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Tallis Mediterranean and Greek Cooking Vacations > programs > tours > Five Senses Experience in Nemea: Nemea and the Town of Ancient Nemea and Its Archaeological Site
Five Senses Experience in Nemea: Nemea and the Town of Ancient Nemea and Its Archaeological Site
For a trip to Nemea you need your five senses on high alert; there are too many things to feel… listen… see… taste… and… smell…
It is hard not to feel the pull of ages standing in front of the Temple of Zeus with the 7 remaining Doric columns, and the Nemean stadium, which hosted the ancient Nemean Games, which were at the same magnitude of Olympic Games and attracted crowds from several regions. Today there is a revival of the old games and the Nemean stadium hosts the modern Nemean Games. Reaching the stadium, do not hesitate to become an ancient athlete for a couple of minutes. Take off your shoes and be rewarded with feeling the contact with the stones and oil touched by ancient feet more than 2,000 years ago.
A journey through ages reveals great myths and legends; listen to the stories about Nemea and its wine. Nemea is the birthplace of the famous Flashion wine, the royal wine that Agamemnon the King of Argos (southern Greece) drank in Mycenae (4th century BC).
Another myth is associated with the foundation of the Nemea Games, the story of Opheltes son of Lykourgos and Eurydike. When their son was born Lykourgos consulted the Oracle at Delphi in order to ensure the health and happiness of his child. Pythia proclaimed that the boy must not touch the earth until he had learned how to walk. Lykourgos assigned a slave woman, Hypsipyle, to care for his son. Sometime thereafter the Kings of Argos passed through Nemea. They found Hypsipyle and asked her for something to drink. Hypsipyle placed Opheltes on a bed of wild celery where he was killed by a serpent, thus fulfilling the prophecy. The kings renamed the baby Archemoros (beginner-of-doom) and held the first Nemean Games as funerary games in his memory.
Nemea was also the place where Hercules performed the first of his 12 mythological labors: killing the vicious lion of Nemea, which terrorized the locals. According to the legend, after realizing that his arrows had no effect on the beast, he strangled it with his bare hands. The hero is often represented on Greek artifacts wearing the lion's impenetrable skin while enjoying a cup of its blood. Nowadays the blood of Nemea has a more contemporary approach, it comes in the form of wine. But not just any common wine; a rich, complex, intense, and generous red that definitely will draw your attention.
The scenery throughout Nemea is unforgettable. You will see hills and small valleys covered with countless rows of vines, sweeping olive groves, pine and cypress trees.
But the most surprising part starts when you taste one of the well-known and noble native Greek varieties: the unique and charismatic Agiorgitiko, the grape of St. George (Agios Georgios), from which Nemean wine is made. Agiorgitiko is a "chameleon" grape because of the large number of wine styles that can be crafted from it: fresh and light rosés with fruit aromas, young to medium-bodied and moderately tannic reds aged in oak barrels to some of the deepes-colored, tannic wines with high alcohol concentration and intensity, aged in an oak barrel for 1-10 years.
You should try sweet Agiorgitiko mostly made by straw grapes and Agiorgitiko blended with other red international varieties to realize why this wine should get a place on the pantheon of Greek wine varieties.
In a bottle of Nemea wine you can smell all the aromas of the Greek countryside. A rich bouquet of red raspberries and cherries; sweet baking spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg; rosemary, Greek herbs, and pepper; lemon, orange, mandarin, raisins, and figs; honey; olives; mushroom; and wild Greek flowers – aromas that remind you forever of the secrets of Nemea.
In a glass of Nemea Wine you will:
Discover a wine history of 4,000 years. Drink the same wine as Hercules drank just before he slayed the Nemea Lion.
Taste one of the noblest Greek varieties that stand out for their deep red color and remarkable aromatic complexity.
Explore Nemea through a journey to this charming wine region with the different microclimates, altitudes, terrains which can delight visitors by its natural beauty.
Smell the charming Mediterranean fruity aromas like plums, cherries, strawberries, pigs.
Feel its graceful texture, low acidity and flavors that create a wonderful balance on the palate.
Find the best match with your meal as it can be an excellent food pairing with meat dishes but due to its acidity can also be enjoyed with richer seafood.
Be intrigued not to stick with the first wine; taste different varieties of fresh, light wines, dry or sweet, red or rose, aged in oak.
Understand why wine experts and opinion leaders appraise the Nemea Wines as the most talented and charismatic Greek wine variety.
Perfect Meal Accompanied with Agiorgitiko:
Rosé Agiorgitikois the perfect party wine and the perfect summer drink, but it is also a great partner to the oil-rich vegetable dishes of the Peloponnese (and to those of other parts of the Mediterranean), leafy green salads or cooked wild greens.
The Agiorgitiko reds go well with meat.
Young, fresh Agiorgitiko that has not been aged in oak, matches well with a large variety of dishes, like meat balls in tomato sauce, pork, even moussaka.
Braised meats and stews, such as rabbit—in Greece sweet with the addition of onions—are a perfect counter for the more tannic, oak-aged Nemea Wines.
More flamboyant Nemea Wines, with more tannins, more alcohol, and more evident oak, call for intense aromas, like lamp chops, especially charcoal grilled, or game.
Nemea, Land of Wineries
Travelling through 2,300 hectares of vineyards and olive groves surrounding Nemea are of stunning natural beauty. In the distance looms the mountain of ancient Corinth.
In the midst of this beauty lies Nemea, a small city in the Corinthian region, located 1.5 hours from Athens and half an hour from Corinth and Nafplio. Nemea is built amphitheatrically on the slope of Profits Ilias Mountain, with River Asopos crossing and irrigating the valley and its vineyards.
It was Homer, the greatest of the epic poets (8th century BC) who first called Nemea Ampeloessa – full of vine. Today Nemea is the largest and most important red wine appellation in Greece and the Balkan.
The Town of Nemea
The town of Nemea is famous for producing the most important red wines of southern Greece, going back to the 15th century BC.
Many as 95 wines are produced in this region, all made from the local Agioritiko grape, in more than 40 wineries located in Nemea.
Grapes are grown at three levels: on the flat areas around the village, on the slopes towards the west, and on the mountainous area of Mount Killini in the north. The best grapes are grown in the vineyards at the highest altitudes where thin soil and lower temperatures produce a better quality grape.
The whole area surrounding Nemea is one of absolute natural beauty spread out all around for as far as the eye can see. In the distance looking out over acres of vineyards and olive groves looms the mountain of ancient Corinth.
Nemea is not only known for its delicious wines and natural beauty. Like all Greek towns and villages, Nemea has its own history and mythology.
The Town of Ancient Nemea
It is here that Hercules killed the Lion of Nemea (a fierce monster in Greek mythology), the first of the 12 labors of Hercules, the 12 tasks given to him by King Eurystheus. According to Herodotus, a famous Greek historian, lions did roam about in ancient Greece up until 100 BC.
Nemea's Old City, especially the stadium, was restored with incredible precision by the honorable Prof. Stephen Miller, the director of the University of California Berkeley's excavations in ancient Nemea. He has devoted his life to unearthing and restoring ancient Nemea and reviving the Nemean Games, held every four years. These competitions preserve the conditions as they existed thousands of years ago. Runners run on the same track used thousands of years ago, barefoot and dressed in the clothes worn by the athletes of antiquity. The wrestlers compete in the original arena where their predecessors wrestled thousands of years ago, and so with all the other sports.
East of Nemea is the ancient village of Kleones where people have lived since Neolithic times. Here, in the 5th century BC the Kleones Neamean Games were held, competing and just as important as the Olympic Games in Athens. In the village are the ruins of the Temple of Hercules and Athena.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Windows 8 and Microsoft's Fate
I've been to two Windows 8 trainings from Microsoft in the last few weeks, as we at Abelssoft build Windows software for consumers and Windows 8 will be a pretty big market, as it will ship with every new PC sold from Octobre on. I'm not sure how much I can tell about this, so I'm keeping out stuff where the speaker directly stated to not tell the public, but basically all I'm telling has already been leaked before or is directly stated on Microsofts MSDN pages at http://dev.windows.com or http://design.windows.com. Also I'm not from Microsoft, so take everything written here with a grain of salt.
It was presented that we now have about 600M Windows installations, and googling just found that half of them is on XP, 6% Vista and the rest Win7. I guess the Vista users, some of the XP users (XP support is over) and everyone buying a new PC will have Windows 8. Everyone of those people will see the windows market and everyone who tries to use the Metro interface will very early need to have a live ID, which enables them to enter the windows market. The tablet users will only have the Metro interface as the only desktop apps working will be the office products Microsoft preinstalls.
So the market will be big. Very big. For Metro apps at least. With Windows 8, every Metro app that Microsoft thinks to be a good design example for Metro will be shoved into a large amount of people's eyes.
The Metro Design Language is nice, clean and minimalist. I like it. On design.windows.com everything needed is shown, including design decisions, metrics and what you need to design a Metro interface app.
Frameworks and the Market
Most of the other technological stuff that was mentioned is already known to everyone who looked at the Apple store concepts. For example it's the same mechanic of declaring which permissions your app needs to work, if it needs to have access to your location, sensors, etc. Microsoft here copied from Apple where it made sense, which is basically everywhere.
Interesting differences include:
The Microsoft cut is 30% unless you app is very successful – as soon as it reaches a certain threshold in earnings (the number 25.000$ appeared somewhere), Microsofts cut lowers to 20%. This is a very nice move from Microsoft, although it won't affect most of the apps it keeps the hopes of developers for getting rich high. As far as I know, this is counted on a per-app basis.
Trials. There's a (feature-limited & time-based) trial mode, recurring payments (subscriptions), in app purchases – including a mock windows store for testing.
Not as strict as Apple. I questioned if we would be able to harvest the users email to give him an otherwise free app, I got no definitive answer but the basic message was that Microsoft won't stop you from using the business models you've used so far. They only said that the windows store team will check your app, and if they cannot get in or see the functionality based on a trial version, they will likely reject it. From a user perspective, I don't like it so much, but from a developer's perspective, this is good news.
Synching is easier. Everyone who can buy stuff from the store automatically has the credentials to use Microsofts Dropbox Skydrive. An SDK for this is provided to work with it in code. This means that synching will be really easy AND cross-plattform (as you also have Skydrive for Mac, iOS, Android and such), which on Apple's platform iCloud is designed to lock people in the Apple world.
The app sandbox will be one-sided. The Metro app has only access to a few places on disc, but from the "old" Windows apps you'll be able to scan through the (hidden) app folders of the Metro apps and theoretically influence them. This has an impact on security considerations, as you cannot openly put private user data on disc, but it also means that you can use file-based communication to communicate with your "old" desktop apps and services. The implications of this could be manifold. For example, you could implement a way for Metro apps to recognize if there's already a full version of the apps' desktop equivalent is installed to automatically make the trial free for the user.
No system database will be provided. No core-data for Windows 8 now. You can use file-based databases in your app, but that's it for now (SQLite and one other thing I've never heard from are supported).
.NET 4.5 is something I'm really looking forward to. .NET 4.0 already is a heavenly programming language from the future, and .NET 4.5 will be another evolutionary improvement. The asynch language feature automatically makes your synchronous spaghetti code asychronous. Which is not only big for your code, but should also make the whole framework faster, as Microsofts talented engineers provide you with asych representatives of usually blocking code.
In the developer and designer trainings is was oftentimes emphasized that you more or less automatically have a valid metro design when you use the new grid-based application template, as it scales and reformats contents automatically based on device and portrait/landscape orientation. I got the feeling that this was stressed a lot as Microsoft doesn't think people design good UIs. If I look at the Windows world, this is mostly true.
The semantic zoom is another big paradigm that will be greatly supported by the grid. The idea is that you can zoom out and in on everything so you have only a single view in your application that shows different levels of detail,depending how far zoomed in you are. You can see with in the Windows 8 start screen, where you can zoom out to have an overview of all your icons, while zoomed in you see interactive tiles and program names.
One other interesting thing is that SVG graphics might be usable, which is a feature I wished for a long time ago. Sharp graphics without big file sizes should be good for everyone.
The Developer and Designer Trainings
Overall, I would have expected more.
First, I was expecting more non-official information. The non-official information I gathered was merely what everyone would expect to happen anyways.
MS's own stance on details isn't very universally consistent. The to trainers I met didn't have the same knowledge about things, and some information was even contradictory.
The number of trainings and the overall low number of participants oftentimes let me think that Microsoft is desperate to train developers to make something else than the 10 year old windows forms that we all know and hate. In a non-representative questioning of the audience, only about 1/3 of the attendees knew about MVVM, which is the de-facto technical standard design pattern for modern Windows applications since about 2007-2008. This means that most of the Windows developers are about 5 years behind in knowledge. Maybe this is the reason why the trainings didn't dive very deep.
The early beta-like release of code isn't very good to test. While I like the idea of the semantic zoom, the code base is buggy so it can hardly be tested now. On a sidenote, of course it's still better than not releasing stuff beforehand.
The User's Point of View on Windows 8
Users will see Windows 8 very differently than developers. In my opinion, you need a desktop and different windows for real work, while having the minimalist full screen experience for tablet PCs will be the primary way to go.
Having seen Windows 8 weeks and having played with it a lot, in the developer trainings I learned a lot of hidden gestures that a user won't understand. Asking for Microsofts plan to make the user understand the new interface, I didn't get much more than "Yes, we'll have to do something about that". UPDATE: Windows 8 is out now, and they didn't.
Therefore I guess that many will be puzzled, and that many will stick to the edition of Windows they currently have. In fact, I even think that Windows 8 will be Metro's Vista – an unfinished product that lays the groundwork for a really great Windows 9. Sadly, no Microsoft representative was going to talk to be about Windows 9.
UPDATE: Microsoft screwed it
1.) Discoverability: While working with Windows 8, I noticed that there's no indication if there're options and if the charms work on this page of the app. In Microsoft-theory, every app should implement a way to share stuff, the search charm etc, but if this isn't implemented or there is just nothing to share or search the charms don't work. I would have expected that in the final implementation they're greyed out, or hidden, if thats the case, but it isn't.
In terms of discoverability, it would be better to have a visual indication that a search or a sharing charm is available, as when you want to share or search something, you don't want to check if thats possible at the moment. Same problem with the lower options bar – you can never know if there are options unless you find out on every page of every app. This will lead to users testing out swipes and strokes all the time.
This makes Windows 8 a bad tablet OS.
2.) Touch on Desktop: Soon the Surface Pro will be the first real Windows 8 device where you might want to try to do some work on a touch device. Microsoft promised to make the old Windows Desktop more "touch-friendly". This is necessary, because it's where you'll have to do work, because the Metro part of Windows 8 with it's one-window open approach won't work for most people. What happened? They increased the padding on the Ribbon interface. That's it. Users who really try to do work in Office on a touch screen will often miss their touch targets.
3.) Two worlds: The distribution of settings you want to make in two different system settings are deeply frustrating, when you cannot find the setting you look for – because it's in the other settings. When you wanted to drag a file in Mail, you can't now. When you wanted to look at a Wikipedia page while writing something for reference, know you can't. (Well, you can, but then you'll try to have to ignore the Metro "Windows 8 – Sytle" part of Windows, which makes Windows 8 a worse operating system than Windows 7).
2. + 3. makes Windows 8 a bad Desktop OS.
TL;DR: Windows developers will finally have to learn something new, as the market will be big and I believe that the Windows AppStore will initiate a new gold rush. Windows 8 is technically a very nice concept, but the trainings were a bit shallow and Microsoft seems to be desperately hoping to find developers who will learn all the new stuff their brilliant engineers have been working on in the last 10 years, that nobody used because of Microsoft's backwards compatibility (the old shit still runs), and devs who will look at MS's style guides. Users will like Win8 for tablets, but not for PCs, where it will not be too successful before Windows 9.
, Posted Monday, May 14th, 2012 under Business, Programming, Usability.
Tags: C#, Computer, English, Microsoft, Outlook, Review, Software, Usability, Visual Studio, Windows
I'm not much of a Windows user, but that still was an interesting and well written article, thanks!
gold price says:
What's your point? Besides, it's a Consumer Preview. For something that's supposed to show what Windows 8 is capable of, the apps sure do leave a lot to be desired.


