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Favorite Books for 2005
It is New Year's Eve. My husband and I had a band for many years and always played on New Year's Eve. So now we don't even think about leaving the house on this night. We are about to watch "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", having had a lovely home cooked dinner.
So it seems that the blog has become my performance venue for the time being. My gig tonight is to present to you, dear readers, my favorite books for 2005. I only read 109 books this year which is down from last year and my lowest since 2001. I am not sure why because it sure seems like I read continuously, but I do know that I read a heap of books that were over 500 pages long.
I usually try to limit my list to a TOP 10, but I couldn't do it this year. In spite of reading less, I had more favorite books and I see that as some kind of a good sign. So here they are, in order of when I read them. I am not giving any summaries here. You can go and see for yourself if you are interested. They are all available at public libraries. Let me know if you've read any and what you thought. I would also love to read your top favorites list and encourage you to post it as a comment here so others can see it as well.
Happy New Year and Happy Reading!
1. Raintree County, Ross Lockridge, Jr
2. The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
3. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
4. Spending, Mary Gordon
5. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
6. The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber
7. The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
9. The Dangerous Husband, Jane Shapiro
10. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
11. The Known World, Edward P Jones
12. Weetzie Bat, Francesca Lia Block
13. Absolute Friends, John le Carre
14. Heir to the Glimmering World, Cynthia Ozick
15. No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
16. The Song of Names, Norman Lebrecht
17. Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co, Maria Amparo Escandon
Labels: Lists
I am honored to have a guest blogger today: my son Noah, who has the day off and is visiting me. He has a gift, as you will see. Please enjoy this Christmas tale composed by Noah for his nieces and nephews, my grandchildren.
Merry Christmas from your Uncle Noah! It is the middle of the night here in LA and I just ran into Santa Claus. He was dropping off gifts near where I live and as I was walking home, I saw him stuck on a roof next to my apartment building. He had just delivered to the children in that building. His sleigh and reindeer were trying to take off but could not. The problem was simple: NO SNOW and way too hot!! So the reindeer were over-heated cause they were trying to pull the sleigh on rocks instead of snow. I did not know what to do. I called the North Pole and spoke to the Chief Elf. He told me there was nothing I could do. So I went back to my office and did a Google search: "Santa" "LA" "Stuck" "NO SNOW". Only 1,333,658,452,652 came up in 0.0000275 seconds. I searched all of them and only found one of them with the solution I needed. It was the 1,333,658,452,652nd of them.
It was a guy named Wilbur. Was born in Idaho, the northern part, where it gets real cold in the winter. He does heating and cooling out here in LA, but never has any heating business because it never really gets cold enough in LA to turn the heat on. So he told me I had to make the roof where Santa was stuck cold enough so it would snow on that roof. I asked him how the heck I was going to do that. He told me he had a cousin Jasper that lives in Idaho, the northest part, where it gets REALLY COLD!!! He owns an ice cutting business where they cut ice out of the frozen lakes and ship it down to Las Vegas.
He told me that for just a few dollars more per pound of ice and per extra mile driven, I could get Jasper to bring me the ice I needed to make smow for Santa to take off. I was so happy I had a solution. I called Jasper on his 800 hot-line: 1-800-JUST-ICE, ICE BABY!!! Jasper picked up and I told him my story and that his cousin Wilbur told me to call him. He was very happy to hear from me, as he was kinda worried and all. You know, manning a hot line every year for the last 25 years on Christmas eve night, he got used to seeing Santa come by every year to drop off the presents. But when he heard my story, he knew exactly what had happened to Santa.
Jasper told me he could get 50 tons of ice to my address right away. So I gave him my credit card and he ran it. Only $2.99 a pound for the ice. Good thing I have an Amex card! He gave me my receipt number and told me ice was on the way. Then he told me it would get there on the 27th of December as Monday was a holiday.
Now what does that mean for you, my nieces and nephew? It means your presents won't be arriving from Santa tonight. There has been a delay. The presents (and there are lots of them) won't leave LA until the 27th of December and won't arrive in Cincinnati until after the New Year. But don't be sad my loves. Just think of it this way: When Christmas is over and the New Year has arrived, there will be more cool gifts that you will be getting from the coolest Uncle in all of LA: UNCLE NOAH!!!
