text:
Support Aeon
'Great ideas need to have a place where they can survive and thrive, and such a place does not build itself.'
Wah Loon K, USA, Friend of Aeon
Aeon is a registered charity committed to the spread of knowledge and a cosmopolitan worldview.
But we can't do it without you.
PLEASE GIVE NOW
The great disillusionist
In an age when so many people are at a loss to give life meaning and direction, Giacomo Leopardi is essential reading
'...the recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul.' Inside the Pantheon, Rome. Photo by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos
Tim Parks is a British author, translator and essayist who lives in Milan in Italy. He has written 14 novels, the latest of which is In Extremis (2017), and has translated works by Italo Calvino, Niccolò Machiavelli and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. His latest book is Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness (2017).
Imagine you spend your childhood almost entirely in a library, your father's library. There are thousands upon thousands of volumes, most of them old, many in foreign languages. Your native language is Italian, but by age 10 you are reading in Latin, Greek, German and French. English and Hebrew are next on the list.
Why are you doing this? Your father is ambitious for his firstborn son. He wants you to be a priest. At 12, you receive the tonsure, meaning your hair is cut like a monk's to dedicate you to God. You are dressed in a cassock. More than a priest, or even a bishop, your father wants you to be a champion of Christianity, a theologian; you will use your learning to refute false doctrines, liberalism, atheism.
Your progress is astonishing. At 14, your tutors tell you they have nothing more to teach you. Left to your own devices, you limber up with translations from the classics, philological commentaries, philosophical dissertations, tragedies, epigrams, History of Astronomy and a Life of Plotinus, until, at age 17, you embark on your first major work: an Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients. 'The world is full of errors,' you write in the opening line, 'and man's first task must be to know the truth.' Your father is delighted. But the truth, as time slips by among the 'sweat-stained pages' in the book-lined rooms, is that the more you write about gods and ghosts and mythical monsters, the more attractive these stories begin to seem, especially when compared with the Christian rationality that was supposed to sweep them away.
A crisis is approaching. At some point you look in a mirror and discover your back is crooked. Your youth has been wasted in 'seven years of mad and desperate study'. Your eyesight is weak, you have asthma, you are constipated. So unlikely are you ever to marry or have children that your younger brother is declared heir to the family estate. You have lost your birthright. But most of all, you think too much. 'Thinking about how one breathes,' you find you can hardly breathe; 'thinking and ruminating on the act of urination,' you find you can't urinate. 'Thought,' you later reflect, 'can crucify … a person.'
How can you know that it is precisely this insight into the dangers of compulsive thinking, the psychosomatic nature of your ills and the hubris of grand philosophical systems that will make you so important to readers 200 years hence?
In any event, you don't want arid erudition anymore; you want poetry. So you translate the Odyssey and the Aeneid and even start to write poems yourself. You will call this your literary conversion. It is followed at 18 by your political conversion. Suddenly you turn against your father's support of Papal power and absolutist monarchies, and become a patriot and a liberal. You want Italy to be united and free. You want revolution. And you start writing patriotic hymns. Your father is appalled. But the real bombshell arrives at 21, your philosophical conversion. All at once, it's obvious to you that Christianity is as much an 'error' as believing in Zeus or Apollo. Because the world is 'a solid nothing'. It has no meaning and no direction.
So what on Earth are you going to do now?
The 'you' of this story, as any Italian schoolchild would immediately recognise, is the poet and thinker Giacomo Leopardi. The place is Recanati, a small town near the Adriatic coast south of Ancona, then part of the Papal State. The time is the early 19th century; Leopardi was born in 1798 and completed his three 'conversions' in 1819. So in one of the most neglected areas of perhaps the most backward and reactionary state in Europe, a young man arrived at the conclusions that were then driving the early writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and would later underlie the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, of 20th-century Existentialism and absurdism, of Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus, Thomas Bernhard and Emil Cioran.
Trained all his life to pursue knowledge, Leopardi's simple intuition was that, once found, knowledge did not help you to live. On the contrary, it brought despair. And once learned, it could not be unlearned. His enormous contribution, in the 18 years that remained to him, would be to explore this modern, godless state of mind in all its ramifications and implications, to reflect on how it had come about, and to look for strategies on how to live with it. In an age when so many people, particularly young people, are at a loss to give life meaning and direction, Leopardi is essential reading. 'No one,' Schopenhauer would observe, had handled the theme of life as 'tragic farce' so 'thoroughly and exhaustively' as Leopardi. Yet he did so 'in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, is throughout entertaining and exciting'.
Boredom and inertia, Leopardi understood at once, would be the archenemy of a world freed, or bereft, of all illusions, all belief. 'If I were to go mad this moment,' he wrote in 1819, 'I think my madness would be always sitting with my eyes wide with bewilderment … neither laughing nor crying, never moving from where I was unless forced … This is the first time boredom hasn't merely oppressed and wearied me, but actually plagues and racks me like a terrible pain.'
How did the heroes of the past do what they did, he wondered? How did anyone find the will to achieve anything? Illusion. They were driven by beliefs that were demonstrably vain, by the very errors that Leopardi had trained himself to smell out and deconstruct. On the other hand, how wonderful to believe in such things and to act with energy and intention. No sooner had Leopardi undergone his philosophical, essentially nihilist conversion than his thinking began to revolve around this central paradox: one studied and educated oneself under an imperative to find the truth, yet to live a happy life, which necessarily meant a purposeful active life, one needed to be impelled by illusion, not truth – or certainly not ultimate, philosophical truths.
So was 'illusion' a positive quality? And was it actually better not to know things, at least certain things? In his first major, but very brief poem 'The Infinite', written in 1819, the poet, sitting on a hillside, rejoices in the fact that his view is mostly blocked by a hedge. Not seeing the landscape, he can imagine all kinds of things out there beyond the hedge, imagine the infinite, and hence write poetry, something he would not be able to do if he saw the landscape plainly. Freed of a stream of hard information, the imagination is stimulated, which is a pleasure. 'All that is fixed and certain,' Leopardi commented in his diary, 'is much farther from contenting us than that which, by its very uncertainty, can never content us.' Vagueness has a value in itself. One hundred and fifty years later, the aphorist Cioran would have this text framed and hang it in his Paris apartment.
What rapidly began to accumulate, in a diary Leopardi called his Zibaldone (meaning 'hotchpotch') was a vast psychological study of how man in the past, individually and collectively, had defended himself from existential emptiness, and at the same time an exploration of how in the present it might be possible both to know the truth about life, yet still to cultivate illusion and so find the impetus needed to live. Crass as it might seem, there was a self-help impetus behind his thinking. 'I wish the best for my species,' he wrote laconically. In fact, he was the poet most read by Italian troops in the misery of the First World War trenches.
An illusion such as Christianity could lead only to aberration and disaster
The key to a positive state of mind, Leopardi soon decided, might lie in inducing a temporary forgetfulness. In 'To a Winner with the Ball', written in 1821, the poet watches a game of football, as it then was, and likens its impassioned players to the heroes of ancient times: 'has human effort / Ever been but a game?' he wonders. 'Is truth any less / Empty than falsehood?' In the absence of nobler beliefs, the absurd notion that it might be of supreme importance to win a game of football is offered as a solution, albeit temporary, to existential crisis:
What's life for? To be despised:
Blessed then when by danger
Beset, it forgets itself, doesn't measure
The damage or heed the flow
Of slow and putrid hours;
Blessed when the foot
Pushed to the ultimate limit
Comes back the happier.
There could be no football for Leopardi. Almost an invalid and with no private income, he was trapped in Recanati with his reactionary father and an ultra-Christian, penny-pinching mother who had no intention of paying for her son to travel to the centres of learning where he might be corrupted and fall into sin. 'I once knew very well the mother of a family,' Leopardi remarked in a thinly veiled autobiographical note, 'who was not in the least superstitious, but devout and unswerving in her Christian faith and in the practice of her religion.' Believing that the only thing that mattered was getting to heaven, this mother deliberately talked down her children's capacities and ambitions, to help them avoid the sin of pride, and 'sincerely envied' parents who lost their children young 'because such infants had flown safe and sound straight to paradise, and had freed their parents from the inconvenience of supporting them'. An illusion such as Christianity, Leopardi concluded, could be genuinely comforting, until you started to apply systematic reason to it, after which it could lead only to aberration and disaster.
In an extraordinary paragraph that attacks the core of Western thinking from Plato onward, Leopardi suggests that man had been happier in a distant past trusting the truth of direct but always relative experience, and ran into trouble when looking for metaphysical absolutes. 'We were fine just as we were … But we have sought out the good, as a thing divided from our own essence, distinct from our own natural and original intellective capacity, as a thing consisting of abstractions, and of universal forms.' All too often, the end result was persecution and torture.
In November 1822 Leopardi finally managed to leave home for Rome where he stayed with an uncle, met other philologists, academics and clerics, and looked for some kind of work. But he hated Rome. He found his interlocutors pompous and crass, and realised at once that it had been an illusion to imagine that travel might cure his despair. 'All the greatness of Rome,' he wrote to his sister Paolina, 'has no other purpose than to multiply the distances and numbers of steps you have to climb to see anyone at all.' 'The ugliest, crassest Recanati tart was better than all the streetwalkers of Rome,' he informed his brother. In April 1823 he was already back home. Years later he remembered: 'When I went to Rome, the need to live with others, to give myself outwardly … made me stupid, inept and dead inwardly … I lost almost all self-esteem and all hope of … achieving anything in my life.'
Self-esteem, Leopardi now reasoned, would be one of the most crucial illusions for modern man, and something we all need help with. The English and French, he noticed, had an unwarrantedly high opinion of themselves, something that sustained their collective self-regard and created a shared sense of complacency. The Italians on the contrary had a very low opinion of each other, with each person trying to build up his or her own self-esteem by talking down others. Public conversation in general in Italy, he decided after the trip to Rome, was little more than 'raillery and insult'. At this absolute low point of his life, Leopardi set about turning the very exploration of despair into his salvation. First in poetry, then in a series of prose pieces known as the Operette morali, or Moral Fables (1827).
The strategy of his finest poems is simultaneously to dramatise some absolutely inconsolable fact of private loss or tragedy, yet redeem it, as least aesthetically, by turning the narrative savouring of catastrophe into a pleasure, a wondering over the individual's capacity to feel and suffer and transform that suffering through language, an achievement that then becomes a source of self-esteem and encouragement for both writer and reader. In 'The Dream', the poet is visited by 'the girl who first taught me what love is, then left me in tears'. 'Are you alive?' she asks. 'Do you remember anything about us?' She herself is dead, she says. The poet is appalled. She died young:
Cut off in the flower of my years
When life is sweetest, and before the heart
Can know how human hopes are all
In vain.
While the history of their relationship is left absolutely vague, and hence intriguing, the anguished conversation between the two unfolds with crisp colloquial directness, but in a style that is curiously archaic, as if heard across a vast divide of time that, as it were, silvers the underlying hopelessness. 'Works of genius, have this quality,' Leopardi commented in his diary, 'that even when they capture exactly the nothingness of things, or vividly reveal and make us feel life's inevitable unhappiness, or express the most acute hopelessness … they are always a source of consolation and renewed enthusiasm.' 'Momentarily,' he adds; elsewhere, he reflects that one might expect a poem to induce this state of mind, 'for about half an hour'. What makes Leopardi superior to so many other thinkers and poets is his refusal to deceive himself about the power of art and aesthetic consolation. Managing despair is a day job; never imagine the problem is solved.
An elf and a gnome discuss the extinction of the human race, and agree that the planet is better off without it
In the Moral Fables, written in 1824, whimsy and irony stand in for lyricism. The book opens with a 'History of the Human Race' that has Jove first inventing an easy, painless, rather restricted life for man, then constantly having to make changes in response to his creature's tendency to feel bored and dissatisfied. Natural phenomena are multiplied and diversified, different climates and races are introduced, new desires and ambitions are stimulated, and with them the concept of work and achievement. Eventually, illness is conjured up to give man something to overcome and a reason to feel happy for the mere fact of good health. But none of this is enough. Men are 'avid for the infinite but incapable of it'. Irritated by their endless whining, Jove finally lets the human race have what it has always been clamouring for, Truth. He knows it will be devastating.
So the content is grim, but the form is full of fun. As in the best of Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions (1944), we amuse ourselves with our tremendous predicament. Atlantis and Hercules play ball with the world and drop it. An elf and a gnome discuss the extinction of the human race, and agree that the planet is better off without it. Fashion and Death, who turn out to be sisters, debate which of the two is the most usefully destructive. A progressive academy that believes in the betterment of man offers three prizes for breakthrough inventions: a robotic best friend to build up the owner's self-esteem; a steam-driven man to perform 'virtuous and magnanimous deeds' (since no one else will), and an ideal woman along the lines drawn up by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528).
Essentially, Leopardi is creating a playful mythology, whimsical illusions that nevertheless deliver the truth that sweeps aside all illusion. The operation is all the more engaging for the multitude of sly references to Greek and Christian myth that allow the reader to feel pleased with himself for recognising them, while nevertheless swallowing the bitter pill: life is empty and absurd. In 'Copernicus', the Sun suddenly decides he is fed up of turning round the Earth, and asks the philosopher Copernicus to inform the planet that, if it wants to go on enjoying evenly distributed light and warmth, it will have to do the turning itself from now on. Copernicus is hesitant: the change might be possible, he says, but the fact is that, with Earth fixed and the other planets all orbiting around it, man, despite his misery, has been able to imagine himself the centre of the Universe and the acme of creation. Reduce the Earth to spinning around like any other planet, and man will lose his self-importance and be left just with his misery. Not to worry, the Sun tells Copernicus, if they don't like the new situation, men will have no problem living in denial and imagining they are still the masters of the Universe anyway. Then, who cares what men think? So Leopardi satirises human delusions of grandeur, but simultaneously reminds us how attractive it was to think of the Sun being pulled across the sky by a chariot, and how uninspiring is our mechanistic knowledge of the Universe. If our condition is dire, we do have our imagination, he suggests, which we dismiss in favour of scientific fact at our peril.
These antithetical energies in Leopardi's vision, at once unmasking illusion and regretting its loss, inevitably led to conflicting responses to his work. His poems, where the underlying nihilism could be overlooked in favour of their extraordinary lyrical intensity, were soon loved and admired. But in the Moral Fables, the poet's atheist message and his mockery of all science-driven optimism were inescapable. Rather than being moral, the stories destroyed all morality, observed one judge of Italy's main literary prize in 1830. Needless to say, Leopardi didn't win that prize, and he knew why: 'The perpetual and total denial of the vanity of things,' he wrote, was an obligation in society; how else could people trick reason and sustain their illusions? In short, no one wants a bearer of bad tidings.
One of the fables, describing the life of an imaginary philosopher, begins: 'Filippo Ottonieri … lived most of his life, in Nubiana … where there is no memory of his ever having injured anyone, in word or deed. He was generally hated by his fellow citizens…' Hated simply because he didn't like what they liked, didn't share their opinions, hence became a threat to their collective denial. And as the illusions on which society was based became more fragile, Leopardi goes on to suggest, insistence on conformity can only increase. It's hard not to appreciate his clairvoyance in this regard, and when he has Ottonieri claim that one can measure the extent of a society's civilisation by the diversity of opinion it is willing to countenance, we can't help feeling that our modern times stand condemned.
The poet departed Recanati again in 1825, living first in Milan, then Bologna, where the papal authorities refused him a job because of his ideas, then Florence, then Pisa. Working freelance for publishers, he was always short of money, his health always poor. Three times he fell in love, and each time had to recognise that for him this was the most unlikely illusion of all. 'My dear, he stank,' was how the last object of his affections explained to a friend her refusal of the poet. 'Now you'll rest forever, worn-out heart,' Leopardi wrote in the late poem 'To Himself'. 'The ultimate illusion that I thought was eternal died. It died.'
Even more galling than being denied work for his subversive ideas was the constant insinuation that his negative thinking was merely the result of his twisted spine and poor health, based, what's more, claimed the Catholic critic Niccolò Tommaseo, not on reason but on a few 'incomplete observations'. 'I wish it were so,' Leopardi replied to his publisher who had told him of the remark. He added new pieces to the Fables to counter the criticism, but knew it would stick. 'Two truths that most men will never believe,' he remarked in his diary in 1832: 'one that they know nothing, the other that they are nothing. Add the third, which depends a lot on the second: that they have nothing to hope for after death.' Again, he proved clairvoyant. Although Leopardi has always been read in Italy, and although in the last few years English and American publishers have overcome our innate Anglo-Saxon provincialism to retranslating and republishing all his work, there remains a resistance to his thinking. Perhaps the time has come, though, when we are so genuinely used to the bad news which is Leopardi's premise that we can now begin to appreciate the strategies for survival he developed to deal with that news.
In 1833 he moved with a friend to Naples, living in poverty and giving up any attempt to become part of literary society, even discontinuing his diary, as if that too had been an illusion. In 1836 he wrote his last great poem, 'Broom, or the Flower of the Desert'. Walking on the slopes of Vesuvius where a whole civilisation had been buried under burning lava, he takes comfort in the scent and yellow flowers of the broom. Very soon we realise that the shrub is an image of Leopardi's own endeavour; it thrives on the destruction of man's illusions, but without any pretensions to immortality, quite resigned to being swept away itself by the next lava flow. All the same, it does adorn 'this abandoned countryside with fragrant bushes'. The poem was published posthumously in 1845, Leopardi having departed this world aged 38 in 1837.
Why read Leopardi now? And what Leopardi? If you're feeling robust enough for a major reality check, go to the Moral Fables, nobody will tell you more truthfully the predicament you are in, or put such a big smile on your face as he does it. If you want the company of someone who thought long and hard outside the box about almost every aspect of human behaviour, mental life and language, get the huge Zibaldone and keep it by your bedside as I do. If, finally and unhappily, you are facing a personal crisis, or suffering some tremendous loss, Leopardi's poetry is waiting for you.
It's telling that Iris Origo, who wrote the only biography of the poet available in English, turned to the project soon after the death of her seven-year-old son in 1933. Nobody more than Leopardi could look disaster in the face, never denying that it was disaster, yet at the same time turning unhappiness itself into a colour or fragrance that would help you through the day. For, as Leopardi wrote, 'the recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul, when it is conveyed by a work of genius. And the spectacle of nothingness is itself a thing in these works, and seems to enlarge the reader's soul, to raise it up and to make it take satisfaction in itself and its despair.'
Stories and literature History of ideas Thinkers and theories
View at aeon.co 13 November, 2018
'Worldly and thought-provoking, there's nothing on the internet quite like Aeon.'
Freddie W, USA, Friend of Aeon
Essay/Thinkers and theories
Marxism and Buddhism
Life is suffering, whether you sit under a Bodhi Tree or stand with the workers. But do the two schools agree on the remedy?
Adrian Kreutz
Video/Death
Idea/Logic and probability
How ad hominem arguments can demolish appeals to authority
Moti Mizrahi
Essay/Film and visual culture
Video/Economic history
Before 'government cheese' was a punchline, it was an experimental economic plan
Idea/Archaeology
What a deer-tooth necklace says about our Ice Age ancestors
Izzy Wisher
© Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2019. Privacy Policy.