Want to develop your employee, supervisors and direct reports?
Sound like a crazy idea? Sure it is. But, the concept will help your direct reports begin the process of independent thinking. When a member of you team comes to you with a problem, ask them how they would solve it. When someone asks you to make a decision, ask them what they would decide if you were not there. Then, discuss their answer and use it as a learning opportunity.
Too many times as managers we instantly answer questions, quickly solve problems and give specific direction. Although our experience and knowledge have helped us lead our organization, it has not developed our staff as effectively as possible. Remember, you can't move up in the organization until there is someone who can fill your spot when you move up. Develop your employees and you will create more opportunity for your own career.


text:
Q: Unable to parse correct total hours from Wednesday to Thursday in java I am having an issue while parsing day and time to get the total hours and minutes in java.
If I calculate total hours starting from 'Mon 22:00' to 'Tue 22:00' then I am getting correct total hours 24. But If I calculate total hours starting from 'Wed 22:00' to current day and time like 'Thu 12:45' then I am getting 'Hours : -153 Min : -15'.
This is the case only for Wednesday and Thursday. For rest of the days it is working fine.
import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

public class Test {

    private static DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE HH:mm");
    private static DateFormat dayFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("E");
    private static Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        try {

            Date date1 = dateFormat.parse("Wed 22:00");
            Date date2 = dateFormat.parse(dayFormat.format(calendar.getTime()) + " " + calendar.getTime().getHours() + ":"
                    + calendar.getTime().getMinutes());

            long hours2 = getDurationInHours(date1, date2);
            long min = getDurationInMin(date1, date2);

            System.out.println("Hours : " + hours2 + " Min : " + min);

        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    public static long getDurationInHours(Date returnTime, Date leaveTime) {
        long durationInMillis = leaveTime.getTime() - returnTime.getTime();
        long hours = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toHours(durationInMillis);
        return hours;
    }

    public static long getDurationInMin(Date returnTime, Date leaveTime) {
        long durationInMillis = leaveTime.getTime() - returnTime.getTime();
        long min = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMinutes(durationInMillis) % 60;
        return min;
    }

}

A: That's because when you define your date as Wed 22:00 it's not the Wednesday the current week. It is actually 7th of January 1970 ;)
As you probably know the dates in java work as long number since 01.01.1970. So when you say Wednesday and not an actual date it gets the first Wednesday  after 1970 which is the 7th. When you say Mon 22:00 it works properly because it uses 5th of January 1970 and the difference is 2 days.
When you use "Thu 22:00" in the same logic it uses 1st of January 1970 (which is a Thursday) and that's why you get negative numbers. Because it's actually 6 days ahead