MERRY HAPPY BLESSED
The creator sent a man with a message
It was simple: love one another, he said
We in our complexity began the fragmentation
Naming every different kind of love instead
We have young love, tough love
Love at first sight, love gone wrong
A mother's love, a secret love
The love of the poets, a sad love song
Now each year we send cards with messages
And I ponder what I want to say
We celebrate this special season once a year
We need to love one another everyday.
GONZALES & DAUGHTER TRUCKING CO
Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co, by Maria Amparo Escandon, Random House, Inc, 2005, 285 pp.
This was a reading group pick and an example of a book I might never have found otherwise. I really liked it! The subtitle is: A Road Novel with Literary License. Libertad Gonzales is the daughter of two truckers whose mother died at Libertad's birth and who was raised by her father while riding the Interstates in his 18 wheeler.
Now Libertad is serving time in a Mexican prison and consumed with guilt, but she is unable to reveal her crime to her fellow inmates at the Mexicali Penal Institution for Women. She comes across an old paperback and begins reading aloud, but what comes out is not the story in the book but her own story. The other women are largely illiterate, so Libertad forms The Library Club and "reads" to them everyday. Thus you learn her history and at the very end, her crime.
The prison, its inmates and staff reminded me of Pen Pals by Olivia Goldsmith. It is a complex scenario of graft, rehab and sorority. The trucker characters are larger than life and the author even provides a glossary of trucker lingo. The book itself touches on feminism, parenting, coming of age, teen issues and also has a dash of magical realism. Quite an accomplishment in a novel that keeps you turning the pages and reads like a bestseller. Highly recommended for teens, adults, men and women.
Blogging as a discipline
As usual, I have been absent from the blogosphere for many days. I make deals with myself that I will blog daily mainly because "they" say that one needs to post regularly in order to keep people coming to one's blog. Then the other day, I read on someone else's blog that it was a good way to get into the discipline of meeting deadlines and writing regularly. It all sounds good, but I am basically a slacker when it comes to discipline. Lord knows there are way too many things one must do daily in life: brush your teeth, get dressed, eat, clean up the kitchen, to mention just a few. Then there are weekly chores such as laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning the house. Finally there are the really annoying things like going to work at a certain time whether you feel like it or not, driving in freeway traffic, making the bank deposit, blah, blah, blah. So why would I want to make blogging and writing a regualrly scheduled duty when I do it for fun, for the joy of creating?
Well yesterday I was reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing and he says that writing that 1000 words a day is the way you learn to write. Somewhere on a blog yesterday I read that Ray is credited with the opinion that a writer needs to write 1,ooo,ooo words before he or she gets any good at all. (At 1000 words a day, that is about three years.) I am sure it is all true. I go on marathons where I promise all the gods that I WILL WRITE 1000 WORDS A DAY. It does not ever last.
What I am trying to say is that if you are a visitor to my blog, I am so glad to have you. Please check back from time to time. I read two to three books a week (that is one thing that does not ever feel like discipline to me, but most always feels like a guilty pleasure), so I doubt that I will run out of books to blog about for a long time, if ever. Then there will be the occasional chapter from the book I am usually not writing. But if you want a daily dose, you won't find it here. Luckily there are countless blogs where you can get that, so I don't have to feel obligated to provide it.
While I am on the subject, I just have to mention that I am puzzled by lit bloggers who merely mention interesting articles that they read elsewhere or post other bloggers posts. Don't these people have anything to do? Do they find this fun? Do they actually ever read all the books they talk about? Well, I don't want to get too snarky here, but I do think that "literary" people ought to be reading more than anything else, unless they are writing their 1000 words everyday, in which case they could be excused from reading once in a while. I have a writer friend (who is a regular here at Keep The Wisdom and I thank her for that), who doesn't read anything while she is writing a book. She wants to be sure her ideas are her own. I respect that totally, although I can't imagine going without reading for long enough to write a whole book.
