If your youngster fumbles out in left field, chances are you'll toss him some practice balls in the backyard. But if he stumbles when stringing words into a sentence, what then? Simple. Play with words as you'd play with baseballs - free and easy fun.
That's the advice from Marjorie Frank, author-teacher-mom, whose mission is to get youngsters to write.
Mrs. Frank takes the stance that parents have a stake in this project, not to turn out little Hemingways and Melvilles, but to see that their kids can at least put thoughts into a penciled paragraph. And sparking a romance with words is the first step.
Because schools are up to their chimneys in requirements, there's little time for writing, Frank explains. Teaching young people to write ``the very shortest pieces takes at least a half hour or 45 minutes, three or four days in a row. There's no time'' for this, she explains.
Today, ``I don't know that you can get kids to be decent writers unless parents have a little time personally to put into it,'' says Frank, who gives writing workshops to teachers across the nation. She has also written four books on writing used by both schools and families.
She shuns the heavy-handed approach around the home, going instead for the make-it-a-game method.
And why not? She grew up with that. Her mother was a ``word lover, pure and simple,'' says Frank. She used to bake puns and vocabulary words into cookies. She always had something chalked on the kitchen blackboard - poems to learn, jokes to laugh over, riddles to figure out. All this kind of stuff gets kids tuned to the written word rather than the fast flash of the TV screen.
``And another thing, Mom was always using words that she wanted us to learn. Like we'd come home from church, and she'd say, `H'mmm, that man sitting in front of us certainly had a pruinose scalp.''' Having sat in the same pew, Frank knew pruinose probably meant white dust - or dandruff.
``Mom believed if she used interesting words three or four times, we'd remember them,'' says Frank.
The author takes the same tack with her own seven-year-old daughter, Sara, inventing zany ways to promote the written word. There's a special clothesline strung from the Franks' home to playmates' houses so Sara and friends can send messages back and forth. They fly paper airplanes, too, from window to window. Naturally, words are written on the wings.
Mrs. Frank and her husband, Douglas, live amid the Cascade Mountains near Lincoln, Ore., in an old-time logging camp. Thirteen years ago, the mill with its loggers' homes and cabins was converted into an alternative educational facility for college students who want to spend an interdisciplinary semester away from their regular campus.
Although Frank isn't officially on the staff, she lends her writing expertise. Her husband, however, is a full-time faculty member at the Oregon Extension of Houghton College, which is in Houghton, N.Y.
Frank doesn't find it surprising that kids can't write well, because ``we're in such a non-writing culture. At school, they have videotapes and filmstrips, cassette tape recorders, and computers. At home, children grow up in front of television. Everything's in short segments, constantly switching,'' she comments. It's a jumpin'-jack world where life is a perpetual tap dance with no time to watch the ants crawl by, no time to ponder why the sky stays up so high.
``I find kids even have a hard time envisioning their own ideas, their own creations, their own stories.'' Today, they're programmed to parrot. ``If you ask them, for instance, to write a story about a monster, they can only envision the monsters on TV - the Incredible Hulk and such,'' she says.
Many are adept at filling-in-the-blanks, says Frank. But they fall short on collecting ideas, sifting and sorting to decide what's needed, organizing into topics, adding what's missing, then finally putting it on paper.
Value words as you would dollars in the bank.
``There's a strong connection between reading and writing. Don't just read stories, but lots of different things - poetry, signs, ads, newspaper and magazine articles, so they get filled with good writing,'' she says. The bigger and better the word input through reading, the easier [the] kids' output through writing.
All this is fairly simple with young children, because it's still easy to tinker with their daily schedules. With middle-schoolers, it's tougher. They already walk with Walkmans plugged in their ears. They turn on the tube every time they enter a room.
But parents can still toss new words about, offering offspring a change in linguistic diet. And more - on theme-writing night when a blank paper triggers terror, parents can be on hand to lessen the threat.
Frank suggests that parents sit by while youngsters select a subject. Gather information with them. Talk about the topic. Work through the writing together, down to the last period. That's not doing it for them. That's showing them how by doing it with them.
``It's always easier to start writing if you have someone with you,'' says Frank. ``That's why teachers do group writing.
``And you don't have to do an autopsy on everything they write,'' she cautions.
A good time to start the family's romance with words is during car rides. Or at dinner if joint supping is still in style at your house. Maybe during TV commercials with the sound turned down. Or better yet, click the tube off for a spell.
Keep ongoing lists of grumpy words (like ``cranky'' and ``curmudgeon''); soft words (like ``cotton,'' ``clouds,'' and ``dandelion fluff''); lazy words (like ``dillydally'' and ``dawdle'') - serious words, loud words, wet words, city words, country words. As time goes on, these will mesh into daily conversation.
Compile words that make you see red (``fire engines,'' ``poppies,'' and ``rouge''). Or how about ``anger'' and ``discrimination''? Words that make you ``see'' blue, yellow, or black.
Someone writes a single sentence to start a story. He passes this to a second person who adds another sentence. The paper is then folded down so only the last contribution is visible. Continue in round-robin fashion, allowing the current writer to see only the foregoing sentence. Read them all aloud when finished.
Draw a face. Choose words to describe that face. Then, select words that reveal the character behind the face.
One person compiles a list of ``moving'' words - ``pirouette,'' ``fluctuate,'' ``amble,'' ``wobble,'' ``strut,'' ``tremble,'' ``canter,'' ``slink,'' etc. He distributes the words to players. A recipient doesn't have to know a word's meaning in order to act out the motion - that's where the fun comes in. Everyone guesses.
All the words in the world are going to be buried - except seven. Everyone lists the seven he wants to save. Each then writes a phrase telling why that particular word is so special. For example: ``joy'' - bleak world without it; ``sister'' - my best friend.


"I visualized and I affirmed, however I'm still in the same place"
"I changed my beliefs, however, I must need a more high-tech way of doing it, such as NLP, because so far, it is not working".
I'd bet that they think something, maybe a book or manuscript, should suddenly appear from the ethers, leaning against their door the next morning with a map to their particular desire.
"If you want a sewing machine, for instance, I do not mean to tell you that you are to impress the thought of a sewing machine on Thinking Substance until the machine is formed without hands, in the room where you sit, or elsewhere.
... It will be brought to you by the power of the Supreme Intelligence, acting upon the minds of men. If you live in Maine, it may be that a man will be brought from Texas or Japan to engage in some transaction which will result in your getting what you want."
"The action of thought in getting rich is fully explained in the preceding chapters; your faith and purpose positively impress your vision upon Formless Substance, which has THE SAME DESIRE FOR MORE LIFE THAT YOU HAVE; and this vision, received from you,sets all the creative forces at work IN AND THROUGH THEIR REGULAR CHANNELS OF ACTION, but directed toward you."
The key phrases, for me, are: "It will be brought to you by the power of the Supreme Intelligence, acting upon the minds of men"
"IN AND THROUGH THEIR REGULAR CHANNELS OF ACTION, but directed toward you. "
That object or circumstance, whatever it is you desire, whether or not it is a 2006 Corvette Z06, a vacation cabin in the woods, or just an Ipod, will appear through regular channels, as seen by everyone else around you who just expect to have things happen in their normal, 3-dimensional ways!
Just because someone knows about and applies the Powerful Principles that most of us are now remembering, it doesn't mean that he/she can violate a particular Universal Law.
This particular principle being one that is not going to allow something to happen that would not correlate with the belief systems of millions of others who unfortunately live small, believe that they are Acted upon by Life as helpless victims, and will not accept anything out of the ordinary.
Someone might just give you one, or you get a surprise refund from the IRS, etc.
- through the existing ways of commerce, or winning a sweepstakes, etc..
We, by using the principles in books such as Science of Getting Rich this, are in fact doing things the easy way, the non-struggling, the Inside-Out approach of seeing and feeling As If, and feeling the gratitude of possessing that objective..
We create those luscious, wonderful circumstances in the normal channels that others expect - however things just simply work soo much easier and only *WE* seem to know that and enjoy how smoothly life flows!
- We do not hold a negative, pining, attachment to having to have it.
If the Universe doesn't see a way of creating it by any other means than money, than it will use the quickest means of existing channels to create it. This may mean you have an urge to apply a particular skill, and you apply that skill, market it, and you have the money for the car.
However, I appreciate Wattles' explanations of how to not lose faith in the "metaphysical" just because things will not magically appear from thin air.
Why Is Secrecy so important to your success in creating your circumstances ?
include the resoucre box listed above.