A: java.time
    DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("EEE H:mm", Locale.ENGLISH);

    ZonedDateTime now = ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneId.of("America/Dominica"));
    TemporalAccessor fromTa = formatter.parse("Wed 22:00");
    ZonedDateTime from = now
            .with(TemporalAdjusters.previous(DayOfWeek.from(fromTa)))
            .with(LocalTime.from(fromTa));
    Duration dur = Duration.between(from, now);
    System.out.println(dur);

Running this code just now gave the following output:

PT11H41M25.284611S

This means a duration of 11 hours 41 minutes 25.284611 seconds. If you need to use this duration further in your program, you will probably want to keep the Duration object. For printing to the user it's not so nice, so do that this way:
    long hours = dur.toHours();
    int min = dur.toMinutesPart();
    System.out.println("" + hours + " hours " + min + " min");

11 hours 41 min

Java doesn't have a concept of "Wednesday at 22:00". So we need to pick a specific Wednesday and a specific Thursday. SimpleDateFormat was trying to be helpful to you and picked for you, but didn't pick the Wednesday and the Thursday you had expected, so didn't do you any favour. java.time, the modern Java date and time API, forces us to pick ourselves. I much prefer this. It makes it much clearer exactly what happens in the code, which in turn will also make it easier to spot and fix any errors.
My use of TemporalAdjusters.previous ensures that I get last Wednesday (not next Wednesday). And my use of ZonedDateTime ensures that the hours and minutes are correct. Even across transitions to and from summer time (daylight saving time) and other such time transitions. You should of course fill in your own time zone if it didn't happen to be America/Dominica.
Link: Oracle tutorial: Date Time explaining how to use java.time.

A: The date-time API of java.util and their formatting API, SimpleDateFormat are outdated and error-prone. It is recommended to stop using them completely and switch to the modern date-time API.
You can do it in an intuitive way with java.time.Duration which is modelled on ISO-8601 standards and was introduced with Java-8 as part of JSR-310 implementation. With Java-9 some more convenience methods were introduced.
Note that a weekday and time e.g. Mon 22:00 is not sufficient to create a date-time object directly. A weekday e.g. Monday comes in every week and therefore we will have to create a date-time object defaulting to a particular date e.g. today. From this date as a reference, you can find the first occurrence (LocalDate) of the given weekday (e.g. Monday) and from that object, you can obtain a date-time object with the given time.
Duration#between gives you the Duration object between the two date-time objects. Using the Duration object, you can create a string formatted as per your requirement, by getting days, hours, minutes, seconds from it.
Demo:
import java.time.DayOfWeek;
import java.time.Duration;
import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import java.time.LocalTime;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
import java.time.temporal.TemporalAccessor;
import java.time.temporal.TemporalAdjusters;
import java.util.Locale;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Test
        displayDuration(getDuration("Mon 22:00", "Tue 22:00"));
        displayDuration(getDuration("Wed 22:00", "Thu 12:45"));
    }

    static Duration getDuration(String strStartDayTime, String strEndDayTime) {
        LocalDate today = LocalDate.now();
        DateTimeFormatter dtf = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("EEE HH:mm", Locale.ENGLISH);
        TemporalAccessor taStart = dtf.parse(strStartDayTime);
        TemporalAccessor taEnd = dtf.parse(strEndDayTime);

        LocalDateTime ldtStartDateTime = today.with(TemporalAdjusters.nextOrSame(DayOfWeek.from(taStart)))
                .atTime(LocalTime.from(taStart));
        LocalDateTime ldtEndDateTime = today.with(TemporalAdjusters.nextOrSame(DayOfWeek.from(taEnd)))
                .atTime(LocalTime.from(taEnd));

        return Duration.between(ldtStartDateTime, ldtEndDateTime);
    }

    static String formatDurationJava8(Duration duration) {
        return String.format("Days: %d, Hours: %02d, Minutes: %02d, Seconds: %02d", duration.toDays(),
                duration.toHours() % 24, duration.toMinutes() % 60, duration.toSeconds() % 60);
    }

    static String formatDurationJava9(Duration duration) {
        return String.format("Days: %d, Hours: %02d, Minutes: %02d, Seconds: %02d", duration.toDaysPart(),
                duration.toHoursPart(), duration.toMinutesPart(), duration.toSecondsPart());
    }

    static void displayDuration(Duration duration) {
        // Default format
        System.out.println(duration);
        // Custom format
        System.out.println(formatDurationJava8(duration));
        System.out.println(formatDurationJava9(duration));
    }
}

Output:
PT24H
Days: 1, Hours: 00, Minutes: 00, Seconds: 00
Days: 1, Hours: 00, Minutes: 00, Seconds: 00
PT14H45M
Days: 0, Hours: 14, Minutes: 45, Seconds: 00
Days: 0, Hours: 14, Minutes: 45, Seconds: 00

Learn about the modern date-time API from Trail: Date Time.

*

*For any reason, if you have to stick to Java 6 or Java 7, you can use ThreeTen-Backport which backports most of the java.time functionality to Java 6 & 7.

*If you are working for an Android project and your Android API level is still not compliant with Java-8, check Java 8+ APIs available through desugaring and How to use ThreeTenABP in Android Project.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


These 20 lobbyists, politicians, communicators and industry representatives are actively working to prop up polluters up and down the west coast.
There are a total of 5 counties, 9 major organizations and 31 cities that have officially voiced concern or outright opposition to oil trains in their communities. With groups as wide ranging as the Washington State Council of Firefighters to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and cities from Spokane and Aberdeen to Bellingham and Hood River (basically anywhere the trains would run) its clear how diverse and widespread opposition is in both states.


text:
Denton Transgender storytime Book reading a huge success despite 6 protesters across the street
Having never gone to a children's storytime book reading I was curious as to why republican Texas Gov. Abbott, would be so offended by them.
The reading on Saturday took place at a local establishment instead of the library as they normally do three times a year. This came after the library staff said they noticed threats of violence posted in comments by out-of-state and local extremists.
Texas Republicans threatening violence forces the cancelation of "story time" a TDoR event at a Denton Library
About 150 people attended according to the facebook event page. I would estimate more that that since so many were children brought by their parents.
It was a simple joyous affair. I felt welcomed and safe as I entered the cafe, a feeling that has become very rare in Texas.
Outside a man holding a megaphone was blasting prerecorded random religious messages. And at the very end of that block far away from the the eyes and ears of the children, 3 people were holding signs accusing the Denton library of promoting pedophilia.
A huge thank you to the Denton Police Department. Officers outnumbered the right wing extremists 10 to 1 and allowed the book reading to be what it was meant to be, an event for children.
Meet Max Appenroth the first trans person to compete for the title of Mr Gay Germany
Max Appenroth / Instagram
Meet Max Appenroth, they/them/theirs, the first trans person to successfully reach the preliminary round of the Mr. Gay Germany Competition.
Max Appenroth is a trans activist and diversity consultant from Berlin. They are currently enrolled in a doctorate program at the Institute for Public Health of the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Last Sunday Max wrote on Facebook:
On Sunday, I want to share some good news with you: I made it the first trans person among the last 12 in the race to choose Mr Gay Germany! 🥳🏳 ⚧🌈👍🏽 It is a great honor for me to represent my community here at this contest. Mr Gay Germany is about way more than just looking good. All candidates need to start a community campaign and present it to a jury. The whole thing then falls down the biggest weight even when the decision at the end. With my #ProudToBeAlive campaign, I want to draw attention to the enormous high suicide rate among lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, inter & asexual (LSBTQIA+) youth and young adults. It makes me terribly sad to see how many LSBTQIA+ kids seem to see no other way out than death. I have concrete ideas on how to improve the situation here and support the next generations Queers. But please read more in my interview with queer.de 🥰
Max wrote on the Instgram below: "In the year we remember the victims of violence in my community. 375 trans people died violently worldwide in the past year. The number has never been higher and most of the murdered were trans women of color.
The actual number of murder cases is likely to be significantly higher, since many of the acts of violence are never discovered or adequately recorded. The violence against trans people must come to an end!
We are people who deserve love, respect and recognition and have a right to our life in freedom. To experience love and protection is unfortunately not a matter of course for us trans people. That's why I'm so incredibly grateful for the support I have from my family, friends, community and my husband Idàn. They give me the strength to keep fighting for equality in my community every day."
A post shared by Max Appenroth (@maxfabmax)
Max understands from personal experience that their competing for the title of Mr. Gay German would be received well by most of the LGBTQI community, but would be seen as an affront by others.
Trans people overwhelmingly welcome their advocacy. We understand that sexual orientation and gender expression are two different things entirely.
queer.de spoke to Max about their participation, hostility in the scene, and his #ProudToBeAlive campaign.
As a trans applicant, did you experience hostility?
As a trans person, I experience discrimination every day. In fact, unfortunately, again and again from the (cis) gay community. To some, my identity doesn't seem entirely tangible. That is completely ok, but no reason to isolate myself, to hostile me or to threaten me with violence. Even if someone doesn't understand my identity, that doesn't make my feelings about it any less real. I don't always understand everything either, but I generally accept it as long as no one else is harmed. I would like that from society too, because through my being and my identity I simply do not take anything away from anyone.
A post shared by Mr Gay Germany (@mrgaygermany)
Which community project are you going into the Mr. Gay Germany preliminary round from November 26th to 28th?
With my campaign #ProudToBeAlive I want to draw attention to the enormously high suicide rates among lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, inter and asexual adolescents and young adults. It makes me terribly sad to see how many LGBTQIA + kids seem to see no other way out than death. As some studies have already shown, suicidality is extremely high, especially in LGBTQIA + 13-17 year olds, and trans people are even more affected by it. Since I'm currently doing a trans-empowering children's book anywaypublish, on the one hand I would like to achieve more visibility of queer ways of life in books for children and young people, so that queer children and young people can find themselves there and simply see that they are not alone. On the other hand, I would like to do active suicide prevention work by creating a professional and continuous crisis hotline for LGBTQIA + adolescents and young adults in order to give the coming generations of our community support, strength and hope for a better future.
Labels: Max Appenroth, Mr. Gay Germany, Transgender Competitor


