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Studies In Expectation: The Life Of Astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Dale DeBakcsy June 16, 2021
Brewers Of ChangeCareerSTEMTrailblazersWomen in Science0 Comments18 min read
Sometimes the hardest thing about living in the universe is knowing about it. There is real and true terror to be faced in the indifferent march of the universe towards its inevitable dark close, and it takes a special type of person to stare into the void of our cosmic destiny on a daily basis and contemplate the mechanics of the vast machinery cooly plotting the complete demise of us, everything we've ever done, and everything we shall ever do. Psychologically, astronomers of the modern era have to be made of some pretty stern stuff, and how they cope with the magnitude of their subject matter is often as fascinating as their research, and few in this regard are as consistently compelling as Quaker astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943).
Bell Burnell has a gift for Taking Things In Stride that has served her well both in the contemplation of humanity's grim chances in a hostile universe and during a life that, while serving up an exciting set of triumphs, has also dealt her more than her fair share of restrictive expectations. Her equanimity in the face of adversity is perhaps the result of her unique upbringing – she was the eldest sibling of a father whose family had Quaker roots going back to the seventeenth century and a mother who had been denied a higher education at the hands of the Great Depression. They were both determined that all of their children would receive a quality education, and that they would be brought up in a tradition of critical thinking.
Bell was born in Ulster, where the reigning Quakerism was of a fundamentalist, Bible-first variety that did not jibe well with her parents' more critical and inquisitive approach to religion and the world. Their Quakerism was more of the English stripe, in which one's own experience of religious moments had more weight than textual sources and church traditions. It was a religion that left room for critical thought and adaptation to facts, and one that had historically placed an emphasis on gender equality, and as a result had produced, over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, an impressive lineup of women scientists including Maria Mitchell, Kathleen Lonsdale, Sara Josephine Baker, and Graceanna Lewis, to name some of the most prominent.
Soon after the Second World War, Bell's father resumed his career as an architect, in which work he would often bring his eldest daughter as a companion and helpmate, and so from an early age she became used to the careful use of measuring instruments and to the mental habit of checking one's results against one's common sense, of thinking to oneself "is this measurement reasonable?" before blindly jotting it down on the page. These were habits of mind that would serve her well on the road to discovery that would make her an international name, but they had to wait for their development until Bell was moved from the generally poor quality state school she had attended for most of her youth to The Mount, a Quaker boarding school in England where she received exposure to the more contemplative bent of English Quakerism, and encouragement in the form of an elderly physics teacher who had come out of retirement to give the girls at The Mount a solid scientific education – Henry Tillot.
It was in these years that Bell realized the extent of her abilities in science, that not only was she doing everything more easily and naturally than those around her, but that she seemed to have an ability to explain difficult concepts to her peers to help them through their coursework. Science seemed to click, and she felt a particular pull to astronomy after her father checked out a copy of astronomer/science fiction writer Fred Hoyle's 1955 classic Frontiers of Astronomy. Her father, as it happened, was a consulting architect at Armagh Observatory, where one of the astronomers, in talking to her about what it was like doing astronomical research, told her that one of the practical expectations of the job was putting in long nights at the telescope. This deeply worried Bell, who knew enough of herself to realize that she functioned best on a regular sleep schedule and had no gift for pushing herself far into the wee hours.
Fortunately, a few months later, Bell discovered the existence of the field of radio astronomy, which answered questions every bit as monumental as those of traditional optical astronomy, but that didn't require the night sky for its observations. Reassured, she began attempting to piece together exactly how one became a radio astronomer, and wrote a letter to radio astronomy pioneer Bernard Lovell, who had founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory in 1945 to study cosmic ray phenomena.
Lovell's advice was simple – do physics. If you have a solid enough basis in physics, everything else can be picked up along the way. Since Bell wasn't attending a high school whose purpose was to feed students into the rarefied realms of the Cambridge-Oxford axis, she set her sights on schools of less towering reputation but boasting solid physics programs, and ultimately chose the University of Glasgow.
At Glasgow, there was a tradition that, whenever a woman student entered the lecture hall, all of the male students would stomp the ground and bang their desks while shouting catcalls until the woman student took her seat, a ritual repeated to one degree or another whenever she asked a question, and with particular vehemence if she ever out-performed her male colleagues in class exams. It was a hard enough atmosphere to bear up against when there were other women in the class to lean on, but more often than not, Bell was the only woman student in her physics classes, and had to stand alone against the ritualized abuse which her professors did nothing to try and stop.
In spite of the discouraging campus culture, Bell continued with her studies in physics and some chemistry, bypassing entirely the positional astronomy that was all Glasgow at the time had to offer by way of astronomical coursework. Her end goal, however, was still radio astronomy, and when Jodrell offered its first summer school program for promising undergraduates in 1964, Bell immediately signed up and was accepted.
That program gave her hands-on experience of what doing radio astronomy research was all about, and also brought her into the orbit of the astronomers blazing a trail in the big-dish approach to radio astronomy. They encouraged her to apply to Jodrell for her graduate work, but her application was never answered, officially because it got lost, though Bell believed the somewhat famous misogyny of Jodrell's head astronomer also likely played a role. There was nothing for it, then, but to apply to Cambridge on the slim chance she might be accepted. Fortunately, as a candidate from North Ireland, she came with a grant that was tied to her person rather than her department, and on the strength of that already-secured funding her late application was accepted, placing her fatefully in the hands of Anthony Hewish.
Hewish was studying quasars at the time of Burnell's arrival in 1965. These objects, first discovered in the late 1950s, consist of supermassive black holes (sporting masses on the scale of millions to billions that of our own sun) surrounded by clouds of gas that release titanic amounts of electromagnetic radiation as they fall into the black hole. Hewish's project for Bell was to construct a radio telescope which was then to be used to hunt for quasars, the light from which presents tell-tale irregularities (or "scintillations") as it passes through our sun's solar wind on the way to our radio telescopes. By looking at hundreds upon hundreds of feet of radio telescope observations, Bell could determine the patterns for how quasar scintillation varied with the density of the solar wind, and thereby produce a rough estimate of the angular diameter of the quasar.
It was a neat idea for using the response of the quasar's light to the interfering presence of solar wind to produce an estimate on the size of the quasar, and for two years Bell spent her mornings in the bitter cold constructing the four acre apparatus that would do the job. Amazingly, it worked perfectly from the first throw of the on switch, a testament both to the soundness of her design and the thoroughness of her cabling. The telescope produced 96 feet of observational paper a day, which Bell had to comb through in the search for, and cataloguing of, likely quasars.
On November 28, 1967, Bell noted what she described as a "bit of scruff" – Irish slang for untidiness – in a section of recorder paper about an inch in length. It didn't behave like the scintillating sources she had been tracking so far, but it also didn't have the right period for the other forms of interference she knew about. It was a mystery that her brain carefully logged away, and the next time she saw the anomaly she remembered its first occurrence and brought the irregularity to Hewish as a potentially noteworthy inconsistency. What was needed was a better image of the event, taken at a higher speed setting that would show in more detail what was occurring.
When Bell found the signal again, the high speed paper revealed a remarkably regular pulse structure occurring every one and a third seconds, which Hewish took to be a sign of a man-made origin, since only very small astronomical objects could produce pulses of that period, objects too small to be stars. When Hewish stopped by the observatory and saw the event for himself, however, he began to be convinced that there was something potentially significant there, and set in motion the process of checking the phenomenon in another telescope, to eliminate the possibility that it was an artefact of some mistake Bell had made in constructing the device.
The secondary telescope picked up Bell's phenomenon, which was dubbed the "Little Green Man" for the possibility that it might be a broadcast from an alien civilization and not a legitimate astronomical occurrence. When Bell discovered a second pulsar, and then a third, however, in completely different parts of the sky, the possibility of it being an artificially generated signal was all but eliminated, and the Cambridge astronomy department was set in motion to organize the announcement of the discovery. Bell was not included in the meetings to discuss that strategy, and she was actively prevented by Hewish from changing the topic of her thesis from her quasar observations, which were an integral part to the research he was doing, to the discovery of the pulsar.
Bell's name was listed second on the paper announcing the existence of pulsars which was ultimately sent to Nature, and she included her discovery as an appendix in her quasar thesis paper so it would be firmly lodged in the scientific record. As a third year graduate student, Bell had made one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century, and had she stayed at Cambridge there is no saying what role she might have played in the studying and ultimate explanation of the nature of pulsars (Thomas Gold would ultimately receive credit for the correct model of a pulsar as a rapidly rotating neutron star).
It was, however, at this moment, between the discovery of the second and third pulsars, that she became engaged to fellow Quaker Martin Burnell, a government official who expected as a matter of course that the demands of his job would always take precedence over the career of any woman he should marry. The couple waited for marriage until after Bell received her PhD, but the next two decades of Bell's career would be entirely determined by what city Burnell had decided to move to in order to advance his own career, leaving Bell to grab whatever positions she could in the immediate environs, often with a reduction in pay and prestige.
She first moved to the University of Southampton, where from 1968 to 1970 she performed studies of the ionosphere in Michael Rycroft's group that she didn't much believe in and didn't go much of anywhere, causing her to switch to Southampton's gamma ray group, which involved using equipment attached to balloons to make observations of electromagnetic radiation in the 1MeV-10MeV range. Bell taught classes while carrying on her calibrations of the gamma ray equipment, and discovered that not only was she good at explaining things to students, but that she rather enjoyed it.
In 1973, however, her husband found a new job, which necessitated a new move, and Bell managed to find a position in 1974 at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, where she worked as a member of the technical support staff for the Ariel 5 X-Ray satellite. It was a good use of the skills dealing with high-energy electromagnetic radiation she had developed with Southampton's gamma group, but was considered a technician position rather than a full-fledged research science post. The job, however, was rewarding, as it placed her at the center of the remarkable flood of data that the Ariel 5 produced, data which she would go on to mine for her own research goals.
1974 also brought the announcement that the discovery of pulsars was being rewarded with a Nobel Prize – to Anthony Hewitt and Marin Ryle, Bell's superiors at Cambridge. Bell had been cut out of recognition for the discovery of the object which had been detected by machines she had built, the signs of which she had detected on one inch among thousands of feet of recording paper, and the astronomical origin of which she had confirmed with her discovery of second and third pulsars. It was a glaring and controversial omission which Bell took largely in stride, to this day insisting that she felt it would have been improper to give a prize for work done as a graduate student, and that she was simply happy that something she contributed to allowed astronomy to get its first Nobel for physics.