Question: What is the electric field strength of microalgae?
Background: So I have been having some problems with fungi contaminating my chromera velia algae cell cultures. I haven't determined what fungi are contaminating it yet, but I will figure that out with microscopy. I tried using some antifungal agents, such as cycloheximide, on petri dishes to separate the algae from the fungus. However, fungi with their obvious hyphae are growing happily on the petri dishes despite the antifungal agent.
So I thought maybe use some physics for algae separation science, instead, so I came upon a patent which proposes using a pulsed electric field to kill bacteria and rotifers without harming the algae ( Green, Michael P., et al.) . However, I'm not sure what the electric field strength of the microalgae is so this is not clear to me. But the patent states that algae can have a lipid content of up to 50% of their cell mass so that would seem to me to make the cell wall of algae strong and have a high electric field strength.
where "a" is the radius of the cell, "F" is determined by the shape of the cell, and "x" is orientation of the electric field (Grahl, T., and H. Märkl). "E" (kV/cm) is the important parameter which is the critical electric field strength of the cell membrane that induces a trans-membrane potential of 1 volt.
This equation would mean that the greater the radius of the cell the lower the electric field strength would be required to lyse the cell. Experimentally, the critical electric field strength of Escherichia coli is 13.7 kV/cm, for S. cerevisiae (Baker's yeast) it's 4.7 kV/cm ( Grahl, T., and H. Märkl). For algae, I don't know what that is.
Yeast is about 5 - 10 uM in diameter and for chromera velia the diameter is like ~ 5 uM so based on size if this equation is valid for algae then a pulsed electric field should not be effective for isolating algae from fungal contamination. If the algae cell wall and membrane is stronger than the equation presented, a pulsed electric field might work for reducing competing organisms such as fungus in growth medium. I came upon this conference abstract which states that a pulsed electric field with a field strength of 40 kV/cm for 30 minutes at a pulse duration of 25 nanoseconds is nonlethal and promotes algae growth ( Gusbeth, Christian A., et al). I don't know how much stock to put into this because it's a not a full scientific paper.
If bacteria can be killed at 99.99% efficiency at an electric field strength of 20 kV/cm and several milliseconds of pulses (Hülsheger, H., J. Potel, and E-G. Niemann) and if that abstract is accurate and algae can survive 40 kV/cm just fine then I think I could significantly remove fungal and bacterial contamination with a pulsed electric field strength greater than 20 kV/cm for 30 minutes with 25 nanoseconds pulse duration + antibiotics + cycloheximide.
Is an algae cell membrane + cell wall really that strong? Does it have a large electric field strength despite its size? What is the composition of an algae cell membrane + wall like? If you think this method of applying a pulsed electric field would work for my problem, give me some advice please.
Sources: Green, Michael P., et al. "Enhancing algae growth by reducing competing microorganisms in a growth medium." U.S. Patent Application No. 13/419,062.
Grahl, T., and H. Märkl. "Killing of microorganisms by pulsed electric fields." Applied microbiology and biotechnology 45.1-2 (1996): 148-157.
Gusbeth, Christian A., et al. "Boost of algae growth by ultra short pulsed electric field treatment." 2013 Abstracts IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS). IEEE, 2013.
Hülsheger, H., J. Potel, and E-G. Niemann. "Electric field effects on bacteria and yeast cells." Radiation and environmental biophysics 22.2 (1983): 149-162.
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I'm a small business web design specialist with interests in social media and other online marketing methods. As my blog intro states: "Steering small businesses in the right direction with what I hope is practical, realistic advice and useful tips, amidst the constantly changing noise and hype. I'd like to help you sort out what you really need and how to go about it." I'm a proud Aussie, living in Sydney, and an avid fan of Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald.
I’ve written previously about my love/hate affair with WordPress as a website builder. As I said back then, one of the things I hate is how it draws hackers like bees to a honeypot. But they’re killer bees. And they’re getting worse.
Working on your own can get lonely at times. I’ve tried co-working. I’ve tried working in cafes. I’ve tried apps like coffitivity.
But what’s finally done the trick is getting a kitten. It’s been many years since I had a pet and I’d forgotten just how much companionship they provide.
Last month I was fortunate to travel to the UK to attend the annual Generate London conference for web designers. Of all the great talks, probably my favourite session was an unexpected one, entitled “Designing for Crisis”.
You know the old saying “A woman’s work is never done”? And the one about “a painter’s house is never painted”? Combine those two and you get “A web designer woman’s website is never done”. My own website is the first one I ever published (not including the ones I created at uni, which weren’t made public). It just turned 5 years old. Which is really old in web years!
The working title for this blog was originally Why I Hate WordPress. But I decided that was a little too harsh a stance to take against the world’s most popular blogging platform. And as I wrote I realised I needed to reveal both sides of the coin because, as I always say… it depends.
We’re nearly half way through the calendar year. Already! It’s a good time to assess how things are going, don’t you agree? For me, the first six months of this year was overflowing with a lot of firsts.
You know that song from Oliver?
Back in the old days (though not as far back as Oliver)… websites used to be restricted to a pretty small variety of fonts – and we quickly got bored of them. Nowadays the internet is littered with so many different fonts that it can be very confusing to choose the right ones for your website.
Who is this blog post for, exactly?
Just as many people will, against popular wisdom, judge a book by its cover, people are very quick to judge your website by its homepage.
And if the ‘synopsis’ they read (like the back cover of a book) only talks about how great the author is, and not the exciting ride they’ll be taken on within the storyline, they get no sense of why they should read on.
Translate that to modern day (first world) problems such as finding your way through an unfamiliar city with an outdated Navman roadmap. Or using a website with a poorly designed navigation menu.
When it’s good to be a sheep. And when to break free of the flock.
Welcome to the Year of the Sheep on the Chinese lunar calendar. The Chinese consider sheep to be lucky animals – they spend their time following each other from one green patch of grass to the next without too many cares or worries. They never have to do any hard labour, which is left to the Ox.
Author RobynRHDPosted on February 20, 2015 February 23, 2015 Categories Miscellany, WebsitesLeave a comment on When it’s good to be a sheep. And when to break free of the flock.


Another concept that reflects an intelligent designer of the universe is the precision of the universal constants. A physical constant is a fixed number or parameter that applies to the entire universe, such as gravity or the speed of light. These constants make life posssible in the universe. If these constants were too high or too low, life would not be possible. The universe would just be a bunch of black holes. The following is a list of examples.
1. The relationship among the gravitational constant (G = 6.67 x 10-11), the weak force coupling constant (gw = 1.43 x 10-62), and the cosmological constant (Λ > 10-53, SI units). If either G or gw were off by one part in 1050 then the expansion of the universe would be explosive and galaxies could never have been formed.
2. The strong force coupling constant (gs = 15). If gs were greater than 15.3, there would have been no hydrogen in the universe. If gs were less than 14.7, hydrogen would be the ONLY element, thus there would be no carbon which is the building block of life. In both cases, life would not be possible.
3. The relationship between the mass of a proton (mp = 1.6726 x 10-27 kg), the mass of a neutron (mn = 1.6749 x 10-27 kg), the mass of an electron (me = 9.11 x 10-31 kg), G, and gw. If the ratio between these five were slightly off, again there would have been no hydrogen, or no elements heavier than hydrogen, and life would not be possible.
4. The relationship between the electromagnetic constant (ά = 7.30 x 10-3, SI units), G, mp, and me. If ά were slighly stronger, or if G was slightly weaker, or if the electron was slighly less massive, then all the stars in the universe would be red dwarfs, which cannot sustain life. The closest star to the Earth, Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star. If the opposite of any of these constants were true, then all the stars in the universe would be blue giants, which also cannot sustain life.
5. The relationship between gw and the carbon atom. All life in this universe is made from carbon, so without carbon bonding, life would not be possible. Carbon bonding requires a lot of heat which can only be provided by a supernova (an exlposion of a big star). Supernova explosions would not be possible if gw was slightly off.
6. The nuclear magnetic resonsance of carbon, beryllium, helium, and oxygen happen to match. Fred Hoyle discovered this in 1954. Without this resonsance, there would not be enough carbon in the universe to support life.
“the numerical coincidences [necessary for an anthropic universe] could be regarded as evidence of design. The delicate fine-tunning in the values of the constants, necessary so that the various different branches of physics can dovetail so felicitously, might be attributed to God. It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out. Such a conclusion can, of course, only be subjective. In the end it boils down to the question of belief. Is it easier to believe in a cosmic designer than the multiplicity of universes necessary for the weak anthropic principle to work?” – Davies, God and the New Physics, 1983.
In other words, is it easier to believe in God who designed this complex universe whose physics we can barely understand, or that by some astronomical improbability the universe came into existence by chance?