Those are my thoughts today, Christmas Eve day. Oh, one more. Currently I am reading My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I haven't been able to get up to speed on this book yet, because it takes place in Turkey in the sixteenth century and I have never read a book set in Turkey. I feel like a very unprepared tourist so far. But what has struck me as I read is that there are so very many ways to live a life. I live in the outskirts of Los Angeles, a town which tries to convince you that there is only one way to live. I was born and raised as a middle class American, a culture which has quite limited approved ways to live. In Pamuk's book we have a cast of characters who are artists who illustrate books; calligraphers, miniaturists, colorists, etc. They go through long years of apprenticeship, their lives are fraught with the vagaries of political and religious upheavals, they become bent and blind doing this type of work. But it is what they love, it is their passion. So it is with writers. Even the most disciplined and dedicated writers lead lives of financial uncertainty and social ineptitude for the most part. I was filled with admiration and gratitude to all the writers who keep on writing and putting together books for me to read. I wanted to give them a special holiday party where they could just come in any old clothes, without a shower if they wished and sit around feeling relaxed, not having to be brilliant for a few hours, just eat and drink and talk about whatever, but feel honored and adored for the wonderful creatures they are.
READING FOR MY LIFE: 1940
A couple months ago, I completed reading through my lists of books for the decade 1940-1949; the first stage of MY BIG FAT READING PROJECT (see earlier posts in the archives.) The project consists of reading the top ten bestsellers of each year plus a selected list of other books, with the purpose of getting an understanding of each year as portrayed in books, as well as to see how the literature and events of these years influenced me, my life, my search for truth, enlightenment and understanding about life. I was born in 1947, but I started reading the books of 1940 to get a feel for the times I was born into.
I have already learned more than could have imagined from this reading. I have found out more than I ever knew I didn't know about World War II. I have discovered how earnest and wholesome many people were in the 1940s; that Christianity made for bestsellers back then; that war and the Industrial Revolution, communism and socialism were beginning to erode all those values and to create chaos. It has been a fascinating study made through fiction.
In 1940, my parents were in college, finishing their junior year and starting their senior year. Here is some background on my family:
My ancestors on both sides are all German. My father's great-great-grandfather was born in 1775 in the Duchy of Brunswick, part of the German kingdom called Hanover. His family were farmers and had lived there for centuries. There is possibly some Swedish blood in the family and we certainly have a proportion of blonde-haired, blue-eyed family members. This ancestor of my father was a soldier from the age of 16 and although he was illiterate, he could speak six languages, including German, Dutch, Low German, some English and a little Swedish. He settled in Osnabruck (still in Hanover) and married a tenant farmer's daughter. They had 5 children, three of whom lived. The youngest of these was my father's great-grandfather who was named Balthasar Henry, but was known as Willie.
Willie became a spinner of flax and a tailor, but the cotton that was being imported from America took over from flax and put Willie out of business. In 1837, he sailed with many other German emigrants from the North Sea and arrived in Baltimore, MD on July 4. From there he walked to Pittsburgh, PA in ten days. Although he had intended to go to Cincinnati, OH, he was tired of walking and stayed in Pittsburgh. About six years later, after establishing himself as a tailor and opening his own shop, he married. He was 32 and his new wife was 22. They had three sons and three daughters. The youngest son, born August 3, 1854 and named William was my father's grandfather. He also became a tailor.
William married a preacher's daughter and had nine children, the eighth of which was my grandfather, Ernest August, born in 1892 and a third generation American. He married the daughter of a grocery store owner. Two of his brothers married my grandmother's sisters. Ernest and my grandmother lived in her childhood home at first, a tradition that would continue when my parents married and lived in my father's childhood home until my first sister was about to be born. My dad's parents were church-going Lutherans and heavy drinkers. My grandmother did not learn to drive until around the time I was born and I recall her riding the brake down the many hills of Pittsburgh. My grandfather was an accountant and went to work everyday on the streetcar, as did my father when I was an infant and toddler.
This side of my family had several ministers, some alcoholics and some who went insane. Both of my grandparents were alcoholics and my father probably was too, though he got sober in his late 50s and remained so to the end of his life. My father was highly intelligent, deeply spiritual and totally committed to the family. He died of Alzheimer's leading to pneumonia at the age of 84, but could still sing all the old hymns and Christmas carols as well as harmonize to anyone else's singing.
