flower!
LOOOOVE it! what a gorgeous little album! thanks for playing along with H2H!
Oh, Brenda...it's getting to where I truly enjoy seeing your name on Mr. Linky 'cause I know you'll have something AWESOME to share...this week is no different! I LOVE IT!!!! Thanks for playing along each week...we love your artwork!
Brenda this is gorgeous!!! Look at that flower!!!!! Your work is amazing! When you get the chance please stop by my blog I have something for you!!! Have a wonderful day!! Hugs!!!


Hmm, increases my speed but I have to stay near it?
Currently very good trinket for SV Hunters. Heroic version is better than most trinkets from Mythic in many instances, notable exceptions being Dead-Eye Spyglass and Lustrous Golden Plumage. Used correctly the haste boost is big gain in DPS.
I have to admit that I find this trinket highly situational. On certain bosses, such as Viq'Goth, Unbound Abomination, Azerokk, Rixxa Fluxflame, tailoring use of it around the different "move, dude!" abilities seriously crimps this.
So I spent a long time puzzled as to why they would design a rune on the ground to give a movement speed buff, since if you're trying to get to/out of something fast, you'll only benefit from it for about 0.3 sec until you run out of the rune.
Then it finally clicked when I happened to use it during MOTHER's Wind Tunnel in Heroic Uldir. The strong wind push mechanic is faster than your regular run speed, but if you're standing in Galecaller's Boon, it's much easier to fight against the wind, which allows you to stay within melee range of the boss during an otherwise tricky dance.
Furthermore, the higher ilvl your trinket is, the more Speed it grants you, which is great since Heroic and Mythic MOTHER's Wind Tunnel pushes faster. My 385 grants 1,321 Speed, which equates to a 20% movement speed increase, and allows me to run in place on Heroic.
Come to think of it, I doubt that it's a coincidence that the name of the trinket basically means "helpful to the wind caller".
By default, one of the best in slot trinkets for agi dps. Haste gives ~30-40% bonus on use for its duration (40% for feral druids).
Movement speed is just a perk.
Drops from Brother Ironhull within Shrine of the Storm, and is available to Agility classes only.
Galecaller's Boon has a 1 minute cooldown that grants additional Haste and Speed when you remain within the 10 yard diameter circle. This circle lasts for 10 seconds.


text:
Cengage Learning announces appointment of new CEO
Cengage Learning, a leading global provider of teaching, learning and research solutions, today announces the appointment of Michael Hansen to the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Mr. Hansen will succeed Ron Dunn, who has served as CEO since July 2007. Effective upon the commencement of Mr. Hansen's employment on September 17, 2012, Mr. Dunn will take up the position of Executive Chairman for at least the next three years.
Since 2008, Mr. Hansen has served as CEO of Elsevier Health Sciences, a unit of Reed Elsevier. From 2006-2008, he was President and CEO of Harcourt Assessment, the education arm of Reed Elsevier, where he led a successful turnaround and sale of the business. Before Reed Elsevier, Mr. Hansen was Executive Vice President, Operational Excellence at Bertelsmann, where he led a group-wide performance improvement initiative. He began his career with Boston Consulting Group where he was a partner and co-chairman of their e-Business and Media practice.
Ron Dunn commented: "We are delighted that Michael Hansen has agreed to take on the role of CEO at Cengage Learning. He is a seasoned executive with significant experience in guiding digital transitions in publishing businesses, and we feel he is highly qualified to lead the company through the next stages of its growth strategy."
Christian Stahl, a partner at Apax Partners and member of the Cengage Learning board of directors added: "Michael will make a great addition to Cengage. In particular, we believe that he and Ron represent an unrivaled leadership team that will enable the company to drive continued strong operational performance by delivering innovative learning solutions to our customers."


Erasmus Mundus MSc "MathMods" and Joint MSc "InterMaths"
What is a MathMods experience like?
A video made by our alumnus Petar Sapun, around two years ago, when a group of ex-MathMods students returned to L'Aquila for the MaMoW14 workshop. This is what they have to say about how they met, what they learned and what they took from that experience.
MathMods & InterMaths Alumni Association, a non-profit organization involving former as well as current students on the Erasmus Mundus Joint MSc MathMods & the Joint MSc InterMaths.


