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Minor earthquake 3.12 mag, 6 km SSW of Guánica, Puerto Rico
Posted by admin on July 4, 2020 0 Comments
A minor earthquake magnitude 3.12 (ml/mb) strikes 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Guánica in Puerto Rico on Saturday. Exact location of event, longitude -66.9396 West, latitude 17.9256 North, depth = 14 km. Date and time of earthquake in UTC/GMT: 04/07/20 / 2020-07-04 04:07:29 / July 4, 2020 @ 4:07 am. The epicenter was at a depth of 14 km (9 miles). The 3.12-magnitude earthquake has occurred at 04:07:29 / 4:07 am (local time epicenter). Event ids that are associated to the earthquake: us7000ahr1, pr2020186002. Id of event: pr2020186002.
Nearest city/cities or towns, with min 5000 pop, to epicentrum/hypocenter was Corozal, Aibonito, Manatí. The epicenter was 36 km (22 miles) from Ponce (c. 152 600 pop), 37 km (23 miles) from Mayagüez (c. 78 600 pop), 65 km (41 miles) from Arecibo (c. 49 300 pop), 72 km (45 miles) from Barceloneta (c. 22 300 pop), 15 km (10 miles) from Yauco (c. 20 300 pop). Nearby country/countries that might be effected, Puerto Rico (c. 3 917 000 pop).
Earthquakes 2.5 to 3.2 are often felt, but only causes minor damage. There are an estimated 130,000 minor earthquakes in the world each year. In the past 24 hours, there have been twenty-eight, in the last 10 days one hundred and eighteen, in the past 30 days two hundred and nineteen and in the last 365 days two thousand, three hundred and sixty-one earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater that was reported nearby.
What was your situation during the earthquake? Leave a comment or report about damage, shaking and activity at your home, city and country. This data comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service. Read more about the earthquake, Seismometer information, Distances, Parameters, Date-Time, Location and details about this quake, that has occurred near: 6 km SSW of Guánica, Puerto Rico.
AibonitoAreciboBarcelonetaCorozalGuanicaManatíMayaguezPoncePuerto RicoYauco
3.12 mb The magnitude for the event.
-66.9396° West Decimal degrees longitude. Negative values for western longitudes.
6 km SSW of Guánica, Puerto Rico Textual description of named geographic region near to the event. This may be a city name, or a Flinn-Engdahl Region name.
1 The total number of felt reports
2 The maximum reported intensity for the event.
pr The ID of a data contributor. Identifies the network considered to be the preferred source of information for this event.
,us,pr, A comma-separated list of network contributors.
23 The total number of Number of seismic stations which reported P- and S-arrival times for this earthquake.
0.0781 Horizontal distance from the epicenter to the nearest station (in degrees).
md The method or algorithm used to calculate the preferred magnitude for the event.
pr2020186002 Id of event.
2020186002 An identifying code assigned by, and unique from, the corresponding source for the event.
,us7000ahr1,pr2020186002, A comma-separated list of event ids that are associated to an event.


Luke Heaton has nearly 15 years of experience in civil engineering and project management for clients in mining, government and municipalities, military, power, airports, and education. He provides conceptual planning, design, cost estimating, plan preparation, construction specifications, bidding services, and construction observation services. Luke lends his expertise to a variety of projects including railroad tracks and yards, tailings basins, earthen dams and dikes, outlet channels, stormwater management, roads, site design, parking lots, erosion control, and sewage treatment systems.


The felony conflict of interest case against former South San Luis Obispo County Sanitation District administrator John Wallace is moving to Santa Maria following the appointment of a controversial attorney to the SLO County bench.
Wallace is facing four felony and four misdemeanor conflict of interest charges for allegedly funneling money from the sanitation district to his private engineering company. Previously a sanitation district board member, new San Luis Obispo Judge Matt Guerrero may be called as a witness in Wallace's case and could also face criticism for enabling the alleged criminal activity.
While a board member for the sanitation district, Guerrero voted in support of many of Wallace's questionable actions and verbally condemned several people who asked the district attorney to investigate him. As a defense in the criminal case, Wallace's attorney may argue that sanitation district board members knew Wallace had a criminal conflict of interest, but continued to allow Wallace to funnel government contracts to his private firm, The Wallace Group.
For years, the sanitation district board was bitterly divided between those who wanted Wallace investigated and those who supported his administration. In addition to receiving backing from Guerrero, Wallace received support from former Arroyo Grande Mayor Tony Ferrara and Grover Beach Mayor John Shoals, who each served as sanitation district board members.
But in 2105, following pushes made by Grover Beach Mayor Debbie Peterson and Arroyo Grande Mayor Jim Hill, the sanitation district board hired Carl Knudson, of Knudson & Associates, who conducted an investigation into Wallace and then asked the board to send his report to criminal investigators. Then, following a 10-month investigation of its own, the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney's Office filed charges against Wallace.
On Tuesday, just weeks following Guerrero's appointment to a judgeship, the entire SLO County bench ordered that Wallace's case be moved to the Santa Maria branch of Santa Barbara Superior Court. The order did not contain any individual judge's signature, nor did it make any mention of Guerrero's involvement in the case.
Neither the prosecution, nor the defense, contested the ordered change in venue.
Now, Santa Barbara County Judge James Voysey is expected to preside over Wallace's conflict of interest case. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Jan. 22 at the Santa Maria courthouse.