With the birth of her child in 1973, Bell quickly realized that she was not made to be a round-the-clock stay-at-home mother, and looked for opportunities to keep in the world of astronomy and education that she could explore from home, opportunities which came her way in the form of the editorship of the Observatory, a prestigious astronomical journal that had existed since 1877, and in her participation in Britain's famous Open University program, whereby adults can further their education with correspondence courses, supported by tutors in their area. From 1973 to 1987, Bell worked as a tutor in physics and astronomy for the Open University, while working concurrently at Mullard from 1974 to 1982, and found that she loved working with people so motivated to learn that they stuffed their precious leisure hours with studying while holding down regular jobs.
Burnell's quest for advancement necessitated another move in 1982, this time to Edinburgh where Bell managed the running of the James Clarke Maxwell telescope, which involved interesting international coordination and travel, but tended more towards management than research. In 1991 she became professor of physics at the Open University, a position she held for ten years, during which time she succeeded in re-introducing original research as a significant component of the university. In 1993, Burnell, in a move that will, by this point, surprise precisely nobody, decided to leave Bell for a younger, less complicated, spouse, which ultimately allowed Bell to step forward into the spotlight in a way she hadn't allowed herself while married to a spouse who bridled at her success and fame. She took up more speaking engagements and interviews and in 2004 took up the presidency of the Royal Astronomical Society for two years, followed in 2008 by a two year stint as the president of the Institute of Physics.
In 2013, she published A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist Also be Religious?, a transcript of a James Backhouse Lecture she gave to an audience of Quakers that stands as one of the more remarkable reflections about the intersection between religion and astronomical research yet set down by a scientist. It is unrelenting in its portrayal of a doomed planet set in an equally doomed universe which is consuming its precious reserves of hydrogen on its way to a cold, dark, diffuse nothingness. Bell's Christianity has no room for creation mythologies or all-powerful superbeings, indeed for anything but the assuredness of destruction and the comfort of some godly presence that means us well but is rather powerless in the face of the basic truths of existence. It's an intriguing, terrifying document but ultimately, even for those of us who don't believe in godly beings of any sort, a comforting one. Now is ours, tomorrow isn't, and that makes our todays just that much more meaningful in their beautiful ultimate meaninglessness.
At the age of 77, Jocelyn Bell Burnell continues to study intriguing aspects of the deep night sky, and in 2018 won the Special Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics, the proceeds for which she donated entirely to a fund to help women, refugees, and minorities achieve research positions, making the journey for the next generation perhaps a bit less fraught with expectational encumbrances than hers had been.
FURTHER READING: A Quaker Astronomer Reflects is pretty easily obtainable through print-on-demand type services, and contains bits and pieces of Bell Burnell's story in addition to a gallop through all of the different ways life as we know it is going to inevitably end. For the most in-depth look into her career this side of the three-part BBC miniseries Beautiful Minds, this American Institute of Physics interview with David DeVorkin is pretty wonderful.
Photo credit: Image of Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell giving a keynote address at Inspirefest 2015. This picture was taken by Conor McCabe Photography. By Silicon Republic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Want to know more awesome Women in Science? Check out my WYSK column archive and my books, Illustrated Women in Science – Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.
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Dale DeBakcsy
Dale DeBakcsy is the writer and artist of the Women In Science and Cartoon History of Humanism columns, and has, since 2007, co-written the webcomic Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable Comedy with Geoffrey Schaeffer. He is also a regular contributor to The Freethinker, Philosophy Now, Free Inquiry, and Skeptical Inquirer. He studied intellectual history at Stanford and UC Berkeley before becoming a teacher of mathematics and drawer of historical frippery.
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Street Vendors Blast Plan
Fabián Borges March 26, 2004 March 26, 2004
CURBSIDE vendors in San José are vowing to do everything in their power to overturn a recent decision by city officials aimed at ousting them from the sidewalks along several of the capital city's main streets.
"We'll fight!" vowed Cecilia Tercero, 42, a fresh fruit vendor working on Ave. 6, near Calle 4, in the central district of La Merced. "The livelihoods of 400 families depend on this. We're working here. What we want to do is work without problems. We're hardworking, honest people."
Last week, the Municipal Council of San José voted to give informal street vendors three months to clear away all chinamos (street stands) in the Zona de Tregua (Zone of Truce) – an area spanning Ave. 1 from the Central Market to the Coca Cola bus stops, Calle 8 from Ave. 2 to Ave. 8, small sections of Ave. 4 and Ave. 6 and one block on Calle 13.
These areas were given that name in 1996 after city officials agreed to temporarily allow informal vendors to operate there.
According to the new decision, after the three months are up, police will be ordered to forcefully shut down all chinamos that remain open.
"WE consider it a reasonable length of time for them to individually or collectively come up with a strategy to relocate," said San José Mayor Johnny Araya during a press conference March 17.
He accused the vendors of spreading "chaos and anarchy" in San José, and said they were responsible for "strangulating the sidewalks by leaving no room for pedestrians and forcing them onto the streets, creating conditions favorable to criminal actions and the sale of drugs, producing large amounts of garbage, giving San José a dirty image and polluting its scenery."
Municipal authorities claim the 1996 agreement gives them the right to unilaterally revoke the concession when they see fit. Council members, who represent four different political affiliations, voted unanimously to impose the ban.
According to a survey conducted by the Metropolitan Police, approximately 440 informal street vendors are operating in these areas. That number does not include the permanent street vendors in those areas who have operating permits from the Municipality.
The decision to expel the informal curbside vendors is part of the municipal government's plan to "reactivate, regenerate and repopulate" San José by transforming it into a place for residents and tourists to visit and shop.
ARAYA said the vendors obstruct access to formal commercial establishments, making it difficult for the latter to conduct business. This, he said, works against urban renewal in San José.
"What this does is make formal businesses – commerce, restaurants and hotels – leave the city," he said.
The mayor pointed to a survey of city residents, conducted by the San JoséMunicipality Nov. 4-8, 2003, as proof the measure has popular support.
Out of a sample of 429 josefinos, 62% said they agreed the Municipality should "completely shut down" all informal street vendors. Another 19.8% said the situation with the vendors should be left as is, while 12.1% said the vendors should be relocated.
When asked if the municipality should use "extreme measures such as expelling illegal street vendors," 58.7% said yes, and 38.5% said no.
"I applaud Don Johnny's actions," said Marta Mora, a resident of La Merced. "I, like many Costa Ricans, don't own a car and have to use the sidewalks to get to work each morning. The vendors force pedestrians onto the streets."
Mora called the vendors "vagabonds" and said they should "go to the country to pick coffee and cut sugarcane."
VENDORS insist the chinamos are their only way of making a living and they will fight to ensure their livelihood.
The Costa Rican Association of Street Vendors last week announced it would file a complaint before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. The group also plans to file an injunction before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court (Sala IV), according to the daily La Nación.
"Every Costa Rican has the right to work – period!" said Fernando Hierro, 46, a vegetable vendor. "That's what the Constitution says. They [municipal officials] don't own the sidewalks. The sidewalks belong to all Costa Ricans."
Hierro says a compromise between the vendors and the municipality is possible. However, the municipality must be willing to negotiate, he said.
VEGETABLE vendor Liliana Dixson, 39, said the municipality has refused to listen to vendors.
"I depend on this job," she told The Tico Times on Tuesday. "I haven't taken any courses so I can't go look for a job in an office. Now, even to sweep streets they require a high-school degree.
"We're asking the mayor to think this through," she explained. "He has his family, he lives well. He's not poor like us. He doesn't have to be here day after day, under the sun and the rain, even when he's sick. At the very least he needs to relocate us."
Araya said the municipality will not assist vendors in relocating to other parts of the city, since previous efforts to do that in the 1970s and 1990s had a high cost and were unsuccessful because vendors kept returning to the areas where they had been removed.
STILL, Dixson feels her right to earn a decent living is being trampled by municipal officials.
"As a vendor of Ave. 6, I feel the municipality needs to let us work," she said. "This is what our families depend on. I have three children that go to school.
"One of them is a 10-year-old girl with a small tumor in her head that needs treatment," she explained. I sell vegetables and make the money I use to buy her medication. It's hard to be told you can't work. We're all depressed, very sad. We will fight because we depend on this."
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Wetaskiwin Times
Share this Story: It's got to be all or nothing
It's got to be all or nothing
Christina Max
May 13, 2020 • November 27, 2020 • 2 minute read
Christina Max/Max Chats
I don't know about you, but I wasn't even a little bit surprised when the Provincial Government announced students would not be going back to class for the rest of this school year.
I mean, c'mon, we're halfway through May. I've got one on Wetaskiwin Regional Public Schools modified calendar, so he's got about a month left and his high school brother has about a month until final exams at the high school.
It's got to be all or nothing Back to video
What will be interesting to see, however, is if I'm shopping for back-to-school supplies come September.
Last week, as part of her announcement, Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said no decision have been made on school operations for the 2020/21 school year yet and that the province is working with school authorities and education system partners to develop a re-entry plan.
I know the Alberta Association of School Councils has been asking parents for their input via an online survey, which I did take the time to fill out so I'm hoping they'll take the concerns and suggestions of parents into developing that plan.
So far, there are three scenarios being floated around: normal school operations resume, partial re-opening with restrictions and at-home learning continues.
Personally, I don't think the second option is going to work.
A lot of schools don't have the space to split over-crowded classrooms so the students are seated six feet apart.
If physical distancing is still in place, Phys. Ed is for sure out of the question and I have no idea how you could expect kids to sit still for several hours without giving them breaks for recesses and lunch while maintaining physical distancing. Heck, how are you going to keep kids off the playground equipment when it's sitting right there?
If the kids don't get an opportunity to burn off some energy they'll drive us all batty.
Right now, it looks to me like it's an all or nothing kind of a thing.
While I know the at-home learning is challenging, to say the least, if we aren't able to flat out open the schools to normal operations, we may as well keep plugging through at home because what I would really hate to see is to send the kids back and have everything shut right back down again.
Questions of comments? Email cmax@postmedia.com
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Q: How can I deserialize a Json String to get polymorphic result using Java and Jackson Library? I've a class CONTAINER, that contains a List .
BaseClass is not an abstract class, but there is 2 subtypes of BaseClass :  BaseClassA and BaseClassB which each have extra fields.
BaseClass has an attribut enum Type, from which i can determinate if an object is BaseClass, BaseClassA or BaseClassB and that i want to use as a discriminator.
How can i tell Jackson the discriminator so when it deserialize the json string, it builds the correct object. At the moment every object is instancied as a BaseClass so i cannot cast it in my java code.
The same way as @DiscriminatorFormula & @DiscriminatorValue work for hibernate and entities
I've found this question : How can I polymorphic deserialization Json String using Java and Jackson Library? which is kinda close but here the user only wants the basic type.