Farengar Secret-Fire, a Nord elemental mage, is the court wizard of Jarl Balgruuf the Greater. He advises the Jarl when Whiterun is facing a magic-based threat. He is also doing research into dragons and will ask you to retrieve a dragon tablet, found in Bleak Falls Barrow. As a court mage, he is one of the few people outside of the College of Winterhold who will sell you spells. Farengar can possibly be killed during The Whispering Door quest.
Expecting that your business involves the current war, he will greet you with, "Come to Dragonsreach to discuss the ongoing hostilities, like the rest of the 'great warriors'?" He will then elaborate on the subject: "It seems this damnable conflict has claimed everyone's passions of late. Me, I prefer my books, and my spells." He will then discuss his passion for the magical arts: "There's a tranquility in magic, don't you think? It is simply energy, to be harnessed by those with the will and knowledge to do so." If you go near him before you have completed the Bleak Falls Barrow quest he will somewhat rudely comment by either saying "I thought you were already on your way to Bleak Falls Barrow, the Jarl is not a patient man and neither am I." Or when exiting the conversation he will say: "Away with you!"
He may also give a tutorial for enchanting items at the arcane enchanter in Dragonsreach.
If you do not immediately release Odahviing after capturing him in Dragonsreach, Farengar will make an appearance to introduce himself to the dragon and attempt to perform "tests" on him, but will flee when the trapped dragon demonstrates his fire breath out of frustration.
Farengar wears blue mage robes and a pair of boots. He is equipped with an iron dagger and carries a selection of common loot and gold. During the quest The Whispering Door, he also carries a copy of the key to said door. He knows the Destruction spell Firebolt.
Enchanting Tutorial: Use an Arcane Enchanter.
"This is a priority now."
After thanking you for coming to him with your concerns about Riverwood's safety, Jarl Balgruuf will introduce you to Farengar: "Come, let's go find Farengar, my court wizard. He's been looking into a matter related to these dragons and... rumors of dragons."
As you are walking over to see Farengar, he'll say, "I'll introduce you to Farengar. He can be a bit... difficult. Mages. You know." or "Farengar is probably puttering around in his lab. Day and night. I'm not sure he ever sleeps." When he gets to Farengar's lab, he'll say, "Farengar, I think I've found someone who can help you with your dragon project. Go ahead and fill him/her in with all the details." If you've previously spoken with Farengar, he'll say, "Farengar, I see you've already met my new friend here. I'm sure you two will get along famously."
Balgruuf: "This is a priority now. Anything we can use to fight this dragon, or dragons. We need it, quickly. Before it's too late."
Farengar: "Of course, Jarl Balgruuf. You seem to have found me an able assistant. I'm sure he/she will prove most useful."
Balgruuf: (to you)"Succeed at this, and you'll be rewarded. Whiterun will be in your debt."
"Hmm. I think you're overheating that essence of spriggan sap..." Alchemy >= 25 "What? I'm not even... ah, I see. You have some knowledge of the alchemical art."
"Isn't it dangerous to leave filled soul gems near an unwarded pentacle?" Enchanting >= 25 "Where? I would never... ah, I see. You are a fellow enchanter."
"Look out - you're about to step in your own Shock Rune." Any magic school >= 25 "What? I never even cast... ah, I see. You have some knowledge of the Higher Art."
"Never mind. I'll wait for Jarl Balgruuf." "The Jarl can be found in the Great Hall, probably sitting on his Jarl's throne. Not over here in a wizard's laboratory."
"All right. Where am I going and what am I fetching?" "Straight to the point, eh? No need for tedious hows and whys. I like that. Leave those details to your betters, am I right?"
"What does this have to do with dragons?" "Ah, no mere brute mercenary, but a thinker - perhaps even a scholar? You see, when the stories of dragons began to circulate, many dismissed them as mere fantasies, rumors. Impossibilities. One sure mark of a fool is to dismiss anything that falls outside his experience as being impossible. But I began to search for information about dragons - where had they gone all those years ago? And where were they coming from?"
"Just tell me what you need me to do." "You are eager to begin your adventure. Excellent. The sooner begun, the sooner done, eh?"
Regardless of your choice, your next question will be to ask what he needs you to do. He will tell you, "I, ah, learned of a certain stone tablet said to be housed in Bleak Falls Barrow - a 'Dragonstone,' said to contain a map of dragon burial sites. Go to Bleak Falls Barrow, find this tablet - no doubt interred in the main chamber - and bring it to me. Simplicity itself." If you already have the Dragonstone in your possession, you can hand it over to him. Farengar will be pleased by your preparation "Ah! The Dragonstone of Bleak Falls Barrow! You already found it! You are cut from a different cloth than the usual brutes the Jarl foists on me." If you don't have it with you, Farengar will now offer you his normal dialogue options.
This is the merchandise found in Farengar's merchant chest. These items are only available if purchased from the merchant; they cannot be pickpocketed or stolen. They are restocked every two days.
If you advance The Whispering Door far enough to be able to kill Farengar, and he is killed at some point before The Fallen, the other people involved in the interrogation sequence will react as if he were still alive (talking to him, etc.) despite the fact that he is dead.
Sometimes when using Farengar's arcane enchanter while he is sleeping in his bed in the next room, he may still comment on your enchanting progress as if he was awake. ?
This page was last modified on 23 February 2017, at 17:13.