Amidst stiff opposition by China to India's entry into NSG, France today strongly backed New Delhi's case, saying it will bolster global efforts against nuclear proliferation and asking the members states to take a "positive decision" in the Seoul plenary meeting.
Amidst stiff opposition by China to India's entry into NSG, France today strongly backed New Delhi's case, saying it will bolster global efforts against nuclear proliferation and asking the members states to take a "positive decision" in the Seoul plenary meeting.
A key member of the 48-nation grouping, France also asserted that India's participation in nuclear control regimes will help better regulate the export of sensitive goods, whether they are nuclear, chemical, biological, ballistic or conventional materials and technologies.
"France considers that India's entry into the four multilateral export control regimes (NSG, MTCR, The Australia Group, The Wassenaar Arrangement) will bolster international efforts for combating proliferation.
"India's participation in these bodies will help better regulate the export of sensitive goods, whether they are nuclear, chemical, biological, ballistic or conventional materials or technologies.
"In line with its active and long-standing support to India's entry to the NSG as a full-fledged member, France calls on its members, who are meeting on 23 June in Seoul, to take a positive decision," the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The Ministry also mentioned that strategic partners since 1998, France and India share common goals regarding the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems.
These goals were reaffirmed during the visit of the President of the French Republic to India, from 24 to 26 January 2016, it added. The French President was the Chief Guest at the Republic Day celebrations here.
Yesterday, the US White House had in a statement said India was "ready" for NSG membership and asked participating governments to support India's application at the plenary session of NSG in Seoul starting tomorrow.