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Tag Archives: prose
Cut Deadwood: Eliminating The Innocuous "It Was"
Back in elementary school, I had various teachers who assigned "essays" by giving a required topic and length. Later in college, I had professors who made similar assignments. Not surprisingly, a number of students in both instances looked for ways to pad their work in order to meet the length requirement.
Their goal, of course, was not to entertain the teacher or professor. They simply wanted to complete the assignment.
Most writers who aspire to sell their work aren't length conscious, but I suspect few of us learned ways to keep our writing lean and focused.
Eliminating the innocuous "it was" falls under the category of tightening prose and is particularly important in controlling the pace of a piece of writing.
"It was" is not grammatically incorrect (and thus the "innocuous" label)—it's just not needed in most instances. In all fairness, neither is he was, she was, or they were. These subject/verb combinations almost always follow a sentence that introduces the it or the he, the she, or the they. In essence, then, the pronoun/be verb combinations are redundant.
Examples may clarify the point:
* He pulled out a knife. It was an old World War II relic he'd inherited from his grandfather.
* Jill passed a distinguished gentlemen heading for the front desk. He was taller than her father and as broad-shouldered as Uncle Jack.
* As their mother looked on, the Dorsey twins walked up to the front door and knocked. They were each carrying a birthday present for their classmate.
* Kelvin introduced himself to Mrs. Watson, his son's third grade teacher. She was busy sorting papers at her desk and continued to work as they talked.
In most instances, a sentence beginning with a pronoun and a verb of being is describing or renaming the noun introduced in the previous sentence. So in the examples above, it renames knife, he renames gentleman, they renames twins, and she renames Mrs. Watson. Because of this close connection, however, the extra wordage is not needed.
In many cases, the sentence introduced by the pronoun/verb of being can be incorporated with the previous sentence. The simplest method is to replace the subject/verb with a comma:
* He pulled out a knife, an old World War II relic he'd inherited from his grandfather.
Sometimes the descriptive material can be incorporated in the previous sentence as parenthetical material:
* Jill passed a distinguished gentlemen—taller than her father and as broad-shouldered as Uncle Jack—heading for the front desk.
* As their mother looked on, the Dorsey twins, each carrying a birthday present for their classmate, walked up to the front door and knocked.
Sometimes the material can be restructured in a more succinct way in an independent clause.
* Kelvin introduced himself to Mrs. Watson, his son's third grade teacher, who busily sorted papers at her desk while they talked.
Whichever method an author chooses or the context demands, eliminating the innocuous pronoun/verb of being combination trims deadwood from prose and contributes to a more lively pace.
One caution. The goal of good writing is not to create the fastest pace possible. At the same time, unnecessary words should not pad our prose.
Filed under Prose, Sentence structure
Tagged as cut deadwood, pading prose, prose, write tight
Cadence is the variation in a person's tone, the rhythm created by the rise and fall of his voice. Poetry relies on cadence to create rhythm patters, but novelists can employ the device as well.
Poets, of course, are meticulous about their word choices so that each not only carries the meaning they desire, but also the proper order of accented and unaccented syllables.
Novelists, not concerned with a regular rhythmic pattern, create cadence in several different ways. First is through the length of sentences.
Long, luxurious sentences and paragraphs slow the tempo of a passage. Conversely, short sentences quicken the pace and frequently produce a tense, staccato effect.
The best passages employ both strategies to effect a paragraph with rhythm and balance. ("How To Tell," Michael Orlofsky, Writer's Digest, October 2002)
A second rhythmic device involves conjunctions—either their addition or their omission. The first, called polysyndeton, repeats a conjunction between each of the words or phrases in a series. The latter, asyndeton, omits the conjunction, even before the final element. Here are example of each:
Polysyndeton: An avalanche of rock and dirt cascaded beside him and over him and under him.
Asyndeton: His brother picked up another plate, piled it with a variety of stuffed pastries, a handful of baby carrots, a couple cauliflower clumps.
A third way to create cadence in prose is to purposefully use repetition. For instance, a proposition can be used over and over or a key word in one sentence can be repeated in the opening of the next sentence.
The first use creates a staccato rhythm which can be enhanced if short phrases are written as sentences.
Repetition of a preposition in a sentence: Away from Laguna Beach, from Eddie, from the tatters of his career.
Repetition of a preposition in consecutive sentences: Away from Laguna Beach. From Eddie. From the tatters of his career.
Repetition of a key word from one sentence at the beginning of another: "But my sister, Ainsley, puts her key in the lock five mornings a week. She straightens the over-sized posters that shift every time a train goes by on the tracks across the road from the strip mall that houses the headquarters. Posters of a beautiful little girl with strawberries on her sundress and a makeshift wreath of flowers in her hair." (From The Color Of Sorrow Isn't Blue by Sharon Souza).
Parallel construction is another method to create rhythm. The parallelism can be within a sentence or within a paragraph, but the idea is that multiplies—phrases, clauses, or sentences—have the same basic structure.
Here's an example of phrases each consisting of a verb each followed by a prepositional phrase:
He slid behind the wheel of his Porsche, backed from the driveway, and accelerated onto the road heading south.
Anaphora, or "the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses" (Oxford American Dictionary), is another way novelists create cadence in their prose. The following excerpt from Caught by Harlan Coben illustrates this technique:
And that was when Marcia started to feel a small rock form in her chest. There were no clothes in the hamper.
The rock in her chest grew when Marcia checked Haley's toothbrush, then the sink and shower.
All bone-dry.
The rock grew when she called out to Ted, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. It grew when they drove to captain's practice and found out that Haley had never showed. It grew when she called Haley's friends while Ted sent out an e-mail blast—and no one knew where Haley was. It grew when they called the local police, who, despite Marcia's and Ted's protestations, believed that Haley was a runaway, a kid blowing off some steam. It grew when forty-eight hours later, the FBI was brought in. It grew when there was still no sign of Haley after a week. (As quoted by Margie Lawson, emphases mine)
Cadence is not a device that readers will necessarily notice unless they stop and think about the prose—not a plus if they are to remain immersed in the story world and wrapped up with the character's problems. However, the absence of cadence can work against readers, causing them to stumble and retreat to regain the flow.
Writers want readers moving forward, fully engaged with the story. Proper cadence can help to accomplish this goal.
Filed under Prose, Tone, Writing Style
Tagged as cadence, novelists, poetry, prose, rhythm
Nine Nonfiction No-nos
I have to admit upfront—I only picked the number nine because I like alliteration. I'm not a hundred percent sure I can provide nine writerly things to avoid in nonfiction, but here's my valiant (I hope) attempt.
1. Confusion. People read nonfiction primarily to learn something, to be informed, to increase their understanding. Confusion prevents any of that from happening.
2. Sloppy thinking. Writers of nonfiction need to create a clear line of thinking that readers can follow. Skipping steps or making unfounded leaps to an unearned conclusion will make readers skeptical—either about the writer's ability or the subject's accuracy.
3. Disorganization. Skipping from one point to another without some logical order waters down whatever it is an author is trying to say.
4. Outdated or incorrect statistics. Supportive data is not supportive if it is wrong or no longer relevant. When writing nonfiction, an author must do the research and check it twice to be sure it is up to date.
5. Unclear examples. If an author uses an example to illustrate a point, it should do so in an unambiguous way. Questionable examples can undermine the very point the writer is trying to make.
6. Yawn-inducing content. Even in blog posts, writers must aim to write about interesting subjects in an interesting way.
7. Unimaginative prose. No less than fiction, nonfiction needs to use strong verbs and nouns. The author should vary the sentence structure. The writing itself should be high quality—beautiful or compelling, entertaining or riveting.
8. Deceptive or untrue. Readers looking for an expert's opinion or knowledgeable advice need to trust an author. Consequently no writer should knowingly fabricate information in order to make his argument look stronger. Neither should he use inflammatory vocabulary that will purposefully lead readers to an incorrect conclusion. Sadly, political campaigns all too often resort to this kind of writing—which may be one reason people sigh with relief when an election is over.
9. Plagiarism. Other writers can inspire. A book or article can prompt ideas. But no author should take another's work and pass it off verbatim as if it is his own.
Nine no-nos weren't as hard to identify as I expected. If fact, I can think of one or two others, but I'll save them for another day and give you a turn to add ones you think belong on the list. We can rename the collection Ten Turn-offs or Eleven Errors or something. 😀
Filed under Nonfiction, Writing Rules
Tagged as authors, errors to avoid, nonfiction, prose
Oil And Vinegar, Not Oil And Water
Oil and water don't mix no matter how much a person might try. On the other hand, oil and vinegar have properties that allow them to blend temporarily. When shaken together, along with all the appropriate spices, they can create a delicious dressing, a delight for the palate.
Poetry and fiction work the same way. Yes, they are separate entities and mostly stay in their own literary niches, but there are times and ways that the two can come together to enhance a story. Since April is National Poetry Month, it seems appropriate to discuss ways in which poetry can make fiction better.
One obvious instance occurs when a novelist includes poems or songs in his work. J. R. R. Tolkien utilized numerous songs in Lord of the Rings — from those Tom Bombadil sang to the ones Bilbo wrote as part of his story and those the elves sang on most occasions.
Besides incorporating poems as a whole into fiction, an author can utilize poetry's various parts to spice up his prose.
Poetry, as you may know, is constructed using a number of sound devices and/or a number of imagery devices. It is these that can give prose a boost, taking it beyond the mundane and making it fun, insightful, or even beautiful.
Many people think of rhyme when they think of poetry. This is certainly one of the sound devices poets may use, but it is not the only one. Others include alliteration, rhythm, onomatopoeia, assonance, consonance, even repetition.
Rhythm is probably the most popular device used by novelists. When poets utilize rhythm they are trying to create a pattern using stressed and unstressed syllables, such as you hear in nursery rhymes or children's songs:
How I wonder what you are.
Novelists who pay attention to rhythm, however, utilize variety and flow more than patterns. Not only should a line say what the novelists wants it to say, but it should sound the way she wants it to sound.
High energy action scenes use shorter sentences. Fragments even. Leisurely scenes may consist of longer sentences and paragraphs filled with description or reflection, utilizing parenthetical material, perhaps — whether created by using em dashes, parentheses or even a colon. The key is, the rhythm of the sentence fits the content and the context.
When appropriate, an author may incorporate alliteration — the repetition of the same sounds at the beginning of words:
They muscled the boat to another bend, but as they navigated the curve the vessel rammed to a stop with a heavy clunk.
Consonance is similar but limited to the repetition of consonant sounds and not limited to the beginning of a word.
You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch:
the branch is white,
the green crushed,
each leaf is rent like split wood.
In the same way, assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds.
Onomatopoeia — the formation of a word from the sound associated with it — is another common device. In the earlier line above, the word clunk is an example of onomatopoeia.
None of these devices occurs with as much frequency in fiction as in poetry, and when an author does employ them it should be with purpose. The sounds should strengthen the picture that the meaning of the words has already created.
Creating these word pictures can be more effective with the help of poetry's devices: similes, metaphors, personification, symbols, hyperbole, and so on.
Similes and metaphors create comparisons between two usually unrelated objects for the sake of amplifying a particular trait of the item being described. Similes do so in a more obvious way by announcing the comparison with a preposition — like or as.
"His hair like moldy hay," part of a line from the poem "The Highwayman," makes an effective, and announced, comparison. On the other hand, "The serpentine road crawled to the top of the rise" doesn't declare, the road was like a snake, but instead shows it. Both create vivid word pictures.
Personification gives human or organic properties to inanimate objects. Even phrases like "the heart of the tale" utilize personification.
Symbols stand for and represent something else. In A Christmas Carol the chains Marley's ghost carried around represented his sins from his greedy life.
Hyperbole is purposeful exaggeration for effect. Example: The swarm of crows blackened the sky.
When using these imagery devices, a novelist should stretch to create ones that fit his characters and setting rather than relying on common ones already in existence. Many of these have become cliches.
In summary, good prose — lyrical prose — will utilize some of the same devices that poetry does. One way to become more familiar with these devices is to read poetry. Another is to write it.
What devices do you purposefully use in your prose? Have you done so because you write poetry or have you learned to do so because of what you read?
If you'd like to learn more about poetry, Owl Editing has an interesting page on understanding poetry — organized a little differently and in more depth than what I've presented in brief here.
Filed under Word Use, Writing Style
Tagged as fiction, poetry, poetry devices, prose, Writing fiction
Beautiful And Bad
We've all seen them on TV — gorgeous women who lure the hero by their incomparable good looks, but in the end they are bad, bad, bad. Some stories aren't so different from those characters.
In a recent contest I entered, the submission guidelines included this line: "Some writers can weave a beautiful thread, but tell a really bad story at the same time."
That caught my attention. So often a writer believes that spinning beautiful prose is all it takes to write a best-seller. I don't believe that's true in fiction or non-fiction.
In the latter, we can replace "story" with "content" and the statement above is just as true — a beautiful thread can be a part of really bad content. I've seen it before in blog posts. One beautiful sentence after another, and suddenly my eyes are glazed over because I have no idea where the writer is going and I've forgotten where she came from. Either that or she's made her point over and over using one inspiring metaphor, followed by a clever simile, illustrated by a picturesque analogy, the redundancy leaving at least this one bored reader skimming the rest of the post.
How can a writer avoid wasting beautiful prose on a bad story? To answer this question, I think we must first look at what constitutes a bad story.
A host of story elements gone wrong can result in bad stories, but my Big Three are lack of originality, little or no direction, and an ending that does not deliver what the beginning promised.
Originality. Stories aren't new, but they can be told from a perspective that hasn't been done and re-done. For example, the story of King Arthur has been told in story, film, movies, TV programs over and over again, to the point that I tend to recoil when I hear a story uses elements of that myth.
And yet, when the TV program Merlin came on, it quickly became one of my favorites. Why? Because I'd never seen this slice of the Arthur story before — his life as a young prince as told through the eyes of the young wizard who would one day be the key figure in Arthur's kingdom.
Direction. In fiction the main character sets the direction of the story. Problems occur when a writer has so many point of view characters that a reader has a hard time identifying the main direction. He doesn't connect with one particular character and therefore does not follow the story in the hopes that the hero will find success.
"Finding success" also is dependent upon direction. The main character must want something and must take action to accomplish whatever it is he or she wishes to achieve. This achievement, however, may be something subtle, such as character change. Nevertheless, readers should know without question when the character achieves or fails, whether he's been successful in his quest or not.
Rocky Balboa, for example, lost his first title bout against Apollo Creed, but he forced the fight to go the distance — one of his goals. What's more, through the events leading up to the fight, Rocky changed. Even though the boxing judges' decision went against him, we all knew Rocky was a winner.
The Ending. Recently I read a story that promised much. The character was interesting and the premise original. Tension mounted. Suspense showed up. But in the end, what we thought was true turned out not to be so, and the story ended like a balloon with a slow leak.
Endings need to be strong and satisfying. They need to cap off a steady build up. In fact, all that has come before should be leading to the climactic ending.
With that kind of appropriate build-up, an ending will be satisfying if it answers the story question — can the character overcome? However, that "overcome" issue isn't so much about overcoming an adversary as it is overcoming his own weakness.
Endings need to be strong for their own sake but also for the sake of the next book. Unless a reader finishes with a sense of satisfaction, it's unlikely she will care to read the next novel the author puts out.
In summary, authors certainly should write beautiful prose. However, all that beauty should be poured into making the story great. Attention to style without attention to substance may earn praise from those looking for art in story. But the truth is, most readers are looking for story in story. Authors would be wise to give the best story they can — without neglecting beautiful prose that can serve as the wrapping.
Filed under Story
Tagged as prose, Story, story endings
Sweating The Small Stuff – It's All In The Details
Recently an author friend of mine passed along some of the editorial feedback about a manuscript which required rewrites. In a number of instances, the changes weren't what a writer new to the publishing world would expect.
Yes, there were a few of the big issues — character motivation, for example — but a good number of the suggestions had to do with the small stuff, things like consistency in a character's voice, additional details in describing the setting, and minor characters that needed to come alive.
Initially I thought it might be a helpful tip here to give a list of the details this one writing professional told this one writer to improve this one manuscript. But I think you can see the problem with that — what is true for one story and writer isn't going to be true for all.
I might have great depth in my minor characters, for example, but overlook the missing details that create plot inconsistencies.
The key, then, isn't to look at a list that some other author has received, but to create a list for ourselves. We need to pay attention to the small stuff in our own work in progress.
Thinking in details may be hard initially. For example, I as the author may know that a minor character will appear in the book this one time but not again, therefore I'm not particularly invested in fleshing him out. What that does, however, is make the character nothing but a prop, a two-dimensional piece of furniture that the author drops in at that one spot for convenience.
One of the most egregious examples of this "character as prop" effect was in a novel I read some time ago. The book was part historical love story and part mystery/adventure. At one point an older woman who was acting as chaperon was on board a small boat with the two main characters. But apparently after the chaperon said her lines, the author forgot about her because the two main characters went on to share a dark secret that no one else was to know. And no, they weren't whispering, the minor character hadn't fallen asleep or overboard and she wasn't hard of hearing. The author simply did not account for her presence.
A small oversight like that can ruin the "fictive dream" for the reader. Instead of being lost in the tension and the surprise, the reader is thinking, Wait a minute, if this is such a great secret, why are they telling it in front of this minor character?
Details of a story setting are no less important. Readers need to be anchored in place and need to be able to picture where everyone is so the action they are reading makes sense. One story I read some time ago had the character under attack and running for his life. Imagine my surprise when he decided to hide in a barn I didn't know existed until that moment.
Along with specifics in character and setting, an author needs to pay attention to the specifics of his prose. Word choice can alter mood, a more formal phrase can create inconsistency in tone, repetition and redundancy can slow the pace, too many fragments can make the prose stilted. A writer needs to look at such details.
By taking the time to look at the particulars on every level, a writer will discover two things: making up stories actually is work, and taking time to look at the small stuff pays off. You see, we call stories that keep readers ensnared by a special name: best-sellers. 😉
Filed under Revision
Tagged as Characters, details, Plot, prose