text:
Q: is cast a pointer points-to-class to it's first member illegal? I see some strange code in our project like follows.I test it and get the right answer.But I think it is illegal,Can anyone explain this to me?
class Member
{
public:
    Member():
        a(0),b(1)
    {}

    int a;
    int b;
};

// contains `Member` as its first member
class Container
{
public:
    Container():
        c(0),d(0)
    {}

    Member getMemb(){return fooObject;}

    Member fooObject;
    int c;
    int d;
};

and how we use it:
int main()
{
    auto ctain = new Container;
    auto meb = (Member *)ctain; // here! I think this is illegal

    cout << "a is " <<  meb->a << ", b is" << meb->b << endl;

    return 0;
}

but I get the right answer, a is 0 and b is 1.Is this just a coincidence?I also noted that if fooObject is not the first member, I will get a wrong answser.

A: The snippet is legal. The C style cast (Member*) here is effectively a reinterpret_cast. From [basic.compound]

Two objects a and b are pointer-interconvertible if:

*

*they are the same object, or

*one is a union object and the other is a non-static data member of that object, or

*one is a standard-layout class object and the other is the first non-static data member of that object, or, if the object has no non-static data members, the first base class subobject of that object, or [...]
If two objects are pointer-interconvertible, then they have the same address, and it is possible to obtain a pointer to one from a pointer to the other via a reinterpret_cast.

Special care should be taken to make sure it is indeed a standard layout type, possibly with a static_assert(std::is_standard_layout_v<Container>)
On the other hand, you could sidestep this entire fiasco if you just wrote auto meb = &ctain.fooObject;

A: It's not exactly coincidence, it happens that your fooObject is the first member of your Container class, so the beginning of it will rest at the same starting address as the Container object. If you do:
size_t s = offsetof(Container, Container::fooObject);

It will tell that your fooObject offset will be 0, which start where your Container object start in terms of memory, so when you cast to a Member pointer it's pointing to the correct address. But for instance in other cases you would be in big trouble for sure:
class Container
{
public:
    Container() : c(0),d(0) {}

    Member getMemb(){return fooObject;}

    int c; // fooObject isn't first member
    Member fooObject;
    int d;
};

Or was a virtual class, because virtual classes store an pointer for lookup into a table.
class Container
    {
    public:
        Container() : c(0),d(0) {}
        virtual ~Container() {} // Container is virtual, and has a vtable pointer
                                // Meaning fooObject's offset into this class
                                // most likely isn't 0
        Member getMemb(){return fooObject;}

        Member fooObject;
        int c;
        int d;
    };

Someone else will have to tell you whether this cast is legal even in your example, because I'm not sure.

A: C++ Standard in part 12.2 Class members:

If a standard-layout class object has any non-static data members, its address is the same as the address of its first non-static data member. Otherwise, its address is the same as the address of its first base class subobject (if any).

