SSH (Secure Shell) is a secure substitute for telnet. With SSH, your entire session is encrypted, including logins and passwords. But that's just the beginning; you can do some pretty amazing things with SSH if you know how to configure it and use it. This tutorial shows you how.
SSH stands for "Secure Shell" and is primarily a communications program for character-based sessions. This means that, in its simplest form, SSH works like Telnet to connect you to a command prompt or character-based application on a remote system. However, the main difference between Telnet and SSH is that SSH encrypts the entire session, so that it's impossible for someone to spy on your session even if they find a way to intercept your data stream on the network.
That, by itself, is an amazing benefit, but that's only the beginning. SSH also supports authentication keys, which makes it possible to secure passwordless sessions. This can be extremely useful for unattended system tasks such as remote printing, overnight system backups, or periodic system polling for any purpose.
In addition, the SSH suite of programs includes scp and sftp, two secure file transfer protocols that can be used to download or upload sensitive data with complete confidentiality.
And finally, SSH supports port forwarding, which makes it possible to relay an entire protocol stream (like X Window or HTTP, for instance) from one machine to another. For instance, I frequently use this feature to display an X Window graphical application (such as a word processor or Web browser) from a client's machine to my own screen for trouble-shooting purposes using nothing more than a plain old SSH connection.
Similarly, I can use this feature to point my browser to a client's router or printer to access their Web-based configuration menu, and I can even get through a client's firewall protection (with their permission, of course) by using the port-forwarding features of SSH to piggy-back over a connection I've allowed them to establish from their machine to my own.
That's a lot to absorb right now, but the point is that you can do some pretty amazing things with SSH if you know how to use it. In this tutorial, we will first examine how to use the most basic features of this software, such as connecting to a remote system and transferring files. Next, we will see how to configure the software to implement various desirable features, such as passwordless connections with authentication keys. And finally, we will cover some advanced tips and tricks, including how to use port forwarding as just mentioned.
To get started, let's pretend that someone else has installed and configured SSH on your system and that you are simply going to use it. Here is what you would need to know.
Without any additional options, ssh will attempt to login to the remote server with the same login ID you are using on the calling system. For instance, if you are currently logged in as johndoe, ssh will assume you are trying to login as that user on the remote system.
At this point, one of two things may happen, depending on how the server and your account have been configured: you might get prompted for a password, or you might get logged in immediately if authentication keys have been used (explained later).
We will see later on that it is possible to exchange authentication keys between machines so that a user can connect to an account on another machine without being prompted for a password. At first glance, this might seem like a security risk since an intruder who might gain access to one account would automatically have access to a second account on another machine. That is quite right, and we will see that there are ways to mitigate this risk.
For now, I just want to mention that passwordless connections are possible, and they can be extremely useful for unattended tasks where no user is available to enter a password. For instance, you may want to system to automatically back up your home directory to a server at 2 AM every day. If you set things up right, there is no particular risk since an intruder would only have access to your backup files, which would be rather pointless if he has already gained access to your live files.
Similarly, you may want to set up automated tasks between systems to transfer print jobs to a remote site or periodically poll a directory for the presence of incoming orders. There are lots of scenarios where controlled and authorized passwordless connections can be useful without jeopardizing security. We will cover these scenarios later, after we are finished covering the basics.
The scp command is very similar to the standard Unix cp command with the simple difference that you can prefix its arguments with a system name to indicate you are copying files over the network to a different machine.
The scp command will produce some feedback regarding this transfer, including the name of the file, the size, and the time it took to transfer it.
As mentioned before, it is possible for the system administrator to configure your account for passwordless access. If this has been done, then the scp process would be the same as the standard cp process: you would simply enter your command, the transfer would take place, and you would then be returned to your prompt. It's remarkably convenient.
Secure FTP is a less convenient file transfer utility patterned after the old FTP interface. It provides a familiar user interface for those who are used to FTP but does not provide any other advantage.
If you are a fan of the FTP command set, then this is the utility for you. The standard FTP commands such as put, get, and dir are all available. The only difference is that all transfers, including your login ID and password, will be encrypted to make the session secure.
On most systems, your access will be protected with a standard password, which makes it vulnerable to password-guessing. In the next section, we will see how SSH can use authentication keys to impove both convenience and security.
In the old days, if you wanted to send a secret message to someone, you would encode it using the most clever method you could come up with, and send it in this encrypted form to your correspondent. That person would then use some sort of password or secret key to decode your message.
The challenge, of course, was to communicate this secret decoding key to your cohort in such a way that nobody else would intercept it in transit. In times of war, some extremely elaborate systems were devised to send these keys to their destination in a secure manner so that subsequent correspondence could be sent in encrypted form without as much security. The trouble was, you could never be absolutely sure that your key had not been somehow copied by the enemy, so you were never completely sure whether your encrypted messages were actually secure.
SSH turns the whole problem on its head in such a clever way that you have to wonder why no-one thought of it earlier.
The SSH protocols use two separate keys to implement encryption: one key is used to encode the message while a separate and totally different key is used to decode it.
Now, here is where it gets clever: If you want to exchange encrypted messages with a pal, you give him your encryption key and you keep the corresponding decryption key to yourself. Your buddy uses your encryption key to encode his message to you and then sends it along by the most convenient means at his disposal. It doesn't have to be secure since the message is encoded. For instance, he could send you the message by email and he wouldn't care if someone intercepts it in transit.
When you receive his message, you use your decryption key to break the code and read the text.
The beauty of this system is that you never had to expose your decryption key; it never had to leave your office, so it was never in danger of being intercepted. Not only that, but you didn't have to protect the encryption key either when you sent it to your buddy; you don't care if the whole world sees it because it can only be used to encrypt messages addressed to you, not decrypt them. This key allow anyone to send you encrypted messages if they want, but only you can decrypt them.
Meanwhile, your buddy would have sent you his own encryption key so that you can respond to his message with the same level of security. You would encode your response using his key and then send it to him, without any particular security measures. When he receives your encrypted message, he would use his decryption key, which has never left his computer, to read your response.
SSH provides a simple tool to generate unique key pairs. The encryption key, which you want to hand out freely to anyone who wants to communicate with you, is called the "public key," because you don't mind if the public at large gets to see it. The other half of this pair, the decryption key, is called the "private key" because you want to take great care to keep it to yourself.
If, for some reason, you ever have reason to believe your private key has been compromised (i.e. someone has obtained a copy), you can simply delete it and create a new pair, and send the public key from that pair to everybody you need to communicate with.
So, how do these public keys get exchanged anyway? After all, you may have used SSH to connect to a remote system before and you certainly don't remember sending them a special key in advance, right?
The answer is quite simple: When SSH is installed on a system, a pair of "host keys" are created as part of the process. These keys typically reside in /etc/ssh on a Linux system and have names like ssh_host_rsa.pub (public key, as indicated by the .pub extension) and ssh_host_rsa (private key, no filename extension).
You may come across the acronymns RSA and DSA quite often as you study SSH; these are two different encrytion protocols and the history behind them is outside the scope of this short tutorial. They both work, so it should be of no concern to you which protocol is used. Generally, RSA is considered better for obscure technical reasons, so our examples will assume we are using RSA for everything. Your system may default to DSA, and that would be perfectly fine.
When a user on system "A" calls system "B" over SSH, the two systems exchange public keys and then proceed to accept the login ID and password (or other authentication method). As a result, even this information (your user name and password) are encrypted, along with the rest of your entire login session.
In addition to providing encryption for entire sessions, SSH keys may also be used for a totally different purpose: authentication. After all, each file in a pair of SSH keys matches the other one in a way that is virtually impossible to replicate, so this situation can be leveraged to provide a much more secure authentication method than the traditional login ID and password.
If you just press ENTER when prompted for the location and name of your key, ssh-keygen will accept the default pathname specified in parentheses. That's a perfectly acceptable value and there is no particular reason you would want anything else in most situations.
