Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Get Outta My Way, Ya Clown (Creators Syndicate)
The other day, a local police department told people to call the cops only if they saw a clown where he didn't belong. This was in response to nationwide reports of "creepy clown sightings." Where doesn't a clown belong? At a wake? Well, not if the guy in the box is in a clown suit, too. Maybe they worked together.
Connie Schultz: Trump Sees Working-Class Chumps (Creators Syndicate)
Like so many working-class kids, I was raised not to judge others by what they did or didn't own and never to bring dishonor to the people I come from.
Susan Estrich: Politics, Anyone? (Creators Syndicate)
The day that absentee ballot comes in, I'm filling it out. Early voting couldn't come early enough this year. Taking my time to decide? Are you kidding? I don't know a single soul on either side who wants to take one more minute on this.
Clive James: 'I once did a sketch with Michael Palin and Terry Jones. I was scared I'd screw up' (The Guardian)
The new era of British humour will doubtless be more feminist and I'm sorry I'm going to miss it.
What I'm really thinking: the Oxford student (The Guardian)
The work is never-ending; you hand in one essay only to be set another; the all-nighters are a vicious circle.
Deborah Orr: The tale of Kim Kardashian shows us that you don't have to be cruel. Be kind. (The Guardian)
Whether it's Karl Lagerfeld on the reality star's robbery experience, or online bullying, the impulse for cruelty we see all around us is cause for concern.
Jonathan Jones: "More savage than Caravaggio: the woman who took revenge in oil" (The Guardian)
Artemisia Gentileschi turned the horrors of her own life - repression, injustice, rape - into brutal biblical paintings that were also a war cry for oppressed women. Why has her extraordinary genius been overlooked?
Jonathan Jones: Gangsters' use of paintings as currency shows a profound belief in art (The Guardian)
How many bags of cocaine for a Van Gogh? This is the sense in which the mafia reveres priceless works.
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David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
wrote:
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
That Skunk
About that weed-smoking skunk...
So, Marty, where was the kid last night??
LOL! Just a thought... :)
Sally
Thanks, Sally!
Somehow I ended up with a kid so straight that if I hadn't been at his delivery I'd believe he was adopted.
That being said, I have considered inviting the alley-smokers to come sit in my backyard - if they'll share. ; )
M Is FOR MASHUP - October 7, 8 & 9, 2016
CRUMPLSTOCK 5
By DJ Useo
The internet DJ weekender.
I'll be doing my live set today, on the last of three days of Crumplstock 5.
I'm in a line-up of superb DJ's. Please tune in by clicking on our name at the appropriate time.
Stream from here
( Crumplstock - Crumplbangers Stage )
CRUMPLSTOCK 5
Line-up.... (all times BST (UTC+1)
--------------------------------------------
Crumplbangers Stage:
Sunday 9th
3pm - Superelectro
4pm - DJ Guava
5pm - Scott Cairo tbc
6pm - Nosbic
7pm - Broomfondle
8pm - oki
9pm - DJ Not-I
10pm - DJ Useo
11pm - Batfreak
Crumplstock - Crumplbangers Stage
Bonus Links!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"THE TRIUMPH OF SISYPHUS"
"AWKWARD."
DELETE YOUR YAHOO ACCOUNT!
SO WE CAN EAT!
"I HAVE A FOREBODING OF AN AMERICA…"
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
-- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
First published in 1995
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Bought fresh popcorn for the debate.
"Water Protectors"
Standing Rock
Last month, I joined the other "water protectors" in Standing Rock, North Dakota, where the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline is being built. The pipeline threatens many ancient sites that are sacred to the Sioux who live there. The pipeline also threatens the Missouri River, a source of drinking water for 18 million Americans in four states downstream. Protest camps at Standing Rock have been called the largest gathering of indigenous peoples in world history, but it's not just about solidarity; it's about defending the right of every American to safe, clean, drinking water.
I work for DIGDEEP, an L.A.-based organization that helps U.S. communities-many of them Native-get clean, running water. Most people don't know that millions of Americans still don't have clean water or basic plumbing at home.