Both your classes have standard-layout. So, observed behaviour agrees with Standard.
But the cast auto meb = (Member *)ctain; breaks strict aliasing rule.


Instead, I hugged two sisters-in-law, glad to see them. We ate a nice dinner together at the old dining table with the oak captain's chairs. I was relieved for a little sense of what used to be. Even though everything around the table had changed, it still remained the center of laughter and chatter.
The sisters got out a box of family photos and told me to go through and take what belonged to my family. My husband's high school portraits. What a gas. He had such a skinny face. The kids as toddlers. So sweet.
And then the sisters told me to look through the garage at what was left to see if I wanted anything before it was all taken away by a charity. I did not like that idea. I couldn't imagine wanting a single item. Canning jars, maybe? We had moved to a smaller house a few years earlier, chucking giant piles of belongings. I had no interest in collecting more things. I didn't need any mementos. I already had enough memories, and I was fine keeping it that way.
There was something else, too. I dreaded seeing the folks' belongings all lumped together and cast off.
I reluctantly headed for the garage, feeling more a sense of duty and obligation, a necessary thing to get over with. Then I could go back empty-handed, content that I had looked, satisfied my curiosity, and said goodbye.
The door to the garage banged close behind me, startling me, and setting off a pounding echo from the concrete floor that faded to an oversized silence, sealing me into an unsettling aloneness. I stood there for a long moment, waiting for the loudness to dissolve and my eyes to adjust to the dim gray.
The garage was strangely empty. The little white car was gone. The sturdy wall shelves that had been full of wrapping paper and garden pots were bare. A few tables and shelves in the middle of the garage were spread with odds and ends, the rejects of the rejects, the leftovers of two lifetimes, all the things that had been picked over and passed on by the rest of the family and a stream of strangers. Round price stickers randomly flecking the piles formed a misshapen dot-to-dot puzzle.
As I stood back a little, my eyes apprehensively wandered over the assortment. It was smaller than I had expected, though I'm not sure what I had expected. I just knew it wasn't this. My heart, already heavy, sank even more. My brain was decisively against wanting to find anything interesting. It seemed unwholesome to take something.
I slowly walked over to a table and lazily fingered through a box with a few jewelry pieces in it. I didn't need to move them around to see them, but I had to touch them, lift them up, look them over one last time. I glanced around. A box of brads, some candles, a casserole dish, neatly folded linens. As I had expected, a little relieved, nothing of interest.
Then I looked at the linens again. And I started searching. Quickly. There was one item. One item I would want more than anything. One item I would gladly collect, even though I already had more of them than I needed and the drawer was overfull. One item I had always loved. Could it still possibly be here? Surely, someone had already put dibs on it. Surely, it had been long gone.
And then my eyes fell on it. The familiar gold and brown. My heart leaped. I couldn't believe it was still there. No one had wanted it? No one?
It was a plaid tablecloth with pumpkins and leaves. I picked it up and looked it all over. It was in great condition. No rips, no stains, no pulls, no frayed edges. The nubby fabric was worn to a comfortable softness, all the starch gone so that it was immune to wrinkles. Really, no one had wanted it?
This tablecloth had been spread on the folks' dining table every time we had visited for the past handful of years. Even though it screamed November, it was on their table at New Year's and in the middle of the summer, which made me secretly smile.
I had always admired it. At first it was just a nice tablecloth. Then on subsequent visits it was oh, this tablecloth again. The one I like. So pretty. Then, gradually, I began to look for it every visit, comforted and charmed and never disappointed, even when it was covered in crumbs.
No matter the time of year, in this tablecloth I could see the folks with their heads together doing a crossword puzzle. I could see them patiently playing Kings in the Corner with the kids, whose hands were just growing into the playing cards. I could see corn chowder and fat fava beans.
Mr. Scatter's dad passed away July 9, five days shy of his 95th birthday. On Thanksgiving, when Mr. Scatter talked to his mom on the phone, she was certain she had eaten ham for dinner.
I've been happy to pull out this tablecloth for the past two falls, especially at Thanksgiving, when we cover it with goofy-looking gourds and enough mashed potatoes to fill a large teenager. Sometimes I bring it out other times of the year, too, just for fun. A large game of Clue covers it well. The boys do their math homework on it and eat quick breads. I'm happiest when it's covered in crumbs.
Even though Thanksgiving has passed, the tablecloth has already gone into the laundry basket, and it's time for Christmas colors, I might have to continue putting it in the rotation for a while.
Just the right size, it fits our dining table perfectly, this tablecloth that no one else wanted.
PHOTO: It's just a tablecloth to some people, but to us it makes Thanksgiving special.
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Q: Cannot add new row in DataGrid through Binding I've a DataGrid like this:
<DataGrid x:Name="TotalMatch" ItemsSource="{Binding MatchStat}">
<DataGrid.Columns>
     <DataGridTextColumn Header="In corso" Binding="{Binding Path = PlayingMatch}"/>
</DataGrid.Columns>
</DataGrid>