In fact, ssh-keygen will create two keys: one by the name specified as the default ("id_rsa" in our example) and a second one with the same name but with a .pub extension added to it, i.e. "id_rsa.pub" in our example. As expected, the .pub file is the public key that you will upload to remote accounts you wish to SSH to, while the file without a filename extension is the private key that you will keep on your system and guard very carefully, making sure it does not have read or write access for the group or other users so that nobody can make a copy of it or modify it.
The second prompt is interesting: you are being prompted for a "passphrase." What is this all about?
Quite simply, this allows you to put a password on the private key itself for added protection. For instance, what if someone were to get a copy of your private key, install it on their own computer and then try to use it to login as you or transfer files under your ID? Without a password, there would be nothing to stop this intruder. However, by protecting the key itself with a password, the intruder would be prompted for that password and would not get any further.
In fact, the reason this password is called a passphrase is that you can include spaces and make it as long as you wish. For instance, a typical password might be something like 2hard4U2guess while a passphrase could be somthing like " You'll never guess this in 1000 years!". As a general rule, the longer your passphrase, the less likely it is to be guessable.
Now, the obvious question that probably comes up in your mind is, "Doesn't this defeat the purpose of using keys to begin with? After all, we were trying to eliminate passwords and here we are again, getting prompted for one!"
Valid objection. And there are two perfectly good responses to that.
First, even though you are being prompted to enter a password, the password is on your authentication key, not on your login account. Password-based logins should still be disabled if you are using authentication keys.
You see, the danger with allowing password-based logins is that any stranger, anywhere in the world, can try to guess your password by trying every word in the dictionary or common combinations of letters and numbers until they get in. And I can assure you, a lot of people are trying. I know this from looking at access logs on my clients' systems: I see brute-force attacks all the time, and they all fail because I don't allow password-based SSH logins on the systems I manage.
Conversely, if you disable password-based logins (we'll see how to do this shortly) and put a passphrase on your authentication key instead, you are still being prompted for a password but you are the only person in the world who can enter it because the program that is prompting you is running on your own computer, not on the server. This means brute-force attacks will not work in this scenario; they can't possibly work because no combination of login ID and password will let anyone into your account; only your authentication key can allow this.
From this point on, your passphrase is saved in RAM and will be fed to any program that requires it, such as ssh, scp or sftp. Is that safe? Well, it's as safe as your own login session. If you walk away from your desk and don't log out and don't lock your screen, then yes, someone could sit at your desk while you're away and access remote sites as you. Of course, that person could also access all your local files such as email, documents and your job applications to your employer's competitors.
However, assuming you exercise common sense, your passphrase is as safe in memory as it would be in your head because no standard user has access to it. In addition, this value disappears from RAM as soon as you terminate your login session. For this reason, it may be wise to add the "ssh-add" command to your .profile file so that you will automatically be prompted for it when you log in.
On most modern X Window-based systems, SSH will invoke the "agent" automatically the first time you enter your passphrase and will memorize it for the rest of your session, so you may not even have to invoke ssh-add manually. In other environments such as Windows, you may have to click on an icon to start the SSH Agent.
Now, what? You have generated a pair of authentication keys and have protected your private key with a passphrase. What happens next?
At this time, the authentication keys are most likely located in the .ssh subdirectory of your home directory. To be consistent with our previous examples, we will assume your user ID is johndoe and that your home directory is /home/johndoe on a Linux system. Consequently, you should have a subdirectory named /home/johndoe/.ssh containing the files id_rsa and id_rsa.pub if you have accepted the defaults.
What you need to do next is transfer the public key, id_rsa.pub, to the .ssh subdirectory of your account on the remote system and rename it authorized_keys2 on that system.
Again, using our previous examples, we will assume the remote system is named pluto and that your account on that machine is johnny. Using the method of your choice (ftp, scp, cut-and-paste between two windows, USB flashdrive, etc.), get that file to machine pluto and save it as /home/johnny/.ssh/authorized_keys2. If the .ssh directory does not exist in your account on pluto, just create it.
Important: If anyone can modify, replace or overwrite the authorized_keys2 file on the target system, they could replace it with their own key and access the system as you. For this reason, permissions and ownership must be correct on both the file and the .ssh directory. Specifically, permissions on .ssh should be 755, and 644 on authorized_keys2. In addition, both must belong to the correct user (johnny in this example). If this is not the case, SSH will deny the connection for your own protection.
Note that authorized_keys2 can contain multiple keys, allowing more than one account to connect remotely as this user. To make this possible, simply append as many additional public keys as you wish to this file. After all, these public keys as just text files and can be appended to authorized_keys2 using the ">>" shell construct, or inserted with a cut-and-paste operation in a standard text editor.
When SSH was originally designed (what we call today "SSH-1"), the authentication keys were called identity and identity.pub, and the file containing those keys on the remote site was called authorized_keys, a logical name for it.
Over time, a new and improved version of SSH was designed, which is referred to as "SSH-2". This is the default protocol on most modern systems.
Since the two protocols are quite different, the default filenames were changed to avoid potential configuration errors such as attempting to use an SSH-1 key on an SSH-2 server. This is why the file containing the authorized keys on a remote server that uses SSH-2 is now called authorized_keys2.
In addition, SSH-2 supports two types of authentication: RSA and DSA. For this reason, the default filename for authentication keys under SSH-2 is now id_rsa or id_dsa, depending on the chosen protocol.
We can use SSH keys as a method of authentication to replace password-based logins. The keys are generated using the command ssh-keygen and should be assigned a passphrase under normal conditions.
By default, the keys will be created in the .ssh subdirectory of your home directory. To complete the process, you need to copy the public key (the .pub file) from the source system to the target machine in a .ssh subdirectory of your home directory on that machine, and you must name that file authorized_keys2.
Finally, it is critical that your .ssh subdirectories and their contents on both systems be suitably protected against tampering. Specifically, this means directories and files must belong to the appropriate user and not be writable by members of the group or the general public.
/etc/ssh_config: System-wide defaults for all outgoing calls.
/etc/sshd_config: System-wide defaults for all incoming calls.
~/.ssh/config: Individual user preferences for outgoing calls.
The first two are host settings, configured by the system administrator, while the last one is an optional set of personal SSH settings and can be modified by each individual user.
The file /etc/ssh_config contains default settings for any outgoing SSH transmission (which includes ssh, scp and sftp) initiated on the host where this file resides.
For example, in this segment, we see that the default port is set to 22 and the default protocol is "2" but will fall back to "1" if needed. You will not usually want to modify these defaults.
One possible exception is the "StrictHostKeyChecking" setting. The first time you call a system, the host key for that system is saved in your "known_hosts" file in your .ssh subdirectory. On subsequent calls, SSH will compare the remote machine's host key with the one you have on file and will warn you if it has changed. This is in case an impostor has managed to hijack the IP address of the remote system and is attempting to pose as that machine and trick you into logging in to the wrong system.
While this is a worthwhile safeguard, you may have reason to disable this feature in cases where you know the remote system's host key has changed for a valid reason, such as after reinstalling SSH or the OS, and the unwanted prompt might disrupt some automated transfers you have set up.
Note that we did not replace the commented-out entry but rather added a new line with the value we wanted. I recommend this approach when modifying any settings in order to preserve the original default value for reference purposes. You may want to return to that previous value some day and it is helpful to leave evidence of what it was prior to your changes.
The term sshd stands for "SSH Daemon," which is the process that listens for connection requests on the network and determines whether they will be allowed. The file /etc/sshd_config is the configuration file for this daemon and is therefore critical to the security of your SSH service.
When the SSH daemon is started, it reads this file and adopts the settings you specified in it. For instance, if you wanted to disable password-based SSH logins, this is where you would do it. Similarly, if you needed your SSH daemon to monitor a different port than the standard port (22), this is the file you would edit to make that change.
As a general rule, the defaults in this file are reasonable and you should not modify them unless you understand what you are doing. Just like the ssh_config file we examined in the previous section, this file also includes commented-out entries for the most common parameters, indicating their default values.
Port: Indicates the port number that SSH will listen on.