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22 years of promoting best practice in shrimp aquaculture
People Certification Sustainability Environment
Shaping the future of shrimp production: 4 of 5 1 2 3 4 5
by Rachel Aninakwah
9 December 2019, at 8:00am
George Chamberlain, president of the Global Aquaculture Alliance, looks back on over two decades of promoting best practice in, and busting-myths about, the global shrimp farming sector.
How closely do you engage with the shrimp sector?
GAA's vision has always included the entire aquaculture industry. However, the practicalities of beginning as a startup in 1997 forced it to initially focus on a single sector – shrimp. The organisation quickly expanded to include tilapia, catfish, pangasius, salmonids, marine fish and molluscs. Although the BAP (Best Aquaculture Practices) programme started with shrimp farming standards, today it certifies a much higher volume of salmon (956,000 tonnes) than shrimp (386,000 tonnes). This is a reflection of the more consolidated nature of salmon farming.
George Chamberlain, president of the GAA, at the GOAL conference in 2018
What are the major challenges facing the sector?
The major issue continues to be disease, but the type of disease challenges is changing. Originally, the main concerns were viral diseases, which can be managed with specific pathogen-free (SPF) broodstock and proper biosecurity at the hatchery and farm. Now, we are facing more bacterial diseases such as early mortality syndrome, running mortality syndrome and white faeces. A microsporidean parasite disease called EHP is also spreading. These are diseases that are not easily eliminated from a facility by disinfection and dryout. Management includes use of SPF broodstock and biosecurity, but also use of genetic lines that have been bred for disease tolerance and use of probiotics to inhibit the growth of bacterial pathogens.
As shrimp farmers around the world are getting more proficient at managing these diseases and global production continues to rise, prices are falling. This is leading to a recognition of the importance of unified shrimp marketing programmes to increase consumption. At the GOAL meeting last year in Guayaquil, an organising committee was formed to develop a US shrimp marketing initiative. Similar initiatives are needed in each of the other major markets.
Producers are also being driven to continually drive down the cost of production by implementing more efficient technologies at each step of the production chain. This is one of the most fascinating areas of aquaculture.
when GAA was being formed in 1997, shrimp farming was accused of converting 50 percent of the world's mangrove area to ponds. One of GAA's first projects was to engage leading mangrove experts from around the world to gather the facts. It turned out that the actual mangrove conversion loss was less than 5 percent
Do you educate the public as well as aquaculture producers?
GAA advocates, educates and demonstrates to keep aquaculture on the path toward sustainability. We advocate by relying on sound science to defend aquaculture from misinformation and exaggerations. For example, when GAA was being formed in 1997, shrimp farming was accused of converting 50 percent of the world's mangrove area to ponds. One of GAA's first projects was to engage leading mangrove experts from around the world to gather the facts. It turned out that the actual mangrove conversion loss was less than 5 percent. We have dispelled similar exaggerations about over-harvesting of fishmeal, dioxins in fish and antimicrobial resistance, to name a few.
What does a sustainable shrimp industry look like to you?
In order to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population with increasingly limited resources, the shrimp farming industry needs to sustainably intensify. The biggest driver of improvements is genetic selection, which is rapidly improving growth rate, disease resistance, reproductive performance and other traits. Now emerging in multiple locations around the world are small well-controlled intensive systems stocked with fast growing genetic lines that efficiently and consistently produce high yields. Such systems are adaptable to automation and mechanisation in a manner similar to standardised barns used in the poultry sector. Examples of groups developing such systems include CP Group in Thailand, Marinasol in Peru and Camanor in Brasil.
If you had unlimited funding, what would you do to improve the sustainability and profitability of the sector?
Aquaculture has a very bright future if it continues on the path toward sustainability. The key is to work closely together to help the whole sector remain aware of the opportunities to continually improve and to identify challenges and proactively deal with them.
What is the outlook for the shrimp industry?
When solutions to white spot syndrome virus were developed at the end of the 1990s, shrimp farming quadrupled in volume. Now we are on the brink of a similar transformation, and I believe a similar leap in volume is again possible.
This interview was originally published in Technologies shaping the future of shrimp production, the first issue in Benchmark's insights series. To access the issue in full visit Benchmark's website.
Rachel Aninakwah
Communications manager at Benchmark
Prior to her role at Benchmark, a leading provider of sustainable aquaculture solutions in genetics, health and specialist nutrition, she was a sustainability consultant, working to drive meaningful improvements across food supply chains
More in this series: Shaping the future of shrimp production
Raising the bar for responsible shrimp aquaculture
Christoph Mathiesen, part of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) team that established the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) standard for shrimp, explains how certification has improved the environmental and social impact …
A pioneering perspective on shrimp genetics
Marcela Salazar, Benchmark's shrimp production manager and one of the pioneers of shrimp genetics, explains how shrimp breeding programmes have evolved and are likely to be heading.
How to tackle major shrimp diseases
Andy Shinn, director of Fish Vet Group Asia, and a world renowned expert on aquatic parasites, believes that the shrimp sector can do more to limit the impact of those disease challenges that form the sector's largest co…
How to stay ahead in shrimp farming
Nonglak "Anne" Thaisin, founder and CEO of Quality Farm, has been producing vannamei shrimp in Thailand for 27 years. Here she explains how adaptability and the development of new production systems, as well as new feeds…
The first six companies to registration for the latest F3 Challenge – which is offering three $100,000 prizes for the makers of fish feed containing no fish – have been revealed.
Applications are being sought for a new role that aims to cultivate, develop, connect and promote aquaculture innovation in Ireland.


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Victor Kugler - Victor Kugler (5 June 1900, Hohenelbe/Vrchlabí - 16 December 1981, Toronto) was one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and friends during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
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Victor Kugler (5 June 1900 – 14 December 1981) was one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and friends during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.In Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, he was referred to under the name Mr. Kraler.
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Victor Kugler (5 June 1900 – 14 December 1981) was one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and friends during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, he was referred to under the name Mr. Kraler. From July 1942 to August 1944, he aided his colleagues Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl in ...
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Victor Kugler (5 June 1900, Hohenelbe/Vrchlabí – 16 December 1981, Toronto) was one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and friends during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, he was referred to under the name Mr. Kraler. Loading...
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Victor Kugler (6 June 1900 – 14 December 1981) was one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and friends during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In Anne Frank's posthumously published diary, The Diary of a Young Girl , he was referred to under the name Mr. Kraler.
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DESY, European Mol Biol Lab Hamburg Outstn, EMBL, Germany.
We have periodically (25ms on - 25ms off) illuminated lysozyme crystals with 0.4 THz radiation and simultaneously monitored their X-ray diffraction intensity in order to study non-thermal structural changes in the protein. In this work we analyze the X-ray scaled and unmerged diffraction intensity observations using a multivariate Bayesian model in order to improve the accuracy of the intensity estimates. The diffraction intensity pairs of the illuminated and non-illuminated state show a predominantly positive correlation. The correlation decreases with increasing resolution suggesting that finer slicing and faster sampling of the rocking curve may further improve the accuracy and effect size of structure factor amplitude differences, making the interpretation of structural changes more straightforward. The improved analysis retains the most important structural features described previously (in helix 3) and provide addition details about the B-factor changes close to the substrate binding site.