text:
Pilgrims, Warriors, Heretics: Who Were the Knights Templar?
By Dan Jones
The Templars were holy soldiers: men of religion and men of the sword, pilgrims and warriors, paupers and bankers. Their uniforms, emblazoned with a red cross, symbolized the blood Christ had shed for mankind and that they themselves were prepared to spill in the Lord's service. Although the Templars were only one among a host of religious orders that sprang up in medieval Europe and the Holy Land between the 11th and 14th centuries, they were by far the best known—and the most controversial.
Their order was a product of the Crusades, the wars instigated by the medieval Church, which took aim primarily (although not exclusively) at the Islamic rulers of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, northwest Africa and southern Spain.
Fresco depicting Knights Templar going into battle, from La Chapelle de Cressac, France. Credit: Interfoto/Alamy Stock Photo
As such, Templars could be found across a vast swath of the Mediterranean world and beyond: on the battlefields of the Near East and in towns and villages throughout Europe, where they managed extensive estates that funded their military adventures. The word "Templars"—shorthand for "the Poor Knighthood of the Temple" or, less frequently, "the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Jerusalem"—advertised their origins on the Temple Mount in Christianity's holiest city. But their presence was felt almost everywhere. Even in their own lifetimes the Templars were semi-legendary figures, featuring in popular stories, artworks, ballads and histories. They were part of the mental landscape of the crusades—a position they still occupy today.
Listen to Dan Jones read an excerpt from The Templars. CREDIT: ©2017 Dan Jones (P)2017 Penguin Audio.
The Templars were founded in 1119 on the principles of chastity, obedience and poverty—the last of which was memorialized in the master's special seal, showing two armed brothers sharing a single horse. A 68-point code of Templar conduct, called "The Rule," outlined strict rules of behavior—a lifestyle that emphasized simplicity and equality among brothers. Fashionwise, many marks of conventional knighthood were explicitly banned. Templars were to wear habits of all white, a symbol of purity and complete chastity. No rich fabrics or ornate accessories. No fur. No gold or silver on a horse's bridle, spurs or stirrups. On the topic of trendy footwear, which in the early-12th century could be quite flamboyant, the Rule states: "We prohibit pointed shoes and shoe laces and forbid any brother to wear them...for it is well known that these abominable things belong to pagans." And if fashion rules were broken? According to the Rule, "If any brother out of a feeling of pride or arrogance wishes to have as his due a better and finer habit, let him be given the worst."
Chastity was so strictly enforced that Templars were even prohibited from kissing their mothers, sisters and aunts. Templar Rule stated: 'The Knighthood of Christ should avoid at all costs the embraces of women, by which men have perished many times.'
Despite the emphasis on poverty, the order soon grew rich and influential. Senior Templar officials in the Holy Land and the West counted among their friends (and enemies) kings and princes, queens and countesses, patriarchs and popes. The order helped finance wars, loaned money to pay kings' ransoms, subcontracted the financial management of royal governments, collected taxes, built castles, ran cities, raised armies, interfered in trade disputes, engaged in private wars against other military orders, carried out political assassinations and even helped make men kings. From meager beginnings they became as mighty an outfit as existed during the later Middle Ages.
Map of the Holy Land, c. 1119. Credit: Map Courtesy Jeffrey Ward
Of course, there were dissenters. To some observers the order was dangerously unaccountable and a corruption of the supposedly peaceful principles of Christianity. At times the Templars were the subject of fierce attacks, particularly from scholars and monks suspicious of their privileged status. Bernard of Clairvaux—a sort of godfather to the order—hailed the Templars as "a new knighthood," but a century later another learned French monk dismissed them as "a new monstrosity."
Templars were also concerned about the brothers' chastity with one another. When knights traveled on Templar business, Templar Rule stated, 'If possible the house where they sleep and take lodging should be not without light at night, so that shadowy enemies may not lead them into wickedness, which God forbids them.'
Nevertheless, the sudden dissolution of the order in the early 14th century—which involved mass arrests, persecution, torture, show trials, group burnings and the seizure of all the Templars' assets—shocked the whole of Christendom. Within a few years the order was shut down, wound up and dissolved, its members accused of a list of crimes designed specifically to cause outrage and disgust. The end came so suddenly and so violently that it only added to the Templar legend. Today, more than 700 years after their demise, the Templars remain the object of fascination, imitation and obsession.
13th-century illustration of the Templar seal, depicting two Templars riding on one horse. Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
So who were the Templars? It is sometimes hard to tell. Featured in numerous works of fiction, television shows and films, the Templars have been presented variously as heroes, martyrs, thugs, bullies, victims, criminals, perverts, heretics, depraved subversives, guardians of the Holy Grail, protectors of Christ's secret bloodline and time-traveling agents of global conspiracy.
In fact, their real deeds were even more extraordinary than the romances, half-truths and voodoo histories that have swirled around them since they fell. Theirs is a tale of a seemingly endless war in Palestine, Syria and Egypt, where factions of Sunni and Shi'a Muslims clashed with militant Christian invaders from the West. Their story chronicles a "globalized," tax-exempt organization that grew so rich that it became more powerful than some governments. It tells of the relationship between international finance and geopolitics, and of the power of propaganda and mythmaking. And it pulls back the curtain on centuries of violence, treachery, betrayal and greed.
To understand it all, we have to start in Jerusalem, in the aftermath of the First Crusade…
From THE TEMPLARS: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors by Dan Jones, to be published September 19, 2017 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2017 by Dan Jones.
Dan Jones is an acclaimed medieval historian and lead consultant on HISTORY's forthcoming 'Knightfall' series.
COMING SOON - KNIGHTFALL, the exciting new drama series from HISTORY.
Follow KNIGHTFALL
More on Dan Jones Knights Templar
Were Crusader Knights Really Protecting the Cup of Christ?
Watch Video & Read
The Templars' Crusader Origins
Follow #Knightfall