A: Guessing you have probably solved this but if not check out JsonTypeInfo as a way to annotate classes with subtypes for desrialization.  This link http://programmerbruce.blogspot.com/2011/05/deserialize-json-with-jackson-into.html has a good explanation that is still valid.  If you can't annotate your classes you can use configuration to set up mix-ins (see https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-docs/wiki/JacksonMixInAnnotations) that allow you to add annotations to existing classes.

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Q: jQuery Mobile Dynamic Content Insertion Ok, would someone help me figure out why the "test" li in the following code isn't visible? I inspected the live dom and the elements do seem to be getting processed:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0/jquery.mobile-1.0.min.css" />

Thanks in advance.

A: The call to changePage doesn't work because you only have a single page which is visible/active by default.
You can force the active page to update by triggering the create event.
$('

test

').appendTo("#home");
$.mobile.changePage("#home", {transition: "none"});
$.mobile.activePage.trigger('create');

A: The element below has display property set to none and it hides its siblings:

The CSS rule:
.ui-mobile [data-role="page"], .ui-mobile [data-role="dialog"], .ui-page {
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
min-height: 100%;
position: absolute;
display: none;
border: 0;
}


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The Northwest suburb of Buffalo Grove has been included as one of "Fifty Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family" in a nationally published book by the same name, and there's good reason why. The Village of Buffalo Grove has been one of the fastest growing communities in Chicago's Northwest suburbs. With its tree-lined streets, well maintained lawns and homes, award-winning school districts, business centers, churches, synagogues, libraries, museums, friendly residents and delicious restaurants, it truly is one of the best places to live.
Buffalo Grove is conveniently located 35 miles northwest of downtown Chicago and overlaps Cook and Lake Counties. In Cook County, the neighboring communities include the Village of Arlington Heights and the Village of Wheeling, while in Lake County, the neighboring communities include Long Grove, Vernon Hills, Lincolnshire, and Riverwoods. With the total population of over 41,000 the population only keeps growing, with eventual population predicted to be 48.000 in the near future.
Unlike many other suburban communities which often display problems and characteristics of rapid urbanization and development, Buffalo Grove has retained the characteristics which attracted its earliest residents, all the way back in 1834. To learn more about the history of Buffalo Grove, one can visit the Raupp Museum, which is operated by the Buffalo Grove Park District. The beautiful Saint Mary's Church, which was completed 1899, is the oldest building in Buffalo Grove. Lou Malnatis Pizzeria which is a very popular destination, not only for Buffalo Grove residents, but for residents from surrounding communities, is housed in the second oldest building in the village, also built in 1899. Besides the cozy views and delicious food of Lou Malnatis Pizzeria, Buffalo Grove has many other restaurants to offer, from sushi restaurants, to Indian restaurants to Georgian Cuisine. There's definitely something for everyone!


and today we're talking Blueberry Pie.
This is actually the very first and only blueberry pie I've ever made.
(and truthfully the first and only photo I took as we hurried out of the house with our pies for Thanksgiving dinner).
I've never been head-over-heels for Blueberry Pie and in my mind, blueberry pie is for the Summer...like for 4th of July. And actually here in Florida, our very quick blueberry season starts in April and ends in May...so seasonally speaking, it's more of a Spring pie for us.
But...regardless of my personal preference for pie flavors and the fact that fresh blueberries are hard to come by since they are not in season around Thanksgiving, my uncle requested Blueberry pie...and so blueberry pie it was.
Blueberry pie is pretty basic...as most pies seem to be.
It's made with a lot of blueberries, a good amount of sugar and a little spice.
So of course, with the pie being so simple, I decided to dress up my pie a bit by creating a braided and twisted lattice crust pie like one I had been inspired by on Instagram. And I would typically share the link with you because the pie was absolutely gorgeous and amazing but then you'd think less of my own pie. Ha!!
One for you and one for a friend...all on the same sheet for printing!
Okay, never mind...@thejudylab on Instagram is too amazing not to share with you so I'm swallowing my pride... HERE IS THE PIE CRUST I was inspired by. And here is an awesome Cable Knit Crust she made too! Amazing, right?
Although this blueberry pie has nothing to do with my mama or her mama or any other mama I know, "Mama's Blueberry Pie" just sounded so much more appealing and nostalgic. So yeah...I fancied the name up too! And I think it's okay since this mama right here is the one that baked the pie, photographed the pie and decided to create a cute recipe card for the pie so I could share it with you. So there you go. Ha!!
So there you go...even though I increased the flour to 1/2 cup instead of 1/3 cup as suggested by the recipe I was following when using frozen blueberries, it still set up differently than I think it would have had I been able to use fresh blueberries. I'm definitely going to test that theory and report back.
If you love blueberry pie...I hope you'll try this one.
I swear it took me an entire hour just to configure the top crust on this pie.