Protocol: Indicates which protocol your server will support. Valid values are either 2 for SSH-2, or 1 for SSH-1, or both "2,1" if you want your server to accept connections over either protocol. Most modern systems support protocol 2 by default. If your configuration file indicates only one supported protocol, clients attempting to connect using the other protocol will not get a connection.
PermitRootLogin: Do you want to allow remote users to SSH into your system directly as root? Generally, this is considered poor security policy because root is an anonymous user; you can't really tell who logged in as that user. However, on a trusted system such as your own LAN, you may find it convenient to login directly as root without the hassle of using su or sudo.
StrictModes: The first time you access a system over SSH, an entry is created in your known_hosts file to save the host key from that system. Every time you connect to that system again, SSH will check your known_hosts file to make sure the host key on the remote system is indeed what you have on file. If it isn't, SSH will assume an impostor is posing as this host and will deny the connection. This is called "strict host key checking," or "strict mode." This is usually a desirable feature but you may want to disable it if you have just changed your host key and don't want a bunch of users to be denied access to your system, especially if these involve automated processes such as system backups or remote printing.
PasswordAuthentication: If you want to disable password-based logins and force users to use authentication keys (recommended), set this parameter to "no." Note that you may also need to set ChallengeResponseAuthentication to "no" on PAM-enabled systems for this to work.
ChallengeResponseAuthentication: This setting is equivalent to PasswordAuthentication for systems that use PAM, the "Pluggable Authentication Module" interface. Since most modern systems use PAM, you should set this parameter to "no," along with PasswordAuthencation, if you don't want to allow password-based logins.
PermitEmptyPasswords: It's difficult to image a scenario where you would want to allow password-based logins and allow users to login without a password. Normally, if you want to allow paswordless logins, you will usually implement this with authentication keys, which are actually more secure than passwords. However, your might be in a special situation where you may want to allow users to get into a system without a password, possibly to allow potential customers to try out a piece of software for demonstration purposes. If this is the case, set this parameter to "yes" and be sure to allow password-based logins. In all other cases, you should make sure this parameter is set to "no."
AllowUsers: This is a handy parameter for password-enabled system. The AllowUsers parameter lets the system administrator specify a list of users who will be allowed to access the system; all others will be denied. For instance, the line AllowUsers john mary will restrict access to the login IDs john and mary only. Note that it only makes sense to use this parameter when password-based logins are enabled. If password-based logins are not allowed, access is already restricted to those users who have a valid authentication key installed in their account, so there is no need to also specify their names here.
For the full list of parameters, check out the man page for sshd_config.
NOTE: After you modify this file, you will have to restart your SSH daemon if it was already running. The command to do this will vary with the flavour of Linux or Unix you are running. For instance, on Ubuntu, you would enter the command service ssh restart. On OpenSuSE, you would enter rcsshd restart. On Mac OS X, you wouldn't need to restart the SSH daemon because it is invoked on demand rather than running in the background. Refer to your system documentation for the appropriate method for your environment.
While system defaults for outgoing SSH calls are saved in /etc/ssh_config, users may wish to set their own personal preferences different from the system defaults. This is done by simply adding the desired lines to the file config in the user's .ssh subdirectory.
This can be particularly useful when creating automated SSH transfers in shell scripts, for instance.
Port forwarding is one of the most mysterious, yet most useful, features of SSH. Using port forwarding, you can get a different type of connection (HTTP, telnet, X Window, SMB, printing, etc.) to "piggy-back" over your own SSH session in either direction. This is often called "tunnelling" as well.
For instance, let's say you need to reconfigure a client's router or printer. If you were sitting in their office, you would simply start up a Web browser and access the Web-based administrative tool on the device. However, since you are sitting in your own office, perhaps even in a different city, you don't have this option. Or do you?
If you have access to this system over SSH, you do have that option. Using the appropriate options to ssh, you would ask SSH to forward any HTTP packets originating from your system to the IP address of the device you are trying to configure on your client's LAN. And as if by magic, you can now access the configuration page on that device, right from your office!
Similarly, what if you wanted the remote host to send traffic back to your system, such as perhaps sending a print job to the printer sitting on your desk? The classic challenge with this is that your system is usually protected by a firewall, so the remote host cannot initiate a connection to send that print jobs. Using port forwarding, however, you can allow the remote host to "piggy-back" over your existing SSH connection to send this traffic back to your system, right through your firewall.
Finally, another common use of port forwarding is to allow an X Window application running on the server to display on your own monitor, again without having to open any ports on your firewall.
Let's have a look at each one of these examples in detail.
The -L option (for "Local port") allows you to forward a port from your local system to the remote host. Conceptually, it's like creating an alias that transforms a resource located on the remote system into one that resides on your own LAN.
For instance, let's say you would like to configure a router on a remote system, and let's also assume this router is not enabled for remote administration. Normally, you would have to be inside the network (i.e. sitting in the remote office) to access the administrative Web page on that router from inside the LAN. However, if you have an SSH connection to that remote host, you can relay your HTTP packets from your local machine to the target device using your SSH connection as the middle-man.
Note that there is no particular significance to port number 1234; we simply picked any number that was not already being used on our system. The only restriction is that you cannot use port numbers below 1024 unless you are root; any other valid port number (1024-65535) is fair game.
Note also that the IP address we specified to the -L option represents the device we are attempting to connect to, not the IP address of the system we are calling.
Just as we are able to "tunnel" packets for any port from our system to the remote host over an SSH connection, we can also do the exact opposite and relay packets from the remote system to our own.
For instance, let's assume you are sitting at home and accessing an application running on your office server. What if you would like this application to send print jobs directly to the printer sitting on your desk at home? If this printer is accessible over the network, you can fool the remote host into thinking your printer is a local device on its own network using port forwarding.
The -R option, for "Remote," tells SSH to redirect a given port on the remote site to a particular port and IP address on your local network.
From that point on, anything the remote host sends to itself over port 3000 is automatically relayed to your network, care of IP address 192.168.2.33, port 9100.
The topic of printer configuration is outside the scope of this tutorial, but the above examples should be sufficient to point you in the right direction if you are already familiar with configuring printers under Linux.
One very common and useful application of SSH's port-forwarding features is to run X Window applications remotely. For instance, if someone calls you with a problem they are having configuring their Web browser on their Linux system, it would be nice to be able to login under their ID on their system using SSH and start up the browser and have it show up on your own screen.
Once the SSH connection is established, you can then start the X Window application of your choice and the X packets will be relayed to your own X Window server, i.e. your own screen.
Of course, for this to work, you must be running X Window on your own system, which usually means you would be doing this from a Linux system at your end. While it is true that there are X Window servers available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, these are not their native display system, so the -X option will not readily work under Windows and Mac OS X unless you have specifically arranged for an X server to be running.
Did you find an error on this page or do you have a comment?
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text:
National Alliance for Adoptee Equality
Get Involved: Sign a Letter
Get Involved: Call your Representative
Adoptee Citizenship
Make a Phone Call
Add Your Name to Letters to Congress
Rights to Citizenship for Intercountry Adoptees
"I have fought for the US. The US needs to fight for me," said Leah, a Navy Reserve veteran who courageously shared her story of discovering her lack of U.S. citizenship just days before her deployment to Iraq. She was born in South Korea in 1982 and adopted by an American family in 1984. Because the U.S. is the only country she knows and because her parents were U.S. citizens, never once did it occur to her and her family that she could be anything but an American citizen until it was too late. Unfortunately, there are as many as 49,000 more such people suffering from the same crisis as Leah. Click here to read more on her story.
Led by the Korean American Grassroots Conference, Adoptee Rights Campaign, and Holt International, the National Alliance for Adoptee Equality is a consortium of community organizations, faith-based groups, adoptee advocates, and allies who came together to raise awareness of the inequality of citizenship among intercountry adoptees and to work towards materializing a permanent, legislative solution to end this crisis. NAAE officially launched in November, 2019 with the support of impacted adoptees, familes, and friends from across the United States, as well as members of Congress from both parties. Click here to see the current list of member organizations of NAAE. You can also follow NAAE on Facebook.
Adoptee.Equality@gmail.com • Facebook • (202) 450-4252