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
The Confederate "Silent Sam" Statue At The University Of North Carolina Has Been Torn Down By Protesters
At least 300 protesters gathered around the controversial statue before tearing it down Monday night.
By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
Michelle Broder Van Dyke BuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on August 20, 2018, at 11:18 p.m. ET
Posted on August 20, 2018, at 11:05 p.m. ET
Gerry Broome / AP
A contentious Confederate statue on the campus of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was torn down by a group of protesters Monday night.
Around 300 protesters marched through Franklin Street, a prominent thoroughfare in Chapel Hill, at times blocking the road to traffic, before eventually gathering around the base of the "Silent Sam" statue, chanting "stand up, fight back" and "hey, hey, ho, ho, this racist statue has got to go," according to WRAL.
Red T Raccoon @RedTRaccoon
Silent Sam, a memorial to the Confederate alumni of The University of North Carolina, has been torn down. #SilentSam was a prominent figure on UNC's quad. This is going to cause a major uproar in North Carolina. https://t.co/r4HVZAZ7CA
01:49 AM - 21 Aug 2018
By 9:30 p.m., the statue had been torn down and protesters then buried its head in dirt. ABC11 reported that a small group used a rope to bring the statue crashing down.
One person was arrested and charged with concealing their face during a public rally and resisting arrest, WRAL reported. Chapel Hill police did not immediately respond to a BuzzFeed News request for information.
The statue was erected in 1913 as a monument to the more than 300 alumni of the school who died during the Civil War and the more than 1,000 who joined the Confederate States Army.
The statue has been controversial for decades, but after a white supremacy protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly last year, students at UNC renewed calls to tear it down.
In a statement to BuzzFeed News after the statue was torn down Monday, school officials said that "tonight's actions were dangerous, and we are very fortunate that no one was injured." The university said it has opened a vandalism investigation and is "assessing the full extent of the damage."
Josh Chapin @JoshChapinABC11
The statue of #SilentSam has been picked up by a backhoe and will be put into a dump truck as we speak. #abc11
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said on Twitter that he has been in contact with local law enforcement and school officials, "and appreciates their efforts to keep people safe."
In a statement, Cooper's office added that the "governor understands that many people are frustrated by the pace of change and he shares their frustration, but violent destruction of public property has no place in our communities."
Michelle Broder Van Dyke is a breaking news reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Honolulu.
Contact Michelle Broder Van Dyke at michelle@buzzfeed.com.


Pictures and Photo Galleries of Hoedspruit, Hoedspruit Events, Parties, Outdoors – everything and anything Hoedspruit – uploaded by ShowMe Hoedspruit and our locals. Also articles on our 'Local Personalities'. Upload your photos and have your say in our Interactive section for Hoedspruit locals and visitors alike….
Hoedspruit Farmers Market – The place to be!