Unfortunately everyone can make mistakes. Often these can be rectified with little or no harm being suffered. However, in some circumstances it can be difficult to rectify the mistakes, if at all, and damage or loss can be suffered. In this situation, it may be necessary to bring a claim for professional negligence or malpractice. There is a specific protocol that must be followed in these cases and strict time limits apply as to when claims can be issued.
Professional negligence is a specialist area and we have the necessary expertise to deal with such matters. Often the professional concerned will have the benefit of a professional negligence insurance policy and we can assist with liaising with the insurers to negotiate a settlement without recourse to the court.
If a settlement cannot be reached then we can issue proceedings and pursue the case to trial if necessary.


text:
The Limits of Incompetence
Our social instincts compel us to think well of our fellow man. In spite of much evidence to the contrary, we think him competent to cast votes, to decide how to spend and borrow money, and how to bring up his own children. We persist in this conviction even as the manifest lack of competence at every level of American society causes it to careen toward ruin. We recoil at the thought of government bureaucrats separating the competent from the incompetent, making those who are incompetent, along with their children, wards of the state, remedying their incompetence through strict discipline when possible, and consigning the rest to a lifetime of manual labor in service of society. Many of us quite justifiably think that the government bureaucrats are themselves incompetent, or worse. Those who no longer trust the competence of either the government or our fellow man instead put their faith in corporations or in churches or even in bloggers and internet newsgroups (pathetic, I know). They may preserve their sanity by doing so, but it does nothing to change the big picture. Presumably, it is better to be a competent observer of collapse than an incompetent one.
Of course, the label of generalized American incompetence seems to cast too wide a net. After all, most of us have the competence to not starve when provided with cans of baked beans and a can opener. But it seems that each and every one of us is forced to plead incompetence when presented with the task of judging the value of various figments of financial imagination which comprise fully half of the increasingly fictional US economy, for the depths of incompetence on which this crumbling edifice floats are truly unfathomable. It started with incompetent public officials who blithered on about "ownership society," which is a boneheaded idea. This, in turn, empowered individuals who were incompetent to make financial decisions to borrow vasts sums of money, with the loans backed by an implicit government guarantee. It proceeded to incompetent appraisers, who inflated the value of the collateral based on circular reasoning (value = price = value), and to incompetent bankers, who improperly documented, resold and bundled the loans into unfathomably faulty Collateralized Debt Obligations. It proceeded to incompetent government officials who treated these faulty documents as valuable and backed up their value with public money which they are yet to collect in taxes. It proceeded to incompetent judges who rush through foreclosures and throw people out of their homes based on faulty or nonexistent documentation of ownership.
Some people express umbrage at all this, harrumphing about this and that technical defect in the paperwork, throwing around big words like "personal responsibility" and "fraud." Some of them claim that a concerted effort by brilliant legal and financial minds must be made, to flush all of this illegality out of the system, to determine what all of this soiled paper is really worth, to punish the guilty and to restore dignity to the innocent who were harmed along the way. In this they have so far been quite incompetent: they have vociferously yet impotently complained about a matter over which not a single one of them is competent to exercise any degree of control. An attempt to unscramble all of the faulty financial paperwork is bound to lead to a ridiculous death by a thousand paper cuts. About half of the US economy consists of financial froth that is floating above an unfathomable abyss of incompetence, and once that froth blows away, what will remain of the US economy will turn out to look like a deflated, shriveled little thing, at a standstill because it will be unable to borrow internationally to finance fuel imports, full of defunct financial institutions right up to and including the Federal Reserve, with a worthless currency that nobody is willing to accept as payment, and full of people furiously shaking their tiny fists, hurling their impotent rage at an indifferent sky.
How does a "can do" nation degenerate to such depths of incompetence? A key insight is offered by the Dunning-Krueger effect, defined and experimentally tested by Justin Kruger and David Dunning at Cornell University. Kruger and Dunning proposed that, "for a given skill, incompetent people will:
tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve."
Krueger and Dunning, and other experimenters, have shown this effect to be quite pronounced. Competent people initially assumed that others were competent as well, and were able to correct their misperception once they were allowed to examine the work of others. Incompetent people, on the other hand, were only able to recognize competence in others after being taught to recognize their own incompetence. Thus, a weaker version of point 4 above suffices: incompetent people do not need to become competent, but to able to judge the superior competence of others they do have to gain some insight into their own incompetence.
But now comes an embarrassing fact: Krueger and Dunning carried out their initial research on American subjects, and their results squared well with their hypothesis, but when their experiments were repeated with Europeans and East Asians, a different picture emerged. With Europeans, the effect seemed barely measurable, while with East Asians the exact opposite picture emerges: Dr. Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia has found that East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities, focusing on self-improvement and group cohesion. I have come across examples of such a systematic error before. I recall listening to a certain researcher of human behavior at Yale, who was discussing the results he got by doing experiments on his students, which he blithely extrapolated to all of humanity. But I suspected that an error had crept into his experiments, due to his unstated and unquestioned assumption that his little sample of Yalies was representative of the inhabitants of Planet Earth rather than Planet Yale (which is what I walked away thinking).
And so it turns out that this blind faith in everyone and sundry's competence is quite specifically an American trait. I invite cultural anthropologists to concentrate their efforts on finding out how this cultural trait could have ever evolved, seeing as it is quite obviously maladaptive. I would venture to guess that it will come down to a false incentive for fostering "inclusive fitness" rather than fitness per se: one's ability to work and play well with others being emphasized and rewarded over and above one's ability to work and play well, others be damned if they can't keep up. A certain vital part of humanity has been bred out of us. How many of you Americans have sat through endless meetings, listening dutifully (or pretending to while doodling on a pad or daydreaming) whereas what you really wanted to do is to stand up, extend the accusatory finger and say: "This is bullshit. You, Sir, are an idiot. How dare you waste our time with this nonsense? Shut up and get out." Were you to do this, you would have found your American colleagues cringing pathetically and trying desperately to smooth things over while avoiding your eyes like whipped puppies, while your foreign colleagues would be doing their best to stifle their guffaws while looking at you with newfound respect.
Now, if you have ever worked for a Chinese, a Russian, or especially an Israeli company, chances are you have been witness to a few variants of the scene described above, all accompanied by easy laughter and cheers, and a general sigh of relief: idiot expelled, sanity restored. But here in America we are now a bunch of pathetic cringing ninnies branded with a peace sign and mooing dolefully. Some Mr. Gnang-Gnang or other from Planet 10 can get up in front of us and tell us that printing half a trillion dollars will create jobs, and not a single person jumps up an screams "WHAT? WHAT?" No, we don't do that here, plus it's almost lunch, so let's just chew our cud until somebody comes and feeds us. Here's a prime example: just a week ago Germany's Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble called US policy "ratlos," which translates into the local vernacular as "clueless." Immediately some apologists popped up, saying that "clueless" is too harsh a translation. Well, here is "ratlos" done unto English via Russian, thanks to Google Translate: "ignorant, embarrassed, helpless, indecisive." Does that work for everyone?
To recap, we have three categories of incompetent people, whose definitions at this point in our exposition should seem uncontroversial. First, we have the proud, the few—the competent. They are becoming rather thin on the ground in the US, because Americans have largely forgotten how to make new ones, and the ones that exist are getting a bit long in the tooth. Their main problem is that they have been conditioned to think the best of others; in essence, to suffer fools gladly. They can be turned around simply by setting the right incentives.
Second, we have the incompetents who know the limits of their competence. These are potentially useful: they just have to be matched up with tasks at which they can become competent. They are less likely to have inflated expectations for what they can expect to achieve through their labors, and although their lavish habits may not be in line with what their increasingly impoverished country can provide, they can be brought around.
Third, we have the vast army of the deeply incompetent, some of whom look upon themselves as paragons of home-spun self-reliance, have a "who the hell do you think you are to tell me anything" attitude toward their betters, and with their clueless bungling pose a grave danger to themselves and to everyone else. They are a problem, but many of them can be rehabilitated. You see, being pointed and laughed at when you do something stupid is something of a human universal, and most people are wired to accept that message, remember it as a formative experience, and struggle to avoid it in the future.
But there is also a fourth category of incompetent people: those who are so deeply incompetent that nobody can assess their competence, or lack thereof, because they cleverly shy away from all forms of productive activity, thus making their competence, or lack thereof, impossible to assess. Wouldn't it be nice if they displayed some telltale physiological trait, such as tufts of hair on the earlobes or the nose? Or if some genius were to devise a hand-held sensor that, when pointed at them, would blink a red light and sound an alarm? Alas, nothing of the sort exists. What's more, pointing at them and laughing serves no purpose, for they inhabit a rarefied bureaucratic realm where human cultural universals do not apply, and where anyone who calls them incompetent can be treated as a security risk, to be handled by those who are competent at just one thing: dispensing violence.
The final refuge of the deeply incompetent is in economics and finance. It is easy to see why this is so. Think of any very useful object you happen to own, and think of its value. Do you know how to use it well? Do other people? (The fewer the better, of course.) Is it ruggedly built, to last a long time, or is it flimsy? If it breaks, do you know how to repair it? Can you live without it, or are you hopelessly dependent on it? Is it a popular item, and therefore a thief magnet, or is it sufficiently unusual to be passed over by the casual thief despite of its usefulness to you? Does anyone know that you have it? (The fewer know, the safer it will be.) Do you know one or two people who like it as much as you do, in case you have to sell it? And so on. Now usher in a bunch of financial incompetents. What can they tell about the value of your very useful object? Just its price. How can they tell? By asking other incompetents how much they would pay for it. To this bunch, value equals price equals value equals price, at various times and in different places, until the whole thing crashes and burns because nobody actually knows the value of anything to them.
What empowers these people is our love of money. The last vestige of sanity an American seems to be able to cling on to is in his ability to count his money. While he still has some money, he adds up his "net worth," and the higher the number, the better he feels about himself. Once all he has left is debt, he adds up the money he doesn't have, and the more "credit" he has, the better he feels about himself, because of all the things he can still "afford." And once he finally defaults on his loans and no longer has any credit, it is as if, in his own minds, he ceases to exist. "I lost everything," he is apt to say, as if his earthly existence amounted to a number written on a piece of paper. A population that is in thrall to arbitrary numbers written on bits of paper is what makes it possible for the financial incompetents to remain undetected, practicing their sort of low-grade magic. It is as if everyone is blindly in love with them and thus unable to see their faults. But this spell can and will be broken, because the rest of the world is now quite ill-disposed to tolerating any more of this financial nonsense. A day will arrive when America's sages and high priests of finance, together with their wealthy clients, will suddenly turn out to be, for all to see, what they have been all along: clueless incompetents unsuitable for any task that is worth doing.
Ярлыки: Federal Reserve, financial crisis, incompetence
It's much like that old saying. Ignorance can be fixed with education. Stupid goes clear to the bone.
It's almost a relief to see the financial system fall apart. The system makes little logical sense, yet kept on existing year after to year. Seeing it collapse is vindication that I wasn't imagining what I saw.
Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 7:42:00 PM EST
rcg1950 said...
d.o. asks: "And so it turns out that this blind faith in everyone and sundry's competence is quite specifically an American trait. I invite cultural anthropologists to concentrate their efforts on finding out how this cultural trait could have ever evolved, seeing as it is quite obviously maladaptive."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, a philosopher of genius (thus generally misunderstood and suffering with mostly bad press in the nearly 6 decades since his death) went far in answering your question. I recommend to the intellectually curious (are their any such around?) a look at The Revolt of the Masses (and please, read further than the title). It happens to be free on line at http://www.aibi.ph/politics/DOCS/Ortega%20y%20Gasset%20-%20The%20Revolt%20Of%20The%20Masses.pdf"
rab said...
"Some people express umbrage at all this, harrumphing about this and that technical defect in the paperwork". Right on. See Debt Commission Report.
Monday, November 15, 2010 at 12:05:00 AM EST
"full of people furiously shaking their tiny fists, hurling their impotent rage at an indifferent sky."
Actually, they will blame scapegoats -- Jews, Muslims, Freemasons, China -- whoever the most pleasing conspiracy theory fingers. Lynch mobs (historically) come next.
Monday, November 15, 2010 at 5:27:00 AM EST
I plead incompetence as to assessing the inherent value of this priceless piece of reasoning.
My congratulations, Dmitry.
Ronald - a western European
Sean Carolan said...
Dmitry; love reading your blog but there appears to be an issue with line breaks and google reader.
You should probably only syndicate the first paragraph of each post to RSS, and make the user click through to read the rest of the post.
hawlkeye said...
When all the available jobs exist within the froth, then no-one has any idea who they'll be when they grow up. To go deep is to drown.
If the Deeply Incompetent can't even recognize incompetence per se (version 4.20) then they won't recognize "tasks worth doing". For instance, feeding oneself is regarded as "stoop labor", etc. and an economy based on white people doing THAT is just hopelessly out-dated.
In our county we just elected a Profoundly Incompetent Tool to be one of 3 County Commissioners for the next 3 years. The candidate who lost proposed re-vitalizing the local economy through small-scale farming incentives.
The new PIT-boss thought this was "a wonderful, nostalgic look, but I don't think that takes us into this world economy. I definitely believe we have to grow our economy, while protecting the environment, of course. We lost the timber industry..."
Yes, that was misplaced after cutting down all the trees, DOH!
I'm sure glad my education never kept me from learnin' how to DO stuff...
I always assume that the competency of people like Gnang Gnang is actually in screwing things up for everyone else, it's their job, like the job of a plague ridden corpse thrown over the city walls by a besieging army.