what I what to do is create a count of items so the result should be:
| In corso |
     5

I set the Binding to PlayingMatch, for this in the ViewModel class I defined this:
public Models.MatchStat MatchStat = new Models.MatchStat();

so in the Model I've this definition:
public class MatchStat : ViewModel
{
    private static int _playingMatch    = 0;
    public int PlayingMatch
    {
        get { return _playingMatch; }
        set { SetField(ref _playingMatch, value); }
    }
}

when I add a new value as count I did this:
var vm = new ViewModel();
vm.MatchStat.PlayingMatch += 1;

but no row is displayed under "in corso" cell, why?

A: The DataGrid.Itemssource must be assigned with an IEnumerable (collection, array or list) object.
Use ObservableCollection which implements IEnumerable, and also keeps your Window updated if it changes in code-behind (item added or removed from the collection).
Your declaration in the ViewModel class should be like:
public ObservableCollection<Models.MatchStat> MatchStats = new ObservableCollection<Models.MatchStat>();

Now, you need to create a MatchStat object and add it to the collection you initialize before.
Models.MatchStat matchStat1 = new Models.MatchStat();
matchStat1.PlayingMatch += 1;

MatchStats.Add(matchStat1);

A: *

*Your ItemsSource should be a collection of MatchStat.

*Have you assigned vm as the Window's DataContext?


text:
Verta, Inc. Announces the Formation of its Midwest-based High-performance Architectural Metal Coating and Finishing Business
Jul 15, 2018 | Business
Verta, Inc. is excited to announce its official launch as a high-performance architectural metal coating finisher serving the Midwest and beyond.
DELANO, MN, July 15, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ — Verta, Inc. is excited to announce its official launch as a high-performance architectural metal coating finisher serving the Midwest and beyond. The company, established in 1985 under another name, has been the exclusive finisher for its sister company, Industrial Louvers, Inc.
Verta is a certified applicator for Valspar and PPG aluminum extrusion formulations. Verta's standard finish is Valspar's Fluropon® Pure line of coatings. Formulated without the use of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), hexavalent chromium, cadmium, lead, phthalates and other hazardous materials, these coatings were created with material transparency and environmental impact in mind.
"We are really excited about the interest and opportunities we have received from the market," says Brett Reinhardt, LEED GA, director of operations at Verta, Inc. "Our process is unique and offers significant advantages, including high-quality appearance, durability and sustainability."
Verta is the first company of its kind to completely eliminate all types of chromium from its processes without sacrificing quality. After extensive testing, Verta's chrome-free pretreatment process has proven as effective as hexavalent chromium and more effective than trivalent chromium. All coatings carry a standard 20-year warranty.
Verta illustrates its commitment to sustainability throughout all of its operations. Its state-of-the art facility and new paint line feature high-efficiency ovens that use a fraction of the energy of traditional ovens. The wash system will use rainwater captured from the building's roof for the wash process, reducing the amount of water used and processing required to pretreat water for the system. Water is filtered and recycled multiple times through the five-stage wash process, minimizing the amount of fresh rainwater required to fill the system. The company's new facility was designed and built to be ready for photovoltaic panels in the future. All of these innovations contributed to sister company ILI's achievement of the International Living Future Institute's Living Product Challenge Petal Certification.
Sustainable practices are only one component of Verta's continuous improvement and quality efforts. With more than 30-years' experience in packaging complex, custom architectural metal products for ILI, Verta is uniquely positioned to handle large and complex finishing projects. Extrusions and sheets up to 2 feet wide by 6 feet high by 20 feet long can be processed with a standard setup. Larger sizes are also possible with special setup.
Visit the website www.vertafinishing.com or call +1 763-972-7030 for a quote or additional information.
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This residential area was originally a farming community, settled in the early 1800s by families such as the Cawthras, Shaws, Lynds, Cavens and Ogdens. The Ontario Rifle Association opened a rifle range in Lakeview and after the First World War more and more people settled there as land was less expensive. During the Second World War the Small Arms Company opened a factory there, which was used after the war by various other industries.