the light clock in a more quantitative fashion.
In the previous video clip we did it in a qualitative fashion.
I want to leave a lot of space here to do some work.
I think you can see that there and we'll point out the details of course.
the special light clock we talked about, the bottom here the top here.
delta as you may or may not know.
no special meaning to it or anything like that.
travel time for the light beam light pulse to get to the top and back down again.
In fact, lets write an equation then for delta t that we can do here.
So weve got delta t sub A is going to be the travel time up and back down again.
We know if we have a distance to cover.
And we have a certain velocity if we're going 120 kilometers an hour.
the speed we're going, and that gives us the elapsed time.
same thing for 120 miles and 60 miles per hour, 2 hours in either case.
So delta t a then is going to be the round trip distance.
And we're going to call this distance L, from the bottom mirror to the top mirror.
So it's just going to be 2 times L, L up and L back down again.
L plus L is 2 L.
Divided by the speed of light c.
That's how fast it's travelling up and then back down again.
but we have delta ta is 2L over c.
Now let's look at Bob's perspective again.
So here is the diagram.
in the qualitative analysis we did before.
Bob of course is seeing Alice's clock moving here.
So this is Alice's clock as Bob sees it.
This is Alice's clock as Al sees it, just sitting next to her.
But Alice is moving now with respect to Bob at a velocity.
And so these are really three snapshots of Alice's clock as Bob sees it.
the upper mirror is up here.
We didn't draw it in there.
So that's one snapshot of Alice's clock.
Here's the second snapshot right here where the light beam hits the top mirror.
And then the bottom here is down here in that position.
hits the bottom mirror again and the top mirror would still be right up here.
actually the bottom mirror in the middle we left that off as well.
So it's just Bottom mirror up to the top mirror and back down to the bottom mirror.
This distance here is L, this distance.
It's going to be the same for both of them.
You might ask, there's so much relatively weirdness going on here.
How do we know L is the same?
Maybe Bob see L as something different.
Alice's clock shrinks or expands or something like that.
to show that L with not change.
That this vertical distance as Alice sees it will be the same for Bob as well.
But we'll leave that at a later time.
We'll just have to take that, as an article of faith at the moment.
But what can we see here?
We'll call this path length D.
this length are the same because there's a constant velocity motion as it goes along.
we'll give call it x.
The round trip time is up and back down again.
By definition we're calling that delta TB.
delta t sub B, one tick of Alice's clock according to Alice is delta t sub A.
a quantitative relationship between those two quantities.
So, this distance here, we'll call X.
the velocity of Alice and her clock going by.
back down again, which by definition is delta P sub E.
back down again as observed by Bob.
So, X here, this total distance X, is just v times delta t sub B.
So let's write now an equation.
Let's block that off a minute.
Let's write an equation for delta t sub B here, see what we can write down.
We actually have a couple things we can do.
as Barbara views it, is this travel time B.
Or actually not the travel time, the distance D plus another distance D.
which of course is C.
that the velocity of light, the speed of light, was constant for all observers.
away from them or whatever.
most of the weirdness, that you get in this special theory of relativity.
So velocity c up, velocity c down that way.
that Bob sees is 2 d over the velocity c.
And right off that you could say, well hey, are we done?
Because we have an equation for delta t a, we have an equation for delta t b.
you know here's l hypotenuse here of the little triangle is D, D is greater than L.
Therefore delta t B is greater than delta t A.
The tick time that Bob observes is longer than the tick time that Alice observes.
So Bob observes Alice's clock running slowly.
In other words, that's the qualitative analysis we did before.
And here we see it somewhat quantitatively.
But we'd like something better.
Again, we've got D here, we've got L here.
We're not quite sure what those are.
We'd like to have an expression involving delta t b and delta t a.
And also maybe involving C in and maybe B as well, but not L and D.
So what about another equation we can get out of here that maybe could help us?
Well if you remember your, not even really trigonometry.
But probably algebra, early algebra.
And what we have here is a right triangle.
and d is the hypotenuse there.
we'd have d squared = l squared + this side squared.
Pythagorean theorem so the question is though, what is this side right here?
the time to take to go from there to there.
So that's good, and this is x over 2.
So this divided by 2 essentially is this side.
So let's just start writing that down here.
squared = L squared + x over 2 squared.
We'll just write that first.
those of you doing maybe a more quantitative approach.
Taking the more quantitative approach to the course.
Or even if you're just auditing or taking a more qualitative approach as well.
Little challenge here for you would be to take what we've got so far.
We've got this equation, this equation, and this equation.
what that is involving V and delta tB.
come out with a relationship just involving delta tB, delta tA.
The velocity v, and the speed of light c, because that's our goal here.
spend a few minutes working with that see how far you can get with that.
So D squared equals L squared plus X over 2 squared.
We can fill in some things here.
We'd like to, remember, get rid of the D squared and the L squared.
The D and the L here.
And, in a minute, we'll plug in this for X.
But, let's focus on D first here.
Pull the c over here, and divide each side by 2.
c delta tB over 2.
That's good news because now I can square that and plug it in here.
We'll do that in just a minute.
This is one here I can rewrite and it tells me that L multiplied by C here.
L = c, Delta TA over 2.
then the X there can be this, let's plug all that in and see what I've got.
so it'd be c squared delta tA squared over 4.
And I've got x squared over 4.
Right, x squared 2 squared is 4.
And x squared is v delta tB.
So that's going to become + v squared.
Delta tB squared over 4.
And now were getting someplace.
Because we see, I know have an equation, no more of Ds, no more Ls.
with equivalent expressions involving delta tB and delta tA.
I'm going to try to combine those terms.
I can get rid of the 4s, just cancel the 4s out, so these 4s will go away.
delta t A squared + V squared delta t B squared.
Let's bring all the delta t B squared on this side.
So I'm going to take this term, subtract it from each side.
So we'll write this as C squared.
c squared delta tA squared.
it step by step, try to make case slowly here, not to go too fast, lose anybody.
And again, pause it, ponder things if you have to.
I've got c squared delta tB squared, v squared delta tv squared.
Let's factor out the delta tB squared there.
minus v squared equals c squared,delta tA squared.
Just doing some algebraic manipulations here.
And this is starting to look pretty good here.
We don't need this anymore right?
So just to get a little room here because I want to bring this up here.
equals some other stuff involving delta tA.
So let's divide both sides by this.
We're going to bring this over here to the denominator.
equals c squared times delta tA squared.
All over c squared- v squared.
Now we're really getting some place.
we've got some squares in there we would like to get rid of.
that we could focus on the c squared over c squared minus v squared.
And now let's bring it back to the center of the board.
So we've done all these manipulations here.
And we don't need this any more either.
We'll leave up our original delta tB there.
And so let's bring it back to the center board so we can work with this.
squared over c squared- v squared delta t A squared.
We're going to use a little trick you may, or probably may not remember.
is still delta tA squared, and of course delta tB squared over here.
as 1 minus V squared over C squared.
Multiply that by 1, we got the C squared.
Multiply this times this, the C squareds cancel, I'm just left with V squared.
So just a different way of writing this.
And it looks actually like it's worse, and in general it would be.
But, look what we've got here, now we can cancel this C squares.
I got a C squared in the numerator, a C squared in the denominator.
here now on top over a 1 minus V squared over C squared times delta tA squared.
But now let's take the square root, get rid of these squares.
you gotta do a plus, minus thing to be precise about it.
In this case, everything's going to be positive so we can write delta tB.
What we're doing is we're just taking the square root of each side.
The square foot of this is delta tB, equals the square root of this.
times this whole thing, times delta tA.
And one more thing here just slightly more.
Again we'll want to bring this up in the center so we can look at it.
So hopefully we've got all that done.
Just bring it up here.
by the square root of the denominator, but square root of 1 is just 1.
Again, everything being positive here.
V squared over C squared times delta tA.
And that is our final result for our quantitative analysis of the light clock.
It's going to be a very important result as well.
make sure that things check out as much as possible.
So here's our final result.
First of all, we said that delta td was greater than delta tA.
We saw it somewhat quantitatively here.
therefore delta tB must be a bigger number than delta tA.
Again the idea is that the moving clock ticks more slowly from Bob's perspective.
Does this result here also indicate that?
Is delta tB greater than delta tA?
then probably we made a mistake some place along the way.
Or our earlier analysis is incorrect.
So let's just think about this a minute.
And let's also think about a couple extreme cases here.
What happens if V is 0?
Okay if V is 0, that means Alice's clock isn't moving at all.
they've got their clocks next to them.
And they should be running the same with identical clocks.
If V is 0 here, this becomes 0, so I've got 1 minus 0 square root of 1 is 1.
I get 1 divided by 1 is just 1.
I get delta tB equals delta tA, as we would expect.
there's no difference in their tick rates assuming that they are identical clocks.
And the math is checking out for us there.
What happens if V, let's think about another extreme case.
What happens if V equals C, if Alice is actually going at the speed of light?
Well, if V equals C here, I've got C squared over C squared then.
1 minus 1 is 0.
I've got a 1 divided by 0 situation.
that Alice's velocity can never be equal to the speed of light.
contradictory situations that delta tB equals infinite times delta tA.
So rule that situation out.
not quite the speed of light, any of those situations.
Well V then is going to be less than C for sure.
is going to be the square of a fraction which gives you another fractional number.
Something like 0.8 or 0.792 or something like that.
this number's going to be between 0 and 1.
If you're not sure about that, get out your calculator.
you'll see you always get a number that's like, again, 0.8, 0.32, or whatever.
So we've got 1 minus a number between 0 and 1.
The square root of a number between 0 and 1, is always between 0 and 1.
So, I am going to have 1 divided by a number that's between 0 and 1.
Now there's a number smaller than 1.
I might have something like this.
1 divided by, perhaps say 0.8.
If the square root of this thing comes out to 0.8, between 0 and 1.
that's 10-eighths, a number bigger than 1.
is always going be greater than 1.
Could be equal to 1 actually, it's going to be greater than or equal to 1.
It's equal to 1 if V equals 0.
that means delta tB is going to be greater than delta tA.
squared over C squared, occurs a lot in the special theory of relativity.
And therefore, it's given a special name.
We say it equals the Greek letter gamma, a special symbol for it.
And one of our next tasks will be to explore gamma a little bit.
then a little bit later on in something called length contraction as well.
this V squared over C squared business here to see when this really matters.
When time dilation actually occurs so that we could see it perhaps in the real world.
I just mentioned it, we call this time dilation.
Another way to say that is moving clocks run slow.
They tick more slowly then if they're not moving.
they both looked at them and said just fine.
as some velocity V passing by Bob with her light clock.
her clock right there is just ticking away nicely, nothing weird about it.
comes down again at a diagonal.
And therefore, he sees her clock ticking more slowly.
something's wrong with your clock because it's not working like it was before.
I've got my clock right next to me, it's ticking away just fine.
Your clock is now ticking more slowly.
Each tick takes longer time than it did before when I compared it to my clock.
So that's the whole idea of time dilation.
And really you can reverse the process.
also she's going to see his clock ticking more slowly.
And so you might be thinking, well, what's the deal with that?
although really it all goes back down to the relativity of simultaneity.
you know their regular height, if their right next to you.
we think nothing of that because its just part of our everyday experience.
really become a factor, velocity has to be very high, up near the speed of light.
And, typically we don't deal with things like that, so we don't see it.
Velocity here is very low compared to the speed of light.
by the square root of 1, maybe just slightly, slightly different.
delta tB equals delta tA and we don't observe that affect.
we'll want to explore that a little bit more as we proceed.


text:
Emiliano Zapata är en stad i Mexiko, tillhörande La Paz kommun i delstaten Mexiko. Emiliano Zapata ligger i den centrala delen av landet och tillhör Mexico Citys storstadsområde. Staden, som är döpt efter den mexikanska ledaren Emiliano Zapata, hade 25 309 invånare vid folkmätningen 2010.