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Cécile Furtado-Heine, born Cécile Charlotte Furtado, was a French philanthropist. She was born in Paris on March 6, 1821 and died on December 10, 1896.

Biography
Cécile Furtado was born in Paris on March 6, 1821 to a Jewish family of Sephardic (Spanish-Portuguese) ancestry.

Cecile's father Élie Furtado was the son of Joseph Furtado, the rabbi of Bayonne, and the nephew of Abraham Furtado, a banker in Paris and representative of the constituency of Bayonne in the central consistory in Paris. Abraham Furtado would also serve as secretary of Napoleon Bonaparte's "Grand Sanhedrin", a Jewish high court convened in Europe.

Cecile's mother Rose Fould was the daughter of Beer Léon Fould, the bank manager and mayor of Rocquencourt, near Versailles. Her maternal uncle, Achille Fould, would be the French Finance minister under Napoleon III.

Cécile was married on October 2, 1838 in Rocquencourt to the rich Frankfurt banker Charles Heine (1810 Hamburg - 1865 Luchon), the son of Salomon Heine and cousin of the German poet Heinrich Heine and the banker Michel Heine.

Widowed on July 4, 1865 at age 44, she inherited a considerable fortune. In Paris, she lived in a large mansion in the middle of a huge garden, at 28 rue de Monceau. Having no children, she adopted an orphan, Marguerite Laure Juliette dite Paule (1847 - 1903), who was possibly the biological daughter of Cécile's brother Paul Furtado-Fould and his mistress Marie-Julie Morel. Marguerite Paule married Michel-Aloys Ney, Duke of Elchingen in 1866, and later married Victor Masséna, Duke of Rivoli in 1882.

During the war of 1870, Cécile supported the Red Cross and organized an ambulance service for the repatriation of the wounded. In 1884, she created an annuity for a children's hospice in the 14th Arrondissement. The street where this establishment is located has been called Furtado-Heine Street since 1897. She financed other establishments, including a nursery school in the city of Bayonne and a nursery in Montrouge.

In 1895, at the return of the French expeditionary force of Madagascar, Cécile sought to relieve the fate of the sick soldiers. She bequeathed to the army her villa in Nice on the Promenade des Anglais as a convalescent home for officers; today that building is known as Villa Furtado-Heine. She was also responsible for the cost of maintaining the sick, the staff, and the building. She was also very generous to the Pasteur Institute. A bust representing her still adorns the hall of the Institute.

Cécile Furtado-Heine did not forget her co-religionists. She supported several Jewish charities and contributed to the construction of new synagogues in France and Belgium. The most beautiful of these synagogues is without doubt that of Versailles where two plates of red marble pay homage to her. She also underwrote the cost of stained glass windows at the Saint-Germain church of Grand-Chesnay on which Rocquencourt depends; they represent a Saint Cecilia and a Saint Napoleon. Her charitable activities and generosity earned her the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor (Légion d'honneur) in 1896. At that time, it was still very rare for a woman to attain such an honor.

A few weeks after this appointment, Cécile Furtado-Heine died on December 10, 1896 in her castle Rocquencourt. Her death was marked by a public mourning which is associated with the President of the Republic, Felix Faure, ministers and the municipality of Paris. Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, gave the eulogy at her funeral.

Sources
 AFMEG
 Généalogie Heine

Bibliography
 Richard Ayoun, « Une femme philanthrope : Madame Cécile Furtado-Heine (1821-1896) », dans Centenaire de la Synagogue de Versailles, Versailles, 1986, .
 Lucienne Mazenod (dir.), Les femmes célèbres, Paris, éditions d'art Lucien Mazenod, t. 1, 1960, « Furtado-Heine Cécile », .
 M. Parcot, « Furtado-Heine Cécile », dans M. Prévost et Roman d'Amat, Dictionnaire de biographie française, Paris, Letouzey et Ané, 1954, 14 : 1458.

Related articles
 Villa Furtado-Heine

1821 births
1896 deaths
19th-century French Sephardi Jews
19th-century French philanthropists
French people of Portuguese descent
Fould family
Jewish philanthropists
Officiers of the Légion d'honneur

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Fox Coffee House in Wrigley will permanently close Aug. 23. Courtesy of Yelp!/Jeff V.
restaurant closure
Wrigley's Fox Coffee Shop to close permanently at end of month
Brian Addison
Fox Coffee Shop, the sole indie coffee shop in Long Beach's Wrigley neighborhood, announced they would be permanently closing with their last day of business being Sunday, Aug. 23.
"Closing Fox has been an extremely difficult decision but unfortunately this year has taken a lot of wonderful small businesses down, including my own," owner Mary Gallagher told the Post. "I'm so grateful for the six years of business I shared with Wrigley, one of the most charming neighborhoods in Long Beach."
After Portfolio did away with its '90s-meets-Bohemian look for a cleaner, contemporary concept, it left two coffee shops in the city that remained true extensions of their neighborhoods in both vibes and looks, while only hinting at going full-on Third Wave: Viento y Agua in Belmont Heights and Fox Coffee House in Wrigley.
Fox eschewed pretense: A Yoskay Yamamoto-painted wall was what welcomed you, along with various rugs that once were fancy and now were cozy. You were met with a fairly large, eclectic menu—from lavender milks and matcha concoctions to an ode to Nutella by way of their Filbert latte—while tending to old-school coffee house vibes with things that are rarely seen in contemporary shops: live music, art shows, poetry readings, open mics…
On top of this, Gallagher's house made treats that became patron favorites: vegan chocolate chip cookies sat side-by-side with crispy cherry treats and s'mores chocolate cake. Fox was, unquestionably, an extension of Wrigley.
As for the future?
"I'm sure Fox will resurrect in the future, whether I'm slingin' vegan pastries at a Farmer's Market or cruisin' in a Fox Food truck," Gallagher said.
The announcement came via Facebook:


text:
Climate Scepticism
joint ideas under construction
Do not read this blog post
Posted on 06 Dec 15 by Paul Matthews	8 Comments
The BBC Trust has decreed that a light-hearted Radio 4 programme by Quentin Letts, "What's the point of the Met Office", which included a brief section suggesting that global warming might be a bit exaggerated, broke its guidelines on impartiality. See the verdict here, Quentin Letts's piece here and commentary from Biased BBC here. The programme has been removed from the BBC iPlayer.
In order to respect the BBC ruling, let's have no more laughing at the Met Office. So please, no more references to Michael Fish saying we are not going to have a hurricane, and no more mention of the Met Office prediction of a barbecue summer. Henceforth, it is not appropriate to mention the video of Vicky Pope confidently predicting that 2014 would be 0.3C warmer than 2004, a prediction that turned out to be completely wrong. And any satirical comments along the lines of "Here come de heap big warmy" will not be tolerated.
All copies of the audio of the Quentin Letts programme should be deleted, in accordance with BBC guidelines, and if you have a transcript of the programme, please delete it.
And whatever you do, please do not read, publicise or distribute the following transcript of the Quentin Letts programme, produced by Alex Cull, who is now undertaking a re-education course conducted by Cardinal Harrabin.
Updates: more commentary here, here and here.
Fri 11th: How I was vaporised by the BBC's Green Gestapo after daring to mock the Met Office and global warming
Sun 13th: Orwellian: Award-Winning Journalist Censored After Skepticism of Man-Made Climate Change
BBC's green gestapo punishes presenter for wrongthink
BBC censures itself for telling the truth about 'global warming'
There is a copy of the sound recording here (HT Michael Hart), also here.
The Streisand effect seems to be in operation here.
Wed 16th: Some interesting updates from Quentin Letts himself on twitter:
Mole: complaints about censorship of my R4 show on the Met Office now exceed lobby-whipped complaints about the original show. Can it be so?
BBC boss Lord Hall, quizzed by @Jesse_Norman, just declined to express any enthusiasm for censorship of my R4 programme. Went pink.
Exchange came after Hall said 'people's views should be heard on a range of opinions in all things'. Er, insert not, perhaps.
What's the Point of…? The Met Office
[Sound of sheep bleating.]
Male voice [over loudspeaker]: So we'd like to extend a very warm welcome to everybody here at the Royal Three Counties Show. Indeed, the forecast was for a thunderstorm – luckily, that hasn't happened. But then you can never trust the weather forecasters.
Quentin Letts: Can't trust weather forecasts?! Why not? Most forecasts come from the Met Office, a government body which receives hundreds of millions of pounds of public money. The Met Office employs 1,800 people, some of them on big money. It does a great deal more than predicting the next "barbecue summer". It has military links. It takes a not uncontroversial position on climate change. If we don't believe its weather forecasts, what about the rest of its activities? Is it a national asset? A much-loved institution? Or a historic throwback, in need of reform? What's the point… of the Met Office?
Male voice: The area forecast for the next 24 hours: Viking, North Utcire, South Utcire, north-easterly 4 or 5, backing north-westerly 5 to 7, mainly fair, good…
Male voice: What I have on offer for you today is going to come as a real rude shock…
Male voice: Not a lot of sunshine about today, in fact much more rainfall too, in the south, that we had expected…
Male voice: In all districts, there shall be some showers, but with bright intervals…
Quentin Letts: The weather forecasts down the ages, Met Office voices broadcasting on the BBC, for the past 90 years. An official take on the weather was the idea of a Royal Navy admiral, Robert FitzRoy, who had sailed to Australia with some chap called Charles Darwin. He started data-based predictions of the weather in 1854, but set up a forerunner of the Met Office five years later, when a bad storm off Anglesey sank the clipper Royal Charter, with the loss of 450 lives, mostly gold miners returning from Australia. FitzRoy used the latest technology for his forecasts, as historian Catherine Potts explains.
Catherine Potts: Instrumental meteorology had been improving for the last 50 or so years, so we had much better instruments to measure, to understand changes in pressure which were crucial, self-recording anemometers for the wind had been invented in the previous 20 or so years – just take the Beaufort Scale, which was invented in 1806, and that enabled people to measure wind in the same way across the world.
Quentin Letts: Was it based in London?
Catherine Potts: Yes it was, it was based in London, um, and it had stations – what we term stations, recording sites – around the UK at the ports, and they sent their information in via telegraph, the Met Office basically couldn't have actually started doing anything without the invention of the telegraph.
Quentin Letts: What was the size of the thing, at the start, and who was funding it?
Catherine Potts: It was funded by the government and it was absolutely tiny – there were three staff and they were headed up by Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who was our founder and actually the inventor, essentially, of the science of forecasting.
Quentin Letts: The science of forecasting? The latest technology? These terms evoke egg-headish certitude, yet can we ever be sure about the climate? The weather forecast is 154 years old, but not everyone agrees with the way the Met Office boffins concoct their forecasts. They still get the weather wrong! Now, we – the British public – are buying them a £97 million computer to improve the accuracy of those forecasts. Mark Vogan is an amateur weatherman who uses ocean temperatures and soil moisture for his predictions.
Mark Vogan: The Met Office methods are based around computer, and unfortunately computer isn't going to necessarily always give us the answers, you know. It's human input into that computer, and the computer obviously just runs through various equations to come up with scenarios, and obviously, accuracy-wise, once you get out past 10 days, the accuracy greatly drops off. For example, we've got a strong El Nino developing in the East Pacific – that has a big impact on the atmosphere, so if you can understand what response that water has to the atmosphere, then you can have a rough idea as to what's going on. For example, the North Atlantic – I'm 32 years of age, I don't recall the last time the Atlantic has been as cold as it is, compared to normal, in my lifetime, and that has a big impact, I think that's going to rule a cooler summer, I think it's had an impact on the last couple of winters, so if you can understand what ocean temperature does to the atmosphere, then I think that can give you a reasonably good idea as to what kind of weather you can expect, further down the road.
Quentin Letts: Cooler summer?! I'm melting here, in 36 degrees – that's 96 Fahrenheit, in old money. Piers Corbyn, brother of Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, runs his forecasting service WeatherAction from a cramped basement office in South London. He uses sunspots and other non-mainstream methods, yet has a strong record of accuracy. And he has some quite strong words about the Met Office.
Piers Corbyn: They spend hundreds of millions on supercomputers. Those supercomputers will – even if you spend ten times that – would not improve forecasting skill one jot. They've reached the limit. The reason why they've reached the limit is they're ignoring external influences – solar activity and the modulation of solar effects by the Moon. If those are not in there, whatever goes in will produce what comes out, and rubbish in is rubbish out. What those supercomputers do is enable them to get short-range right answers quicker, but when it goes to anything like a few days ahead, it enables them to get the wrong answers quicker.
Quentin Letts: The title of this programme is "What's the Point of the Met Office?". Can you answer that question – what's the point of this organisation?
Piers Corbyn: The point for them and the government is it's primarily was set up to do weather forecasting, to the best of its ability and to the best available science. They fail in that, because they're not using the best available science. The reason is, they've had another purpose latched on them, which is to – and you read it in their blurb on the TV – it's to promote and defend and propagate the man-made climate change theory, and suggest what horrors are going to come, allegedly, from more CO2, which is fiction.
Quentin Letts: A contentious point, and one we'll come back to. [James Bond signature music plays in the background.] By the way, did you know that all Met Office forecasters must sign the Official Secrets Act? Civil servants, you see… "It may drizzle in Droitwich tomorrow, 007. But if you tell anyone, I shall have to kill you". One operative, who spent three decades at the Met Office is John Kettley, now running a weather consultancy of his own. What, for him, is the point of the Met Office?
John Kettley: The point of the Met Office is that it provides fantastic information worldwide but particularly in the UK, using the skills of experienced forecasters and the power – fantastic computer power – that is now available to organisations like the Met Office and others around the world, to provide excellent computer analysis for the future. So, you know, we are looking, these days, not only at weeks and months ahead but years ahead, if you're looking at the fact that we've got the Hadley Research Centre within the Met Office, which has got to try and analyse to see just exactly where this globe is going, really, what's going to be the position on the globe in the next century or two. So we've got to look ahead with these computers, which, you know, Joe Bloggs like myself, we cannot be involved in that.
Quentin Letts: In his small-screen days, was bearded, rangy meteorologist John Kettley a scientific figure or something more than that? Teatime crumpet, companionship? Are TV forecasters – "presenters", they are now called – figures of dry, impartial fact or are they – dread word – "celebrities", pin-ups. They tell us to take brollies or wear sun cream. Is this the duty of a meteorologist or a nanny? And need they emote so much when they tell us it might be chilly?
John Kettley: Many of us did get fan mail. Some of us did get items of clothing sent through the post –
Quentin Letts: Did you?!
John Kettley: Um…
Quentin Letts: Did you get knickers sent through the post to you?
John Kettley: Not necessarily that sort of thing but sweaters. Which may seem a little bit boring to you… [Laughs.]
Quentin Letts: I see… [Laughs.]
John Kettley: But we did get clothing sent through the post. But yes, it was just fan mail but it was all friendly stuff, and you knew where to stop.
Quentin Letts: So that's interesting, because that's an idea of the weather presenter, weather forecaster, being a friend –
John Kettley: Yes.
Quentin Letts: – and being almost a member of the family. So that's part of the role of the Met Office, is it, to be companionable?
John Kettley: Yes, you go right back to the beginning, when I had my first ever audition- and it's an awful long time ago – I had my first audition through Pebble Mill, and the presenter from Pebble Mill came in and he said to me "The first time you go on television, John, nobody's invited you into their lounge. You've got to be there as a friend. If you upset them, they'll never turn on again". That is so vital, that is so important, it's important now as it was then – you've got to be somebody who people can associate with, you've got to be trustworthy and you haven't got to be talking down to them, either. You are a scientist, first and foremost, but you're now a presenter and you've got to speak language over the garden fence.