Steps 'n' Stetsons, the Line Dance Club based in the Reading and Wokingham areas of Berkshire, generously chose PCRF as its charity of the year in 2012. Its members – aged from 10 to 80+ years old, and led by Julie Myers and Stephanie Stoter, have raised a magnificent £3914!
Overall, a brilliant year for Steps'n'Stetsons charity fundraising, and we are hugely grateful for your support!


The group meets four times a year, each time in a different library, for a business meeting and program. The meetings provide opportunities to develop and maintain resource sharing projects and enhance communication and cooperation among health sciences librarians. During the program sessions, members share information on new trends and technologies.
Any individual who works in a health science library or is interested in the field is welcome to join. Institutions desiring membership must meet criteria relating to collection breadth and depth, interlibrary loan cooperation and group participation. For both individuals and institutions, there are established levels of membership, depending upon qualifications.
The HealthLINE Bylaws are available for review. This document provides more detail on the organizational structure of the HealthLINE organization. The Bylaws were last revised in January 2017.


text:
Q: Succes method of $.Ajax does not work in ASP MVC I read almost all post about the topic. But Unfortunately I can't handle my problem. The problem is really awkward at least for me:
I have a simple C# code to retrieve tracking status of submitted factor in ShoppingController class as follow:
  public string StatusOfFactor( string guid )
    {
        // note that guid was being trimmed in javascript

        Factor factor = (from Factor fact in db.Factors
                         where fact.TrackingCode.ToString() == guid
                         select fact).First();
        return factor.StatusOfFactor;

and I have a javascript function which call this method as follow:
function TrackPurchase() {
    var txtTrackingPurchase = $("#inputpeygiry");
    var guid = $.trim(txtTrackingPurchase.val());
    var urlMain = 'ShoppingController/StatusOfFactor';
    alert(urlMain);

    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url: urlMain,
        cache: false,
        data:  guid,
        success: function (returnVal) {
            alert("I am sucess function");
            $("#StatusOfFactor").html(returnVal);

        },
        error: function (e) {
            $("#StatusOfFactor").text("nothing is really exist");
        }
    });
}

note that I have a textbox with id="inputpeygiry" which receive tracking code of user. above javascript function is call by clicking bellow button:
  <input type="button" class="btn btn-success pull-left" id="btnpeygiry" value="Track Purchase" onclick="TrackPurchase()"/>

so the problem is that the success function never call!!!
Would you all please help me to solve it?

A: Which version of jQuery are you using? Callback methods are removed as of jQuery 3.0. You can use jqXHR.done(), jqXHR.fail(), and jqXHR.always() instead.
See documentation of jQuery Get
$.ajax({
    type: 'GET',
    url: urlMain,
    cache: false,
    data:  guid,
})
.done(function (returnVal) {
    alert("I am sucess function");
    $("#StatusOfFactor").html(returnVal);

}).
fail(function (e) {
    $("#StatusOfFactor").text("nothing is really exist");
});

A: Change the GET to POST and it should work fine for you.
Controller code becomes :
[HttpPost]
public string StatusOfFactor( string guid )
{
    // note that guid was being trimmed in javascript
    Factor factor = (from Factor fact in db.Factors
                     where fact.TrackingCode.ToString() == guid
                     select fact).First();
    return factor.StatusOfFactor;
}

Javascript code becomes :
function TrackPurchase() {
var txtTrackingPurchase = $("#inputpeygiry");
var guid = $.trim(txtTrackingPurchase.val());
var urlMain = 'ShoppingController/StatusOfFactor';
alert(urlMain);
    $.ajax({
        type: 'POST',
        url: urlMain,
        cache: false,
        data:  guid,
        success: function (returnVal) {
            alert("I am sucess function");
            $("#StatusOfFactor").html(returnVal);

        },
        error: function (e) {
            $("#StatusOfFactor").text("nothing is really exist");
        }
    });
}


On September 27th Google has once again done another page rank update. It has only been 2 months since the last page rank update. In this update it seems that Google has been awarding newer blogs with page ranks boost of around 2-3 and is major websites that have been around a while with a page rank drop of around 1. It has also been reported that backlinks to your website are being updated more frequently than before. The Google pagerank update seems to be bringing more anger than joy across the internet with long established companies mysteriously being hit with a pagerank drop even though the have been working on increasing their pagerank status for a long time now. Google seems to be leaning toward newer pages and domains being formed over just updating older pages with this update. Most of our websites have suffered about a loss of 1 pagerank on the main domains, but have gained in the blogs and many of the newer webpages. If you lost or gained pagerank from the update do not think to much of it because Google reports that pagerank is just one of many items that go into their algorithm for their search engine.


text:
// Copyright (c) Tunnel Vision Laboratories, LLC. All rights reserved.
// Licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE file in the project root for full license information.

namespace NOpenCL.Test
{
    internal static class TestCategories
    {
        public const string RequireGpu = nameof(RequireGpu);
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Il distretto di Wolong () è un distretto della Cina, situato nella provincia di Henan e amministrato dalla prefettura di Nanyang.