Winter is coming. In addition to the extremely hard work of winterizing the camp, Oceti Sakowin is required to move by Jan. 1, 2017. They will be at the new camp, several miles away from the current location, until at least March 2017, which is currently when the pipeline construction permit ends. These two huge tasks require a lot of work, especially as the leaders are moving away from disposable items such as Styrofoam and plastic to serve the camp food. The camp has ordered several army-grade tents with heaters, which will be used as kitchens, storage, and a place for the elders to eat and rest.
Support from all over the world continues to pour in. Indigenous leaders from many countries and many states head to Standing Rock to show their love and support. The movement grows larger and stronger every day as more and more people arrive and as more people become aware of what is going on in North Dakota.
Standing Rock
Send a Message of Support to Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters, and Defend Clean Water!
1-Nanometer Gate
World's Tiniest Transistor
It's no secret that electronic components are getting smaller and smaller all the time, but just how tiny they're getting may surprise even close followers of the industry.
To that end, a research team under the leadership of Ali Javey at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has just created a transistor with a functional 1-nanometer gate, which the team claims is the smallest working transistor yet made. Putting its diminutive size in context, one strand of human hair is around 50,000 nanometers in thickness.
Making transistors smaller is important because the tinier a transistor can be made, the more that can be fitted onto a single computer chip. Pushing the limits of physics to make ever-smaller transistors is one way that Moore's Law - the theory about the annual doubling of the number of components per integrated circuit - can be kept going.
"A 5-nanometer gate length was previously considered the theoretical limit for transistor operation, due to direct source to drain tunneling of electrons at smaller gate lengths," Javey told Digital Trends. "Our work shows that through proper material selection and device architecture, gate lengths as small as 1 nm are feasible with near ideal transistor switching characteristics."
The construction of the 1-nanometer gate relied on a rethink about the materials it was created from, due to its size. Since regular lithography techniques aren't suitable for this scale, the team instead employed hollow cylindrical carbon nanotubes.
World's Tiniest Transistor
Google's Open Source Font
Noto
Google has released a new open-source font called Noto, which supports 800 languages and covers 110 writing systems.
Short for 'No more Tofu', the name of the new typeface is a nod to what people call the default white boxes that appear when a computer doesn't understand a character on a website.
"One of the goals of the project was to support every language and every character, so one of the things we wanted to do was make sure there's no tofu for all our users," said Bob Jung, an director of internationalization at Google.
The huge project was carried out by Google and type firm Monotype over five years, resulting in a single font in eight weights that covers 800 languages supported by the Unicode standard.
Noto consists of 110,000 characters and 110 writing systems. To ensure consistency with Unicode, Google intends to update Noto as new characters are introduced to Unicode, such as the recent emoji updates. It's also available under an Open Font License, allowing developers to add to the design of scripts, and use them freely.
Noto
Dinosaur Found In Cupboard
Brazil
Brazil just found its biggest ever dinosaur -- in a storage cupboard.
In its prime, more than 66 million years ago, this long necked herbivore was 25 meters (82 feet) long -- longer than an articulated bus -- and could chomp through trees at a terrifying rate.
By the time the creature was found by renowned Brazilian paleontologist Llewellyn Ivor Price in 1953, only a few hefty, fossilized bits of the spine remained.
They didn't have the staff or resources to figure out how big, however, so the dinosaur pieces languished the next six decades in storage at Rio's ornate Museum of Earth Sciences.
The remains of what has been named "Austroposeidon magnificus", and pronounced Brazil's biggest dinosaur, went on general public view for the first time Thursday.
Brazil
Pours Money Into Republican Campaigns
NRA
The National Rifle Association is on track for record spending this year on U.S. political campaigns, including Missouri's U.S. Senate race where a gun-owning Democrat is waging a tough fight against an incumbent Republican backed by the gun rights group.
Democrat Jason Kander, an Afghanistan war veteran, is running just 2.5 percentage points behind Republican U.S. Senator Roy Blunt in opinion polls in Missouri, despite the NRA's expenditure of $1.8 million so far trying to protect Blunt as well as the Republicans' U.S. Senate majority.