Lorde (born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor 07.11.96) Lorde is a New Zealand singer/songwriter best known for her 2013 debut single, 'Royals'.
Net Worth: In 2013, Celebrity Net Worth stated that Lorde had a net worth of 2 million USD.
Childhood: Lorde was born in Takapuna, New Zealand, to Vic O'Connor and Sonja Yelich. She was raised in the suburb of Devonport, along with her two sisters and brother. She attended a drama group from the age of five, which inspired a love of acting and singing, and later studied at Belmont Intermediate School. In 2009, she appeared on the New Zealand radio show, 'Jim Mora's Afternoons', along with her band mate, Louis McDonald and the two performed to cover songs. When Lorde won the school talent contest in that same year, McDonald's father sent a recording of Lorde to Universal Music Group, and she was soon signed to the record label.
Career: Lorde worked with songwriter Joel Little through 2011 to record five tracks for The Love Club EP, which Lorde released as a free download via Soundcloud. The EP was downloaded 60,000 times, so Universal Music Group decided to release it commercially, whereupon it peaked at number two on the New Zealand and Australia record charts. In June, 2013, Lorde released her debut single, 'Royals', originally the second track on the EP. The single stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 list for nine weeks. Lorde, therefore, became the youngest artist to have a number one single in the US. She then released her debut studio album, 'Pure Heroine', in September 2013, which peaked at number three on Billboard's 200 list, as well as number one on charts for Canada, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom. In November, 2013, Sony Music Publishing offered Lorde a publishing deal that allows them to use her songs recorded for Universal Music Group. This led to her cover of Tears for Fears' song, 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World' being used in the soundtrack for 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire'. In December, Lorde began working on the material for her second album.
Personal Life: Lorde chose her stage name, due to a fascination with "royals and aristocracy", and decided to add an 'e' to the title 'Lord', in order to make the name sound more feminine. She is a staunch feminist, and has spoken out against the exploitive costumes of female performers, as well as people like Miley Cyrus and Rihanna for their fanning of these stereotypes.
She claims that the Kids See Ghosts duo used the same Es Devlin 'floating perspex cage' idea that she used on her Melodrama world tour last year.
Lorde has hit out at Kanye West and Kid Cudi, accusing the rappers of stealing her idea of a ‘floating’ Perspex cage for their stage design.
The two rappers, who collaborated earlier in 2018 on an album entitled Kids See Ghosts, performed live together for the first time over the weekend at the Camp Flog Gnaw festival in Los Angeles. It saw them both suspended in a Perspex box above the stage – something very similar to the technology utilised by Lorde during her Melodrama world tour last year.
“I’m proud of the work I do, and it’s flattering when other artists feel inspired by it, to the extent that they choose to try it on themselves,” she wrote in an Instagram story, showing an image of her tour with images of West and Kid Cudi’s performance.
Using a controversial anti-boycott law, three Israeli teenagers who bought tickets for Lorde's cancelled Tel Aviv show in June 2018 won a lawsuit against the New Zealand-based activists who urged the star to pull out.
A court in Israel has ordered the two New Zealand activists who published a letter urging pop star Lorde to cancel a concert in Tel Aviv earlier this year to pay damages for harming the “artistic welfare” of three Israeli artists.
The Jerusalem Post on Thursday (October 11th) reported that Judge Mirit Fohrer ruled Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab of New Zealand must pay damages to the tune of NZ$18,000 to Israeli teenagers Shoshana Steinbach, Ayelet Wertzel and Ahuva Frogel for writing a letter to urging Lorde to cancel her concert in Tel Aviv in December 2017.
The social media pressure sparked by the letter caused the New Zealand-born pop star Lorde to cancel her June 2018 show, on the world tour for her most recent album Melodrama.
Lorde had posted an image of a bathtub with Whitney Houston lyrics earlier this week, apparently not making the obvious connection.
Pop star Lorde has been forced to apologise after sparking outrage on social media when she posted what she called an “insensitive” reference to the late singer Whitney Houston.
The 21 year old New Zealand-born hitmaker shared a photo on Instagram of a bathtub filled with water, captioned with the words “and iiii will always love you”. Oops!
Legendary soul and R&B singer Whitney Houston passed away in 2012 at the age of 48, when she accidentally drowned in a bathtub in a hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, died three years later in 2015 in eerily similar circumstances.
She performed an a cappella rendition in Chicago.
If you ever needed proof that Lorde can sing almost anything, her cover of Kanye West's 'Love Lockdown' during her Chicago show is pretty much that. She sang a raw a cappella rendition of the 2008 hit on stage and fans are absolutely in love with it.
The 21-year-old New Zealander's cover of the track - which featured on Kanye West's fourth album '808s & Heartbreak' - was so good, that now we're left wondering whether it beat Glass Animals' version of the track from their 2014 'Pools' EP. She certainly comes close.
It had been widely reported earlier this week that the two New Zealand-based activists who called on Lorde to cancel her Israel gig were being sued by "would-be concertgoers".
The lawsuit allegedly brought against two New Zealand-based activists after they penned an opinion piece calling on pop star Lorde to cancel a concert in Israel is apparently not real – according to the would-be defendants.
The article’s authors Nadia Abu-Shanab and Justine Sachs, are widely reported to have been sued this week under an Israeli law that allows claimants to file civil lawsuits against anyone calling for a boycott of Israel, if they know it could reasonably have triggered a boycott as a result of their action.
As such, the supposed lawsuit seeks $13,000 in damages by way of “moral and emotional injury” for three people who had been scheduled to attend the gig before it was cancelled, according to the Associated Press.
Lorde is believed to be considering cancelling a concert in Israel.
The 21-year-old singer - whose full name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor - is considering ''all options'' about performing in an upcoming gig in Tel Aviv, after she received criticism from her fans who asked her to cancel the gig as a sign of protest against the country's occupation of Palestine.
Lorde has surprised fans by hiding hiding secret packages including free tickets and more during her homecoming tour in New Zealand.
Lorde is treating fans to free tickets and secret gift packages during her homecoming tour of New Zealand.
The 'Royal' singer celebrated her 21st birthday on Tuesday (07.11.17) and she marked the happy occasion by giving a present to her fans in the form of tickets to her Dunedin concert and even a piece of personalised merchandise.
She thinks people have a problem with seeing someone experiencing joy.
Lorde has finally opened up about the criticism she received following her non-singing all-dancing performance at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards last month. She thinks people were uncomfortable with the show because she looked like she was enjoying herself too much.
The 20-year-old popstar has never exactly been known for being conventional, but she took her performance art a step further by doing a dance routine to her song 'Homemade Dynamite' at the MTV VMAs on August 27th rather than singing it live. She was struggling with the flu at the time, so the audience at The Forum in California were lucky she even made it out onto the stage.
She had told The Guardian that being pals with TayTay was like being around someone with "very specific allergies".
Lorde has apologised after comparing being friends with fellow pop star Taylor Swift as like being around someone with an autoimmune disease.
The 20 year old New Zealand-born singer, who has just released her second album Melodrama, made the rather strange remark in a profile interview with The Guardian at the weekend. Quickly, she received a backlash from Swift’s fanbase who criticised her for the comments that Lorde now admits were “insensitive” – but she said that she hadn’t been addressing Swift directly.
“It's like having a friend with very specific allergies,” she had told the British newspaper in an article published on Saturday (June 17th).


Will president's pledge unlock PPA jam?
SOUTH AFRICA: Political turmoil and the state utility's heel-dragging on renewables development are stifling wind-power growth in one of the world's most promising markets. But the president's promise to force Eskom into action has raised hope of breaking the deadlock.
South African president Jacob Zuma's state-of-the-union address on 9 February started over an hour late. Opposition MPs held up proceedings, first by throwing corruption allegations at him, and then throwing punches at members of his government. Footage of the brawl was broadcast around the world.
Zuma did finally get to make his speech, and it contained the words the country's wind-power developers were desperate to hear: a clear promise to force public utility and grid operator Eskom to sign a 2.38GW backlog of renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs), nearly 1.4GW of which relates to wind projects.
All the projects had won rights to PPAs through the third and fourth rounds of the Department of Energy's (DOE) rigorous renewables bidding process.
South Africa had been globally heralded as a star of emerging wind markets, but progress came to an abrupt halt in mid-2016 when Eskom refused to sign any further PPAs.
Contentiously citing excessive costs of renewables capacity, Eskom said in May it would wait for government guidance before unblocking pending PPAs.
Zuma has now provided that guidance.
"Easier said than done," is the reaction of Joffrey Dupuy, a regional analyst at global energy consultants Make. "The president did not provide any details on the timeline regarding the resolution of the problem."
Brenda Martin, CEO of the South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA), takes a more positive view while admitting that the political mayhem hardly inspires confidence in the administration. "It's not every day a president issues such direct support for a sector," she says. "It's no small deal."
Eskom told Windpower Monthly in early March that it had approved the backlog in renewables PPAs, including nearly 1.4GW for wind. Eskom insisted its investment and finance committee and the public enterprises minister have approved the PPAs, and that regulator Nersa "has provided assurances for (PPA) cost recovery".
Martin, however, remains sceptical. She says the Independent Power Producer's Office — the watchdog for power contracts — had registered no change to the hiatus. "More smokescreen from Eskom," she says.
Longer-term policy supports wind power. Prior to Zuma's address, the DOE had completed a draft integrated resources plan (IRP) - South Africa's infrastructure road map — which signals the need for around 37GW of cumulative wind capacity to 2050. That builds on 2010's IRP, which envisaged 8.4GW of wind to 2030.
South Africa has "little choice" in the matter, argues Martin. "Renewables is the only way to deploy cost-effective power rapidly, shoring-up a weak grid plagued by load shedding, while supporting local communities."
She accuses Eskom of a smear campaign, deliberately exaggerating wind-power prices by citing those from earlier power auctions rather than today's much-reduced going price.
Martin's argument is supported by a report from national watchdog the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
This states that wind power's average auction price fell from ZAR 1,510/MWh ($115/MWh) in Round 1 (2012) to ZAR 620/MWh ($48/MWh) in Round 4 (2015).
That makes wind 40% cheaper than new coal, and more than 50% cheaper than older coal-fired generation, according to the CSIR. Solar PV prices have fallen even faster — from ZAR 3,560/MWh to ZAR 620/MWh in the same period.
Eskom appears more interested in kick-starting a 9.6GW nuclear programme, for which it says 27 firms are responding to a request for information. But the CSIR's findings of ZAR 1,300/MWh for nuclear generation provide another reason why it would be politically foolish to continue blocking wind power, says Martin.
SAWEA estimates the PPA blockage is holding up ZAR 50 billion in investments, roughly half of which is for wind power. With around half of renewables investments sourced locally - a cornerstone of South Africa's renewables programme - that is a big deal for local communities and jobs.
But the present-day reality is decelerated wind-market growth, with just 433MW of new capacity connected in 2016, according to SAWEA, compared with 483MW in 2015 and 555MW in 2014. Cumulative capacity at the end of last year stood at 1,471MW across 19 projects.
"We remain cautious about the shortto medium-term development and do not expect the president's stated commitment to ensuring PPAs will go through to solve all the problems," says Dupuy.
Make expects more tempered growth in the medium term, estimating around 5.5GW of wind capacity to 2025 to reach 7GW in total. This represents an annual rate of build of just under 700MW; below expectations in 2015, when 1.2GW annually was expected for 2016-2020.
SAWEA sees steering wind power back on course as a lengthy process requiring consistency. Despite the seemingly fast deployment in 2014-2016, South Africa's renewables framework itself, the renewable energy independent power producers procurement programme (REIPPPP), took over two years to draft and approve.
The REIPPPP initiated a process of competitive bidding in 2012, largely aimed at ending outages, load shedding and dependency on the 34GW of coal capacity, which supplied 88% of all electricity consumption. Its exacting demands on project and developer viability provided solid assurances to investors and financers.
The bidding process allocates successful developers the right to finalise a 20-year PPA with Eskom. The REIPPPP has already finalised five calls for bids (rounds 1-3, 3.5 and 4), procuring a total of 6,376MW across wind, solar and biomass, according to figures from state regulator Nersa.
Eskom has signed PPAs on just over 4GW across 64 sites, with 2,738MW of renewables online at the end of 2016. The 36 projects pending PPAs, all but one from round 4, amount to 2.38GW, 1.4GW for wind.
"Even if pending PPAs are signed in the second quarter, a minimum of one year needs to be added considering construction time, resulting in projects not being commissioned before mid-2018," says Dupuy.
Round 5, which was to call for 1.8GW of renewables capacity, has been on hold since May 2016, producing even more delays in new capacity deployment. No figures have been set for subsequent rounds.
In the longer term, however, Dupuy sees a continued future for South African wind. "Large and well-spread wind resources combined with continuously decreasing costs in renewable energy allows the country to produce power at a low price," he says.
SAWEA believes the sector is more than primed to get back into overdrive. Since 2012, global and local industrial players and investors have responded to REIPPP's long-term assurances.
Developers include Ireland's Mainstream Renewable Power, which created a joint venture last year with global energy investors Actis.
The partners commissioned the 80MW Noupoort wind plant in the Northern Cape last summer, bringing its online wind capacity in the country to 118MW. They have a further 280MW of wind capacity building and were awarded the 137MW Kangnas and 110MW Perdekraal East in round 4.
Italy's Enel Green Power (EGP), commissioned its 88MW Nojoli wind plant in Eastern Cape in October 2016 and is currently building the 111MW Gibson Bay project. EGP was allocated 275MW in round 4, across the Soetwater (139MW) and Garob (136MW) projects.
Chinese utility Longyuan and France's EDF also have major project stakes, as do Spain's Acciona, as well as other global developers, and even Eskom itself.
SAWEA wants immediate action to prevent wind-factory closures. Tower and blade factories are now completing orders for round 3, Martin says. DCD Wind Towers, near Port Elizabeth, says it cannot rule out liquidation due to empty order books for round 4.
"Developers are also struggling," says Martin, explaining the bidding process requires financial guarantees and that, besides hiring staff in preparation, they have also put money aside. "And money costs money," she says.
Since Zuma's promise, industry signals have been mixed. Eskom said its investment and finance committee had approved all 2.38GW of outstanding PPAs, pending developer signature.
Yet trickery is suspected. Before the PPAs are signed, developers need to negotiate so-called "budget quotes" with Eskom.
The quotes are Eskom's calculation of the costs that developers must pay for new power lines and related infrastructure to interconnect their wind projects. Eskom's budget quotes "seem to be vastly exaggerated, more than doubling expected costs", confided one developer adviser, suspecting the utility of delaying tactics. The coming months will tell.