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
package controllers

import play.api._
import play.api.mvc._

object $className$ extends Controller {

  def index = Action {
    Ok(views.html.index("Your new application is ready."))
  }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Jean-François had worked with over 50 cellars in the Rhone valley and together in 2004 the partners approached the best of them with their idea. Ranvier would consult with each property on all aspects of vineyard management, proper harvesting techniques, and winemaking processes in the cellars of each property. Agreements would be made prior to harvest on the proper price for the grapes or finished wines and Dauvergne Ranvier (D-R) would purchase 100% of the yearly production. Win/Win. The properties knew they could sell all of their grapes and what the price would be and DR had assurances of quality and volume.
Thanks to their enthusiasm, Jean-François and François convinced several friendly wine producers to hand over the management of part of their most promising vineyards from the best terroirs. The destiny and the responsibility of these vineyards are now in the hands of the DR duo. From one winery to another, they are involved in each step: advising during planting, looking after vine development and pruning, advising when to grass or de-bud, tasting the grapes, and along with the producers deciding when to harvest. It is a completely collaborative effort.
Jean-François Ranvier has spent over fifteen years in oenology and wine making both in Burgundy and the Rhone Valley. He has worked in the cellars of over 50 properties in the Rhone Valley consulting on viticulture and wine making.


text:
/*! \file i2cconf.h \brief I2C (TWI) interface configuration. */
//*****************************************************************************
//
// File Name    : 'i2cconf.h'
// Title        : I2C (TWI) interface configuration
// Author       : Pascal Stang - Copyright (C) 2002-2003
// Created      : 2002.06.25
// Revised      : 2003.03.02
// Version      : 0.7
// Target MCU   : Atmel AVR series
// Editor Tabs  : 4
//
// This code is distributed under the GNU Public License
//      which can be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
//
//*****************************************************************************

#ifndef SIMULATE

#ifndef I2CCONF_H
#define I2CCONF_H

// define I2C data buffer sizes
// These buffers are used in interrupt-driven Master sending and receiving,
// and in slave sending and receiving.  They must be large enough to store
// the largest I2C packet you expect to send and receive, respectively.
#define I2C_SEND_DATA_BUFFER_SIZE       0x20
#define I2C_RECEIVE_DATA_BUFFER_SIZE    0x20

#endif

#endif


text:
Car logos
Audi Sport Logo
cars that start with a | german cars | Volkswagen
Audi Sport Logo PNG
Audi Sport is the name of the Audi branch, which is specialized in the design and production of luxury performance cars. The subsidiary was formed in 1983 and today its supercars are distributed all over the globe, being one of the most reliable and stylish in their segment.
The visual identity of the sports subsidiary of the famous German automaker hasn't changed much since the day of the first Audi Sport logo introduction in 1983. Though there was a slight difference in the Formula E construction subdivision, Audi Sport Abt Schaeffler.
The emblem of the car marque is executed in dark red color and composed of two elements — a geometric graphical part, and lettering, placed on its right. The emblem is a simple red parallelogram, which is slightly vertically stretched and inclined to the right, and the wordmark is executed in a classic clean sans-serif typeface with full rounded shapes of the letters. Both elements are colored scarlet red, though sometimes the text-part of the logo turns white, it happens when the emblem is being placed on a black background.
When placed on the car itself, the "Audi Sport" can be written in silver and the red emblem — outlined in the same color.
Audi Sport Formula E
For the Audi Sport Formula E team, a more complicated logo is used. The class is red lettering with a parallelogram is complemented with additional text, which was changed throughout the years.
The first Formula E team was called Audi Sport Abt and had its logo composed of two simple lines — the upper one in red, with the iconic parallelogram emblem and minimalist "Audi Sport" lettering. And the bottom black line, with the "ABT Formula-E Team" in the same neat sans-serif typeface, but with thinner lines, which made the letters look fuller and wider.
In 2015 the name of the team was changed to Abt Schaeffler Audi Sport and the logo gained the third line. Now the red bottom, which got its contours refined and made more distinct, was underlined by "ABT" in thin black lines and green "Schaeffler" in capitals of a bold serif font and has the "Formula E Team" written on the third level, in black, with a lot of space between its uppercase letters.
In 2017 the name of the team was slightly changed and became "Audi Sport Abt Schaeffler", though it did not affect the logo style and composition, and all the elements remained untouched and in their places.
Font and color
The clean and laconic Audi Sport lettering is executed in a traditional sans-serif typeface with rounded shapes of the letters and distinct cuts of their lines. The brand's type is pretty close to such fonts as Radiate Sans Semi Bold and Vito Wide bold, but with some lines modified.
As for the color palette, the official one is based on a scarlet red shade, which represents passion, strength, and exclusiveness. Though there are also secondary color scheme options, Audi Sport uses from time to time, depending on the needs — red and black, red, black and white, and, finally, red and silver, when placed on the cars.
All four variants are elegant and timeless, though have a very strong and even aggressive character, which says a lot about the speed, power, and style of the brand's sports cars.
Anker Logo
Harley-Davidson Logo
KIA Logo
Mercedes Logo
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Mahindra Logo