You mean he really doesn't know what he's doing?
He certainly wears a kind of dreamy, dopey expression.
Karrol Steeves said...
Another excellent observation on the human condition. I look forward to your next post!
A very intriguing article Dmitry and most humbling to one who considers himself incompetent (especially about economics) and knows it.
Around me I detect many more folks in your category-three than those I would place in the first category.
A previous poster mentioned that ignorance can be remedied with education, but stupidity goes clear to the bone. I suspect the outcome of all this will be a rather traumatic separation process between some of these categories.
I am tending rapidly toward a back to the earth, simplicity, basic skills frame of reference and attitude.
Thank you for sharing your valuable perspectives here (and I do have your book on collapse).
DaShui said...
Incompetence is a "selected for" trait. I got to see the inner workings of an university, I discovered that only incompetent teachers were hired, anyone too good who came for an interview was rejected because the other teachers were jealous and didn't want the competition. I assume this dynamic is in play in all organizations.
Whoa. Dmitry, this was very interesting and I agree with much of it, but I wonder if competence isn't misjudged or misapplied here, conceptually speaking.
If someone is put in office to be an arbiter of true human value, to protect what is true -- and then turns around and acts in a way that merely promotes his own desires for power and material goods acquisition, is he really "incompetent"?
Seems to me he's being competent at achieving a selfish end. Very competent...
...while thwarting the ostensible end of chasing what is true and holistically good.
That's not competence or incompetence under review. What's under review is motive, not competence.
I submit that those who play in the realms of economics and finance are very competent at projecting a massive subterfuge which enriches themselves to the detriment of a much larger segment of the populace.
I call that selfishness and greed, human destructiveness, and general misanthropy.
Not incompetence.
Competence is about failure to achieve one's intended goal.
Not pursuing a wholly different goal.
Monday, November 15, 2010 at 12:05:00 PM EST
You severely underestimate the role of fraud (unenlightened self-interest, crook solidarity, accessory in hopes of inclusion etc phenomena) in most of these cases of incompetence; we're talking motivated incompetence here!
Especially in the priesthood referred to as "economists" (which should mean, should it not, believers in Economism?)-- which can be, and occasionally is, practiced as a genuine theoretical and observational science, but generally isn't because doing so is ruinous to professional employment most places.
Especially in the financial rackets, where this "trade you a dead horse for dead cow" sort of practice has likewise become a job requirement.
The paperwork sorting that worries you could be largely eliminated by a simple, across the board debt writeoff-- which could be done de facto by the simple expedient of reinstating traditional bankruptcy law, refusing to bail out failed banks, letting property prices fall to affordability.
Fraud prosecutions of those who most benefited from an industry of fraud would be a good idea, just for the recovery of the stolen goods. Those who simply went along but didn't receive significant payoffs should be simply required to state, on any and all future job applications, that they worked for a financial institution during the Orgy Period.
A whole lot of medical incompetence may well disappear with the Medical Insurance Scam.
This should do a lot to reduce intentional political incompetence, by significantly reducing the scale of rewards available, hence potentially reducing architectural incompetence (though I'm not optimistic about that!)
As for engineering, product misdesign of the sort you've written about... that will also persist, as long as there are managers capable of thinking: "If we sell them a simple electric shaver, we'll go out of business. If we put a battery in the shaver, we'll sell a new one whenever it stops recharging" which isn't what I call "competence", but passes in corrupt times...
Monday, November 15, 2010 at 1:17:00 PM EST
Is it safe to say that the wide-spread acceptance of circumcising babies in the US is a form of incompetence? What about the wide-spread acceptance of fluoridated water? What about the accepted use of various toxins, carcinogens, petrochemicals, etc. It seems Americans live in a sort of bubble of ignorance and accepts things without questioning them. If they do question these things, many still accept them because, "there's no unequivocal scientific evidence that proves without a shadow of a doubt that it's harmful; therefore, it's totally safe and good."
Larkin said...
Kollapsnik, are you saying that there is a parallel between the Congress of People's Deputies and the US Congress?.... Now that I think about it, I think you might be right.
Upon reading your piece Barack Obama came to mind. Here is a highly intelligent, not unattractive individual who rises seemingly out of nowhere to become President. The fact that he was a community organizer was reason for me to hold him in high esteem. Of course I was pleased when he was elected but there was the nagging feeling that he was placed in office to be there when the shit hits the fan. I was apprehensive for him.
Those of us that voted for Obama wanted him to do battle against these insurmountable forces but I suppose that is a just fairy tale.
What appears to be a pattern is Obama going into a room with the toughest guys in the world and coming out, much like a community organizer playing the role of mediator between these forces of power and the interests of the people he represents. It is as if he has been button-holed by them and we all on the short end. I do not think that he is a bad man, but he is a weak executive. I do not think he is corrupt but I am beginning to think he is incompetent for the position.
Maybe it's a good thing, maybe it will hasten the inevitable.
This last election I didn't vote for the first time in my life.
Even the pacifist, Chris Hedges talks of revolution, but it will have to get a lot worse before that happens.
I suspect it will.
A common inability to rationally assess competence seems to permeate both academic and corporate culture. An example of the latter: I know of a now-defunct Silicon Valley company where the abilities of engineers to perform their tasks was assessed fairly reasonably, but the CEO was chosen for his social class and elite education, for his robust Charles Crocker-like physical appearance and ability to bluff people into thinking that he knew what he was doing: whereas his actual activities consisted mainly in plundering the resources of the company, building and inflating a worse-than-useless PR department staffed by idiots, and ultimately driving the firm to its doom. When the company folded he came out well ahead financially, while the engineers were simply out of a job. It's just one example, but I expect there are many others.
archipelagian said...
It is getting to the point where incompetence is necessary trait for survival. As part of my job search I have been forced to take "evaluation questionnaires", which are competency tests graded in reverse. Judging by the questions and the implied correct responses, passing these tests requires an absence of critical faculties or the ability to suppress them (dishonesty). After all, critical thinkers are not generally good at selling cheap junk to people that can't afford it, and they have a tendency to stir up trouble when they discover irregularities.
As the USA becomes more corporatist, the two pillars of incompetence are merging into one unstoppable force, a riptide of idiocy and ignorance. Swimming parallel to the shores of sanity keeps my head above water for now, until I can find my sailboat.
CapnRick said...
Gee... wish I'd said all that! Great post.
When one party has control of two branches of the government... in this case, Executive and Legislative, they usually do a tremendous amount of damage. Laugh at the TEA Party all you want... it is shining a powerful light on the scurrying rats. I tend to vote for a new set of thieves every two years... probably, as a result of my own incompetence.
Suerte -CapnRick
Michael Dawson said...
Personally, I would hypothesize that this cultural phenomenon traces back to the logic of social classes and empires. When those things get as far along and as far past their pinnacle as the U.S. domestic overclass/foreign imperium now is, popular competency becomes an increasing danger to the status quo. Hence, sponsorship and incentives for it get progressively withdrawn.
One wonders how the late Roman Empire would've tested on this...
One also wonders what in the world will be happening to all the "economics" majors that continue to pour out of elite US universities.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 2:10:00 PM EST
emaho said...
Well said, Dmitry. Seems like the Peter Principle playing out to it's logical ends.
Chris Hedges' 11-15 post on TruthDig talks of "The Origins of America's Intellectual Vacuum". Some intruiging ideas here, and perhaps directly relevant to America's ready acceptance of incompetence.
Thank you for your thought/analysis/commentary. BTW --- when will we see a new book? Current affairss surely are fertile ground.
Opolis said...
Good article. Thank you.
I have a friend who a number of years ago identified this problem in, of all things, the "Antique Roadshow." He disdained the show, because it attributed value to everything based not on usefulness or sentiment, but to some arbitrary expert's opinion. Families would sell off their history and soul to gain short profit. He saw it as the degradation of our culture. I agree.
How 'bout this then?
No one gets things wrong a hundred percent of the time. The facilitators of this economic collapse don't suffer any deficiency regarding the dynamics of the economic system.
In this age of information,its mechanisms are apparent enough for the inquisitive mind to interpret (even if they require a nudge from a helpful blogger or two).
My question... Is it a sound assumption that all this is merely the consequence of poor judgment rather than thoughtful deliberation?
TheRefreshmentCenter said...
"A population that is in thrall to arbitrary numbers written on bits of paper is what makes it possible for the financial incompetents to remain undetected, practicing their sort of low-grade magic."
DING. Well said.
It's almost like people in denial protecting a molester within the family. I honestly believe this 'low-grade' magic is awfully close to gambling addiction. In the last 10 years...it's become an epidemic.
Great reading but let's not forget that fraud has played a huge part in the decline of the U.S. economy. I'd say that it was carried out quite well by people that knew just what they were doing. I'd say that greed and fraud have played a bigger part than incompetence although incompetence is a big part. The dollar itself is a huge fraud. It is the biggest hoax to ever be pulled on mankind.
If there was one predator out there that was coming for you, a dangerous predator, the most dangerous predator on the planet as a matter of fact what would this predator be to you? What fits that definition the best? Would it be a Siberian tiger, or a lion? Or, would it be a brown bear or a wolf pack? If you'd answer anything other than people, you are underestimating people. Humans are very obviously the most dangerous predators of all.
Bukko Boomeranger said...
One of the best books I have read about human behaviour is "The Peter Principle". That's the one that posits "in a hierarchy, every worker gets promoted until he or she reaches their level of incompetence. Then the promotions stop." The book was intended as humour, but it's all too true.
(The other great book is "Parkinson's Law", which explains a number of behavioural traits, the most famous being "work expands to fill the time allocated to it." It's also a humour book, but it's dead-on in its take on humanity, right down to the chapter on the economics of kidnapping Chinamen.)
Take heart, Kollapsnik, because in life-or-death professions, competence still prevails. I'm impressed by the competence of doctors and nurses I see in hospital. The hacks are weeded out because patients die if workers screw up. Incompetent ones drift down to nursing homes and other places where the pressure is not so great, and death is an expected outcome. (Note to the easily offended -- I'm not saying ALL nursing home staff are incompetent, but face it -- you know that many are.)
I interviewed for a job on the spine ward at my hospital last week and the unit manager asked me "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I told him "I see myself doing what I'm doing now -- being a floor nurse. I like what I do, and I don't want to hit my Peter Principle limit." That's the truth -- I'm good at my job, but I'd be a bad manager. However, the look on the manager's face told me it was not the gung-ho answer he expected. I don't think I'll be getting that job.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 6:15:00 AM EST
ddu said...
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
An excellent post. ddu
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 3:23:00 PM EST
I think what Dmitry means by "incompetent" is not the inability to play money games or find a way to get something for nothing or worse, just outright steal it via complex frauds, but rather the complete lack of any real world skills -- the kind that actually help other people and do not hurt them mindlessly.
For example, how to use natural resources in a way that does not destroy them permenantly just so one or two men can have a great party, or using money (or trade tokens) to create industries that benefit society as a whole instead of, again, just a few nitwits.
The key statement in his essay, which is great, is that our inability to see beyond money -- a complete mental abstraction -- allows all these crooked, real world incompetents to thrive.
This problem hits home because I cannot convince my own wife that the green bits of paper she collects will someday be worthless, and she is from Thailand -- a country that already had a currency collapse.
I am not sure I agree with Dmitry on the Asian issue, as I witnessed a strange obsession with money over there that leads me to believe this problem is a world-wide problem now, at least in all the major cities.
I think only a few isolated groups and individuals truly understand that money and numbers have no real, concrete connection to the natural world.
Unfortunately, by the time most people realize this, they will be dead, or very close to it.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 2:58:00 PM EST
This might be a little off-topic, but I would add to The Peter Principle and Parkinson's Law John Gall's The Systems Bible (formerly Systemantics). In a manner very similar to both Peter and Parkinson, Mr. Gall expounds in a very witty and enlightening way upon the systems in which humans find themselves ensnared. These three books are a sort of Holy Trinity for me, books that I have returned to time and time again throughout my life, in my attempt to understand the endless folly of human beings.
"Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in this world with nothing but folly." - Don Juan Matus
I saw a intervieuw on RT,how you explain how a collapse working.Nice to hear it from someone,who have live in that time of period.The big problem for us towns people,that we are depented to the state.A state who lies to us.
Greatings from holland.
Tamso
Friday, November 19, 2010 at 5:08:00 AM EST
Wendell Berry has a compelling taxonomy of Ignorance in his contribution to the wonderful collection "The Virtues of Ignorance". Mainstream America nearly fills the "Arrogant Ignorance" bucket.
Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 9:09:00 AM EST
The problem with Stupid is that it isn't Ugly enough to see it all around us. TV adds 50 IQ points.
Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 10:25:00 AM EST
A well known financial analyst said this recently
"We do not see QE2 and QE3 as incompetence or bungling. It happens to be the only option available to the powers behind government. The same errors committed during the Great Depression of the 1930s are being repeated and economists, including Mr. Bernanke know they do not work."
Which exposes a bit of a fault line in politics - is it incompetence or deliberate sabotage. If it's deliberate then it would be you making the incompetent call (I am not trying to insult you).
I guess it could be said to be deliberate incompetence, or competent incompetence. It depends upon what you think politicians and bankers are supposed to be competent at, helping you or herding you. Me, I'm not competent to judge. Ah well.
EB said...
The big danger is America still has MANY nuclear bombs. Any scapegoat should be a little nervous right now. This problems tend to be solved by starting wars of economy that then devolves into wars of bombs.
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 12:26:00 AM EDT
We should have a "War on Common Sense". If it has the same effect as the war on terrorism, the war on poverty, and the war on drugs — problem solved!!
Korea: The Fate of a Cold War Vestige
America—The Grim Truth
But what is "Community"?
Happy November Seventh
A Survey of Unlikely Voters
Peak Oil is History