Multiple Geeklogs with shared code?
I've been playing with the thought of running multiple Geeklogs on a single server, and wondering if it could be done without installing multiple copies of the Geeklog code.
Having all the config stuff in the database in 1.5 helps. I'd start with some scheme for mapping the URLs for each Geeklog to a unique pair of siteconfig.phg and db-config.php, which would point to a unique database for each site. But it might get a little trickier than that.
The default setup has a mixture of site-independent stuff ("code" and site-dependent stuff ("data", logs, etc) in /path/to/geeklog. I haven't looked at all the path settings in the config db yet to see how easy it would be for multiple sites to point to a single directory (or set of directories) for site-independent stuff, and unique directories for stuff that varies between sites.
At this point, this is mostly an academic question for me. I don't really have a need for multiple sites right now. And if I do, the amount of disk space wasted by the simple technique of just replicating everything might not be big enough to worry about. But I'm a geek, and sometimes I like to waste a lot of time trying to do things the "right" way instead of the easy way, and it seems right to avoid duplication of code.
Has anybody tried this, or thought about it enough to have any thoughts on whether it's a reasonable idea?
See this recent discussion. Slightly different focus, but contains links that should help you.
All times are EDT. The time is now 10:59 am.


Kemar Roofe Had A Big Hand In The Equaliser From Leeds - Was It Handball?
Saturday night's Championship game was shrouded in controversy as Leeds United scored a dramatic late equaliser to draw 1-1 with Nottingham Forest at Elland Road- although the nature of the equalising goal was fortunate to say the least!
However, Roofe blatantly used his hand to score! Forest players were incredulous as they were left complaining to the referee and it is difficult to understand how the officials didn't see the incident.
The result leaves Leeds in second place in the Championship table - two points behind leaders Sheffield United - and Forest remain in seventh, six points off the top.
What did you make of the 'dubious' handball goal?
11 - Kemar Roofe has had a hand in 11 goals in his last 14 Championship games for Leeds United (8 goals, 3 assists). Crafty.


A Volcano has erupted in How-why-ey spewing lava and causing a mass evacuation.
Is this the same one that's been erupting for days now?
Yes, this is a South-Eastern extension of rifts from the main crater of Kilauea. The Hawaiian chain of islands extends North-West from the Big Island where this vulcanism is occurring. This is evidence for the hypothesis that there is a hot spot in the mantle over which the Pacific Plate is gradually moving in a Northwesterly direction, leading to it burning a series of holes which move progressively Southeast with respect to the plate.
It is not unexpected that over time this new eruption location may become more important. However since the rate of movement is only a few cm/yr, this will take centuries.
The Hawaiian lavas are basic in chemical composition (relatively low silica content) and are quite fluid. Generally this allows gases to escape through the magma, resulting in eruptions that are not very explosive in nature. However on this occasion the new rifts seem to have come into contact with groundwater, leading to generation of steam, which seems from the reports I have read to be powering the explosive generation of ash clouds.
That steam must be a few thousand PSI.
I heard the laes effect was happening as well?
Yes, this is a South-Eastern extension of rifts from the main crater of Kilauea.
The main volcano has been deflating as lava has been moving into the rift zone ~30 km east of the main volcano. (The US Geological Survey has sensitive instruments that can measure small rising and falling movements in the ground.) Unfortunately, it's a populated semi-rural area with homes and small farms.
The Hawaiian lavas are basic in chemical composition (relatively low silica content) and are quite fluid.
Some of them look like lava rivers (USGS photo).
I was there in 1987, on my way home from my posting to Dubai. Pu'u O'o was going off at that time, but quite gently. I managed to dodge the police cordon and get close to a lava flow going into the sea.
would be interesting to see the Army Engineers with USGS vulcanologists blasting diversionary channels & monsoon bucketing to see if and how they can divert various lava flows.
... and no mention of any thoughts about under sea megga land slides on the south east fault line ?
It grew taller as we watched. It reminded us of the steam plumes we used to see from Mt. St. Helens back in the day. When we got back to the Hotel we found out that there had been another eruptive event that day.
The Puna Geothermal Venture, a geothermal power plant that everyone was concerned about a few days ago, seems to have been mostly engulfed and appears to be toast. A Hawaiian newspaper has shown pictures of buildings at the site going up in flames. There's some concern about the release of dangerous (and stinky) hydrogen sulfide gases from the plant and its wells, but reportedly none has been detected.
It looks like Pohoiki is in danger of being cut off if the new flow-front reaches the sea. They are advising residents of Kapoho and Vacationland that they might want to consider evacuating too. See here. The state of emergency has just been extended.
The flows are constantly evolving. Here's the latest map that the USGS has put out.
That's already old. Lava is nearing the 137/132 intersection near Kapoho, and they are evacuating all the communities to the east.
i wonder if the all seeing power of capitalism is fevorishly busy re-housing these unfortunate citizens.
i think the main-land official response is to try and ignore it and hope it goes away.
the usa has its own refugees. how it responds will be very interesting.
Hmm. The "all seeing power of capitalism" would mean that they are selling their stories/videos and using the money to buy/rent a new place.
If there is a governmental "official response" to allocate them housing, that would be the all seeing power of socialism.
The USGS slogan is certainly pertinent.
Hawaii Civil Defense says: "Hawaiian volcano observatory reports that vigorous lava eruptions continue on the east rift of Kilauea. Fissure 8 is very active and producing a large, fast-moving flow. The flow front is half-a-mile above the Four Corners area, and moving quickly. At the present rate, it is possible the lava flow may cross Government Beach Road near Four Corners within 7 to 10 hours."
They add: "Residents in Vacationland, Kapoho Beach Lots and in areas near Highway 137 are advised to evacuate now. Traffic is flowing both ways to allow evacuation. Residents should complete evacuation by 2:00 this afternoon, or risk the possibility of being isolated."
The most up-to-date lava location information that I've seen is on this map from Hawaii Civil Defense. I believe the green squares might be police roadblocks (not sure) and the roads in blue are closed or restricted access.
It's pretty current and has lava sightings up to 7:00 AM Hawaii time. (I think that's about 3 hours ago). Lava appears to be west (to the left) of the big ampitheater-like volcanic spatter cone near the crossing of 132/137 at Kapoho in the maps in the posts above.