Referenser

Orter i La Paz, delstaten Mexiko
Städer i Mexiko

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Affordable, durable and economical, these clear frosted plastic shopping bags are great for retail purchases, gifts and party favors. The lightly frosted design adds a timeless appeal to its overall look while the high density polyethylene plastic makes it a clear winner for reliable continued usability. Made with two built-in handles, these shopping bags will not fail you while your carry around small to medium sized goods, like toys, promotional items, groceries, takeout, clothing & accessories, and so much more!
Sold in a case of 25 bags only. These bags come in clear frosted and entirely crafted of plastic.


text:
Revision as of 10:11, 15 December 2005 by Gavinj (talk | contribs) (→Wikipedia and Britannica go head to head)
In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias and they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out and were then examined by Nature's news team.
The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among the 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. So Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries, although the inaccuracies in both sources suggests that some caution is always advisable. Nature claims that only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But their reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.
Tom Panelas, director of corporate communications at Britannica's headquarters in Chicago commented
Also several of Nature's reviewers noted an undue prominence given to controversial scientific theories.
Challenges of being a Wikipedian


Via Corsa Magazine takes you on a first person exclusive through the Italian countryside behind the wheel of a Ferrari 458 Speciale in the Ferrari Tribute to the Mille Miglia. Also, learn about the Punk Rocker of Cars, Aaron Hagar, as he combines art and mechanics in his Rat Rod garage. Follow Aaron Brown and Ed Goff as they took the adventure of a lifetime in this 1970 Toyota FJ-40 through the Trans-American Trail. Discover the difference and similarities of driving on ice two thousand miles away from each other in Europe and North America. There's so much to cover in this issue, and perfect for the auto enthusiast in your family!


2 bed Cottage in Rhayader - 559024 - Seven Stars Self Catering with BRAND NEW hot tub spa !
Need more information about booking Home 559024 ?
The Lodge is fresh and open plan in style on the inside, traditionally timber-clad on the outside. It sleeps four people with one king-size room and one bunk room. It is in a quiet, rural setting. A BRAND NEW hot tub spa has been installed in June 2018. You can sit in the Spa under big skies, day or night, between a mighty ridge and the rolling landscape to the Elan Valley. Walk,mountain bike, watch wildlife and stargaze straight from the doorstep and of course, you can always do absolutely nothing at all!
Free Wi-Fi , heat ,light and power. Linen and towels are also inclusive( please bring your own towels for hot tub use), in this converted barn, which is furnished to a high standard. The cosy barn is an excellent base to explore mid Wales, the coast and beyond. Or just stay and relax in the exclusive to you, Hot Tub Spa and admire the view under big skies or look at the stars!
Our hot tub spa is meticulously prepared and maintained daily during your stay, to maximise the safety and enjoyment of your experience. The hot tub spa will either be ready for use on your arrival or, if the water has been changed that day, later in the evening or the following morning.
If you are looking for a relaxing short break or week away in a beautiful rural setting, from where you can go for easy country walks, have long lunches or do something more energetic, then this is the cottage for you. This is the perfect venue for taking a holiday in Wales since it is in a centrally placed location close to the Elan and Upper Wye Valleys, Rhayader's kite feeding station and the Royal Welsh Crystal factory. It is also within an hours drive of Hereford and it's cathedral, Ludlow's renowned cuisine or Cardigan bay's beaches and dolphins.
There is a huge variety of walking in the area from the national trails of Offa's Dyke, Wye Valley Walk and Glyndwr's Way to shorter circular routes in spectacular and very quiet countryside.
Mid-Wales, has always been one of Britain's premier fishing areas, fish for trout in the Elan valley and Llyngwyn or river fishing on the Wye, Elan and Claerwen.
We live nearby and so we usually welcome guests on arrival and are on hand to assist in any way. Otherwise we will give you complete privacy.
This Cottage has 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and sleeps 4. It's been listed on Holiday Lettings since 04 Jan 2014. Located in Powys, it has 30 reviews with an overall rating of 5. The average weekly rate varies from £626 to £810.
The accommodation was perfect for the two of us and the dog! Clean, warm and well equipped with a dog-safe garden. Elen gave us a warm welcome then left us to it. We took her advice and managed the walk up on the ridge and it was worth every step - the views were absolutely fantastic. Easy drive into Rhayader and the Elan Valley dams. I would recommend and we hope to return for another getaway weekend of peace and tranquility.
Owner's reply: Thank you so much for your lovely comments. We look forward to welcoming you again soon.
Very clean well equipped cabin in a fantastic location. Very private even with the owners living close by, your completely left alone with no interference from them, I only met the once and that was to collect the keys. The garden is very secure for children and pets and the hot tub is very clean and warm. I definitely would stay again..
Owner's reply: Thank for your lovely comments. We hope to see you again soon.
Lovely little cottage ideally located for the Elan Valley which is what we wanted. Great for walking and mountain biking. Enjoyed the hot tub! Only negative and reason for not giving it 5 stars is due to a poor shower and no black out curtains. Other than that a great place to stay. Host we're very friendly and helpful.
Owner's reply: Thank you for your feedback. We are glad you enjoyed the hot tub. There are black out blinds in both bedrooms but we haven't felt they are necessary in the lounge. We will be looking again at how to improve the shower.
Had a great weekend here. Owners were very friendly. Located close to Llandrindod Wells and Rhayader, with the red kites nearby and elan valley which we highly recommend visiting for some stunning views. Accommodation was very clean and well equipped, very pleased.
Owner's reply: Thank you, so glad you were pleased.
Owner's reply: Thank you for your comments. We are so glad you enjoyed your stay.
We had a lovely time here. The converted barn is well furnished and really ideal for a family of 4 (2 kids under 7). It is close to great walking and beautiful scenery - good place for nature lovers. It is close to towns too so great if you need to do a spot of shopping. The owners were lovely and very discreet. They gave us some good tips on badger-watching!
Owner's reply: Thank you for taking the time to write your great review, Merci!
You can get in touch with Adrian and Elen (the owner) through the contact form on this page.
Send Adrian and Elen (the owner) an email through the contact form on this page. Alternatively, if there's a phone number on this page, you can call them.
How do I contact Adrian and Elen (the owner)?
If you've already booked, go to Manage your holiday booking to view Adrian and Elen the owner's contact details or send them a message.
Or send Adrian and Elen (the owner) an enquiry through the Contact the owner/manager form if you'd like a quote or more info first.
When you pay online through the Book your stay form, a booking request is sent to Adrian and Elen (the owner). You'll find out within 24 hours whether they've accepted - no money will leave your account before then.
You can also request a quote from Adrian and Elen (the owner) through the contact form. The owner will email you the total cost for your dates and a link to book and pay online.
Use the Book your stay form to pay provisionally online. You can pay by credit/debit card or PayPal. Adrian and Elen (the owner) will have 24 hours to accept the booking and no money will leave your account before then.
Why can't I call Adrian and Elen (the owner) before booking?
You'll need to contact Adrian and Elen (the owner) to do this. Send them a message in Manage your holiday booking or through the contact form on this page.
You can request to change the dates or number of people on your booking via the Manage your holiday booking page. To change your holiday dates use the Edit booking button. If you need to change the number of guests staying then send Adrian and Elen (the owner) a message.
If Adrian and Elen (the owner) agrees, they'll send you a revised quote outlining the changes. You can review and accept/decline this from the Manage your holiday booking page. You'll have 48 hours to take action before the revised quote expires.
Seven Stars Self Catering with BRAND NEW hot tub spa !