Quentin Letts: Some forecasts can seem almost Biblical, these days. Heatwaves, floods, "weather events" – to use a term not found in Genesis. We once spoke of natural disasters, but they may, in part, be the fault of mankind. One enters the foggy debate about climate change at one's peril, but is the Met Office, with its attachment to the state and its emotionally splashy presenters, truly impartial here? Its work is open to political scrutiny, not least by the Commons Select Committee on Climate Change. One recent member has been Labour's Graham Stringer.
Graham Stringer: They're very good and getting better, when it comes to 1 to 5-day weather forecasting and getting the detailed weather forecasts down to very small areas – I think they're excellent at that. Er, their climate predictions are – and their medium-term predictions – are pretty random and they are very poor.
Quentin Letts: Random? That's a bit worrying, isn't it?
Graham Stringer: Well, it is. I mean when, at the start of last year, they said we could expect less precipitation than normal, in January and February – and the whole country was flooded. [Quentin Letts laughs.] And then the Chief Scientific Officer said that this was undoubtedly due to climate change, and most of the scientists – even in the Met Office – looked askance at that, because there's no scientific evidence whatsoever that that rain was related to climate change. So, good at the short term, very poor at medium and long term.
Some of the scientists who believe that they're absolutely right are saying we must save the planet, we must change the way we produce energy and therefore we will have lots of alternative renewable forms of energy which, at the moment, are very expensive. The money that my constituents are paying, effectively as a flat tax on their energy bills, I think would – that money would be better spent, i.e., not on a flat tax way but would be better spent on research so we could genuinely produce clean and cheap electricity, rather than very expensive, ugly electricity.
Quentin Letts: Another member of the committee has been the veteran Conservative Peter Lilley. Does he get lobbied by the Met Office?
Peter Lilley: I suppose we do get lobbied by them. They come before the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, on which I sat, and tell us they need even more money for even bigger computers so they can be even more precisely wrong in future.
Quentin Letts [laughing]: That's one way of looking at it – they would say it's going to help them to be ultra, um, long-termist and being able to tell us what the weather's going to do and also what the climate's going to do.
Peter Lilley: Well, in 2004 they put out a very glossy document –
Quentin Letts 2004, so 11 years ago…
Peter Lilley: – called "Forecasting the Next Decade". So they say the Met Office Hadley Centre has pioneered a new system to predict the climate a decade ahead. "We're now using the system to predict changes up to 2014" – this was in 2004, they made this prediction. "By the end of this period, the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 degrees Centigrade, compared to 2004". That's a huge increase, because in the previous 150 years, the increase was about 0.7 degrees, so it's nearly half as much again in the next decade, was what they were expecting – and they were 90% sure that it would be within 0.2 and 0.4 degrees.
Quentin Letts: And what actually happened?
Peter Lilley: Nothing. Zilch. There was no global warming over the ensuing decade.
Quentin Letts: Are you a total sceptic, on man-made climate change?
Peter Lilley: No, I studied physics at Cambridge, so I accept the basic thesis that a bit more CO2 in the atmosphere, or a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere, will marginally warm up the Earth. But I'm what's known as a "lukewarmist", one who thinks that there won't be much warming as a result of it, and that's the scientifically proven bit of the theory – anything going on the alarmist scale is pure speculation. The sad thing is that they've become committed to a particular pseudo-scientific doctrine and now are unwilling to change their doctrine when the facts refute it.
Quentin Letts: By that, you mean man-made climate change.
Peter Lilley: Alarmist man-made climate change – there is a certain amount of man-made climate change going on but not very much, and they're pretending that there's a lot and going to be a lot. And when their predictions turn out to be false, then they don't change their theory. Dame Julia Slingo, the Chief Scientific Officer of the Met Office, now says that the heating must have taken place but it hasn't shown up on the surface of the Earth because it's been swallowed by the deep oceans, a sort of new version of "the deep oceans swallowed my homework" thesis.
Quentin Letts [laughing]: Does this lead you to think that the Met Office should be privatised?
Peter Lilley: I'm not sure anyone would want to buy it.
Male voice: In western districts, showers will be more frequent than in the east…
Quentin Letts: What a voice… For some, the Met Office's forecasts, of weather on land and at sea, are crucial. The new Chairman at Westminster's Climate Change Committee is Scottish Nationalist MP Angus MacNeil from the Western Isles, near Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides.
Female voice: Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey. Northwest, backing southwest 4 or 5, increasing 6 at times. Showers good, occasionally moderate…
Quentin Letts: Angus, you have an amazing journey to your constituency every week – you land on a beach, in an aeroplane. You must listen to the weather forecast with some attention.
Angus MacNeil: Absolutely, and particularly the wind speeds are absolutely vital to me, to make my journey, because sometimes the journey doesn't happen or you can't land – you go to the island, you look down and you return to Glasgow for the evening, so weather is absolutely vital and knowing what the weather's going to do.
Quentin Letts: And your constituents are in that rare part of the population who actually listen closely to the shipping forecast, because it affects their lives. Which bit of the shipping forecast affects you?
Angus MacNeil: Well, I've listened to shipping forecasts since I was a child, and when the words "Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides" would come up, "Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides" was the cue to be quiet. And particularly the weather in Malin and Hebrides – it was always important to us to give us a guide as to what was coming.
Quentin Letts: Your new position, as Chairman of the Climate Change Select Committee at Westminster, means that you're effectively, um, you know, you've got a vested interest in the Met Office. Are they right to get into the climate change issues or should they concentrate on just plain short-term weather forecasting?
Angus MacNeil: The primary point is providing the data. If they want to inform with their knowledge and provide us with a view on that data, I think that's a useful contribution to the debate. I think what is also and must be respected is: other people might have a view on that data as well.
Quentin Letts: And is it good that they are a state body. Does that affect things?
Angus MacNeil: It's better to be privately owned by the taxpayers than privately owned by some private individuals, if you like. They're using data from Norway, from Ireland, from Faroes, from wherever, and I think they do a good job at that, and I think they're very much trusted in the job they do, and that trust is vital and important.
Quentin Letts: We can laugh about the "barbecue summer", but weather forecasting acquired a graver significance 71 years ago. Tens of thousands of lives, and even the freedom of Europe, depended on the Met Office getting its forecast right. The Normandy invasion of early June 1944 was delayed by storms. One of those waiting for the off was my maternal grandfather, a sapper, one of the first to land. He and his advance team needed the high seas to abate. It was down to Group Captain James Stagg from the Met Office to let military commanders know when the weather would improve. Advised by Stagg, Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower ordered the invasion to go ahead.
James Stagg: Certainly, as my colleagues and I withdrew from the meeting that made the final and irrevocable decision, he came across to me and said "Hold that weather to what you have forecast for us, Stagg, for Heaven's sake hold it."
[Soundtrack of Frank Sinatra: "Stormy Weather".]
Quentin Letts: The Met Office's customers – yes, they pay – include the Civil Aviation Authority, Heathrow Airport, Thames Water and – keep this to yourselves – the Ministry of Defence. Former weather presenter Helen Chivers is now the Met Office's corporate spokeswoman.
Helen Chivers: The Met Office is the UK's national meteorological service, and we deliver the public weather service to the UK. So what we're doing there is providing forecasts and severe weather warnings that protect lives and livelihoods and critical national infrastructure for the UK. But we work wider than that – we work across the whole of the world and we provide, sort of, a joined-up area that will work for the different needs of everybody within the UK. So we're global and we're – got a real focus on saving lives and helping people be prosperous in the UK.
Quentin Letts: Makes you sound like an emergency service.
Helen Chivers: I suppose we are, in a strange way. I mean, when it comes down to it, our history and where we started was saving lives at sea, and in essence, that is still very much at the heart of our ethos. But it isn't just at sea, now, it's on land as well, and not in the UK – it's across the world.
Quentin Letts: Country lore has much to say about the weather. "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight", if bees stay at home rain will soon come, sheep climbing a hill a clear day – sign of a clear day, pigs gather leaves and straw before a storm. I've come to the Three Counties Show in Malvern to talk to some rural weather experts – farmers. Eric Freeman, 83 summers young, has squinted at some weather in his time. How does he work out what's coming?
Eric Freeman: I think when you've been around a long time, you get a feeling. You get up in the morning, don't you, and you think "Ah, there's a drop of rain", but that's the pride [?] of the morning, isn't it, and it comes out nice later on.
Quentin Letts: If your beasts are sitting down, in the field, does that tell you something? Because there's that old saying, that when the cows are sitting, it's going to rain.
Eric Freeman: I think they get up and feed when, you know, if there's some weather coming, I think they tend to be up and about. [Sound of cow mooing.]
Quentin Letts: Here we are, talking to Ken Nottage, Chief Executive of the Three Counties Show – Royal Three Counties Show. Ken, weather is a very big thing, it's a very big consideration for you, isn't it.
Ken Nottage: It's huge, and you know, it's probably the most important factor, pre-Show [?].
Quentin Letts: To the people who've come here today, it's a question of whether or not we wear gumboots, whether or not we bring a mac. But to you, it's a question of finance.
Ken Nottage: It is, indeed. It's not just finance, it's also safety, for the visitors that are here. But a bad Show – one that needs to be cancelled due to weather, be that rain, be that wind, whatever it is – can be very, very expensive.
Quentin Letts: There was one year, I think, when the weather forecaster said "Whatever you do, today" – this was during your Show – "whatever you do today, folks" – he said, on the radio – "don't go out".