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Tania Galloni
Office: Florida
Tania Galloni is the managing attorney of the Florida regional office, which has locations in Tallahassee and Miami. Tania is based in Miami.
Prior to joining Earthjustice, Tania served as the managing attorney for Southern Poverty Law Center's Florida Office in Miami, focusing on juvenile justice and education reform. Before that, she worked at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center (now Americans for Immigrant Justice) to advance and protect the rights of immigrants. She successfully litigated cases in the administrative immigration courts, Florida district courts and the Eleventh Circuit.
Tania also served as a law clerk for the Honorable Donald M. Middlebrooks in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida and for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. After graduating from Yale Law School, Tania worked at Florida Legal Services, handling cases related to occupational exposure from pesticides and collaborating with farm worker organizations, state agencies, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to raise awareness about the dangers of pesticides and the need to increase occupational protections.
Earthjustice Insider: Tania Galloni
South Miami requiere paneles solares en nuevos residenciales gracias a una visionaria
South Miami now requires solar panels on new homes, thanks to visionary youth
Clean Lake Okeechobee's Water, Don't Move it Around
"He sort of MacGyvered the system."
– Jessica EnnisEarthjustice legislative representative, on David Brosch's work to bring solar power to his Maryland neighborhood.


text:
ProLinks #4
Lot of stuff about serverless and other changes that are coming to IT world and also interesting looks into alt-right and Antifa worlds. All this and more in this week edition of ProLinks.
www.bluecoat.com/
No, I have no side code projects to show you - I have no presence on github. I have no open-source projects with which I whittle away my evenings. I have exactly zero pull requests for any of the latest sexy codebases all the cool coders are in on. I don't mess around with exercises in Haskel. And I loathe hackathons.
Why would anyone choose Docker over fat binaries? - I have the impression that Docker is an incredible technical feat that barely manages to keep an old paradigm alive.
I interviewed at five top companies in Silicon Valley in five days, and luckily got five job offers - In the five days from July 24th to 28th 2017, I interviewed at LinkedIn, Salesforce Einstein, Google, Airbnb, and Facebook, and got all five job offers.
What is backpropagation and what is it actually doing? | Deep learning, chapter 3
NIST launches new face recognition evaluation - The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched a major new evaluation of face recognition technologies.
Coding Without Limits - What would we be able to accomplish if we were not victims of time pressure, blockers, inherited code bases, political games or economic distress?
Thinking in Symbols for Universal Design - Benjamin Wilkins, Airbnb
Top 19 Software Architecture Books - Expand your development knowledge with these books on a wide variety of software architecture topics, such as domain-driven design.
MINIX: Intel's hidden in-chip operating system - Buried deep inside your computer's Intel chip is the MINIX operating system and a software stack, which includes networking and a web server. It's slow, hard to get at, and insecure as insecure can be.
An Open Letter to Intel - Thanks for putting a version of MINIX inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world.
If The World Was Created By A Programmer - In the beginning, there was light and darkness and stack overflow, which is really just a combination of the two.
The Java Fork-Join Pool Framework (Part 1)
Functional Programming Jargon - Functional programming (FP) provides many advantages, and its popularity has been increasing as a result. However, each programming paradigm comes with its own unique jargon and FP is no exception.
Why Senior Devs Write Dumb Code and How to Spot a Junior From A Mile Away - Often, the way to write fast code in Java applications is to write dumb code — code that is straightforward, clean, and follows the most obvious object-oriented principles.
Serverless vs. Containers: How Serverless Will Win - Serverless vs. Containers is a Matter of What's Easy and Cost Effective.
The end of the cloud is coming - We're facing the end of the cloud. It's a bold statement, I know, and maybe it even sounds a little mad. But bear with me.
Keynote: The Value of Values - Rich Hickey compares value-oriented programming with place-oriented programming concluding that the time of imperative languages has passed and it is the time of functional programming.
GOTO 2017 • Why the Fuss about Serverless • Simon Wardley
Who Actually Owns Your Content When You Post It to the Web - Signing the terms and conditions on your favorite social networks could mean signing away the rights to that video of your kid's birthday party, or that sweet snapshot you took on vacation.
YOU WILL NOT UNDERSTAND THIS - This is my exit interview from social media. Some of these "services" I abandoned years ago. Others I am still struggling to avoid.
Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers - When Danny Greg first moved to San Francisco to work at Github in 2012, he used to get high-fives in the street from strangers when he wore his company hoodie. These days, unless he's at an investor event, he's cautious about wearing branded clothing that might indicate he's a techie.
The two questions I ask every interviewer - What's your goal when interviewing a candidate?
The Other Reformation: How Martin Luther Changed Our Beer, Too - For among the things it impacted was a drink beloved throughout the world and especially in Luther's native Germany: beer.
Monster magnet meets blood...
Western philosophy is racist - Academic philosophy in 'the West' ignores and disdains the thought traditions of China, India and Africa. This must change
Field of Vision - A Night at the Garden
For the love of Earth, stop traveling - Realistically, is there anything that you or I can do as individuals to make a significant difference in the short time remaining?
Hooked: how slot machines are designed to be addictive - Poker machines use a range of design features that leverage psychology to keep people playing.
Are Your Kids Too Fragile? How to Make the Next Generation More Resilient.
Why No One Trusts the Mainstream Media
Economic Development: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Thinking Is Expensive. Who's Supposed to Pay for It?
The Black Bloc: Inside America's Hard Left
Inside America's Largest Right Wing Militia
Check out my Slovak newsletter.
alt-right antifa beer coding docker hr interviews media minix philosophy programming serverless
Labels: alt-right antifa beer coding docker hr interviews media minix philosophy programming serverless
ProLinks #57 - Truth, Wayland and Sex Tapes
Tech Let's talk about Wayland ... This is the fundamental principle of every single product (including security products). If you cannot use a thing, because its "safety" or "security" mechanisms prevents the core functionality from being utilized in the intended fashion, the product is useless. For example, a Web browser without an Internet connection is possibly very secure from Internet exploits - but it also doesn't do its main function - let people browse the Internet Speed is the killer feature When you touched a Razr or a Palm phone, there was a delay. It felt sluggish and slow. Apple removed the delay between your finger tapping the screen and something happening. Your finger could finally manipulate the UI in realtime, just like in the real world. It felt magical. If there was even a slight delay, the whole experience fell apart. Everything is broken, and it's okay Every car you've ever ridden in, every elevator you've ever taken, every s
ProLinks #65 - North Korea, Cryptocurrencies, Propaganda and more
Tech The Incredible Rise of North Korea's Hacking Army He was right. As the newspapers soon reported, more than sixteen million dollars was withdrawn from roughly seventeen hundred 7-Eleven A.T.M.s across Japan that morning, using data stolen from South Africa's Standard Bank. The newspapers surmised that 7-Elevens had been targeted because they were the only convenience stores in Japan whose cash terminals all accepted foreign cards. Soon after the raids, the withdrawal limit for many A.T.M.s in the country was reduced to fifty thousand yen Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud ❧ Current Affairs Schweikert is partly right: "selling it as a revolution" is a hugely important part of why cryptocurrency is succeeding. But as is generally the case when someone is trying to sell you something, the whole thing should seem extremely fishy. In fact, much of the cryptocurrency pitch is worse than fishy. It's downright fraudulent, promising people benefits that they will not get and trying
ProLinks #64 - Cookies, How to Survive Apocalypse, Fall of Rome and more
Tech Ubuntu 21.04 is here Ubuntu machines can join an Active Directory (AD) domain at installation for central configuration. AD administrators can now manage Ubuntu workstations, which simplifies compliance with company policies. Data Brokers Are a Threat to Democracy The Arkansas firm claims to have data on 2.5 billion people around the world. And in the US, if someone's interested in that information, there are virtually no restrictions on their ability to buy and then use it. How to fight back against Google FLoC Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposes a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. This approach effectively hides individuals "in the crowd" and uses on-device processing to keep a person's web history private on the browser. How Live TV Works Do Neural Networks Think Like Our Brain? OpenAI Answers! 🧠 koush Difficult to quantify what an ecological disaster Bitcoin
ProLinks #58 - Evangelicals, Screen time and BASE Jumping
Tech The technical interview practice gap, and how it keeps underrepresented groups out of software engineering MIT gave me was a big stamp on my forehead that, to this day, makes strangers think I'm smart. But there was another, more relevant gift that gave me a serious advantage over students who did not attend an elite computer science institution: boundless access to technical interview practice. Not only was there a multi-week course during the month-long break between Fall and Spring semesters that was dedicated exclusively to passing technical interviews, but all of my peers were going through exactly the same thing at the same time Clone Wars - Open source clones of popular sites 70+ open-source clones of popular sites like Airbnb, Amazon, Instagram, Netflix, Tiktok, Spotify, Trello, Whatsapp, Youtube, etc. List contains source code, demo links, tech stack, and, GitHub stars count. Great for learning purpose! "Well, it seems great to me" But if your music, your graphic
ProLinks #59 - Terrible men, Facebook and SOCOM
Tech You're Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype What is less obvious is why Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita professor of Harvard Business School, so uncritically repeats the digital industry's marketing materials, nor why she never points to or assesses evidence that goes against her argument. Yet her writings are full of hyperbole that sounds like she took press releases from Facebook's and Google's PR departments and rewrote them to be alarming, How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation Zuckerberg's obsession with getting the whole world to use Facebook had found a powerful new weapon. Teams had previously used design tactics, like experimenting with the content and frequency of notifications, to try to hook users more effectively. Their goal, among other things, was to increase a metric called L6/7, the fraction of people who logged in to Facebook six of the previous seven days. L6/7 is just one of myriad ways in which Facebook has measured "e


text:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
IIT-JEE
Indian govt to announce launch of free study material for IIT-JEE
"This should reduce stress among students who are aspiring for engineering institutes," said a professor, who is part of this programme.Prachi Verma | ET Bureau | Updated: June 28, 2016, 09:15 IST
Aspirants to the coveted Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other premier engineering institutes can now look forward to a readily accessible resource for preparation.
The government is set to provide study material free of cost through various media, including a dedicated website, YouTube and three free-to-air TV channels to be launched by Doordarshan. The launch is likely to be announced on August 15.
The move comes amid concerns over growing anxiety among students regarding entry to premier engineering institutes that has led to an increase in instances of suicide among those who fail to make the cut.
Competition has also led to mushrooming of coaching institutes that often charge lakhs of rupees.
"Any student can access content any time of the day. The government intends to give equal opportunity to all students to be able to crack IITs without - or with minimum reliance on - the coaching institutes," said a senior government official, who did not wish to be identified.
Besides content, regular assignments and tests will be part of the material, the official said. In addition, the government will launch an 8 am to 8 pm helpline to answer queries regarding the entrance examination, he said.
"Right now, it is difficult even for the brightest student to get through IIT without coaching.
This initiative will certainly reduce that need," a senior professor at one of the older IITs said on condition of anonymity.
A team of at least 10 ace teachers is being put together for the project. Efforts are on to pick the best teachers from among IITs, Kendriya Vidyalayas, retirees and professors, and even faculty at private coaching centres.
In addition, top 100 JEE rankers will share tips with aspiring students to solve the questions in less time, another official said.
Three free-to-air channels to be launched by Doordarshan have been slotted for IITs, mostly the old ones. Besides, there will be live content streaming for four hours daily over DTH and internet platforms, with the capsule being repeated through the day.
"This should reduce stress among students who are aspiring for engineering institutes," said a professor, who is part of this programme.
Regular assignments and tests will be conducted online, partly on Massive Online Open Courses or MOOC on 'Swayam' platform.
Tags : Corporate, YouTube, IITs, IIT-JEE, doordarshan


Yes, you can use some of the file hosting services- as long as they allow you to share the documents and provide web page links for people to access. One of the best service is the new Google Drive.
How to get Google Drive ?
As long as you have a Google Account or a Gmail account, you automatically get 5G free Google Drive space.
1. Login to Google drive at http://drive.google.com by using your Google or Gmail account.
4. The Sharing Setting page pops up, at top it gives you a webpage address (URL) for the folder, and you can click on "change..." to share it, as in following screenshot.
6. Click on Save again to go back to the Google Drive control panel.
By combining Blogger and Google drive together, you now get 5G space to save any type of files, including multimedia files, documents and application scripts- All free services, with great performance !


Columbia University is a private institution located in New York City. The Columbia Investment Management Company (IMC) manages the University's endowment. Columbia established the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing as a permanent addition to the University in March 2000. The Committee's purpose is to advise the University Trustees on ethical and social issues that arise in the management of the investments in the University's endowment. To ensure that the Committee is broadly representative of the University community, its twelve voting members are drawn in equal proportion from students, faculty, and alumni of the University.


"The Lake of Stars, as it is nicknamed, is Malawi's most well know attraction, and there is no second guessing why. Eager to know why? Lake Malawi is listed as a Natural World Heritage Site by UNESCO, it is the third largest lake in Africa, and one of the deepest lakes in the world.
Lake Malawi is home to the world's largest number of fish species which is especially important to evolutionary studies. And where there are plenty of fish, there are happy fishermen; Lake Malawi is no exception. Fishermen are seen snug in their self-made canoes, locally known as bwatus, patiently cruising along the lake with their hooks, lines and nets cast out into the water.
Lake Malawi is absolutely the pride and backbone of the agricultural country. The contrast between palm beaches, warm clear lake water and the remarkably rugged mountain beauty of an African backdrop is a striking sight to behold. To the south of the lake you will find the Liwonde National Park and Lake Malawi National Park.
The parks are perfect for viewing a large variety of game, as well as spectacular bird watching opportunities. If you were wondering; "What's a lake without water activities?" –your speculations are in vain. Lake Malawi does not fall short when it comes to recreation. We are sure that the lake and its surroundings will keep any water lover, land explorer and bird watcher high in African-spirit."
Fly-In or Drive-In Lodge Safaris: We offer safaris to Lake Malawi by air charter from Lilongwe, or drive-in from the capital city. Being a hospitable, welcoming and friendly place, Malawians are excited to celebrate and share their culture and customs with outsiders.
We recommend spending no less than a week in this paradise destination.
"ISLAND LIFE: Spend time on the Likoma Island, which is situated to the north east of Lake Malawi. Enjoy the tranquility of the warm tropic atmosphere or set sail and explore the island waters.
BIRD VIEWING: Liwonde National Park is Malawi's premier wildlife reserve and the bird life is alluring, the site could possibly be the best location in central and southern Africa to view such a large variety of bird life.
Our accommodation ranges from luxurious lodges to lakeside hotels. The lodges are secluded for your comfort with amazing views of forest-fringed lagoons.
Lakeside hotels embrace a classically regal yet stylish and forgotten charm. There are more traditional living quarters such as thatched rondavels on offer as well, and of course the Malawian staff will try their utmost to make you smile throughout your stay.
To the north of the lake, you will find lush tropic rain forests and rugged mountain escarpments.
The low valley land is to the south, such as Lake Malawi and the curving Shire River, as well as river basins of peaceful lagoons, majestic marshlands, open savannah country, lush woodlands and dry forests. The dominant vegetation is that of the Miombo woodlands.
Malawi used to be populated by Buntu tribes and colonially ruled by the British. Formerly known as Nyasaland, the country had a turbulent struggle to gain independence from British rule in 1964. After claiming their independence, the countries name was changed to Malawi.
Of interest is the name given to Lake Malawi by David Livingstone, who first visited the country during British rule.
Livingstone named the lake "Lake Nyasa," unknowingly realizing that the local word for any large body of water is nyasa. The name given to Lake Malawi by Livingstone is still used today by neighbouring countries who share the lake, namely Tanzania and Mozambique.
Another interesting fact of history is that Lake Malawi National Park was the first of its kind to protect the freshwater species of a deep-water River Valley lake.
"ABUNDANT WILDLIFE: The national parks are home to Africa's Big Five and Malawi is recorded to have more than 400 species of birds and the largest concentration of fish species in the world.
SCENIC WONDERLANDS AND UNDERLANDS: Access the mesmerizing views of unspoilt natural landscape on horseback, 4x4 drives, walking or trekking, or discover the underwater glittering glamour.
INDIGENOUS BEINGS: An attractive variety of wildlife found nowhere else but within the borders of Malawi.
LAKESHORE RECREATION: a large selection of water sports, including windsurfing, paddle skiing, snorkelling, sailing, canoeing and much more.
BASK IN THE AMBIENCE: Malawi's low tourism influx allows you to truly unwind; relax alongside white lakeshore sands, captivating clear blue water or let the winding rivers drift you into picturesque scenery. Leading you to believe that Malawi's beauty belongs to you."
Rain sets in across the land from November to March with unpredictable storms. The dry season may be expected during June. October is the best time to visit the vast lake as it is much calmer, clearer and the temperatures are pleasant.