Altri progetti

Collegamenti esterni

Contee dell'Henan

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Whither the Cauld wind pipes revival?
THE SMALLPIPES in particular have been widely adopted, often as a second instrument by Highland pipers; the Lowland/Border pipes have been slower in taking off and are now played by some notable pipers, though not necessarily for Lowland or Borders music. Is the future as- sured for these instruments, and what of the music? It's fair to say that the revival of these instruments has been a vital part of the whole broadening out of the piping scene over the past 20 or so years. But what happens next? We asked some prominent Society members
Nigel Richard, pipemaker and chairman, LBPS
IN THE bellows pipes revival the smallpipes certainly got off to a stronger start than the Bor- der pipes. The main reason for this happening was that they were largely based on the exist- ing Northumbrian pipe-making technology and sounded good right away, particularly the D sets. The early A sets were quiet and lacked presence, and much development work on these has been done over the years on both sides of the Border. The
modern A smallpipes are more robust, and as loud as can rea-
Nigel Richard
sonably be achieved given the nature of the instrument. The Border pipe-making technology has been not so much recovered, as redeveloped. Thus it took some time before reliable, good-sounding sets came on the market, and they continue to be developed to this day.
What does the future hold? Well, as pipe makers we have been selling considerably more sets of Border pipes than smallpipes for many years, although the fact that there are fewer makers of Border pipes will have a bearing on this. I suspect that the Border pipe market will continue to expand a bit more quickly than the one for smallpipes, although because
there are many fewer sets of Border pipes around, it will take a long time for the overall numbers to be similar, if ever.
Smallpipes remain a favourite for many great Highland bagpipers who want a quieter in- strument, often to practice at home during the winter. The Border pipes are harder to play, and their popularity has come about as a result of the talented players who are making good use of them as well as the ability of the makers to make improvements in the design.
Certainly I now see Border pipes in pub sessions much more often than smallpipes, no doubt because they can be heard better, and they appear to be increasingly the first choice in folk groups.
Their chromaticism makes them more versatile, and I would hope that in the future more pipers exploit this potential for broadening the variety of music played on them. These two sets of pipes have different qualities and some circumstances suit one rather than the other. I expect the interest in bellows piping will continue to grow and that the LBPS will continue to be in the forefront when in comes to promoting this.
Hamish Moore, pipemaker
I HAVE FOUND, during my experience as as a professional pipe maker, that the Border pipes have been steadily
gaining in popularity over the last ten years.
This is as a result of many factors: The standard of the instrument is improv- ing all the time, some no- table professional pipers are now playing the instru- ment, CD recordings are helping to promote them, and Border pipes are popular in sessions due to fact that they play in the
same octave as the fiddle
and have a lovely combined sound with that instrument.
Hamish (on right) and Fin Moore
It has been found by many players that A smallpipes are unsuitable for most sessions where there are any more than of three instruments. Also, A smallpipes are not suitable in a band setting where they are amplified. As a result of these factors, the playing public is now see- ing the potential of Border pipes and these are becoming more popular as a result and are definitely being used in a different social context from their original function.
Demand for a quiet pipe which is as acoustically balanced with the fiddle as possible now dominates requests from the customer, Meanwhile, the music now played on these pipes is also very different from the original Border repertoire.
It is hoped that Border music will become more popular as teaching becomes more wide- spread - and I see the roll of the LBPS as being vital in this last point.
There is an interesting development, however, in the revival of these bellows blown pipes of Scotland and that is in my production of the bellows- blown version of the Highland reel pipes. I am encouraging those customers who want to play Highland music to order these, and those who are interested in Border music to order the Border pipes.
I started making the Border instrument 16 years ago and in that year two sets were manu- factured as against 49 sets of smallpipes. In 2005, however, so far the breakdown has been 27 sets of the smallpipes, nine Border pipes (representing a third of the total of small and Border pipes) and three sets of Highland pipes
Essentially the Border pipes and reel pipes are the same instrument. Catalogues of Glen's, MacDougal's, Henderson's and others offer them for sale in both a mouth and bellows- blown version. The name derives from the "Scotch" Reel. The reel pipes have a common stock (in the bellows blown version), two tenor drones and a bass, and a conical chanter.
The cultural context of the two instruments would have been roughly the same in both the Highlands and the Lowlands/Border country, but with a very different repertoire.
Matt Seattle, piper, composer, publisher
THE Lowland/Border pipes have been slower in taking off and are now played by some notable pip- ers, though not necessarily for Lowland or Borders music. Is the future assured for these instru- ments, and what of the music?
The future of the instruments is obviously assured for the medium and probably the long term, and for obvious reasons - they are an ideal group and session instru- ment for Highland pipers. I
expressed doubts about the future of the music at the 1997 Collogue,
Matt Seattle on left
saying that: "If nothing comes of our Collogue, we merely provide a curious footnote to the history of late 20th-century piping.
Rather than theorise and speculate, I have been working to encourage the spread of the Border music and to find ways of bringing it back into circulation. Perhaps surprisingly, the Pipers' Gathering in the USA has been much more receptive to this than the LBPS in Scot- land, but perhaps this is not so surprising - Scotland, after all, is hardly in need of a living piping tradition.
If I were to speculate, I would guess that the Border music will remain a specialist pastime with a few dedicated enthusiasts. On the positive side, its place in the musical ecology of these islands has now been recognised. It will continue to be a fascinating area of study as well as a valid medium of musical expression. If it also provides employment opportunities for those involved, so much the better.
lain Maclnnes, piper, broadcaster
CLEARLY the impetus in recent years has been to- wards the playing of coni- cally-bored Lowland pipe chanters, and this has been made possible by improved design and the emergence of a number of excellent mak- ers. These instruments have proved to be a great boon for those interested in play- ing with other musicians: they don't dominate the sound, as do Highland pipes; they play in user-
Iain MacInnes
friendly keys; and, because they play an octave higher than the equivalent smallpipe chant- ers, they sit very comfortably with fiddles and flutes.
The down-side has been that they are notoriously hard to play, and require a high degree of fingering precision. I suspect that further design improvements will be needed before they really take off in a big way. It can be disheartening to hack through a tune on a Low- land chanter which you know that you can play reasonably well on a smallpipe chanter. Still, practice, etc etc ...
Regarding repertoire: despite the improved availability of Lowland/Border pipes, the actual Lowland repertoire remains the preserve of a small number of enthusiasts. I suppose part of the problem lies in deciding on what is, in actual fact, a Lowland style of playing. Still, we've been given some very useful pointers in the work of Matt Seattle and Gordon
Mooney, and doubtless Pete Stewart's new book will provide fresh food for thought.
As Lowland-style, conically bored chanters, have taken off, the longer smallpipe chanters pitched in A or Bb have perhaps declined in popularity, widely perceived as being rather low-pitch and quiet for use in sessions (which is undoubtedly the case). Perhaps this would be a good time for us to take a fresh lead from history. It seems clear that the original smallpipes were, indeed, small instruments, cylindrically bored, with chanters pitched in the region of E or F (in the style which has been preserved in the Northumbrian tradition).
Julian Goodacre has suggested that these would have played using a "covered" fingering style, very similar to modern Northumbrian piping, but with the pinkie of the bottom hand raised, and free to embellish the bottom note (see Julian's article on P28 - ed).
The scale of the chanter is different to what we're used to in Scotland, too, with a sharpened top seventh note. This opens up a number of fresh possibilities, both in exploring repertoire (old and new), and in making sense of the sort of long semi-quaver runs evident in the Skene and Dixon manuscripts.
Despite being small, chanters pitched in E, F or G actually "cut through" remarkably well. They produce a distinctive sound. They are not simply scaled-down Highland pipes, played in the semi-supine position, ("a poor peepy-weepy sort of pipe", as Duncan Fraser memora- bly described them in 1907); these are quality instruments in their own right. So, perhaps this is another avenue to be explored in the years to come; old-style smallpiping with a dis- tinctive Scottish accent.
It seems likely that the Society will hold a teaching weekend on the island of Gigha around the end of February, beginning of March. The weekend will be centred at the Isle of Gigha Hotel. Details, are yet to be finalised, but those interested should contact the Society's secretary, Rona MacDonald at 0141 946 8624 or e-mail:
rona. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Society has reciprocal arrangements with other piping organisations regarding their magazines, and we recently received the October 2005 issue of the Northumbrian Pipers' Society journal and An Piobaire (Vol. 4 No.32, September 2005), the journal of NaPiobairi Uilleann, the Irish pipers' society.
To borrow these, contact Jim Gilchrist on 0131 669 8235 or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
LBPS committee members elected at the last Society AGM in November: Ian Wells, George Greig, Richard Evans, Martin Lowe, David Hannay. Merchandise: Tom Dingwall. Pete Stewart has since agreed to become membership secretary.


There are tons of ways to deploy Spring Boot applications to Heroku. You can deploy using the Heroku CLI, deploy a JAR file without uploading the source code, and more.
Deploy using the Heroku CLI.
Deploy using the Heroku Maven plugin.
Deploy a JAR file without uploading the source code.
Spring boot configuration for Heroku.
Deploy the multi-module Maven project.
Set up Heroku locally using your Heroku login.
Once this is done, the steps are straightforward.
After pushing code to the remote repository named Heroku, the build process is triggered.
Given that the project has a pom.xml, Heroku recognizes it as a Java application.
Spring Boot has an embedded Tomcat. Therefore, it can be started up as a JAR file and will work as a web server.
I am working a closed-source project and don't want to send the code to Heroku?
I am using maven dependencies available only in my company's internal maven repo, so the code can't be compiled on Heroku?
What if my project is a multi-module?
The Heroku deploy CLI plugin can directly send JAR files to Heroku. Its usage is quite easy.
Heroku expects our application to listen on the port specified by the PORT environment variable, but it doesn't. There are a few ways to fix this.
However, for some reason, the escaping seems to be broken and it does not work.
It maintains all configuration in a single place, eliminating the need of a Procfile.
It requires no installation of heroku CLI and heroku deploy CLI plugin.
It works out of the box on any CI server without any additional setup.
The API key can be found here. The official description of the heroku maven plugin is here.
If there are multiple applications communicating with each other then heroku supports two approaches.
Only the web process can be accessed over HTTP. This is true not just to end users, but even the web process won't be able to access the worker process through internal network. It can be addressed even by subscribing to the enterprise package that has private spaces or by connecting the processes using messaging, such as RabbitMQ, which is available in the free tier, too.
The processes can't be deployed independently. The deployment of an application must always contain all processes; otherwise, the missing processes are removed.
Due to these two limitations, implementing a microservice project with lots of services is not really efficient this way.
A more robust option is to create separate Heroku applications for every application. If applications are separate Maven applications then nothing additional is required, just configure the Heroku plugin with the correct application name. All applications will be web workers available on the public internet. Heroku applications still won't be able to communicate with each other in a private network. Therefore, they need to know each other's public address.
Travis CI builds the project.
Travis CI executes the Heroku Maven plugin to deploy the applications to Heroku.
Link your GitHub account with Travis CI. Steps are here.
Enable build triggering for your repo.
Store the Heroku API key in a repository variable named HEROKU_API_KEY as described here.
Once the build is triggered using the API key and the Maven Heroku plugin, application(s) will be deployed to Heroku. Environment variable values are not displayed in the build logs; therefore, it is a safe option.
Using Spring Boot, Heroku, GitHub, and Travis CI, a complete application can be created and deployed using free tools (or at least the free versions of paid tools). Heroku itself is very well documented and easy to use. The free version even allows custom domain names. Therefore, it is suitable for professional use, as well. Some advanced settings like private networks are not available in the free subscription.
The build pipeline should automatically deploy commits to the dev environment. The staging or prod deployment should be a manual process after QA approval. The Heroku pipeline is a handy tool to move specific application versions across environments. The full description is here.
A source code with fully integrated CI/CD can be found here.
Published at DZone with permission of Peter Szanto . See the original article here.