Ken Nottage: Disastrous! I can remember it – they said, they said "Stay indoors today – it's going to rain everywhere." And it didn't rain here. And that cost us – you know, that was getting on for a six-figure sum, just that, you know. I wanted to kill that weather forecaster, you can imagine.
Quentin Letts: Here is perhaps the most spectacular example of the Met Office getting it wrong.
Michael Fish: Earlier on, today, apparently a woman rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't.
Quentin Letts: There was. Michael Fish, not predicting the Great Storm of 1987, which left 18 people dead. But it's not just dicey forecasts, that riles Andy Silvester from the Taxpayers' Alliance.
Andy Silvester: New Zealand has an equivalent to the Met Office called Metro, which has a commercial arm which outsources weather forecasting to things like Tesco and Sainsbury's, so they can predict when they need to get the strawberries on the shelves for a hot weekend, or something, and so forth. So I think what we'd like to see there again, is the Met Office have to deal with a bit more competition. It seems, at the moment, to have a bit of a monopoly, largely because it's an institution.
Quentin Letts: Oh, so the very fact that it is official – does it give it commercial advantage, or does it give it a moral, um, advantage? A sort of sense, among the public, that somehow it's more reliable.
Andy Silvester: Well, I think, on the former point, on the commercial advantage, getting a huge amount of money from taxpayers, of course makes it infinitely more competitive than it would be, otherwise, because its commercial competitors don't have to deal with that pressure. You know, you look at the supercomputers that have been bought, you know, huge amounts of money spent, 2009, 2014, on these grand new bits of technology. Of course that gives it an advantage, and that means it doesn't have to deal with competition in the same way that any normal business would. And –
Quentin Letts: It can go to the state for its funding, rather than going to banks.
Andy Silvester: Yes, given a supercomputer, you know – they spent an awful lot of money in 2009 on the supercomputer, forecasting didn't necessarily improve, they got a nice bigger and shinier one in 2014, we're yet again to see the results and whether that's actually improved it. And so I think we'd like to see a bit more competition, we'd like to see these things opened up, and we'd like to see the Met Office, as I say, get back to focusing on what it should be doing, and I think that's around predicting severe weather, you know, flood patterns and so forth, which necessarily it doesn't do as much as it might do now.
Quentin Letts: I asked Helen Chivers how accurate the Met Office's predictions were.
Helen Chivers: On average, we're accurate – if you look at a great big basket of, you know, sunshine, rainfall, temperatures – round about 80% of the time. That, actually, is a really good figure, because weather is not a simple thing to forecast – the atmosphere is chaotic, it's a really complicated thing to try and forecast. And we're not only trying to forecast it for today or for the next hour, we're trying to forecast it for weeks and months and years and hundreds of years ahead, so it's a really complicated thing to do. And we verify our forecasts all the time for all of our customers, so for the aviation industry we're verifying what the winds have been at 25,000 feet, um, for the Maritime Coastguard Agency we're looking at how accurate were the gale warnings, the shipping forecast, and for – let's say, winter maintenance on the roads, we're looking at how was the temperature and the ice forecasts on the roads, how accurate were they. So, you know, we measure it in all sort of different ways, depending on who the customer is.
Quentin Letts: You mention there that you are forecasting centuries ahead, or trying to have an idea of what's going to be happening in a couple of hundreds of years. This is where some of your critics say you are far less reliable. Peter Lilley MP has shown us a document from ten years ago where you were forecasting for now that it was going to be a lot warmer than it actually is, and this was leading to a certain alarmism, a political alarmism, of the sort that a scientific body really shouldn't be getting into.
Helen Chivers: Yeah, I mean, we provide the best evidence-based science that we can provide, and of course, you know, science changes and technology moves on, and as things evolve and as you understand how the Earth system – so the connection between the atmosphere and the oceans and what's going on, on land – all of that knowledge is evolving, so things change over time.
Quentin Letts: Very good to hear those caveats, I might say – we don't often hear those –
Helen Chivers: No, true.
Quentin Letts: – when we hear Met Office people telling us we're all in a terrible gloom and doom, and like Noah, you lot are saying, you know, "Leap for your Arks, because the floods are coming". I mean, it is getting almost Biblical, some of the stuff coming out of the Met Office.
Helen Chivers: Sometimes, but I think that's more on –
Quentin Letts: It is, getting more Biblical, you agree, good, a point of agreement.
Helen Chivers: I think sometimes it – but it depends how you interpret it, of course.
Quentin Letts: But how can you interpret the top Met Office executives earning more than the Prime Minister? I'd expect them to know all about the gold at the end of rainbows – it's in their bank accounts.
Helen Chivers: We have a total revenue of around about £200 million – this is a big company, providing services to the UK and services globally. And you have to, like any business, attract the best people. Now, we are bound by our salary structure.
Quentin Letts: You could be paid much, much more, of course, were the Met Office to be privatised. [Helen Chivers laughs.] Would that be a good idea?
Helen Chivers: Would it be a good idea? I think, because of the range of the work that we do and the huge volume of information that we have to operate with, here – so we're providing data free that's available on our website, we're doing forecasting for space weather and how that might impact on technology, we're doing all the safety of life information that I've been talking about. Every review of how we operate has said that it wouldn't be possible to privatise us.
[Soundtrack of Crowded House: "Weather with You".]
Quentin Letts: That "barbecue summer" fiasco betrayed ambition among the isobars, a hunger for public attention, a desire deep in those Barograph Berties to be noticed. This is an urge better resisted. It's hard to place a value on the secret work the Met Office does for the Ministry of Defence. Emergency planning, a seat on Whitehall's COBRA crisis committee, warnings to mariners, cooperation with international allies in times of ash clouds and so on – such work demands our respect. But how does that sit with sexed-up press releases, ditzy autocuties and yes – with politically risky interventions on climate change, said by some fellow scientists to be plain wrong? As the shipping forecast might put it, sober predictions of short-term precipitations, good. Longer-term visibility and political lobbying, poor. And that's your weather.
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8 thoughts on "Do not read this blog post"
Geoff Chambers says:
07 Dec 15 at 10:28 am
It's worth reading the report of the BBC Trust which led to the suppression of this subversive programme.
Click to access met_office.pdf
The enquiry was obviously conducted with the faceless bureaucratic thoroughness of a STASI report on an East German dissident. It's weird, for instance, that all the committees and subcommittees inside and outside the BBC are named lovingly, while the human beings involves remain anonymous, even when quoted.
Here are some explanations of what went wrong:
An early decision that the programme should not include discussion of climate change was not adequately recorded
There was a misunderstanding that the requirement for due impartiality was met by including one Conservative MP and one Labour MP and a failure to recognise that divergent opinions about climate science cross party lines.
And the action to be taken:
The programme would not be repeated in any form.
All programme makers in Religion and Ethics' radio department would complete the BBC Academy's Impartiality online training module, which included a substantial scenario on reporting climate change science.
When they get to the science, they quote, not the IPCC, but the House of Commons' Select Committee for Energy and Climate Change.
There are, as there ever will be, uncertainties in the science, but these uncertainties do not blur the overwhelmingly clear picture of a climate system changing as a result of human influence.
The implications of the report for policy-makers in the UK are simple: there is no scientific basis for downgrading the UK's ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is imperative that this message is also understood by the international community. The Government must renew its commitment to achieve a global deal on climate change.
It's difficult to be clearer than that. A humorous programme has been suppressed ("the programme would not be repeated in any form.") for political reasons.
John Shade says:
07 Dec 15 at 3:44 pm
Sigh. An 'overwhelmingly clear picture of a climate system changing as a result of human influence' can be obtained by pissing in the wind. Local temperatures will rise, as will humidity levels, some extra convection will take place, and the chemical composition of the air nearby will also be measurably different. The longer term consequences of these disruptions are not clear, but you may well have heard speculation of storms in one place triggered by a butterfly moving about in another. Scary headlines should be easy enough to find.
The BBC seems incapable of quantification in this area. They seem unaware of the blatant foolishness of getting agitated by phrases such as 'climate change', 'rising temperatures', etc etc, when no numbers are present to show what the user takes to be valid estimates of the magnitude and direction of a given change, be it historical or projected. To date the historical numbers are not alarming, and nor are the projections based on evidence as opposed to those based on a horrible mix of vivid imaginings and hopelessly ambitious computer models used to illustrate the core assertion of a major driving role for CO2 which it has never seemed to have had in the past.
chris goodwin says:
I long ago ceased to regard the BBC as impartial, as "balanced" or as intellectually respectable. But then I am a scientist, therefore a sceptic, an atheist, an historian, statistician, antidemocrat, antiprogressive, antipc, and generally non conformist, so what need have I for a government propaganda machine ?
Once I dipped into the future far as human eye could see,
And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as anyone can be–
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldom paralleled on earth.
While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,
From the coals that he'd preferred to the advantages of truth.
He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote
On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote–
For I read it in the rose light of the everlasting glow:
"Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow."
Halcyon Jones.
H/t A. Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'.
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Paul Matthews says:
Oh dear. Quentin Letts has been allowed onto Question Time tonight.
I do hope that the BBC has made it very clear to him what he is allowed to say. Perhaps Cardinal Harrabin has given him a script?
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text:
Usines à Porta Romana () est une peinture à l'huile sur toile réalisée par Umberto Boccioni en 1910.
L'œuvre est conservée aux Gallerie di Piazza Scala à Milan.