In local communities, the civically engaged – the people who vote, volunteer and connect with those around them – play a key role in community life. Thus, how and to what degree they stay informed about their communities carries added weight.
A new study by Pew Research Center in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation reveals that, overall, the civically engaged are indeed more likely than the less engaged to use and value local news. But two particular aspects of civic engagement stand out as most closely associated with local news habits: a strong connection to one's community and always voting in local elections. Americans with one of these two attributes, the study finds, consistently display stronger local news habits across a range of measures: news interest, news intake (the number and types of sources they turn to) and news attitudes – their views of local news organizations.
This report focuses on five ways the public can connect to civic life and compares the local news habits of Americans who engage in each with those who do not. While these civic factors and news habits are related to each other, the data do not indicate the extent to which there is a causal relationship. In other words, the study does not point to whether civic engagement triggers local news interest, intake or more positive attitudes about local news media, or whether it is, in fact, the reverse.
The roughly one-in-five U.S. adults (19%) who feel highly attached to their communities demonstrate much stronger ties to local news than those who do not feel attached – revealing a link between personal connection to these areas and a desire to stay more informed about current issues and events. Nearly six-in-ten (59%) of the highly attached follow local news very closely – about twice the share of the unattached (27%). Fully 44% regularly get community news from three or more different source types, compared with 17% of the unattached. And about a third (35%) think their local media do a good job of keeping them informed – more than double the share of the unattached (13%).
Similar to the highly attached, those who say they always vote in local elections (27% of U.S. adults) display strikingly stronger local news habits than those who do not regularly vote in local elections, perhaps a reflection of the unique service local journalism provides in its coverage of local elections and politics. They are more likely to follow local news closely (52% of regular local voters, compared to 31% of those who do not always vote), get local news from three or more source types (38% compared with 25%), follow multiple locally relevant topics (45% compared with 23%), and to approve of the job local news organizations do (27% compared with 18%).
Unlike local voting, however, regularly voting in national elections alone does not relate to stronger local news habits. Those who vote regularly in national elections – but not local elections – match those who do not vote regularly in either local or national elections in their more limited enthusiasm for local news.
While there is some overlap between those who are highly attached to their communities and regular local voters, these are largely separate groups: Only about a third (32%) of regular voters also consider themselves highly attached to their communities. And just under half (45%) of the highly attached are regular voters. Together, then, the two groups amount to 37% of U.S. adults – and these individuals discuss news more frequently than others, perhaps giving them greater influence on the public conversation about community affairs.
Another trait closely associated with broad community attachment is how well one knows their neighbors (23% of U.S. adults), which indeed reveals a similarly consistent connection to all three areas of local news habits. Fully half (52%) of those who know all their neighbors, for example, follow local news very closely, compared with 32% who don't know any of their neighbors. And 71% say the local media are in touch with their communities versus about half (49%) of those who don't know their neighbors.
U.S. adults who connect to civic life in other ways manifest stronger local news habits in some areas but not consistently across the board. The roughly one-quarter of Americans (27%) who actively participate in local groups and political activities, for example, demonstrate stronger news behaviors, but not more positive attitudes; just 22% approve of the job their local media are doing.
Americans who rate their local communities as excellent (29% of U.S. adults), on the other hand, have more positive views of their local news media than those who rate their communities less highly – about three-quarters of these high raters (77%) feel the local media are in touch with their local communities – but they express few stronger news habits.
The one civic factor studied here which seems to have the weakest connection to local news habits is the political diversity of one's community: The seven-in-ten Americans who say they live in areas with differing political views display very similar local news habits as those who believe most people in their communities share the same political views. While there are a few areas in which small differences emerge, roughly equal shares very closely follow multiple locally relevant news topics and neighborhood news, consume local news via most source types, and approve of the job their local media are doing. What's more, this finding holds up when examined in terms of one measure of observed political diversity. Those who live in congressional districts where the 2012 presidential election was closely contested show similar local news habits to those living in districts that were not contested.
Those who are younger are generally less likely to be highly civically engaged than their elders, and as we have found in the past about news use in general, local news habits are less strong among younger adults. Nevertheless, the relationships we see between local news habits and these various aspects of civic engagement all hold up when controlling for age, as well as income and education.
These findings come from a study that asked U.S. adults a wide range of questions about their news habits and attitudes. The survey was conducted Jan. 12-Feb. 8, 2016, among 4,654 U.S. adults ages 18 and older who are members of Pew Research Center's nationally representative American Trends Panel.
We examined five different aspects of civic engagement.
Voting in local elections: Those registered voters who always vote in local elections are compared to those who vote less often, not at all or are not registered to vote.
Political diversity: Those who see most people in their communities as having different political views are compared to those who see most as having similar political views.
Those with high local news interest closely follow news about their local communities, neighborhoods and/or multiple locally relevant news topics such as crime, business or government.
Those with high local news intake get community news multiple times a week or more from a variety of source types, such as local TV, local newspapers, word of mouth and local radio.
Those with very positive local news attitudes see local news organizations in a good light: they think the local news media are in touch with their communities, do a good job keeping them informed and produce trustworthy information.


text:
package org.madeforall.extractor.test

import org.madeforall.extractor._

/**
 * @author Nicolae Caralicea
 * @version 1.0, 16/01/2013
 */

case class Email(user: String, domain: String) extends RecognizableAndSubstitutable {
  override def toString() = {
    user + "@" + domain
  }
  val recognitionPattern = EmailRecognitionPattern
}
object EmailRecognitionPattern extends RecognitionPattern {
  // The extraction method
  def unapply(str: String): Option[(String, String)] = {
    val parts = str split "@"
    if (parts.length == 2) Some(parts(0), parts(1)) else None
  }
  // email regex
  val regexPattern = """(?i)\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b""".r

  def recognize(value: String): Option[RecognizableAndSubstitutable] = {
    value match {
      case EmailRecognitionPattern(user, domain) =>
        Some(Email(user, domain))
      case _ =>
        None
    }
  }
}

case class Phone(areaCode: String, centralOffice: String, stationNumber: String) extends RecognizableAndSubstitutable {
  override def toString() = {
    areaCode + "-" + centralOffice + "-" + stationNumber
  }
  val recognitionPattern = PhoneRecognitionPattern
}

// the area code and between groups of digits within a telephone number Canada: 819-555-5555
object PhoneRecognitionPattern extends RecognitionPattern {
  // The extraction method (mandatory)
  def unapply(str: String): Option[(String, String, String)] = {
    val parts = str split "-"
    if (parts.length == 3) Some((parts(0), parts(1), parts(2))) else None
  }
  // phone number regex
  val regexPattern = """(?i)\b[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}\b""".r

  def recognize(value: String): Option[RecognizableAndSubstitutable] = {
    value match {
      case PhoneRecognitionPattern(areaCode, centralOffice, stationNumber) =>
        Some(Phone(areaCode, centralOffice, stationNumber))
      case _ =>
        None
    }
  }
}

case class Link(link: String, text: String) extends RecognizableAndSubstitutable {
  override def toString() = {
    link + " --> " + text
  }
  val recognitionPattern = LinkRecognitionPattern
}

object LinkRecognitionPattern extends RecognitionPattern {
  // The extraction method (mandatory)
  def unapply(str: String): Option[(String, String)] = {
    val regexPattern(link, text) = str
    Some(link, text)
  }
  // html link regex
  val regexPattern = """<a href=['"]([^"']*)['"].*>(.*)</a""".r

  def recognize(value: String): Option[RecognizableAndSubstitutable] = {
    value match {
      case LinkRecognitionPattern(link, text) =>
        Some(Link(link, text))
      case _ =>
        None
    }
  }
}


Junior Chemical Engineering major at Texas A&M University. 3.84 GPA. Good at math and science-related subjects.
Hey :) I am a junior Chemical Engineering major with a 3.84 GPA, and I am on Dean's Honor Roll (3.75+ GPA). I am good at summarizing and picking out important points to focus on. I can't wait to help you succeed in your courses!
Will answer questions as soon as I am free. Available Mondays after 3, Tuesdays after 11, Thursdays 10-2, Friday after 2, and Sat/Sun anytime.