By Phil Plait of www.badastronomy.com This article was written by Phil afew years ago now but is still relevant to the newest wave of "Nibiru SOHO" images to hit the web. These images show exactly what Phil describes below.
What is going on in the SOHO images?
A few people have been asking about this, but there hasn't been much talk about it. As it happens, I have a lot of experience with astronomical imaging. I spent about a decade working on Hubble images, and a few years before that on a ground-based telescope. I still do dabble in digital astronomical imaging. I am not bragging, just putting my credentials down to show that I am very experienced in this field.
Let me say this up front: the images from SOHO are completely within the realm of what you'd expect from such images. The "anomalies" pointed out by Tuatha (who claims spaceships are all around the Sun: do a websearch on the words "suncruiser" and "SOHO" and you'll see what I mean), Ms. Lieder and the rest are not anomalies at all. They are simply things that happen when you use a digital camera.
The cameras usually used in astronomical imaging are called CCDs, for Charge-Coupled Device. It's like a computer chip that's sensitive to light. The best analogy for one is like an array of buckets in the rain. Each bucket (CCD pixel) collects rain (light). The amount of rain collected depends on how much rain falls on that bucket; the amount of light in each pixel of the CCD depends on how bright an object is. When light hits a CCD it is converted to electrons, and when the image is done the electrons are "read off" the CCD and counted. The more electrons you see in a pixel, the more light hit that pixel. The numbers of electrons can be converted to images by your computer. That's how the images on, say, the SOHO site are done.
Sometimes, a pixel is more sensitive to light than others. This can happen when a pixel is hit by high energy radiation like cosmic rays (which I'll abbreviate "CR"), which are subatomic particles zipping around space. What happens then is that pixel is always "bright", or "hot", even when nothing is putting light into it. You have to make a map of the hot pixels in a CCD so you can compensate for them.
Ms. Lieder claims the images taken by Steve Havas show Planet X. What they really show is a hot pixel. When the pictures are properly calibrated, as several people have shown (see here and here), the "Planet X" pixel goes away. One giveaway is that stars/planets/etc. are round in the image (they cover several pixels), where hot pixels look like single points. The things pointed out by Ms. Lieder and others are single points, so they cannot be real. This shows two things: 1) you have to be careful and understand CCDs when you look at the data, and 2) Ms. Lieder is wrong.
A lot of the stuff pointed out by Tuatha in the SOHO images is really just hot pixels. They aren't spaceships at all, they are simply pixels inside the SOHO camera that are a bit too overenthusiastic.
When cosmic rays hit a CCD, they dump their energy into a pixel, making it look very bright. Sometime, if the impact angle is low, the CR leaves a streak. At the end of the streak, it can suddenly dump lots of energy into the pixels, making what looks like a spray. I saw this all the time in my Hubble images. Unless there are billions of spaceships out there leaving little trails in all those random images, I would prefer to assume they are actually the somewhat more common cosmic ray.
In the SOHO images, there are lots of CRs. Sometimes these are particles from the Sun, accelerated during a coronal mass ejection. Matter of fact, after you see a big ejection from the Sun, the particles can hit the SOHO detectors, making it look like they were hit by a shotgun. A few of what Tuatha claims are spaceships near the Sun are CR sprays. Tuatha's claims are wrong.
Remember the bucket analogy? What happens when a bucket fills up to the brim with water? It overflows. The same thing happens in CCDs. A pixel can only hold so many electrons before it overflows. Because of the way the pixels are made, the overflow goes into the adjoining pixels horizontally, so the overflowing pixel leaks electrons into the pixels to its left and right (or above and below it). If enough light is hitting the one pixel, it can overflow the adjacent pixels, which flow into the next ones, and so on. When you look at the resulting image, a bright object appears to have a bright horizontal line going through it. This is called "blooming". A bright star may bloom over several vertical pixels, so you get many rows of blooming.
There is a picture posted at http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/indexback46.html which is called the "Ra" image because there is a feature that looks like the symbol for the Egyptian god Ra. This is a perfect example of a bright object blooming. If you go through the SOHO archive, you'll see this happening whenever a bright object is in the image. Venus is the brightest thing you'll see, and it blooms quite a bit. I don't know what was in the SOHO field in the Ra image, but it was bright and it bloomed (it may have been a very energetic CR). Those "wings" are not real. They are simply electrons that overflowed inside the CCD itself.
You can see several examples on this page: http://www.iwonderproductions.com/suncru.htm. In fact, the explanation given by Joe Gurman on that page is correct, and the webpage author didn't believe him. The cosmic rays and bright objects give the same shape every time because what's happening is inside the CCD, not on the sky. Also, the "torpedo" in that image is a comet! Lots of comets are seen going very near (and sometimes actually impacting) the Sun. Matter of fact, more comets have been discovered using SOHO than any other single telescope. Hundreds have been seen.
As far as other "anomalies" in SOHO images go, there are many, but all the ones I have seen have rational explanations. Sometimes you see what look like palm fronds coming out, fanning across the image (this one is a favorite of The Millennium Group, which you can see here). I asked a SOHO person, and they said that sometimes debris gets knocked off the satellite (there are a few moving parts on the satellite that can jolt it) and this stuff drifts in front of the camera. They are out of focus at first, and as they move away they get more and more in focus. That's why you get the palm frond shape; the thick base is actually when the particle is close, and the narrow tip is when it's far away. It's a time exposure of something coming into focus.
Well, that was longer than I anticipated, but I hope it clears some things up. The point here is that people like Tuatha, Ms. Lieder and others have no experience with digital astronomical cameras, and assume they simply take pictures. CCDs are far more complicated than that, and in fact I have just scratched the surface here with what you need to know to interpret CCD images. Every single thing Tuatha has pointed at in the SOHO images actually has a far more mundane explanation than alien spaceships.
Like Robert Sepehr (a man who has a Planet X video to sell, and constantly makes easily-disproven claims on a PX discussion group), who constantly claims the Sun is acting up without understanding that this is actually the Sun's normal and expected behavior, Tuatha and the others simply don't understand the subject they are talking about. It's really that simple. I don't mean this to sound condescending; I mean it to be literally true. I try to stay away from topics (like geology and mammoths) in this field when I do not have the expertise to give an informed opinion, but in this case I do. If more people actually went out and tried to find the answers to some of these questions, a lot of the Planet X "evidence" would go away.


For someone with social anxiety, I sure do put myself in a lot of situations where I need to talk to people. Every conversation is a constant struggle to maintain coherent thought while a voice in the back of my head screams nonsense and "just go hide!" I manage just fine (most people are surprised to learn this about me!), but I am well aware of my tendency to just...stop talking when a conversation doesn't go the direction I expect. It takes me a while to find the words I want, and the anxiety of "don't you dare say the wrong thing" makes that incredibly difficult. I imagine it's why I do so much better in scientific settings, where I constantly have facts and the like to draw on. In a creative setting? I can only be so prepared for what is going to be said.
To that end, I've often thought about taking an improv class. There are many schools of thought for improv, and different ways people expect to be able to apply it. For me I've wanted to learn more about how to make just rolling with a conversation more reflexive and natural. The idea of taking such a class has been frightening though, for the exact same reason I've wanted to take it. I've sat on the idea for well over a year, and finally worked up the courage to sign up for one. That's right, I'm finally taking an improv class!
For the next several weeks my Wednesdays will be spent with 10 people I've only just met, learning about the foundations of improv and trying to put it into practice. I've already had one such session, and it quickly went from being terrifying to being, dare I say, fun? It's already clear there are certain people in the class I click with better for doing scenes, but it's amazing how quickly we came to support each other. It really is truly a judgment-free environment, and even the instructor has already been magnificent about telling you how to improve without it sounding remotely like there's any criticism about what you just did.
I'm still nervous for what the next few weeks will bring, but much less-so than I was. I don't expect any miracles to come out of this, but I do look forward to the progress and confidence I will gain from the experience. Who knows? Maybe I'll enjoy it so much I'll continue to pursue training!
When was the last time you took the leap to do something you were scared to do?
My leap began a month ago, and it's now I'm having a whole bunch of questions about my future. Wish I knew where life was taking me, but I know there's a whole bunch of important conversations coming up soon, but I can't rush them, because that's the next big leap, and I don't feel ready for it, but at the same time, I have to get it done. Not working has allowed my mind to wander, it's making me feel like i don't want to specifically go back to my job, but I don't mind working in general, it keeps me busy and brings in money.


My laptop is currently fitted with a 20GB ata-5 hard drive. I would like to replace this with a 40GB drive but the one I have seen is an ata-6. Are these compatable?
Yes. An ATA6 drive is backward compatible with an older ATA spec. You shouldn't have any problem.
1. Physical size of new drive vs. space in your notebook.
2. Some notebooks use a bracket commonly called a "caddy". The HDD is attached to the caddy and the caddy is attached to the notebook. If your notebook uses a caddy, you will either need to reuse your current caddy or obtain another that physically fits your new HDD.
3. Bear in mind that there are several standard physical sizes for notebook HDDs. They are all the same height and width. But, the thickness varies: 9.5mm, 12mm, 17mm, and 19mm. This is not an issue on desktop HDDs that are typically all 1" thick.


This answer to a previous question gives a way to make bread from pizza dough. It said to roll the dough into a loaf. I took it out of the refrigerator, rolled it into a loaf and let it sit in my oven after warming it to 100 and turning it off. I left it in there for 3 hours but it spread out to end up only about 1 inch thick and 8 inches wide. This has happened to me before trying to make a "loaf" of bread without using a loaf pan. What the heck am I doing wrong?
Pizza dough is supposed to be stretchy and pliable, so it is going to be a bit loose. Given those characteristics it's not going to be able to hold a shape that well. You're best off aiming for a ciabatta shape, putting it into a tin or shaping basket. Best of all make a focaccia type bread with it by just spreading it out flat, letting it rise, then dimpling it with your fingers and pouring some olive oil and salt on it before baking.
There are a myriad of bread doughs and names with various characteristics, yet when it comes to pizza, everybody calls their dough "pizza dough". Even if they are vastly different from each other.
You can make a nice little bread loaf/baton with some pizza doughs depending on the hydration level of your dough, how much the gluten has been worked, and how long it has been let to relax.
kneading your dough for longer to develop a stronger dough able to hold shape (world class pizza dough also starts here).
Don't keep it in the fridge for more than a day (neapolitan style pizza dough usually rests three days in the fridge).
You don't need to turn the oven on for proofing. Just turn on the oven light. It's enough to make a perfect proofing temperature.
Gently roll or shape your pizza dough in a baguette style roll (batonette) and let it rise. The end result after proofing comes to about 2" to 2 1/2" high.