text:
Home / Essays / 2015 / June / Load shedding keeps economic transactions low – May BETI
Load shedding keeps economic transactions low – May BETI
The BankservAfrica Economic Transaction Index (BETI) shows a depressed economy but the year-on-year number is still positive, growing by 1.6% in May.
The impact of disruptive electricity supplies and slower world economic growth is evident in the numbers, which show the sharpest decline on a quarterly basis since October 2014, and the biggest monthly drop since August 2014.
With electricity interruptions an almost daily occurrence in April and May this year, the number of electronic transactions declined (taking into consideration seasonal adjustments and smoothing).
"At present the actual monthly decline of 1% is worrisome as it is rather sharp and sudden. One can only hope that most of the load shedding is now something of the past, or at the very least that the frequency is not going to be repeated, as it is clear that load shedding has a dire impact on economic transactions," says Dr Caroline Belrose, Head of Fraud and Data Analytics at BankservAfrica.
The 5.9% decline in transaction volumes is the biggest in more than a decade, and the first time that – for two months in a row –the actual number of transactions declined while the average values increased to greater than inflation. This is probably indicative of businesses combining transactions and ensuring that these are completed during periods of stable electricity supply.
"The quarter-on-quarter decline of 0.6% is less severe than the monthly decline, however the strong April numbers serve to highlight how weak the South African economy was in March and May this year," explains Belrose.
"With consumer inflation likely to move higher, large increases in the BETI will be unlikely – but it does seem that load shedding is playing a much bigger role at present. If load shedding can be kept to a minimum it is likely that the BETI will at least continue to rise marginally," says Mike Schüssler, Chief Economist at Economists dotcoza.
Another interesting aspect from this month's BETI is that it appears that many consumers are no longer signing debit orders, as the household debt-to-income ratio continues to decline.
"With both consumer and business confidence down, the decline in economic transactions, as represented by the BETI, indicates the economy is under duress rather than expanding. Perhaps winter has also arrived for the economy," concludes Schüssler.
Contact Wendy Fourie for more information: wendyf@bankservafrica.com or (011) 497 4119
Notes to the Editor:
The BETI stands for the BankservAfrica Economic Transaction Index. BankservAfrica is a payment enabling organisation operating between the various South African banks with a very secure messaging environment in place. Economists dotcoza is an economic consultancy that helped develop the BETI.
The BETI is a very fast and broad overview of current economic trends over a broad range of sectors, making use of economic transactions as captured by BankservAfrica. Like the Swift Index, the BETI is considered a "now-cast" number as a result of its speedy ability to convey the overall economic conditions to the market. Where most economic indicators can take anything between 38 and 76 days to become public knowledge, now-cast indicators take less than a month after the facts were revealed to come to the market.
The BETI is also the broadest of the "now-cast" indicators to come to the market, as it covers economic transactions across the whole economy. Very big distortive economic transactions do not form part of the BETI. This is also on its own a trend-strengthening indicative factor.
BankservAfrica is a payment enabling organisation which sits between the various South African banks. The organisation has a very secure messaging environment in place.
Economists dotcoza is an economic consultancy that helped develop the BETI.
BETI Report:
BDSI June 2015 - Disposable salaries squee… BDSI May 2015 - Disposable incomes continu…
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