There are many very good articles on the Internet explaining how computer hard drive works, so we never wanted to write a similar article, telling the same basics. What we really want to talk about is Computer Hard Drive Bad Sectors.
A simple query like hard drive bad sector remapping to Google returns many really interesting things, that a good computer user needs to know. For example, you can easily find an article about hard drive bad sectors on Wikipedia, or the information about US Patent 5166936 called Automatic hard disk bad sector remapping, or the article called Bad Sector Blues. The last one is dated with 2006, and it tells about IDE hard drives, but it's still very good, because it explains the basic things about physical and logical structure of the hard drives. So we'd recommend you to make a quick search on the Internet and read about hard drive basics to understand the next few paragraphs.
Do people really understand the basics of computer hard drive? This is a very good question, because at least not so many people read all that stuff, preferring to ask same naive questions again and again, like "How do I repair bad sectors on an XP hard drive", or "how can I reformat my hard drive at the low level", etc.?
If we return back in the computer history we can find many exotic things about hard drives, how they appeared, their sizes, capacities, speed, power consumption, etc. Take a look at the article, telling about the First computer with the hard drive in the world, created in 1956. Below is the picture taken from this article, posted here just in case if this web site becomes inaccessible.
Below is one more picture of this hard drive taken from popular-pics.com. We copied this picture for the same reason to prevent its loss if for some reason you can't find it there.
We can probably find information about a very first computer virus written for a hard drive, moving the hard drive heads far away from the landing zone so badly, that they could be returned back only at factory using special tools. We can find articles about MFM drives, etc. We can find information about hard drive low level formatting, where we could set the hard drive sector interleave in a very wide range to significantly increase, or instead decrease the hard drive speed. We know about one such a case when the hard drive speed was increased in 4.5 times after such a simple change. But it was the epoch of the XT hard drives. All this stuff is too old, and the current computer generation of specialists never even heard about that.
Later, after IDE drives appeared, people kept talking about low level formatting. And there were many accidents, when computer hard drives died after occasional or intentional low level formatting made with the computer BIOS program. Many fatal accidents were related to Kalok Hard Drives. Only a few years later the reference to this function was removed from the BIOS of the most of computer brands. But even after that it was possible to call it, using a simple command line debugger, if we knew the exact address of this procedure in BIOS.
Approximately at the same time the hard drive developers blocked that hole in the hard drive firmware so that even if the user was thinking that he was making a low level formatting, it was just a high level formatting, nothing else. Beginning from that moment it became safe for the hard drives. They learned to emulate the low level formatting, actually ignoring these commands.
But why it was so dangerous? Describing that in simple words, the low level formatting was deleting the special marks on the hard drive surfaces, made at the factory, making the head positioning impossible. As soon as this info is deleted, the hard drive can never be recognized, initialized and calibrated to start working. End.
There were a few companies regularly publishing their own tools for low level and high level formatting of their hard drives. Except the formatting, that's what they all were made for, these tools were able to do many interesting things to the hard drives, for example, to localize bad sectors, to remap them, to show the bad sector table, to switch the hard drive mode, etc. But later even these tools mostly disappeared, and were replaced with light weight utilities to simply format the hard drives to start using them with some operating system.
Finally the low level formatting became obsolete, useless for a home user. If somebody still uses these words, he doesn't understand the difference and the purpose of both formats. There are still many questions on the Internet like this: "Should I format my hard drive before installing Windows 7 on it?" and the answers from the "experts" like this: "If you've never done a low-level (full) format of the specific drive before, however, I'd personally do it before installing Windows 7. It will usually take a good amount of time, so I'd plan accordingly." Period.
The hard drive heads scratched the surface because somebody pushed this computer while it was working.
Something heavy was dropped on the table with the computer on it.
Small piece of magnetic material from another location got between the flying head and the magnetic surface leaving a long scratch.
Oil from the hard drive bearing flew away and then consolidated on the hard drive surface gluing the heads or at least decreasing the sensitivity of the heads just because the hard drive was overheated for different reasons like insufficient air flow around it, stopped cooler fan, etc., and finally the lubricant was defective. That was a reason of one serious recall of nearly 300,000 hard drives by one company developer a long time ago.
Bugs in the hard drive firmware causing physical damages to the heads, etc. That particular case was a reason of hundreds of thousands of hard drive failures many years ago. We don't want to expose the company name here for obvious reason.
Magnetic fields – somebody left his very good headphones near computer, or right on the top of his favorite laptop, and these headphones had 2 extremely powerful magnets to produce a very good music, like Sony MDR-V700). Depending on the power of the magnets and the distance, the user can lose the whole hard drive in just a few minutes to maximum in a few days. We know about two proven issues when 2-3 days were enough to get a permanent problem with the whole hard drive and the information on it. The reason - these headphones left by the copmputer case. The nearest hard drive died first. The second in the stack died a day later. Then these headphones were noticed and removed away.
Bad mechanics of a particular hard drive, bad assembling line, etc. We'll discuss that later in this article.
Bad cables, connectors, bad controllers, bad power supply, insufficient power, lower current than required, high temperature, glued or sealed hole in the hard drive case, etc.
Multiple of Start-Stop cycles of a particular hard drive.
There are just a few examples here, and the real list can be much longer.
This is not a question for computer professionals. According to the old statistics one start/stop cycle is equal to approximately 10 hours of a hard drive work. That includes only the 4500-5400 rpm hard drives. We don't want to talk about hard drives with 4200 rpm, but there are much faster hard drives with 7200 rpm, 10,000 rpm and even higher. What about them? Can we assume that one start-stop equals to 15-20 hours of continuous work of this hard drive?
There are many articles on the Internet telling different versions about hard drive start-stop cycles. But should we really believe to all that? Our own personal experience shows that we need to be extremely careful with this info and don't completely trust it. Today all the computers have a very nice, from the first view, feature to stop the hard drive when it's not required. It lets the user save some time when he works with a battery powered laptop, or couple pennies for the entire year. But what is the real power consumption of a single hard drive comparing to a single AC unit in Arizona? It's less than negligible. For desktop it's more a downside because each time when you need to read/write something, the hard drive should start spinning, then it should be initialized, calibrated, find the required track, etc. It takes several seconds and in most cases it's very annoying. But this is only a visible part of the problem. Every start/stop operation decreases the hard drive life time. Even if we use a laptop with its small hard drive, the real life of the hard drive, working in this so called "green mode", will be 6-12 months or maybe little longer longer depending on the number of these start-stops. Then the user will start noticing the bad sectors, etc. If we know and can disable this "feature", then it's fine. We can significantly extend the hard drive life cycle. One AZ company, having a lot of computers, making computer hardware for medicine, told us that their "laptop hard drives are pretty bad and die in approximately 6 or so months". When we asked if the green mode is enabled or not we got the answer, that they never even thought about that. After disabling this feature the whole situation changed.
There are some cases when the user cannot do anything to disable this feature. For example, you can buy a 1 TB or more "My Book" USB external drive. First, these models are mostly using a fast 10,000 rpm hard drive, providing a better speed and... higher heat. Second, these "My Books" don't have any cooler fan inside, only the holes. The ventilation of these enclosures is only passive. As a result, these boxes should not be used continuously, they will simply overheat. Third, to compensate that, WD decided to stop these hard drives in 2-2.5 minutes after the last read-write operation. As a result, this 10,000 rpm hard drive has to start and stop every few minutes. We spent several hours testing My Book and got an unpleasant surprise with the Green Mode. We contacted WD support to ask if this feature can be disabled, and we got the answer that it can never be disabled, it's in the firmware, etc. So the user has no access to this very important "feature" shortening the life of his computer hardware. With no doubt this "My Book" was returned back to the store, and we didn't regret about that. Instead, it's much better to buy an empty hard drive enclosure and install a hard drive that we need. It saves money in just a few minutes, because installing hard drive usually takes about 1, maybe 2 minutes, but never longer. And for sure this operation can't worth $30-$50 or higher – the difference between the prices that we'd pay for these parts, getting the brand, that we really like, against the whole "My Book" in one piece. Plus the unstoppable Green Mode.
So we finally came to a very important paragraph. We know now that all the hard drives have bad sectors, but they are remapped, hidden both to operating system and user. Physically, the hard drive controller substitutes the location of a bad sector with a good one from a spare area of the hard drive. This is a normal operation. But here is a first point to stop at. It is extremely important to know where this particular hard drive was made, what country, what line, what was the condition of this line, etc. Many years ago there was a hard drive brand called Quantum Fireball. One Russian guy found a very interesting information about these hard drive controllers at the Quantum web site, and he wrote a small tool called QTest.exe to retrieve this info. Many years ago we used this tool to test several different hard drives. We had several pairs of hard drives made in different countries and then imported. It was the same brand and model, same year +/- a few months, same capacity, they were looking absolutely same excluding just one word following after Made in... The tests showed us a very important info. We don't want to reveal the info about country origin of these hard drives in this web article, although we remember that and can recall if required. So, let's use the numbers instead. After we tested these hard drives we got the following results.
Box 1 – 0.04% and 0.024% of the spare space was used at the factory for the bad sector remapping.
Box 2 – 0.17% and 0.14%.
Box 3 – 4.2% and 8.4%.
Box 4 – 14.2 and 17.4%.
Box 5 – 38% and 42%.
We tested the same brand and the same model, but imported from different countries. The test results of the hard drives made in different countries were absolutely incredible! The difference was really huge! Even during the tests these hard drives were producing different noise.
It's not a question what hard drive from the whole batch was the best. But in addition to these bad sector maps there were more points to pay attention at. The quality of the whole assembly was much better in the first case (number 1). These hard drives were able to position the heads much better, faster, more precisely, with lower noise, and the whole reading speed was significantly higher, especially comparing to the drives from the Box 5. The number of bad sectors also affected the reading/writing speed because instead of reading/writing the whole cylinder in one try (one or more spins depending on the controller and computer speed, reading mode, current drive mode, hard drive sector interleave, etc.) the hard drive had to change the cylinder moving the heads to the spare area and work with the good sector losing time for positioning, losing extra spin to get the required sector under the head, etc. But also keep in mind, that none of these hard drives showed any bad sector after formatting. But we can see now that the whole picture is way more complicated and not so many people have idea about these details.
Ok, these were brand new hard drives with just a few minutes to first hours of life experience, they didn't get any consumer remapped bad sectors. But what should happen when the sector dies, becomes unreadable? It should be remapped, replaced with a good one… until the spare space is completely occupied.
It not only shows the speed diagram, but it can also retrieve the Hard Drive SMART info telling in detail for how long time this hard drive was used, how many start-stop operations it survived, seek/read errors, overheating, etc. There is a special documentation that everybody can find about this tool and how to read the results of the tests. There are just a coupe points we'd like to stop at. First, although this tool shows almost the same as VVSeek many years ago, these results cannot be used in the same way. The picture above shows a regular hard drive installed as a second one in the system. The primary hard drive has a different picture because the system reads its files, writes to the swap file, gets access to the files that it needs, there are many background processes running simultaneously and affecting the graph. Instead, when we were using VVSeek in MS DOS with no resident programs, no disk cache, etc., the picture was ideal. So the picture above cannot be used for a detailed analysis. Below is another screen shot of the test made against the same hard drive running as a system hard drive. There are multiple places on the test when the system simply interrupted the test and did something seriously affecting the results of the test. If we run the same test against the same drive one more time we'll get a similar curve but with different gaps. So, the best way to get the number of bad sectors is to get the SMART info from the hard drive. But here is the trap - this tool cannot get this info from the USB drive, or if the system uses the RAID ready drivers, etc. There are many limits that we cannot avoid directly. Professionals know about that and can do that, but that is at least a different and much longer article which is not yet even written. And who wants to share his professional tricks for free losing his time and typing that for the Internet? Good question.
We could spend more time explaining how Zone Bit Recording works, what that is exactly, how it looks like at different test diagrams, and how can we read them. Or we could talk about the correlation between cluster size and hard drive file r/w speed. There are many things to talk about, and these themes are endless. But hopefully we covered one very important thing with this page - Bad Sectors.
The conclusion is pretty simple.
If we can see the bad sectors on the hard drive then it is a very bad sign that the spare space is probably already occupied, and the firmware can't remap the bad sectors to the hidden area. That means that beginning from this moment none of the bad sectors can be remapped. In other words, the situation is much more serious that most of the people think. The reasons? Read above.
The quality of the hard drives, as well as other parts, dramatically depends on the country origin of these parts. The worse assembly quality leads to a sooner death of the whole hard drive because the mechanical problems cause more significant wearing out of the moving parts. it's like a snowball falling down the mountain - as lower as bigger.
Start-stop feature, silently enabled by Microsoft after the next update that was installed, or intentionally enabled by user, will significantly decrease the life time of the hard drive, despite of the articles telling that the hard drives should always work this way. The most of the hard drive failures happen during start, keep that in mind.
Although the current hard drives are much more robust and can survive the strong shocks, we'd never make these experiments with our own hard drives. Yes, we see in the documents that this particular hard drive, for example, will survive after a 10g shock working and 100g stopped. These numbers can be much higher. Do you still want to test that out? There are many factors affecting this assumption and we don't like to test it with our own hard drives. If you can avoid placing your computer on a shaking table, don't place it.
The important information, that you keep on your computer hard drives, should be at least duplicated and stored at a safe location. The regular backups of the hard drives, including the operating system, are not somebody's good manner or habit. It's a must to keep your data safe. If you want to never lose your files, simply follow this advice.
Comments from the author. First time this article was published a few years ago at www.pcyoutrust.com. Then I decided to publish it on thia forum to let people read and discuss it and probably add more interesting points.