Description
L'œuvre est créée par Boccioni dans son appartement de la Via Adige au numéro 23 à Milan,
dans la zone de la porte  Porta Romana - Vigentina, en regardant par la fenêtre.
Aujourd'hui, le quartier est un quartier dédié à la mode de luxe et à l'art.

Les œuvres La rue entre dans la maison et Materia sont également liées à la vue de cette fenêtre.

Le palais a une plaque commémorative à l'extérieur.

Articles connexes
 Palazzo Boccioni (Via Adige 23 Milano)
 La rue entre dans la maison
 La ville se lève
 Stati d'animo I, II e III
 Materia (Boccioni)

Bibliographie
 Futurisme – Sylvia Martin – Taschen – 2006 –

Références

Tableau d'Umberto Boccioni
Tableau réalisé en 1910
Tableau futuriste
Voie dans la peinture
Usine dans la peinture
Lombardie dans la peinture
Œuvre d'art à Milan


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Re: axesTS Signon - Maximum number of sessions reached.
The message states the error. Maximum number of sessions reached.
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text:
Home News The New Razer Blade Brings 15.6-inch 144Hz Display, Along with Intel Hexa-Core...
The New Razer Blade Brings 15.6-inch 144Hz Display, Along with Intel Hexa-Core CPUs
Razer has launched a new Razer Blade gaming laptop that carries forward the same design aesthetic of its stablemates, but is smaller, thinner and lighter than them. This is largely due to the reduced bezels, which have led the company to claim it is the 'world's smallest gaming laptop in its class'.
As is common for Razer laptops, the new Blade will be offered in a whole lot of different configurations, with different screens, different GPU setups, different RAM and storage options.
New Razer Blade Specifications
The base model of the new Razer Blade features a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) display, but buyers will be able to pick a 60Hz display or a 144Hz unit, which is the best option for gamers. There's also a 4K panel (3840 x 2160) with touch functionality on offer.
The biggest difference between the last-gen model and the refreshed Blade is the more modern look, with tiny bezels (along with webcam in its regular place on top), as well as a similar footprint to the last-gen 14-inch model. The laptop's design has also been updated for a squarish look compared to the more rounded corners of the previous model.
The laptop comes with 16GB of 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM, and offers multiple storage options, ranging from 256GB to 2TB PCIe NVMe SSDs. GPU options will vary between the GTX 1060 Max-Q and the GTX 1070 Max-Q. All of them, however, will be powered by Intel's Core i7-8750H CPU.
Display 15.6-inch IPS Full HD (1920 x 1080) matte, (60/144Hz), 4K (3840 x 2160) capacitive multi-touch
CPU Intel Core i7-8750H
RAM 16 GB DDR4, 2667MHz
Storage Up to 512GB PCIe SSD
GPU NVDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q Design / GTX 1070 Max-Q Design
Wi-Fi Intel Wireless-AC 9260 (802.11a/b/g/n/ac)
Operating System Windows 10 64-bit
Wireless connectivity options will include 802.11ac, MU-MIMO 2×2:2, and Bluetooth 5.0. The device will also come with a whole bunch of ports for wired connectivity, including 1x Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C), 3x USB 3.0, 1x mDP 1.4 and 1x HDMI 2.0b.
All versions with have an 80Wh battery, but while the base models with the 1060 Max-Q will ship with a 200W power adapter, the ones with the 1070 Max-Q will get a slightly beefier 230W adapter. The laptop runs Windows 10 (64-bit) out-of-the-box.
The Razer Blade 15.6 has been positioned between the company's flagship Razer Blade Pro and the 'budget' Razer Blade 14. Pricing starts at $1,899.99 for the model that includes the 60Hz 1080p screen, the GTX 1060 GPU and 256GB of storage. For the top-end variant with the 4K touchscreen panel, GTX 1070 and 512GB storage, buyers will have to shell out $2,899.99.
The device is available starting today from Razer.com and select retailers in the United States, Canada, France, United Kingdom, Germany, and China.
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