Gun violence has transfixed the United States in 2016, from a massacre at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub to a rash of police shootings, fueling demands by some Democrats and activists for tighter gun laws.
Those efforts have been thwarted, as in years past, by the NRA and its supporters, who say such measures would infringe on the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Congress has not approved major gun-control legislation since the 1990s.
The NRA has spent $23.4 million in this election cycle, with a month to go before voting on Nov. 8, compared with a previous high of $27 million in the entire 2014 campaign cycle, according to federal data gathered by the Center for Responsive Politics.
NRA
Most Receive Industry Money
Dermatologists
Nearly three-quarters of U.S. dermatologists received payments worth a collective $34 million from drug companies in 2014, according to a new analysis of a public database.
In most cases, the payments were worth less than $50, researchers found. But a few doctors were taking industry payments worth at least $93,622.
"Most dermatologist in the U.S. - about 73 percent according to this database - received some form of payment from industry," said lead author Dr. Marie Leger, a dermatologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian in New York City. "That being said, most dermatologists get a modest amount from industry."
She and her colleagues analyzed data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Sunshine Act Open Payment database, which records payments made to doctors from U.S. medical manufacturers and group-purchasing organizations.
They found that in 2014, 8,333 dermatologists received 208,613 different payments totaling about $34 million. Those payments could take a number of forms, including gifts, grants, education, consulting and food and beverages.
Dermatologists
Historian Finds First Autobiography
Hitler
The first biography of Adolf Hitler which presented him as "Germany's saviour" and compared him to Jesus may have been written by the future dictator himself, a Scottish historian has claimed.
"Adolf Hitler: Sein Leben und seine Reden (Adolf Hitler: His Life and his Speeches)" was the first major profile of Hitler and appeared in 1923, authored by Victor von Koerber.
Historian Thomas Weber, from Aberdeen University, has unearthed documents in a South African archive which indicates the book was "almost certainly" written by Hitler himself as a "shameless but clever act of self-promotion".
Weber, a professor of history and international affairs and a visiting scholar at Harvard University, said he found the evidence while reviewing von Koerber's papers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for his new book about how Hitler became a Nazi.
The historian believes von Koerber was selected to front the biography due to his aristocratic lineage and reputation as a war hero.
Hitler
Will Not Vote For the Republican
$chwarzenegger
Arnold $chwarzenegger said that he will not vote for Donald Trump (R-Pinche Güerito) during the 2016 general election, in a written statement released on Twitter Saturday.
"For the first time since I became a citizen in 1983, I will not vote for the Republican candidate for President," $chwarzenegger wrote.
The former governor of California who recently stepped in for Trump to host "Celebrity Apprentice" added he has not made up his mind regarding who he will vote for.
"Like many Americans, I've been conflicted by this election - I still haven't made up my mind about how exactly I will vote next month."
He continued: "But as proud as I am to label myself a Republican, there is one label that I hold above all else - American. So I want to take a moment today to remind my fellow Republicans that it is not only acceptable to choose your country over your party - it is your duty."
$chwarzenegger
Top 20
Global Concert Tours
The Top 20 Global Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows Worldwide. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.
1. Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band; $5,709,330; $104.65.
2. Coldplay; $5,674,654; $102.36.
3. Beyonce; $5,592,398; $108.24.
4. Guns N' Roses
5. Paul McCartney
6. Kenny Chesney
7. Drake; $2,368,654; $112.78.
8. Rod Stewart
9. Sting / Peter Gabriel
10. Dead & Company; $1,545,481; $69.85.
11. Justin Bieber
12. Phish; $1,408,203; $51.07.
13. Iron Maiden; $1,323,991; $70.89.
14. Lionel Richie
15. Zac Brown Band; $1,053,664; $51.77.
16. Jason Aldean; $943,716; $47.71.
17. Dixie Chicks
18. Dave Matthews Band
19. The Cure; $764,023; $57.91.
20. Florida Georgia Line; $683,465; $42.70.
Global Concert Tours
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