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Education Secretary says safe schools 'require masks,' touts op-ed critical of Florida's anti-mask mandate law
Children required to wear masks in NY day care centers
Daycare worker Michelle Smith explains how requiring children to wear masks at New York day cares is hurting business.
After months of legal challenges, heated school board meetings, and confusion among parents, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill earlier this month that prohibits schools from mandating masks for students.
Carlee Simon, the superintendent of one of the last school districts in the state to drop their mandate, Alachua County Public Schools, wrote an op-ed last week criticizing the anti-mask mandate law — and now Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is backing her up.
"This isn't complicated & Superintendent Simon is right. As educators, it's our job to keep our schools safe and that requires masks," Cardona tweeted on Monday.
Miguel Cardona speaks after President-Elect Joe Biden announced his nomination for Education Secretary at the Queen theatre on December 23, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. (Photo by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's office hit back at the criticism on Monday, arguing that "forced-masking schoolchildren is absolutely not the 'scientific consensus.'"
"Secretary Cardona's obsession with forcing children to cover their faces is rooted in politics, not public health," Christina Pushaw, DeSantis's press secretary, told Fox News on Monday.
"It is not the role of the government to force kids to wear masks. Governor DeSantis believes parents know their own kids best, and he trusts parents to make the right decisions for their children."
In this Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021 file photo, Students, some wearing protective masks, arrive for the first day of school at Sessums Elementary School in Riverview, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)
Simon, meanwhile, argued that that the law takes away "mitigation strategies" like masks and quarantines that schools have used to fight the pandemic.
"If another surge comes to Florida, schools will have been hamstrung by state leaders more concerned about appeasing their governor and his political base than promoting the health and well-being of their constituents," Simon wrote.
While some studies have shown that masks can help slow the spread of COVID-19, there is also evidence that masking may be detrimental to the development of young children.
VERMONT STANDARDIZED TEST SCORES TANK COMPARED TO PRE-COVID RESULTS, EXPERT BLAMES SCHOOL CLOSURES
"Masks worn in public settings and in school or daycare settings may impact a range of early developing skills, such as attachment, facial processing, and socioemotional processing," Brown University researchers wrote in a study in August.
A student wears a face mask on the first day of New York City schools, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in Brooklyn, New York, U.S. September 13, 2021. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The World Health Organization advises that children younger than 5 shouldn't wear masks, and children between 6 and 11 years of age should only wear masks under certain circumstances.
Severe illness from COVID-19 in children appears to be rare, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Children accounted for roughly 25.1% of all cases reported in the United States between Nov. 11 and Nov. 18, but only account for 1.7%-4.0% of hospitalizations and 0.00%-0.25% of all COVID-19 deaths.
The Biden administration has threatened legal action against several states that have refused to implement mask mandates in schools, but Cardona said he is reluctant to withhold federal funds from those districts.
"I don't know that holding funds from students is the best approach," Cardona told Axios last month. "Ultimately, the students need more support, not less."
Search warrant executed at Marilyn Manson's West Hollywood home: source
Shawn Mendes Calls Time Spent With Camila Cabello During Pandemic 'Truly So Special'


PROFILE: A graduate of School of the Art Institute of Chicago, my creative interests are an interwoven blend of ideas, people, places and subjects that inspire me. Photography allows me explore them in ways that range from intensely personal fine art, to highly collaborative commercial productions. I live in Brooklyn and thrive on the creative community. I balance my urban existence with a passion for the mountains as rock climbing and snowboarding are fuel for my mind and spirit. I was raised in creative family and my brother is a well recognized painter Alex Gross. He is a constant source of amazement and motivation. Among my photography projects I run a digital fine art printmaking studio: Brooklyn Editions. This allows me to collaborate with other incredible photographers and artists in a way that the rest of my work does not. This business combines my digital skills, decades in the darkroom, a life time of looking at images, and a love of physical, tactile prints.


Preliminary kinks aside, messaging app's new feature shows revolutionary potential.
The world's largest mobile messaging platform, WeChat, has finally unveiled its long-anticipated "Little Apps" feature — at least to those who are persistent enough to find it.
The new feature aims to strike a middle ground between websites and dedicated apps, between ease of use and storage space. The Little Apps will be faster than websites, whose content takes time to download, and also more streamlined than stand-alone apps, taking up less space on users' phones while still serving many of the same functions. WeChat's 800 million monthly users first got wind of Little Apps in September 2016, when the company invited select developers to play around with the messaging service's newest function.
QQ News, owned by WeChat's parent company Tencent, reported that the Little Apps feature became available early Monday morning. Users can either scan a QR code with their phones or search for Little Apps in Chinese ("xiao chengxu") to access the feature.
Lu Xiaoming, a columnist for 36Kr, an online news outlet focusing on startups and technology, wrote that Android users seemed to be enjoying greater functionality and ease of use than iOS users. Lu reported that Android users, for example, could freely navigate between Little Apps and chat windows, while iOS users who navigated away from a Little App to chat with their friends were often asked to log in again upon returning to the Little App — a mild headache for Apple fans.
He Chuan, CEO of Socket College, an online forum for young entrepreneurs, shifted the focus from competition with international rivals to those closer to home — specifically, to China's two other internet heavyweights, Alibaba and Baidu. "It won't be long before other big players like Alibaba and Baidu debut their own Little App platforms," wrote He.
Apple and Google, meanwhile, have already released updates to their Messages app and Chrome web browser, respectively, that offer their own versions of the mini-app experience, and though mobile payment platform Alipay — WeChat's Alibaba-owned competitor — declined to comment for He's article, it, too, has apps-within-apps that allow users to order food, play games, call taxis, pay bills, and even request a variety of services from enterprising fellow users.
Left: A screenshot of WeChat's demo 'Little App' shows an English-language menu on a Chinese phone. Right: A screenshot from WeChat shows several 'Little Apps' currently available.
On Chinese social media, reviews of the Little Apps user interface and the demo app of the same name — parts of which are inexplicably in English — have been mixed.
A final group of users were more equivocal in their reviews of WeChat's newest function — largely because they could not figure out how to access it. "I just updated my WeChat to the newest version, and I still can't find it!" wrote one frustrated user.


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SF Insider > Uncategorized > Where Are All the Lesbian Bars in San Francisco?
Where Are All the Lesbian Bars in San Francisco?
CC BY-SA 2.0/Anthro136k Who Owns the Past/Flickr
Looking for the Quintessential Gay Bar in San Francisco?
What Are Some Must-Visit Gay Bars in San Francisco?
Where's a Welcoming Lesbian Bar in the Castro in San Francisco?
San Francisco is known around the world for its legendary LGBT bars and nightlife. Especially in the Castro district, there's a real sense of thriving community and fun. Yet many lesbians find themselves a little underrepresented on the scene, with many venues tending to cater exclusively to men or, at best, for men and women together.
The fact is, there aren't that many exclusively lesbian bars in San Francisco. But here's where the local lesbians go.
El Rio on Mission Street is at the heart of the San Francisco lesbian bar scene. Entry is always free, and there's a very well attended monthly soul dance party known as Hard French. A great place to meet locals and find out where to head next, El Rio has a pool table and shuffleboard, spacious dance floor, outdoor seating and a dive bar feel with plenty of odd trinkets.
QBar
QBar has a more mixed clientele as an icon of the Castro and an epicenter for LGBT nightlife in San Francisco. It has a packed calendar of events, including the Tuesday ladies' night for lesbians, called 13 Licks. The crowd tends to be younger than many other San Francisco bars.
Wild Side West
Wild Side West in Bernal Heights might be open to everyone, but it was certainly founded by lesbians. In fact, it was probably the first lesbian bar in the city, having opened in 1962 by Pat Ramseyer and Nancy White. It has a history of pride and community that goes back decades, having to deal in the early days with stiff resistance from the locals. The current ownership continues in the same tradition, hosting nightly get-togethers for Trivia Wednesdays.
Twin Peaks Tavern
Another mainstay since the founding days of the city's gay scene, Twin Peaks Tavern opened in 1972. Unlike most San Francisco bars catering to LGBT clientele, Twin Peaks Tavern decided that the time for hiding away was over and made the radical decision to have large plate glass windows looking out to (and in from) the street. Today, the venue remains at the heart of the Castro and has even been granted landmark status by the City Board of Supervisors. As might be expected, the interior retains many of its original features, too, including a mezzanine, wooden U-shaped bar and a mirrored backbar that predates the Prohibition era. Locals head here for an unparalleled sense of community and history.