Not many guitar companies have dedicated websites for different languages. In fact, this is the first time I heard of this being done. This makes a lot of sense though, especially for Gibson, which is one of the largest guitar companies in the world.
Gibson is proud to announce that they will have a new dedicated site for their Spanish speaking fans at Gibsonguitar.es. The site will be a one-stop resource for the latest in music news and features, events, exclusive interviews, music videos, guitar lessons and other information related to Gibson instruments and artists.
Gibsonguitar.es has been fully customized with features appealing to the Spanish-speaking community, including product pages describing all the features and specifications for Gibson, Epiphone and Kramer guitars, among other products, gear and accessories. Fans can get all the information they need, all in Spanish.
The website already contains exclusive interviews with a variety of Latin and international stars including the Puerto Rican and Latin Award-winning singer-songwriter Kany Garcia, legendary guitarist Manuel Cabezali, songwriter/producer Tommy Torres and Pablo Hurtado – guitarist for the acclaimed Mexican band, Camila.
The Gibson Guitar Corporation is based out of Nashville, Tennessee and manufactures other instruments as well including Epiphone, Baldwin, Steinberger, Tobias, Valley Arts, Singerland, Kramer, Wurlitzer, Kalamazoo, and Maestro. They're most well known for their solid-body guitar model: the Les Paul.
There's no doubt you heard Gibson in the hands of some of the finest players in the world. Some of Gibson's artists include Rik Emmett, Slash, Angus Young, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page, Ace Frehley, Zakk Wylde, Randy Rhoads, Joe Perry, Pete Townshed, Mike Bloomfield, and the man himself - Les Paul.
With a history dating back to the late 18th century, Gibson is also staying updated utilizing forward thinking technology in such guitars as the Firebird X, Robot, and the Les Paul Standard 2010 Limited.


I am trying to raise awareness and money for my friend Mark. I created a donations page (http://www.marklanders.org) where you can read details but the quick version is Mark almost died from an aortic dissection. Thankfully for his children, wife and friends e lived, but not without sustaining lost of his right leg and at this time much functionality in what remains of his left leg. He needs this money for prosthetic leg, insurance will only cover small percentage.
steven is working on selecting a charity so you can support Help Mark get a leg up on life.


text:
package com.intellij.testFramework;

import com.intellij.openapi.application.AccessToken;
import com.intellij.openapi.application.WriteAction;
import com.intellij.openapi.util.Key;
import com.intellij.openapi.util.io.FileUtil;
import com.intellij.openapi.vfs.VfsUtil;
import com.intellij.openapi.vfs.VirtualFile;
import com.intellij.util.PathUtil;
import com.intellij.util.text.StringTokenizer;
import junit.framework.Assert;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * @author nik
 */
public class VfsTestUtil {
  public static final Key<String> TEST_DATA_FILE_PATH = Key.create("TEST_DATA_FILE_PATH");

  private VfsTestUtil() {
  }

  public static VirtualFile createFile(final VirtualFile root, final String relativePath) {
    return createFile(root, relativePath, "");
  }

  public static VirtualFile createFile(final VirtualFile root, final String relativePath, final String text) {
    return createFileOrDir(root, relativePath, text, false);
  }

  public static VirtualFile createDir(final VirtualFile root, final String relativePath) {
    return createFileOrDir(root, relativePath, "", true);
  }

  private static VirtualFile createFileOrDir(final VirtualFile root,
                                            final String relativePath,
                                            final String text,
                                            final boolean dir) {
    try {
      AccessToken token = WriteAction.start();
      try {
        VirtualFile parent = root;
        Assert.assertNotNull(parent);
        StringTokenizer parents = new StringTokenizer(PathUtil.getParentPath(relativePath), "/");
        while (parents.hasMoreTokens()) {
          final String name = parents.nextToken();
          VirtualFile child = parent.findChild(name);
          if (child == null || !child.isValid()) {
            child = parent.createChildDirectory(VfsTestUtil.class, name);
          }
          parent = child;
        }
        final VirtualFile file;
        parent.getChildren();//need this to ensure that fileCreated event is fired
        if (dir) {
          file = parent.createChildDirectory(VfsTestUtil.class, PathUtil.getFileName(relativePath));
        }
        else {
          file = parent.createChildData(VfsTestUtil.class, PathUtil.getFileName(relativePath));
          if (!text.isEmpty()) {
            VfsUtil.saveText(file, text);
          }
        }
        return file;
      }
      finally {
        token.finish();
      }
    }
    catch (IOException e) {
      throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
  }

  public static void clearContent(VirtualFile file) {
    Assert.assertNotNull(file);
    try {
      VfsUtil.saveText(file, "");
    }
    catch (IOException e) {
      throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
  }

  @SuppressWarnings("UnusedDeclaration")
  public static void overwriteTestData(String filePath, String actual) {
    try {
      FileUtil.writeToFile(new File(filePath), actual);
    }
    catch (IOException e) {
      throw new AssertionError(e);
    }
  }
}


The National Park Service is celebrating its 102nd birthday this weekend and, to let everyone help celebrate, it's bringing a "pop-up national park" to downtown Seattle.
The National Park Foundation (the agency's nonprofit partner) invites everyone to Seattle's Westlake Park from noon-4 p.m. Friday (August 24) and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday (Aug. 25).
The space will feature elements from nearby Mount Rainier, Olympic and North Cascades national parks and information on how close they are to downtown Seattle.
Related: In honor of the occasion, Washington State Parks are offering free admission on Saturday.


Big Ben - What has happened?
This famous clock is being repaired and the bell has been silenced.
However, something special is planned this Christmas. What is it?
What can you find out about the building, the clock or the chimes?


Sometimes when it comes to getting a bill paid on time all patients need is a little HELP. Luckily the needed help is provided for patients with a physician that makes use of the Billing Helper portal. Patients who need to pay off a bill can now do so online by going to the portal's homepage and clicking the Pay Your Bill Online tab. After clicking the button it will be necessary to enter an account number, last name of the patient, and the patient's date of birth prior to hitting the Submit button to locate the statement. Those who aren't sure whether or not a provider uses the portal can look to the lower right hand corner of the bill to see if there is wording that directs them to the Billing Helper portal. An account number, last name of the patient, and the patient's date of birth must also be entered by those who are looking to update insurance information. Those who are a bit baffled by the whole process may want to take a look at the FAQs posted at the top of the Billing Helper portal.
Okay I think I got it. Should I be aware of anything else?
In the case an insurance company does not receive a claim patients are encouraged to contact Billing Helper directly as information may need to be updated in order to submit a claim. Billing Helper can be reached by completing an online contact form with an account number, name, address, phone number, and comments. Those who would rather seek immediate assistance can try calling for live assistance.