With all the talk centered on the property market, investing in the share market seems to be less on people's radars. Out of the two primary growth investment vehicles, shares are less understood. As consumers, we deal with companies on the stock market daily. Locally examples include the big banks, Woolworths, Coles and Telstra. Internationally, well-known examples include Facebook, Google and Apple. We interact with these companies as much as property, yet actually investing in them is much less understood.
When you're buying a share, you're buying a small piece of a company. You're entrusting a team of people to run the company for you (and the other shareholders) much in the same way as you trust your property manager to keep an eye on your property. The key differences being that a good management team can steer a company towards better than market returns. Steve Jobs is an excellent example of a CEO that helped to make a company (Apple) a market leader.
One of the major benefits of investing in the share market is that, unlike property, shares are both divisible and liquid. This means you can elect to sell just a few of your shares at a time when it suits you, rather than your entire portfolio. Depending on your type of share investment, the money can often be in your account within a few days. On the other hand, a property cannot be easily divided up or sold quickly. This is an important consideration when building your investment portfolio as there will be stages in your life where you need more flexibility with your assets.
Typically the income produced from a well-diversified share portfolio is likely to be consistent. Unlike a tenant who rents a property, companies tend not to miss dividend payments. Further, if you have a number of shares in your portfolio, the frequency, amount and timing of your dividend payments will level out. A company can choose to alter the dividend it pays, however it's unlikely that the majority of your shares will do this. As a result, when you're looking for consistent income, shares could prove to be much more stable than property.
One of the biggest challenges with building up a share portfolio is selecting which shares to buy. This is the same for any asset from shares, to property, antiques, artwork or vintage cars. You can buy based on the perceived value, the expected long-term growth, the income stream, a mixture of these, or a variety of other factors. If you haven't purchased shares before, it can be quite daunting.
While often touted as the best way to enter the market for beginners, managed funds offer just as much choice and variety as the share market itself. There are hundreds of managed funds that just invest in the Australian stock market, and hundreds more that offer combinations of shares and other assets such as property and bonds. Again it's easy to get paralysed by choice, and a quick scan of the internet will bring up a variety of opinions. However, don't be put off. You can easily build a simple, blue chip portfolio of quality shares through a stockbroker or a financial planner. There are pros and cons for investing directly versus through a fund, so it's important that you explore these.
You can elect to buy and hold some quality shares for the long term or you can trade in and out. But keep in mind that the more transactions you're doing, the more risk you're taking because shares fluctuate a lot and it's easy to get your timing wrong. It's a good idea to decide on an approach and stick with it. If your stocks are not performing as well as you'd expect, look into why and try to refine them, rather than continuously change what you're doing.
Investing in the share market should form part of an overall long-term investment and wealth creation strategy. As with all investments, you should consider your goals and what you're trying to achieve from the investment.


text:
Q: Is it possible to limit the number of coroutines running corcurrently in asyncio? I already wrote my script using asyncio but found that the number of coroutines running simultaneously is too large and it often ends up hanging around.
So I would like to limit the number of coroutines concurrently, and once it reaches the limit, I want to wait for any coroutine to be finished before another is executed.
My current code is something like the following:
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
p = map(my_func, players)
result = loop.run_until_complete(asyncio.gather(*p))

async def my_func(player):
    # something done with `await`

The players is of type list and contains many elements (say, 12000). It needs so much computational resource to run all of them simultaneously in asyncio.gather(*p) so I would rather like the number of players run simultaneously to be 200. Once it reaches 199, then I wish another coroutine starts to be executed.
Is this possible in asyncio?

A: You can wrap your gather and enforce a Semaphore:
import asyncio

async def semaphore_gather(num, coros, return_exceptions=False):
    semaphore = asyncio.Semaphore(num)

    async def _wrap_coro(coro):
        async with semaphore:
            return await coro

    return await asyncio.gather(
        *(_wrap_coro(coro) for coro in coros), return_exceptions=return_exceptions
    )

# async def a():
#     return 1

# print(asyncio.run(semaphore_gather(10, [a() for _ in range(100)])))
# [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]

A: You might want to consider using aiostream.stream.map with the task_limit argument:
from aiostream import stream, pipe

async def main():
    xs = stream.iterate(players)
    ys = stream.map(xs, my_func, task_limit=100)
    zs = stream.list(ys)
    results = await zs

Same approach using pipes:
async def main():
    results = await (
        stream.iterate(players) |
        pipe.map(my_func, task_limit=100) |
        pipe.list())

See the aiostream project page and the documentation for further information.
Disclaimer: I am the project maintainer.

A: I can suggest using asyncio.BoundedSemaphore.
import asyncio

async def my_func(player, asyncio_semaphore):
    async with asyncio_semaphore:
        # do stuff

async def main():
    asyncio_semaphore = asyncio.BoundedSemaphore(200)
    jobs = []
    for i in range(12000):
        jobs.append(asyncio.ensure_future(my_func(players[i], asyncio_semaphore)))
    await asyncio.gather(*jobs)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.set_debug(True)
    loop.run_until_complete(main())