New computer programme could settle literary debates.
To date, unlike us, computers have struggled to differentiate a page of Jane Austen from one by Jackie Collins. Now researchers in Italy have developed a program that can spot enough subtle differences between two authors’ works to attribute authorship1.
The program can tell a text by Machiavelli from one by Pirandello, Dante or a host of other great Italian writers. It constructed a language tree of the degree of affinity between 50 different tongues. The tree identifies all the main linguistic groups, such as Romance, Celtic, Slavic and so forth and highlights Maltese (an Afro-Asiatic language) and Basque as anomalies.
As well as settling a few literary arguments, the technique might be useful for comparing other information-rich sequences of data. These might include genetic sequences, medical-monitoring measurements and stock-market fluctuations.
Identifying the language of a particular text is generally not hard in itself: one need simply look for the greatest overlap between the words used and those in a reference list for each language. Classifying linguistic styles is altogether more tricky.
One obvious approach is to compare the range and frequency of words in the sample text against reference texts from various candidate authors. That might work for markedly different styles: it would quickly distinguish Shakespeare from Tom Clancy.
But literary scholars often argue furiously about attributions for old texts. The task can become immensely difficult even for those with a great deal of knowledge about the candidate authors’ writing styles.
So Dario Benedetto and colleagues at the Universita ’La Sapienza’ in Rome try a different approach. They start from the premise that written language is in the end no more than a string of symbols. It might look rather random, but it is not.
Some groups of characters recur commonly (such as ’the’ in English), and particular authors favour certain constructions and turns of phrase. These can be measured, rather than being reliant on subjective impressions or anecdotal comparisons.
The team begin from the classic insight of telecommunications engineer Claude Shannon in the 1940s that the information content of a message is related to its entropy. Roughly speaking, entropy is a measure of how much redundancy a message contains. It can be defined as the smallest program that will produce the original message as the output.
For a random string of characters, this program would simply specify every character - it would be the same size as the original message. For a string of just A’s, the program could be very concise: ’repeat A’. Most real messages lie somewhere in-between: they can usually be compressed a little without losing significant information. This is the basis of data-compression computer algorithms, used to make ’zip’ files, for instance.
Benedetto and his colleagues borrow the principles of data-compression algorithms to calculate a kind of relative entropy for two different character strings: a measure of how much they differ. This distance between two texts is smaller for two works by the same author than for two works by different authors.
Benedetto, D., Caglioti, E. & Loreto, V. Language trees and zipping. Physical Review Letters, 88, 048702, (2002).


Given the first k values of m, calculate the nth value of this array. (i.e. m[n – 1]).
The first line contains an integer T (T <= 20), the number of test cases.
(1 <= k <= 105, k < n <= 109).
(0 <= a, b, c <= 109, 1 <= r <= 109).
// Here we cut the running time.


"Arrey Rakh Doonga Kisi Masjid Ka Naam Bhagwan Vishnu Ke Naam Pe...Chillao Mat!"….."Tumhari Himmat Nahi Hai"
You can have an opinion on the spate of name changes spurred/effected/executed by the ruling BJP, from turning Agra into Aggarwala, Ahmedabad into Karnawati or Faizabad into Sri Ayodhya. The Congress had done its bit by turning Curzon Road into Kasturba Gandhi Marg, and a hundred or more other such changes.
But Sambit Patra's recent performance on Aaj Tak takes the cake, or Jalebi-Fafra. Please remember that he is the National Spokesperson of the ruling party of India.
Here are some excerpts from BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra's recent performance on Aaj Tak’s nightly theatre show, Dangal, that is only tangentially/incidentally related to topical news.
Context - The recent rechristening of Allahabad as Prayagraj and Faizabad as Ayodhya. Anchor - Rohit Sardana.
"Jahan tak musalmaano ko target karne ka swaal hai ... kabhi Hindu ne muslamaan kya, kisi ko bhi target nahin kiya. Usi ka nateeja hai ki aap dekhiye Hindustan main humaare musalmaan bhai acche se phale-phoole hain ... aur aaj 20 se 25 pratishit sankhya unki bani hai ... 2 pratishit se 25 pratishit pahunche hain Hindustan main ... toh kaun target kar raha hai?
Syed Asim Waqar, national spokesperson of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen, asked Patra why the party changed the name of Ekana International Stadium to Bharat Ratna Atal Bihari Vajpayee International Cricket Stadium. He asked Patra what was the problem of the BJP with Lord Vishnu, and which historical wrong was being righted by renaming the stadium named after Lord Vishnu.
Patra said BJP had immense respect for Vajpayee who was not an individual but a "soch" (school of thought - rough translation) and then began heckling Waqar, and asked him if he was an Allah Bhakt or a Vishnu Bhakt.
"Aap Allah ke bhakt ho ya Vishnu ke bhakt ho?” he asked. When Waqar said he believed in Allah but also respected Hinduism, Patra asked him to keep quiet or else he would rename a mosque after Lord Vishnu’s name.
"Kisi masjid ka naam main rakh dunga bhagwaan Vishnu ke naam pe, phir chillate rahoge."
To this, a visibly upset Waqar said: Tumhaari himmat nahin hai miyan...tum battameez insaan ho. [You don't have the guts, you are ill-mannered]."
"Chinta mat karo ... hum Vishnu ke bhakt hain bhaiyya ... chhodne waale nahin hain,” Patra then said.
We leave to the readers of Punjab Today what could the National Spokesperson of the BJP have meant when he said, "Chhodne waale nahin hain"?
Given Patra's reputation, and coupled with some of the stuff coming from the party, you can safely assume the worst.
NOTE - Sambit Patra is a Government Nominee to the Board of Directors of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), a position he must have clearly earned for his expertise in oil and natural gas.
Too many people have made claims in the past that he produces a lot of hot air with personal efforts.