Remember my art installation Earth Blanket exhibited as part of The Biennale of Australian Art (BOAA)? Well it has now been accepted into the North Sydney Art Prize – which is great…. but now how to get it there! What was I thinking – haha….
My latest acrylic pouring painting was my best yet, with lots of cell development in different sizes and good colour formation – very happy with this effort, and will be having another go with the same colours and pouring medium – the trick though is getting the consistency of the paint correct….
My artwork, Earth Blanket, is a ceramic installation comprised of over 20 individual pieces sited at Lake Wendouree as part of the Lakeside Sculpture Work, a component of the Biennale. In total there are 36 sculptures installed around the lake from around Australia.
The concept of the artwork is to trigger a re-connection to the Earth via an organic contemplation within the environment using a medium which is of the Earth herself – clay. It is only through a re-awareness of humanities symbiotic relationship to the Earth that we can stop consuming her and begin living with her.
I was very happy with my site at the lake; the site being an important conduit to delivering the artwork's message.
BOAA is well worth a visit if you are in or near the Ballarat area – in fact it is worth planning a visit even if you are not! Besides the sculpture walk there are also lots of solo and group exhibitions, performances, music and much more happening, with a combination of both free and ticketed events. And there is plenty of time to visit as the biennale runs till November 6th 2018. You can check out the program on the BOAA WEBSITE.
Stay tuned for a post showcasing the fab works of the Sculpture Walk!
As readers may know I am somewhat a specialist in pit firing, having explored it extensively during my PhD and then writing a book about it which you can find on lots of online book stores such as AMAZON.
Lately I have been yearning to explore more methods of alternative firing. The idea arose when my pugmill decided to die leaving me with lots of clay I haven't had time to manually reclaim. So I thought I would make an outdoor clay kiln – this is still in the planning stage, and I hope to get it up and running (so that it is 'fired') before fire restrictions come in this year.
In the meantime I decided to use some of this excess clay – mainly from buckets under the potters wheels which has a high water content – and experiment with a TeePee firing. I did the firing a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't had time to post it till now – it seems to be very busy at the moment!
I am lucky enough to live on a 10 acre property with lots of trees, and it has been a windy year so there are lots of blown down branches scattered around. I began by constructing my TeePee using these branches and then lining it with fence palings which I reclaimed from a neighbour a few months ago. Before lining the TeePee though, I constructed a tripod with smaller branches within the TeePee which included seeweed, cow dung, salt and some copper sulphate and nestled my pots into it.
I had previously made a series of pinch pots which were were prepared using string and copper wire wound around the pots to hold on seaweed, gumleaves and cow dung.
After lining the TeePee with fence palings I dipped newspaper – in two or three layers for strength – into clay slip, which I had made by using my glaze drill to mix the clay in the potters wheel slag buckets. I then lined the TeePee with this paper making sure I left I left two holes for lighting the fire and a few draft holes to feed the fire. I also left a hole in the top of the TeePee for drawing.
The firing was really fun to do and visually splendid and I was very happy with the result for a first effort and intend to experiment with this technique more.
Pot Two – love these colours!
Pot Three – great copper wire markings here!
Pot Four – love the subtlety ….
April is National Poetry Month where poets from around the world write a poem a day and post it somewhere on social media – Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Instagram, Tumbler, the choices are endless (although one could participate as a personal challenge and not share on social media, of course). The idea behind social media, though, is to network and connect, and also read some of the great work of others working in this literary space.
As regular readers may know I also have a Poetry & Drawing blog. It began as a poem and drawing a day blog, and after one year of posting I scaled it back to posting weekly. But in April I try to write daily for the National Poetry Month.
So far I have been successful in posting daily (despite extending my studio, which will be the subject of this weeks Sunday Studio Visit, so stay tuned)!
Recently I have been lucky enough to collaborate with a January art challenge involving makers from the sea glass community. I was invited by Meg from MadebyMeg to participate in this exciting project, in its inaugural year.
The brief – to create art pieces inspired by a poem I wrote.
The brief for the poem from Meg was that it not be obviously related to sea glass or waves or oceans, but a bit more abstract. The poem was to be uplifting and not obvious, though it could refer to nature in general.
So I set about writing the poem…. it was good writing to a brief, something I have not had much experience in, mostly I write for myself about my own feelings and experiences (as do most writers I suspect).
Whilst working within the parameters of the brief readers familiar with my poetry may notice some familiarities of course, this is only natural based on writing style.
To check out the responses to the poem – which are definitely worth a visit – visit Meg's WEBSITE. The responses were wide and varied from jewellery to two dimensional pieces, all using my poem and sea glass as inspiration, and were of such a high quality and exhibited a wide scope of creativity.
I must admit I had some favourites, and all were jewellery pieces so I may have been a bit biased – but then its all about personal taste, I guess.
I'll leave you with a snippet of the works – over forty works were submitted, so be sure to visit the website to see all the amazing creations.
Sunday Studio Visit – visiting other studios!
Today's studio visit sees me reviewing some pics I took whilst on a girls weekend ceramic crawl I participated in on Friday and Saturday throughout regional Victoria. The tour was organised through Clayspace, a Daylesford based ceramics co-operative, of which I was a founding member and director.
The course of the trail was dictated by the Sidney Myer Ceramics Award, an international biennial award recognising ceramic excellence, held at the Shepparton Art Museum or SAM. Luckily there are lots of major potters living and working in the central highlands area which meant that a ceramic trail was easily structured that took us from Daylesford to Shepparton and back again.
We started out at 10am on Friday morning and the first stop was Barry Singleton's studio, a renowned Australian studio art potter whose studio was established in Castlemaine in 1970. Now in his 70s, Barry was instrumental in raising the profile of studio pottery in Australia during the 1970s. Trained largely in Japan, Barry's studio set up is amazing, echoing many of the principles laid out in Bernard Leache's The Potters Book, from clay recycling procedures through to handmade tools and equipment.
While Barry was trained in the "form follows function" Japanese aesthetic his work has evolved and matured within the contemporary context to include a range of organic soft forms, art pieces and sculpture to compliment his functional pieces, creating a diverse and accomplished oeuvre.
Next stop was Sarah Ormonde's studio in Bendigo. Sarah is recently back from the Beyond Limitations clay mentoring residency in Sth Korea, which she chatted to the group about over a yummy shared lunch. While Sarah's work is beautifully functional and is careful and considered, it ventures into the conceptual through the abstracted landscape based marks she makes upon the clay surface using coloured slips and lines. This surface treatment conveys a freedom of expression usually reserved for the abstract artist. This approach, however, is not surprising as Sarah is originally trained in painting and spends alot of time drawing in real time in the environment.
After a gorgeous lunch at Sarah's the next visit was Gary Bish's studio. Gary is another hallmark studio potter within the Australian ceramic landscape who, like Barry Singleton, has been working since the 1970s and is a major contributor to the local ceramic scene. Gary has a beautiful showroom, exhibiting so many temptations I had to buy one (I pretty much bought something from everyone). As with Barry, Gary has increased his artist outlook to include a more contemporary approach. While many of his works are based on the vessel, the use of line and decals he designs himself creates a depth and perspective in the work that can sometimes border on early surrealism not the pics I have here – google him & you will see what I mean). Technically innovative, these pieces challenge the contemporary "ceramics purveyor" as they question the viewers ideas about what a ceramic vessel is and what it is meant to convey – concepts very often left to sculpture.
We left Gary's studio at about 4pm and headed for Shepparton, arriving around 5.30pm. By then it was beer o'clock accompanied by some relaxing before heading off to dinner at the local pub. Needless to say after dinner – six girls booked into an apartment… I'll spare you a pic!!
Next morning – an early and bleary eyed start… nothing a greasy breakfast couldn't fix at a local cafe, and then off to SAM to view the finalists in the Sidney Myer Ceramics Award. The award has been a little chequered in its review this year, even by the the artists we had already visited on the trip, which had generated some interesting discussion about what ceramics "is" by definition from both a purist and conceptual basis. There were five finalists in total, Penny Byrne, Ruth Hutchinson, Sanné Mestrom, Adam John Cullen and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, all displaying their work in an installation format, a technique becoming increasingly popular in the ceramics arena.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran won the award with a body of work exploring the nature of religion, gender and futility through referencing Hindu deities, Christian symbols and sexualised bodies. His use of clay is crude – not being trained in the medium – but this allows him to not be restrained by the historical conventions of the material, so that he exhibits a freedom in the form and surface of his pieces. Though not my favourite in the award it has certainly opened up the debate about the use of clay as an overall art material rather than being purely a 'ceramic' medium.