This way, only 200 concurrent tasks can acquire semaphore and use system resources while 12000 tasks are at hand.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Look at that cute little monogrammed burp pad, courtesy of my sweet friend Sydney.
If you're reading this, I'm assuming you've read part 1 in this series, and that you aren't too freaked out to continue reading. Yay for you! Thanks for sticking with me. I love this story. Have I said that yet? I really do. When I was pregnant, I think I read a zillion birth stories, starting with watching A Baby Story before I had Celia, and ending with all the home birth stories on Pinterest. There is so much of this stuff out there, friends. If you or someone you know is expecting, I highly recommend you look for encouraging birth stories, both those that match what you're looking for and those that don't. It's amazing how a mother's (or father's) insight can help shape what you want out of your birth.
Which leads me to part 2 of our story. In an ironic twist (sort of ironic, sort of not, when you consider how anti-norm we are), the hubs is actually the one who got me thinking about home birth. He watched The Business of Being Born before I did, and he educated himself on all the points to argue with me when I said things like, "of course infant mortality rates are higher in the US than anywhere else in the developed world- we're delivering more babies that otherwise wouldn't even survive to the third trimester," and "of course there's a lower cesarean rate for home births- you can't do a cesarean at home." Having said all that, as usual, my leaning on conventionally spoken points without my own diligent research didn't hold water to his statistically-proven and scientifically accurate arguments. After educating myself, and basically losing my mind arguing with Dr. Jerkface, I decided home birth was the right thing for us to do.
Home birth supplies. Laid out super efficiently, of course.
How many babies do you deliver in a month? In a year? How many patients are you seeing right now?
What do you consider high-risk?
Have you ever lost a baby in delivery? Can you tell me the circumstances?
When do you decide to transport?
What's your experience with shoulder dystocia, breach delivery, and cord prolapse?
Any behaviors you hate to see in your patients?
Ideal delivery? Worst imaginable? What do those look like?
Feeling pumped. This is me, in labor, timing my contractions like a boss.
So I hired Talitha, who is a saint among women, and who helped open my eyes to so much more than health during pregnancy and postpartum. She had me keep a food journal and asked me to write my previous birth experiences in detail. Based on what I told her, she had me start on Floridex (a plant-based iron supplement to raise my hemoglobin levels) and liquid chlorophyll, which helps reduce postpartum hemorrhaging (which I struggled with after both girls). She did the same tests my doc did- took my blood pressure, tested my pee for protein and sugar, checked my hemoglobin regularly (since I was always a little anemic), and listened for baby's heartbeat. In our visits, we chatted about my energy levels, my sleep quality, and my emotional well-being. She asked how I felt about the kids and my relationship with my husband in relation to the new baby. We talked about who would watch the girls during the birth (I thought they could stay with us. Wrong.). I left every visit feeling more prepared for what was coming.
Check out that confident smile. No idea that I'd still be in labor 10 hours later.
And my due date came. And went. James was late. And I was seriously ticked off. I like order and predictability, and this kid was cramping my style. Not cool, James. Fortunately, I was able to work from home and manage some good baby prep in the downtime. The hubs took me for walks, and we went to a ton of my stores to get the remaining items on our registry, while seeing coworkers, which boosted my spirit. Then, after a long day of shopping, it happened. My water broke. I called Talitha, and the hubs went to get the girls from school. I put the soup I'd been planning for all of us in the crockpot, laid out snacks for the midwives, burned my yummy aromatherapy candles, and put on my John Mayer Pandora station. I double-checked all my supplies, which every midwife will tell you to order before week 38. I left room for Talitha's supplies: oxygen tank and masks for baby and me, blood pressure cuff, doppler device, and suturing supplies. I had a bag packed and by the door in case we needed to transport. My bed was made with a plastic shower curtain under fitted sheets that I planned on throwing away, and my tub was prepped with tons of towels that didn't really matter. There was literally nothing we hadn't thought of. I. Was. Stoked. Seriously. This was the best thing ever! I went into labor by myself! No pitocin! I am a goddess. Look at what this body can do.
This is me, hating yoga.
Except not. Because 5 hours later, I was still stuck at 4 centimeters dilated and leaking a river of amniotic fluid, feeling royally pissed off. I got in the tub to ease the pain of contractions, and they slowed down. The water felt great. For a minute. And then I was just mad that I wasn't progressing. So out of the tub, to walk around the house with two of Talitha's assistants, who encouraged me with sweet words, rubbed my back, and helped me squat to bring the baby down into position and encourage dilation. She urged me into yoga positions to help bring him down, and those helped. But dang. They hurt. I decided I hate yoga. I also decided that having the girls present for all this was the worst idea ever. So thankfully, my incredibly gracious friend Laura (who has two girls of her own), offered to keep the girls overnight for us. I have never been more grateful to take a friend up on an offer of kindness than I was that day. Holy smokes.
Not a lot of light here, but that's a vegetable ice pack. Only marginally helpful.
With the girls out of the house, I could do all the shouting I wanted. And that was a lot. Like, a whole lot. For the next two hours I basically screamed and yelled through the pain. Poor hubs. The only times I've ever been mean to him in the entirety of our marriage have been on the verge of delivering our sons. And I'm pretty sure my level of meanness in those moments makes up for my lack of meanness the entire rest of the time. I was hot, so I got naked (which is kind of standard for home birth, really). But that didn't make it better. So they put ice packs on my back. Not ice packs really, just bags of frozen vegetables. Which are basically the same thing. I tried getting back in the water, and that didn't help. In fact, it just made me crazier.
Monitoring baby from the tub. Surprisingly, not pleasant at all.
In addition to watching The Business of Being Born, I watched the follow-ups to it, which include 4 separate short documentaries, all amazing. One of those was a focus on celebrity birth stories. Gisele Bundchen does this "ride the waves of labor" thing, which I found to be totally unrealistic, but Cindy Crawford spoke through basically the exact same experience I had. The water birth thing looks amazing, but it doesn't work for everyone. Personally, I needed gravity. I needed to let my boys find their way out without fighting them. So I got out of the water and onto the floor by my bed. It was hard. I was crying, screaming, begging to go to the hospital. I just didn't believe I could do it. After all my research and all my logical reasoning, suddenly all the voices of those people who told me I couldn't do it came into my head.
See how sweet he's being? You can hardly tell I was threatening to backhand him if he said another word.
A good mother finishes the drill. Not to say that a good mother can't give up and get the drugs, but in this instance, that's what I told myself. A good mother, the one who impressed my husband, the one who always puts the kids first, the one who doesn't give a damn about what anyone else thinks or says or does, doesn't give up just because it feels crappy. Friends, I got out of my head, and pushed three times. Seriously. Three, great big pushes. And there he was. All 9 lbs. 2 oz. of him.
If I look stoned, it's because unmedicated birth literally gets you high. That is some good stuff right there.
That was the best part. In birthing the girls, I had such severe reactions to the pain medication and anesthesia that I couldn't hold them. After nine months of waiting, someone else held my baby before me. That was my one request for this birth- whatever it takes, I want to hold my baby first. And I got it. I have never felt better in my life. No one whisked him off to wipe him down or cut his cord or give him tests. They just let me hold him, and let him crawl up my belly to nurse, and left us undisturbed. It was so beautiful. That's when I felt it- the feeling people tell you about but that you don't believe until you do it yourself. I had this unbelievable high (really, it's a surge of serotonin that comes from a natural delivery), and it literally made me forget all the pain of labor and birth.
Me and little dude, getting our nurse on. In my bed. Without bright lights or interruptions.
There was some other stuff- I did lose a lot of blood, and Talitha gave me a shot of Pitocin to stop the bleeding. She and her team took care of all the after-delivery excitement (repairs, stitches- for which I did have local anesthesia, placental examination, etc), and they finally cut the cord and weighed my little man. They examined him, kept a close eye on me, helped me get a shower and made sure I ate, then cleaned up, started the laundry, and tucked me and the hubs into bed with the little dude. That was it. They left our house at 5:15 am, and we were happy and warm and healthy together. No interruptions, no crazy tests, nothing. And we stayed in our house for weeks without leaving to do anything. It was incredible.
Four midwives. These women were incredible, encouraging, and empowering.
Texting everyone the good news.
I had tremendous help. My sweet friend Ashlee came by to help me with breastfeeding, and my dear friend Whitney, who gets our crazy eating habits, made us a butternut squash soup and salad. My friends Nicki, Chasity, Kimberly, and Dalise sent up some mad prayers to cover us with love and support. We have such amazing support. The hubs' parents came and took the girls for a week so we could bond with James in peace. My parents came and helped with housework. And I relaxed while hubs took care of everything else. It was winter in Nashville, and we had the luxury of staying in our house and watching the snow fall, while bonding with the little dude in complete peace and solitude. I have no regrets. Not a single one. I finally had the birth experience I wanted- it wasn't perfect. And I wasn't the tough champion I thought I'd be. But I did it! My recovery was a breeze, so much better than either previous birth. I loved it so much that I did it again (with a much easier labor and delivery process, thanks to Hypnobirthing) 16 months later, in a different city, with a different midwife, and many of the same awesome feelings.
The hubs, getting a snuggle in while the midwives worked on me.
Here's the thing friends- no one's going to like all the decisions we make. But our bodies are our own. No one has jurisdiction over them but us. When we educate ourselves with the facts, surround ourselves with supportive, encouraging friends (even those who think what we're doing is cray-cray), we have the power to overcome whatever authority someone else tries to exert over us, especially as it pertains to our health. Don't let anyone bully you into doing something you don't believe in. If you have questions, ask them. If someone dances around the answer, or if your gut tells you there's more to the story- go find it. Find what you're looking for. Dig deeper. Fight for you. Live without regrets. The only person who has to live your life is you, so love every minute of it.


Residence "this property", 3 storeys, renovated. 200 m from the centre of Mazzanta, 5 km from the centre of Cecina, 3 km from the centre of this property, 400 m from the sea, 400 m from the beach, in the countryside. For shared use: park 5'000 m2, swimming pool (20 x 6 m, depth 125 - 150 cm, 13.04.-03.11.). Children's pool, garden furniture, barbecue, children's playground. In the house: reception, bar, internet access, WiFi, fitness room, lift, sun terrace, washing machine, tumble dryer (for shared use, extra). Available: bicycles. Linen change weekly. Towel change daily. Room cleaning daily (included). Breakfast on request (extra). Parking on the premises. Grocery 200 m, restaurant 300 m, bicycle rental 600 m, railway station "Cecina" 5 km, sandy beach 400 m, rocky beach 12 km, public bathing area 400 m. Tennis 200 m. Please note: baby equipment on request, childminding (extra). The photograph shows a typical example. There are more similar properties for rent in this same residence. The apartments have balcony or small garden with table and chairs. At 400 m away beach establishment (La Conchiglia) with 1 umbrella, 1 bed, 1 chair per apartment to be booked in advance (extra). Continental breakfast buffet available, extra. Restaurant 600 meters.
3-room apartment 45 m2. Living/dining room with 1 sofabed, satellite TV and air conditioning. 2 double bedrooms, each room with air conditioning. Kitchenette (microwave). Shower/bidet/WC. Forced-air heating. Facilities: safe (extra), hair dryer. Internet (WiFi, free). Included in the price: weekly change of bed linen, daily change of towels and daily cleaning of living and sleeping areas, with the exception of the kitchen.


Dealer Spotlight: Meet Avenues Lighting!
Leadership: Pete Duprey, Vice President, has been with Avenues Lighting for 9 years, since day one. There are 25 employees at the store.
Locations: Avenues Lighting is located in Jacksonville, Florida. There's a sister location, called The Lighting House, in Shelburne, Vermont.
What We Should Know about Avenues Lighting: Despite its large 16,000 square foot size, Avenues Lighting is very welcoming. The sales team—which includes five reps each with 20 years of experience—makes the selection and sales process easy and unintimidating. Avenues has a huge selection of lighting and fans, offering something for every budget and style. Avenues is also actively involved in the community, supporting youth sports teams and local Builders Care programs.
Dealer Spotlight: Meet Win's Lighting & Electrical Supply Co.