So this happened this morning.
For many of us, Clarion isn't in the cards. Maybe you can't leave your job for six weeks without losing the job and your home. Maybe you're the parent of a small child, or take care of an elderly or disabled relative. Maybe you have a chronic health condition yourself, or an anxiety disorder that means you wouldn't be able to travel or participate. Maybe you're saving up for a house or paying off medical debt.
Maybe you'd rather go on a proper vacation if you happen to come into a few thousand dollars in disposable income.
None of these things mean you can't be a professional writer. But the good news is, there's more than one path to being a writer, pro or otherwise.
First off, Clarion is a six-week endeavor. There are other writer's workshops that require only one week out of your life, and are also highly regarded. Viable Paradise, for example -- and I wish I could make the time for that one. Taos Toolbox is also reportedly an excellent workshop and worth your time and money, if you have them to spare.
Even better, these retreat-style workshops aren't the only way to improve your craft. There might be a genre writer's workshop in your own town that meets once a week, or once a month. And there are critique circles online ranging from Critters to Absolute Write -- I'm sure commenters will chime in with more. If you want a workshop-style venue to have your work read, and to critically read the work of other writers in turn, there are plenty of options.
And the truth is, workshops are helpful... but they're not necessary. Far from it.
What a workshop does for you is hone your critical eye. Simply by being exposed to excellent critical thinking, you develop the capacity to critique your own work. But you can develop a critical eye on your own, if other means don't suit you.
Read. Read widely. But don't just take in the story. As you go, consciously reflect on what you're thinking and feeling. Are you expecting the story to go in a particular direction? What exact sentence or passage led you to that belief? What made you feel excited, or sad, or tense? How are the scenes structured? How are description, dialogue, and action blended together? How long are the sentences? A story is a machine, and every part should be doing a specific job. You need to become a mechanic, able to look at each piece of the story to identify what work is being done.
Read reviews. But not of your own work -- of the stuff you're already analyzing. When you've finished a book or a story, go looking for the reactions of other people to calibrate your own antennae. In preference, read longer, analytic reviews that talk about both what a work has done and how it fits into the overall landscape of genre publishing. Deep critical analysis like you'll find on NPR Books or Tor.com are perfect, but you'll even find insightful critique on Goodreads and Amazon.
Read bad work. This is, I strongly believe, an important part of a writer's development. Read stuff you know is going to be bad. And then -- this is the important part -- analyze the hell out of it. Why is it bad? Does it fail on a sentence level, on consistency, does it fail in terms of pacing or plausibility? Sometimes we learn from mistakes better than we learn from success. You can't watch Meryl Streep and learn how to be an amazing performer, but you can watch a fifth grade play and learn that maybe you shouldn't leave your hands hanging by your sides the whole show, and maybe you should speak up a little more.
Revise. This is where you apply what you've learned. The temptation to write and immediately submit is strong, but while you're trying to actively develop your craft, resist the urge. Come back to a story after a few days, weeks, months if you can spare them, and try to read as if you'd never seen the story before. Think about everything you're learning, and apply those lessons to your own work.
Repeat. Clarion (and other workshops) are an intensive course in this kind of thinking, but even when Clarion is over, you'll need to keep doing these things forever. At least, you do if you want to keep growing as a writer. And why on earth would you ever want to stop getting better?
Here's the real reason Clarion is a big deal: the alumni association, as it were, is a powerful and widespread network in genre publishing. Human nature being what it is, we like people who have the same experiences and affiliations as we do. And we like to help the people we like. So if you go to Clarion, some doors of opportunity are a little more open to you than they were before.
We like to tell ourselves that publishing is a meritocracy, and that's only sort of true. People do emerge from the slush pile, naked and alone. You really don't have to know someone to be published.
But at the same time, it's a bit easier to break in if you've become a familiar face -- not just because people are more willing to go to bat for a friend, but because you'll begin to understand the kinds of work different editors and markets are interested in, you'll learn from the successes and mistakes of your peers, you'll become a part of the cultural conversation that SF/F fundamentally is.
So how do you fake the network? Duh, networking! Build your own. Go to cons, if you can. Make friends. Invite people to coffee or a drink. If that's not possible for you, work social media. Follow authors, editors, agents on Twitter.
And don't be all networky and utilitarian about it, because people can tell and generally super hate that. You need to approach everything as an exercise in meeting interesting people and making friends. Promote the work you admire. Ask questions. Introduce people to each other when you can; do favors when you can. Give to the community. Give. Give. You can worry about taking later, or maybe never.
Because Clarion is, at the end of the day, just one neighborhood in the SF/F community. But there are others, and you'll find professional writers in all of them.
If you're a long-time reader here, it won't have escaped your notice that I stopped talking about transmedia a while back. I'm not writing about craft anymore, I'm not giving talks at conferences, and I've been increasingly winding down or declining commitments to run workshops, speak to classes of aspiring digital professionals, and so on. But it's not because I've left transmedia, and not that I don't believe in transmedia anymore.
Partly this is because I'm in an extremely fortunate position wherein haven't needed to hustle for new projects for a long time now. But it was already in the cards when I was still hustling. Mostly it's because I don't want to sell snake oil, and when I talked about transmedia, snake oil was where I was headed -- and definitely what audiences wanted from me: promises that if they just did what I told them, they'd get more engagement, attract more eyeballs, and make more money.
That's not always true. Transmedia is not your magic bullet; you can use every technique in the toolbox and still make a project nobody ever looks at or cares about. Sometimes implementing a transmedia strategy is a waste of precious energy and resources. It's hard to say that when your goal is to get people to hire you for money to do things, though. But look: transmedia isn't synonymous with innovative or interesting, nor is it a replacement for a traditional marketing plan.
Anyway, I didn't want to become someone eternally pitching something I didn't believe in anymore. So I stopped punditing, basically.
There's another reason, too. While I was still on the conference circuit, I found myself increasingly talking about work that I'd done or experienced three years before, five years. Meanwhile the amount of work I was actually doing was paltry, and I don't think any transmedia work I've done has been noteworthy since... well. *coughs* It's been a while.
I got into this field because of the art, because of the audience relationships, because when you make something amazing and electric, there's nothing else like it. I got into this because of The Beast, because I was told a story and gifted with an experience that changed my life. I want to do that, too.
I wasn't ever, ever going to do that by speaking to a group of brand strategists about the engagement pyramid.
When something isn't working for you, when you find yourself walking down a path that goes somewhere you don't want to be, the only answer is to turn a corner and head somewhere else. So what have I been doing instead? I doubled and tripled down on making instead of talking.
I've got a really magnificent long-term project that you could probably call transmedia I'm working on -- details will come eventually, I swear. Hopefully in the next couple of months!
And I've also been chipping away at a long-term plan to build some credibility as a writer, and maybe start some organic growth so that one day I can go to a publisher or a production company and have the gravitas to get more complex things made... without having to start a studio my own self. I've done independent works like Lucy Smokeheart and The McKinnon Account. I've also somehow turned into a legit science fiction author. I've written a novel, I've published a few short stories. I'm represented by Zoe Sandler at ICM now, and I'm a member of SFWA. I have a game on the way, and some secret stuff, too. I'm making again. It feels... amazing.
But I'm still here, and I have big plans. Long-range plans, to be sure. But hopefully when we get there, you'll find it's been worth the wait.
And who knows, maybe when the time comes, I'll finally have some new things to say about transmedia, too.
At Phoenix Comicon last weekend, a gentleman came to me after one of my panels and asked if I had any advice for him on writing women. I had a lot of things to say: fill your story with tons of other incidental women, so no one character bears the burden of demonstrating what it's like to be female in your story world; make sure she has agency in the story; please don't have her thinking hard about her relationship with her own breasts.
But the first thing that popped out of my mouth was: write her just like you'd write a man. Because she's not really any different from you at all.
I've read lots of advice about writing the other. Much of it is sensible advice for achieving a new point of view -- research cultures and subcultures, make sure you read and talk to people in a culture and not just people who know it from the outside. But I was always a little unsatisfied with how the topic is addressed. I didn't understand why until that lovely young man asked me 'how should I write women.' And the problem I have is: talking about writing the other assumes otherness. It assumes a fundamental difference, even an alienness in priorities and perceptions. And I simply don't think there is such a thing as a human being who is other to me.
I admittedly have the privilege of possessing a remarkably broad swath of lived experience. I've been a minority in several senses, and just like everyone else around me; rich enough to have live-in servants and poor enough to have food stamps; I've been shy and unpopular, I've been the life of the party; I've made my home in a dozen places cutting across nations and regions, and spent time in a dozen more. And the thing that always strikes me isn't difference. It's how all the same everything is.
Wherever you go, people are fundamentally the same. Do parents want their children to succeed any less in China than in Chicago? Does an Iranian doctor feel any different about losing a patient than a Philadelphian? There are differences between cultures, to be sure, but the variation between individuals even in the same culture dwarfs it in scope. Who's more different from a gregarious restaurant owner and father of three in Atlanta -- the gregarious restaurant owner and father of three in Mumbai, or one of Atlanta's own homeless with crippling social anxiety and PTSD?
So when I'm writing, yes, I do try to be cognizant of how the weight of etiquette and culture color a person's opinions and interactions. Maybe don't have the devout Orthodox Jew order the BLT, right? But also don't assume that no Jew would ever order the BLT -- not everyone practices their faith impeccably. Be sure you're operating from a credible perspective on what a culture's norms and standards actually are, and not groundless assumptions. Maybe don't have your Ugandan character behave as though they have never even heard of a mobile phone before, much less seen one.
But at the end of the day, I think the key to writing the other is to discard the idea of otherness completely. Writing any character is an act of extreme empathy. You have to find the spark in you that understands what it would be like to be someone else -- how the world might treat you in different circumstances, how those different layers of reward and resentment would influence your reactions and change you into something different. All of us know what it is to be virtuous and terrible, petty and generous, brilliant and stupid, selfish and brave and worn down. Find the person-like-you first. Once you have that, the rest is just color.
Most of the news around here lately is about that book, but meanwhile Fireside Magazine published a new piece of short fiction from me on Monday: Children of Rouwen. I'd be delighted if you would read it and tell me what you think!
I'd like to talk a bit about where that story comes from -- and this is incredibly spoilery, so if you care about that sort of thing, please, read the story before you continue. Children of Rouwen is very directly inspired by and in conversation with Ursula Vernon's Elegant and Fine, a breathtaking work about Narnia, and about Susan, and the realistic emotional consequences of living a life in Narnia and then... coming home again, into a child's life and a child's body. It's a fine piece of writing, and Ursula Vernon is a genius.
This got me to thinking about the nature of portal fantasy as a whole, and about the ones who get left behind. If you think on it, the adults of Narnia, living through wartime and reconstruction, arguably need a little magic even more than the children do. The idea of being left behind, of being the one not chosen, of having missed your chance -- I think that speaks to a deep human fear. And there's another layer here, especially for parents: even once those children come back, the parents have still been left behind by the passage of time, haven't they? So Children of Rouwen is also, as many of my works are, about the inevitable sorrow of seeing your children grow up and away from you.
When my first daughter was a few days old and I was home alone with her for the first time, I was suddenly overcome with waterfalls of tears in the middle of a diaper change because it struck me all at once that one day, she would be a teenager and she would hate me; or at the very least, one day, she would be an adult, and she wouldn't really need me anymore. This was mostly a crazy rush of weird postpartum hormones. It's not really a rational train of thought, as such.
But parenting is, for me, full of something opposite to nostalgia; I think maybe the aesthetic called mono no aware in Japanese. It's the sadness of knowing that something beautiful is ephemeral; of missing something that brings you joy before it's even gone.


I don't understand what the phrase 'with a wine press converted for the task' in the following paragraph. Could anyone do me a favor?
By utilizing a process whereby each letter was moulded individually and was then continuously reused, he was able to produce texts - most famously a 42-line Bible of 1282 two-column pages around 1457-8- with a wine press converted for the task.


Hello! I am currently working on a piece that uses the Double Harmonic Major A LOT, but I can't find any progressions that convey what I'm going for, anyone know any good progressions?
This piece is on it's way and will be up before the end of April.
by "double harmonic major", I'm assuming you're referring to what I know as the "phyrgian dominant" scale, or the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale. I like this scale a lot and use it a lot when improvising ideas for pieces, and what I really like to do is utilize chords that emphasize the "unique flavour" of the scale. for example, the double harm. scale is characterized by b2 and b6 scale degrees, so use chords that highlight those two scale steps. one good one is a bII chord (in C major, that's a Db major chord) which contains both of those scale steps. another one I like is bvii, which contains b2 (in C major, that's a Bb minor chord). experiment with these chords and similar ones and see how those fit in. one other thing I like to do in this particular mode is to highlight these scale steps by putting C in the bass underneath every chord so it acts like a pedal tone (a note that stays constant as chords change above it). for example, I'll put a C beneath a Db major chord, which clashes very well. with double harmonic major, I tend to use these pedal tones a lot.
[user=Panda Hero]Panda Hero[/user] Really good advice, I'll be using this. Thank you.
[user=ryanguerra2951]ryanguerra2951[/user] sorry, by C underneath every chord I meant the tonic note (first note) of the scale; not just slapping C underneath every single chord regardless of the key lmao this is a scale often associated with middle eastern, arabic, indian, and sometimes klezmer music, so I suggest listening to those genres to get some inspiration. imitating those sounds I picked up from those musics is how I got all this. let me know how this turns out!
Hello! I am currently working on a piece that uses the Double Harmonic Major A LOT, but I can't find any progressions that convey what I'm going for, anyone know any good progressions? This piece is on it's way and will be up before the end of April.


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Stock market today, September 2, 2014: U.S. markets closed on Friday in the black. The S&P 500 sustained its gains last week, finishing the day above the vaunted 2,000 level. With U.S. markets closed on Monday in observance of Labor Day, investors will look forward to a heavy week of economic data, including the all-important August jobs report.
On the global front, geopolitical problems continue to evolve in Ukraine as Russian troops entered through the eastern border last week. New reports have placed Kazakhstan on high alert of future Russian pressure, heightening tensions between the Kremlin and the West. On Monday, investors placed a greater emphasis on actions of the European Central Bank (ECB) and whether Mario Draghi and his cohorts will begin an unprecedented stimulus program to stave off threats of regional deflation. Asian stocks dipped while the Euro fell to a near 12-month low.
The IPO of the Year: The Wall Street Journal reports that the initial public offering process of the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA) could launch as soon as next week. The newspaper reports that public trading on the New York Stock Exchange could begin by Sept. 18 or 19. The Chinese e-commerce company is likely to carry a market cap as high as $130 billion. Shares of Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), which owns a 24% share in the company, are up 0.8% this morning as the IPO approaches.
NFC Growth: Reuters reports that tech giant Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) will be partnering with several major credit-card processors to enable the iPhone as a primary source of payment for users. It has been a long path for near-field communications, but the iPhone 6 is gearing up to be an important tool for retail purchases and banking. The report indicates that Apple will partner with American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP), MasterCard Inc. (NYSE: MA), and Visa Inc. (NYSE: V).
The Electric Boom: Shares of electric car manufacturer Telsa Motors Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) hit a new intraday high last week on news the company has forged an agreement to build 400 charging stations in China. The company is working with China United Network to build the stations in 120 Chinese cities at the outlets of China Telecom. The news is a boost for the market, where concerns over a lack of charging stations has affected the company's sales forecasts in the nation.