A while ago, I picked up Neutrogena Naturals purifying pore scrub from the new Neutrogena naturals line. I have been using Cerave hydrating cleanser lately and it's been just perfect for winters. But now that we are past the freezing temperatures, I decided to try this new cleansing scrub when I spotted it at my local Walgreens. Actually, I am not so much into scrubs but the words 'jojoba beads' in the description somehow got me into buying this one …..
As stated on the website – Gently scrubs away impurities and dull, dead skin cells that can build up in pores to improve complexion for fresh, clear skin. Suitable for even acne prone skin. Gentle enough for daily use. Won't clog pores.
As you can see, the ingredient list is not huge (which is a good thing) and free of any sulfates. It includes willow bark extract which has natural salicylic acid for exfoliation. The fragrance is very mild so that's a plus point for sensitive skin. This scrub has a soft gel like consistency and the scrubbing beads in it are really tiny and totally non-abrasive on my skin. I really like this because most of the exfoliating scrubs out there feel so rough going on the skin. Anyways, so after I rinse it out, my skin feels really soft and comfortable without that that squeaky clean, tight feeling. You just need a tiny bit of the product and it removes all the dirt and oil leaving clean, smooth skin. I have been using this scrub once daily for almost 2 weeks now and I agree with the claim 'gentle enough for daily use'. Twice a week, I use my Paula's choice 2% BHA lotion for deep exfoliation but this mild cleansing scrub is a great option to get rid of dead skin cells on a daily basis. And I also think that it should be suitable for all skin types because it's so gentle and leaves the skin clean and refreshed. I have never had great results with Neutrogena cleansers before so I am totally impressed! Will definitely buy it again.
Did you find this review useful? Follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter for more!