My two favourite finalists were the works of Penny Byrne and Adam John Cullen.
Penny's work uses kitsch vintage porcelain figurines and found objects to create sculptural assemblages that explore politic themes and popular culture. Again, this work challenges the conventions of what a ceramic 'award' is… here we have mass produced figurines presented in an installation, a format relatively new to ceramics compared to other art forms. Penny's body of work in this exhibition references the war in Iraq, and is a powerful anti-war statement, and while the theme of politics may not be new to sculptural ceramics the coupling of her use of materials may be viewed as controversial to purists who see a ceramics 'award' being contained in the more conventional realm of handcrafted and purely object based.
Adam's installation explored the notion of museum curation and the display of artworks, and the time in between when artworks are in the storage area of the museum waiting to go on display – a somewhat ironic theme, which could be taken as serious comment or just some fun and humour depending your mood perhaps. The work is about the placement of objects in a space and the ambience created – very much in keeping with museum curation. I enjoyed the surfaces of the pieces in this installation, but then I am "into" textures and layers.
Sanné Mestrom's work, suitably titled Leftovers, was created by asking artists throughout the world to send remnants of their work which she then combined with unfired clay create a body of work in an attempt to reveal the the original of objects and how they anchored in that meaning, whether cultural, historical or physical. This was perhaps the most controversial work, not due to her method or the finished forms and sculptures, but because the clay was unfired. Unfired clay is technically not 'ceramic'. Personally I was not very engaged in these artworks as they seemed very slapped together – the components didn't seem integrated to form a resolved artpiece. Unfortunately I don't have a pic to show, and I guess that's why!
Finally Ruth Hutchinson's work Hellmouth, which was not an installation but rather a free standing piece in a separate feature room, depicted a series of figures descending into the open mouth of the abyss. Traditionally trained in ceramics Ruth used dental tools, materials and techniques to create these tiny figures – again challenging the boundaries of conventional ceramics.
Overall the exhibition was great – and had mixed responses within the group, which created interesting thought and discussion – but I suppose this means the exhibition has achieved what the curators set out to achieve and what I think they were attempting and that is to present a collection of ceramic works that push the boundaries of contemporary ceramic art practice in Australia. This award has been in existence for many years, and from a curatorial perspective, it would be time to shake things up a bit!
I do think it was a great show which made me think about my art practice and at the end of the day that is a good thng!
Upon leaving SAM it was back on the bus to visit Graeme Masters in Sweeney's Creek. Graeme is another large figure in Australian ceramics having worked as a production potter in the heyday of Australian pottery during the 1970s-80s. Today he works in his studio producing wares he makes from an amazing carving technique, which he was generous enough to demonstrate to the group, and teaching at Bendigo Pottery. He also makes some sculptural teapots to break the flow. Graeme had an amazing studio setup including a streamlined process for reconstituting clay complete with settling tanks and filter press. At the end of tour of this process he presented each of us with a bag of freshly pugged smooth white clay – can't wait to try it out!
Next it was off to visit Dean Smith in Castlemaine. Dean was the recipient of the Manningham Ceramic Art Award this year, an exhibition I also had a piece in, which you can see HERE. Dean had recently come back from an overseas trip and was only just getting back into work and had a huge pot on the go which he had thrown in two pieces. He didn't have much finished work on display as most of it was with the gallery that represents him in Melbourne. We did get to see his studio and firing setup, which was great. Dean is also quite the creative inventor. He rigged up his own spray booth using an old shower base as the floor of the booth, and created an exhaust system for his glaze mixing area using an old oven rangehood! The pic below is not great, but the surface is dry crystalline glazes … something to make the mind boggle!
And then it was time to jump back on the bus and travel home – eventually all good things must come to an end.
Regular readers will know one of my ceramic sculptures was recently accepted into the biennial Manningham Victorian Ceramic Art Award, an award that has become a fixture on the ceramic awards calendar in recent years, The award is open to all Victorian artists, and spans functional ceramics through to sculptural and conceptual works, as long as the main medium used is clay.
The exhibition opening was held on Wednesday evening at the Mannigham Art Gallery in Doncaster, so now I can reveal my sculpture and give you a bit of information about the conceptual underpinnings of the piece.
So what is this artwork actually about?
Much of the artwork I create addresses environmental issues, sustainability and the need for humanity to reconnect to the Earth and realise their symbiotic relationship with the landscape.
Landscape 1 is the first in a series of sculptural artworks that capture this ethic in both the making process and the finished form.
The sculpture was press moulded in two halves using the polystyrene end packaging of a radiator heater. Polystyrene is especially bad for the environment in its manufacturing process and in that it doesn't break down and so remains a permanent waste product.
With some creative thinking, however, this material can be used to model artworks or can be turned into artworks itself.
The surface of Landscape 1 is achieved through pit firing, a method of firing ceramics in the ground using organic materials to achieve the mottled coloured surface. When pit firing I only use materials which are found on the ground – old branches, sticks, pine cones, cow dung and leaves.
The exhibition runs until the 29th August and there are some fantastic ceramic artworks to see, and buy, from over fifty Victorian artists, emerging through to established. So if you are in or near the area it is definitely worth a visit.
Today in the studio I am finally catching up on polishing the ceramic sculpture I fired last weekend in the pit firing, which was the subject of last Sunday's studio visit.
The piece in the middle of the picture is the sculpture I have had accepted into the Manningham Ceramic Awards which i have to send off tomorrow, and the other two sculptures i need to photograph as proposals for anther two upcoming art awards – fingers crossed.
That's about it for today in the studio…. yesterday my son & his girlfriend visited, and we had a bit of a late night watching movies and chatting, so it was a bit of a late start to the day!
Oh Dear…. a few days late again!!
Sunday was a bit of a busy day….. we visited friends on Sunday afternoon for a low key housewarming party, and didn't get home till quite late!
The day before, Saturday, I did a pit firing to complete a few pieces I am thinking of entering into some upcoming ceramic awards, and had grand plans of unloading the pit on Sunday and writing my Studio visit blog post – but all I got in before we had to leave for the housewarming was a sneak peek, which I dutifully shared on Instagram.
Then yesterday, Monday, I had to go to Melbourne for a catch up dinner with my mum and my two adult sons, and in the process i just get around to getting anything much else done!!
So today, Tuesday, I am writing the blog post I wanted to share on Sunday – sorry for the delay!!
The artworks I had in the pit include a piece already accepted into the Manningham Ceramics Award, and two other pieces I am planning to enter into other awards whose deadlines are looming.
My pit is quite large, and I alter its size, depending on how much work I have to fire, with fire bricks. In this firing I also packed some smaller pieces (which make up one artwork) within sawdust in tin saggars as I wanted to get as much smoking/black firing as possible.
The colour responses I attained from the pit are not the best I have ever achieved, but the nature of pit firing is the lack of control and the random nature of the fire based on so many variables, such as the temperature, the season, the wood used, the clay used, the condition of the pit (where I live I can only do pit firings in Winter due to fire restrictions, and it can be really wet cold where I live) and other combustibles introduced to the pit.
Following is a short photo essay of the procedure I took for the day, but also check out the book I have written about pit firing (yes, unabashed self promotion!) available on Amazon and other online bookstores, plus some brick & mortar stores.
After finishing with a final layer of wood the pit is covered with tin to allow for a slow combust over night.
So, besides being busy in the studio with ClayMotion classes and the mosaic project with the Ballarat Neighbourhood Centre, and keeping on top of my Etsy shop, I'm trying to also play with the development of some new sculptural forms – coz I have nothing else to do!!
PS – I also have a stupid slow computer that wants to keep shutting down which is why I didn't post a Sunday Studio Visit last week – but of course it is working fine now as I type my draft for this post because it is 2am in the morning!!
Anyhows…. as mentioned this week I have been playing around with some new sculptural forms which are little more formal than my usual style of sculpture. These new experiments are much more formal in their design and presence than my usual organic works. This formal and angular design also lends itself to handbuilding, which is a technique I have been growing to enjoy alot more in the past couple of years.
I am, however, in a quandary about how to glaze this piece …. currently I like the surface textures…. I was thinking of pit firing them which would mean burnishing them which would eliminate the surface texture. So perhaps an organic matt earthy style glaze…. or perhaps pit fired with only a partially burnished surface…. arrgghhh!! Thoughts?