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Given a set of players and the cost of each possible coalition, the question we address is which coalitions should be formed. We formulate mixed integer linear programming models for this problem, considering core stability and strong equilibrium. The objective function looks for minimizing the total cost allocated among the players. Concerned about the difficulties of managing large coalitions in practice, we also study the effect of a maximum cardinality constraint per coalition. We test the models in two applications. One is in collaborative forest transportation and the other one in inventory of spare parts for oil operations. In these situations, collaboration opportunities involving significant savings exist, but for several reasons, it may be better to group the players in different sub-coalitions rather than in the grand coalition. The models we propose are thus relevant for deciding how to partition the set of players. We also prove that if the strong equilibrium model is feasible, its optimal cost is equal to the optimal cost of the core stability model and, consequently, a coalition structure that solves one problem also solves the other problem. We present results that illustrate this property. We also present results where the core stability problem is feasible and the strong equilibrium problem is infeasible. Setting an upper bound on the maximum cardinality of the coalitions, allows us to study the marginal savings of enlarging the cardinality of the coalitions. We find that the marginal savings of allowing one more player significantly decreases as the bound increases.
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Are credit cards accepted in the museums and restaurants in Warsaw?
When used in a restaurant, is there a minimum amount you have to spend in order to pay by credit card?
I'm particularly interested in whether the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews accepts payment with a card.
From my experience, non fast-food restaurants generally accept credit cards. As for musea, it depends, so bring always some cash with you, to make sure.
Some smaller shops require[d] some minimal sum (not sure if it's legal now), but it was so tiny (about 10 PLN) that you're unlikely to met that sum in a restaurant.
If the credit cards are accepted, those are practically always 2 main systems (Visa and Mastercard). I've never seen any point that would accept one of them, but not the 2nd. However, if you use more exotic system (like V-Pay), you should expect it won't be accepted in most places.
Please note that even if credit cards are accepted, it happens that the terminals are broken and in that case you won't be able to pay with your credit card).
As a citizen of Warsaw, I never carry cash around (and most young people don't), since card payments are accepted almost everywhere (as long as you use Visa or Mastercard), even in small stores, especially in the central parts of Warsaw (which is what you're most likely going to see as a tourist). I regularly visit restaurants, and not being able to pay by card happened to me like once in the last 5 years, and that was because the terminal was broken. I know of one bakery chain that still requires cash, but otherwise this was never a problem. On the other hand, there are situations where it's a huge inconvenience to use cash (for example ticket vending machines present in pretty much every bus accept only card payments, so if you only had cash, you'd have to buy the ticket from the driver).
Minimum amounts are prohibited, though I've seen this a few times (usually 10 PLN in stores, doesn't happen in restaurants) - this is becoming much rarer than it used to (last time I saw this was two years ago). According to my bank, if I ever see someone requiring a minimum amount, I should ask for terminal ID (which they are obliged to disclose) and report the situation - so, the risk here is pretty low.
As for museums, they also almost always accept credit card payments, especially the major ones.
If you want to be on the safe side, get 50 to 100 PLN in cash - you're most likely never going to need it, though.
Update: As of November 2018, buying tickets in a bus by cash is no longer possible, and the bakery chain which was cash only now accepts cards as well.
I think there's no 100% general answer, but card payments are so popular in Poland that I find it hard to imagine that any bigger museum in Warsaw wouldn't accept it. The same goes for restaurants.
Regarding any minimum amount, it may happen, but it's more often the case in really small shops, and then this amount is really small (like 10-20 PLN) and you would rather always have bill to pay bigger than this minimum.
I stayed in Poland (Warsaw and Poznan) for a month but never had an opportunity to use cash (I withdrew 600 PLN). All the stores I went to accept my credit card, and it was very difficult to find any place that doesn't accept credit cards (I only found one, which is a cheap bakery in Poznan and it put a warning note on the entrance window saying "Cash Only").
As to the minimal sum, I didn't experience it, be it <3 PLN a bottled water in supermarkets, <4 bottled juice in 24H alcohol shop, or <9 a cup of coffee at cafes.
As to the brand, most stores only accept either Visa or MasterCard. Amex is rarely accepted in cheap restaurants and cafes, except some chained stores (Wedal, Starbucks, etc).
I also warn you that in Poland, it is more likely than not that you must choose whether you pay in PLN or your currency. It is usually advisable to pay in PLN as the transaction cost is usually higher in your currency (but depending on your card). Sometimes clerks choose your currency without asking you, but in that case you can ask them to switch back to PLN before entering your PIN.
At this moment, being a resident of Poland I find it impossible to find a cash only place at all. Even the smallest vendors (food trucks etc.) accept cards. I would recommend to keep 50 PLN for a traveller JUST in case. But it looks like card payment penetration in Poland is well above 98%.
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Somewhere along the way Thom fell in love with himself. Or maybe not himself, more his music, but it’s hard to blame him when so many millions of people fell in love with Thom too. We’re now long past the whiny, public school kid from a town whose redeeming characteristic was once described by Bill Bryson as a well kept council estate, and with a hit song amounting to an extended exercise in self pity. We now have huge, media-hungry releases and epileptic fits masquerading as music videos. He hasn’t gone full Michael Jackson with fame, not yet, but the effect fame’s had on poor Thom is unmistakable. Self obsessed, self involved and self assured enough to form a supergroup with some of the biggest names in music then absolutely dominate it, Thom’s a new man.
The crux of this paragraph is all of it shows in his music. Atoms for Peace is a Thom only affair and the only whiff of influence to be found in Amok is of Radiohead. If Thom was the man he is today at the beginning of the millennia, he would have made this exact album instead of Kid A. Musically and structurally we see no real progression: the same scattered drum pallets and samples are still popping up, even similar song ideas can be easily noted, but the direction and mood is much different. After the never ending progression of Radiohead it might be the case that Atoms for Peace is allowing Thom to visit old styles with a new headspace. If this is the case he certainly seems to be making the most of it.
Plenty has changed despite this, creating a sound which for better or worse is distinctly Atoms for Peace. As an album, Amok rushes feverishly between the two polar ends of Thom’s cannon: from crescendos to a repeating percussion-lead hypnotism. The former manifests itself in “Default” and “Unless,” with steadily rising synth and vocal combos surfing the wave of percussion to a kind of desperate emotional outcry. Rapid pacing makes it seem more like an escape into something than a cry for help, and therefore more appropriate for the man dancing manically than the one crying in a shopping trolley. The latter features Thom singing to a lonely beat at his highest and softest with a seemingly random array of accompanying sounds. It isn’t unsurprising following the self-description of his writing process -i.e. dragging himself backwards through a hedge- but the more experimental vibe is much more befitting to the new group. Tracks displaying this, such as “Amok” itself, do seem at ends with the more outwardly emotional parts of the album, but it strikes closer to forward-thinking than Thom’s tendency to play with the past.
Nigel (veteran Radiohead producer), Flea (RHCP), Joey (Beck; R.E.M.) and Mauro (!) eventually get their say in the scattered rhythmic scenes in Amok. Behind the In Rainbows-esque guitar strums, “Stuck Together Pieces” displays the band at work. Inventive percussion and a bass full of a little bit more funk serve as a reminder of the three extra members, though most of the time there’s little to see past the airtight seal of Thom’s personality.
Whether you warm to Amok or not is largely down to whether or not you can stand Thom being in love with himself for 9 songs. It’s inventive, sensitive, beautiful and incredibly interesting, especially for someone who’s spent a great deal of time exploring Thom’s previous work, but at the same time the album teeters on the edge of smugness. Despite this, and ignoring the fact this praise may be the final straw in pushing Thom’s ego over the edge, the album comes highly recommended.
Like Atoms For Peace on Facebook.


Why is USA tax reporting different for essentially identical gold coins?
Why would that be the case when the different country coins are essentially identical? Is it simply that the law is old and has not been updated for newer coins?
Canadian Maple Leaves, Mexican Onzas and South African Kruggerands are explicitly reportable. All the other government-mint gold bullions, and all the government-mint silver bullions are not reportable.
This is at least my understanding. This is defined in the IRS Rev. Proc. 92-103, but I haven't found the actual publication, only various dealers explaining it. This seems to be one of the more coherent ones. I suspect it had something to do with either treaties, lobbying or purity (probably lobbying...).
Note that non-government minted bullions are always reportable.
The quality of the coin. The Canadian Gold Leaf, for example, has at least 0.9999 fitness, so it's extremely pure. Very pure coins are of sufficient quality to fulfill commodities contracts as gold rather than as coins.
As you suggested, the age of the law also seems to matter. From your link: "Many exempt products, like the American Silver Eagle coins, are not on the [exempt] list because they were not in existence when the Reportable Item list was created."
Under 26 CFR 1.6045-1, gold and silver bullion of a certain quality and at minimum quantity are effectively defined as commodities subject to reporting since, at the minimum quality, they can be delivered to complete regulated futures contracts. The default treatment of such commodities is that sales should be reported, but there is an exception for foreign currency. That seems to be why most foreign currency coins are exempt.
The Act has two main objectives: (1) to permit U.S. citizens to buy and hold gold for investment purposes in relatively small amounts; and (2) to compete with the Krugerrand and other foreign gold coins, so that less gold is imported into the United States and fewer dollars are exported.
Finally, if you check the coins on the "reportable" list in the OP's link, I think that you'll find that most have no face value as currency. (The Canadian Gold Leaf has a face value and so do the US coins. The others seem to only have value based on their metal content.) I couldn't find anything specifically stating that's why they are reportable, but I did find controversy in a couple of respects about whether these are actually "currency" under U.S. law and whether the designation might depend on which part of the law is at issue.
I don't have time to dig further than this, but it's at least some anchor to law and history to support my answer. If someone has something more definitive, I'd be interested to see read it.
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What are the tax liabilities or impact for selling gold in the USA?
Why gold prices are affected by interest rates?