text:
P-C Color Guard takes first
The Plymouth-Canton Color Guard took first-place in its first competition.
P-C Color Guard takes first The Plymouth-Canton Color Guard took first-place in its first competition. Check out this story on HometownLife.com: https://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/local/canton/2016/02/28/plymouth-canton-color-guard-wins-first-competition/80880348/
Dawn Pyko Published 12:02 a.m. ET Feb. 28, 2016
Junior captains Catherine Christenson and Kaleigh Pyko.(Photo: File Photo)
An elderly women tapped me on the shoulder while in the stands, "When does Plymouth-Canton take the floor?" I replied, "Three more and they perform." The woman woman turned to her daughter and commanded, "Text your father tell him we are going to be late." She wasn't the only one in the stands eagerly anticipating the debut of this year's Plymouth-Canton Color Guard show – Flight of the Monarch.
Twenty-five young women took the floor on a tarp painted as a butterfly wing. The crowd was on their feet supporting and encouraging the Color Guard from Plymouth-Canton. The excitement in the stands was unbelievable but it didn't distract the Guard. They were determined, focused and eager to showcase their performance at the West Bloomfield Invitational in early February.
The show is a sophisticated depiction of the metamorphosis of the monarch butterfly. it was designed by Color Guard directors Rachel Nelson and Lucas Schmidt. The Guard is costumed in black representing a cocoon. As the show develops the cocoon is shed and the color is exposed on their costumes as the butterfly symbolically emerges and takes flight.
The Guard is competing in the most challenging scholastic class in the Michigan Color Guard circuit. In their first performance they scored a 66, placing them in the number one spot in the state of Michigan. They have had an incredibly busy past couple of months, competing in the marching band state competition, performing in the Rose Bowl Parade, and most recently preparing their show.
Following the competition, I spoke with junior captain Catherine Christenson: "At this point the show is only 50 percent complete, we will spend the remainder of the season finishing, polishing, and perfecting the show for our national competition in April."
Kaleigh Pyko, also a junior captain, said that "in California the crowd treated us like celebrities, but it was nothing compared to the roar that came from the stands on Saturday night when we executed a flawless performance. Every time we caught our flags and nailed our choreography the crowd erupted in excitement."
It is early in the season and the Guard's performance highlighted their precision, grace, and dedication – the show is starting to take flight. The Plymouth-Canton Color Guard also performed in competition Feb. 20 at Milford High School.
Read or Share this story: https://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/local/canton/2016/02/28/plymouth-canton-color-guard-wins-first-competition/80880348/


text:
[Rock] What Are You Listening To?
Re: [Rock] What Are You Listening To?
user-removed
Artist: Third Eye Blind
Release: We Are Drugs E.P.
Year: New October 7th, 2016
Labels: Mega Collider Records
Style of Music: Alternative Rock
Origins: San Francisco, California, U.S.
The band members have been stating since 2012 they intended to release Mini E.P. releases instead of full length releases from here on out. Seems the Dopamine E.P. with also the much large full album release of the same name has begun this trend for the band. So far this second E.P. is an interesting mix of Alternative Rock music styles. According to the release wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Drugs, the band only had a week for recording this and did things in a spontaneous way, and whatever music direction was come up with the band roll with it and did something interesting here. 7 tracks here with this release, and each of the 7 tracks has a unique music twist. Take it for a few spins.
lauzjp
Ah, so pleased some of the demos got released. I had a bootleg cd of them years ago & I love hearing how songs evolve from a demo to the final song. Some of the songs on here are just so raw with emotion in Chris Cornell's ever amazing vocal.
Artist: Kings of Leon
Release: WALLS
Year: New October 14, 2016
Labels: RCA Records, Sony Music Entertainment
Style of Music: Rock / Alternative Rock
Origins: Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.
Well the 7th release by K.O.L. has arrived, it is a rather moody release this one, has some rather interesting twists musically for the band. Sometimes Rolling Stone Magazine really irritates me, makes me wonder if their music critics actually listen to music or just post a bunch of B.S. about releases? Anyway I like this release, but then have always found K.O.L. music to be of interest to me, eh. One of a hand full of bands from the Southern U.S. who have been able to take the classic Southern Rock / Hard Rock vibe, and take the music genre in a new direction musically over the years. Take this release for a few spins, somehow like all work by K.O.L. the music grows on you, seeps into your skin and bones, and feels familiar as a warm Summer breeze going by.
Artist: Hardline
Release: Human Nature
Year: New October 14th, 2016
Labels: Frontier Records
Style of Music: Hard Rock / AOR
Origins: Originally Hollywood, California, U.S. Now the band has an international draw of musicians.
New release with a currently lineup of:
Johnny Gioeli (Vocals)
Alessandro Del Vecchio (Keyboards, 2011–present)
Josh Ramos (Guitars 2002–2009, 2012–present)
Anna Portalupi (Bass, 2011–present)
Francesco Jovino (Drums, 2011–2012, 2014–present)
Rather straight forward hard rock sound, much more AOR focused musically, has a hard driving music direction. The lead singer Johnny Gioeli being the only original member from it's early 90's heyday with Neil Schon on the six string. Johnny seems to have a kind of Jon Bon Jovi sound in his voice now here on this release, and so fans of Bon Jovi's hard rock direction early in their career might go for this release. This Hardline lineup does the hard driving music justice here, kind of has a Joe Lynn Turner/Blackmore Rainbowish feel musically but in a modern way, with a nice hard driving edge to the music. Which should mean something as Joe Lynn Turner's solo band Sunstorm: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6jB65Zq6NTxjrhVVLFdHn4 is on the same label Frontier Records as Hardline, as well as Joe's other side super group, Rated X: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0d8HJ1IaiG77LL8nhfQP5I
Anyway take this new release for a few spins, for fans of AOR music in general.
Just to highlight some content I have gotten around to that showed up on New Music Friday November the 4th, 2016.
As some Spotify users might have noticed the Neil Young discography of his solo content that was released over the years away from the CSNY collaborations effort, Young's solo various works has showed back up on the Spotify service on three main artist pages:
Neil Young - https://open.spotify.com/artist/6v8FB84lnmJs434UJf2Mrm
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - https://open.spotify.com/artist/1jVuLlkfKibBT0hXDnzQjp
Neil Young + Promise of the Real -https://open.spotify.com/artist/2XxfwJ8GFIwpwaHh6oL3PT - note content from this recent solo collaboration effort can be found on just the Neil Young artist page as well.
Since Neil Young's content has come back on the Spotify service, a couple of new releases showed up this past Friday that caught my attention from the last time his content was on the Spotify service.
Artist: Neil Young
Release: Bluenote Café
Year: November 13, 2015
Labels: Reprise
Style of Music: Rock / RnB / Blues Rock
Origins: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
I will just basically link to the wiki page on the information for this release, as the release has many recorded live tracks from different dates and locations, as this is Young's 11th archive release in his series of content he has been releasing over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluenote_Caf%C3%A9 This release has recorded live material from Young's foray into classic 50's era Rock and RnB direction Young went into during the late 80's era of his recording output.
Artist: Neil Young, Promise of the Real
Release: Earth
Year: June 17th, 2016
Style of Music: Rock / Folk Rock
Origins: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada + Venice, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
A live release of content during the Rebel Content Tour of 2015, live album contains animal / nature sounds throughout the live set list of songs.
Last up:
Artist: Queen
Release: On Air - 2 Disc Edition: The Complete BBC Sessions
Year: November 4th, 2016
Labels: Virgin EMI, Hollywood
Style of Music: Hard Rock
Origins: London, England, U.K.
The 2 disc set of this release of basically content recording at the BBC recording studio over the band's career years of early February 1973 - late October 1977.
Venterion
Music Fan
Royal Blood - Royal Blood
spotify:album:0BFzNaeaNv4mahOzwZFGHK
Teefiz
Artist : Silent Elephant
Independant rock from the north of France, got some local popularity but still hasn't broken through.
Deserves more recognition imo 🙂 (special mention to dusk hu)
https://open.spotify.com/album/4d093yMJEGHWT2dObWu8Ml
drock2
currently listening to: (and some classic sabbath ofcourse)
https://open.spotify.com/track/7wGPXDXbU8N0RhOjVyZTl2
Kyusss
https://open.spotify.com/track/0StO1AR9wWQ5SmGPKklV5u


text:
Q: Preserving column names in Sklearn Pipelines Staskoverflow!
I am a complete noob in Machine Learning in Python. I did go through a bunch of books and practice a ton of code. It seems like for more or less intelligent model selection one needs to do some version of gridsearch (I'm looking into Randomized CV Search as the most optimal thing). So I'm making my pipelines - at this stage I wrote a custom column selector by dtype and moved towards custom imputers and standardizers. After transformations I'm successfully doing a feature union for further fun.
My column selector returns a dataframe with all original column names. The imputer that follows it in the pipeline returns a numpy array. All the following transformers like a standardizer obviously get an array and return an array. I examined the imputer with dir() and got this output:
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__',
'__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getstate__', '__gt__',
'__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__le__', '__lt__',
'__module__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__',
'__repr__', '__setattr__', '__setstate__', '__sizeof__', '__str__',
'__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_dense_fit', '_get_param_names',
'_sparse_fit', 'axis', 'copy', 'fit', 'fit_transform', 'get_params',
'missing_values', 'set_params', 'statistics_', 'strategy', 'transform',
'verbose']

I examined everything and nowhere does the imputer store original data or its column names.
Does this mean that I need to either directly modify each of such sklearn classes (basically mess with the source code in my own module that I'm putting the custom classes in) or create my own copy for each and make it return a DataFrame in the transform() method?
I am spoiled by the way R libraries deal with this sort of stuff and I want to be able to explain and visualize what is happening and why.
*** UPDATE
@VivekKumar
num_pipeline = Pipeline([
("num_selector", VariableSelector(variable_type = "numeric")),
("num_imputer", Imputer(strategy = "median", copy = False))
])