Less is known about my mother's family. She is still living and in her words, her family never talked about anything. Her ancestors were also German but there is little information that anyone remembers about when they came to this country. Her grandfather Charles, married Mathilda, who came to the United States when she was eight years old. These great-grandparents of mine lived in Fraser, Michigan, near Detroit. My grandfather on this side of the family, also named Charles, was born March 16, 1887. He had two brothers and one sister. At some point the family moved to Port Hope, Michigan, a small town in the thumb district right on Lake Michigan. Grandpa married Emma, one of seven children from a farming family near Port Hope. His sister married Howard Smith, a banker and co-owner of the hardware store in Port Hope. My grandfather eventually took over that hardware store and ran it until the Depression in the 1930s. After their first child was born in 1915, he and my grandmother bought a house on M25, facing Lake Michigan. We visited that house every summer of my childhood.
Grandpa worked all his life but he was at heart a musician, liked to play drums in local bands and to have a good time. He was always frustrated at working jobs that did not use his musical talents. My grandmother was a fearful woman who was terrified of storms, never drove a car and hated the telephone. She was a prolific gardener and an excellent cook but not much fun to be around. She had four children but was often in poor health due to a bad back, though she lived to be 93. My mother was the second child and when she was three years old, was sent to live with Aunt Lydia and Uncle Howard. Grandma was done in by the birth of my mom's sister and Aunt Lydia had lost her only daughter at the age of eight. Mom thought she was going for a week, but she never went back home to live, only to visit on weekends. After the hardware store failed in the Depression, times were tight and my mother used to tell us how she only had two dresses for school. She wore one for a week and the other for the next week. This story was usually told when I would clamor for new clothes. She did not get along well with her aunt, who was a bitter and critical woman, but she loved Uncle Howard, who recovered financially and paid for her college education.
Although my mother was a year older than my father, she skipped one grade during school and my father skipped two, so they both arrived as freshmen at Valparaiso University in Indiana in 1937. This was and still is a Lutheran school and my father was sent there on his parent's money supplemented by a scholarship from a Lutheran insurance company. He wrote for the university paper, drank heavily with fraternity brothers and sang in the choir. My mother majored in music education, studied organ and also sang in the choir, which is where they met.
In 1940, they were not yet a couple. Though the war was raging in Europe, it did not have much effect on college life. Germany took Norway, Denmark, Holland and France that year and were being bombed by England, but the United States was not yet involved. In fact there was quite a lot a sentiment in this country against having anything to do with Europe's troubles. President Roosevelt however was all for getting involved and there was a lot of stirring up about how democracy and the American way of life was at risk. Actually it probably was at that point and still is. By the end of the year, Roosevelt had pushed through Congress lots of money for armaments, started a draft to build up the military, exchanged destroyers with England and got us a bunch of naval bases all around Europe and Africa. He also got re-elected for a third term.
In the literature I read for 1940, there is a preponderance of books about war and the message is clearly that war is not a solution. I was mildly surprised at first to find the writers of fiction to be almost unanimously against war. There is also a strong religious theme in many of these books. God is alive and well in America of 1940. (For the list of books I read, see my post of October 30, 2005.)
Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, won the Pulitzer Prize. There were no Nobel prizes that year due to the war. In those days, those were the only big awards for literature.
In film, Gone With the Wind won Best Picture, Best Director (Victor Fleming) and Best Actress (Vivien Leigh). Goodbye Mr Chips, based on a book by James Hilton, won Best Actor (Robert Donat). Popular songs were: You Are My Sunshine, How High the Moon, When You Wish Upon A Star and Blueberry Hill.
Technological developments that year included the building of the cyclotron at the University of California, which allowed scientists to split atoms; the development of a form of penicillin practical for treating infection; the first combustion chamber for jet engines, the first electron microscope and the first successful helicopter flight. Whether they realized it or not, science was setting the stage for the most destructive war mankind had ever known.
What I see in the literature is a clinging to the old answers such as religion and family with the creeping in of decay, evil and breakdown. While the writers are not pro war, the readers want to be reassured that there is something to fight for and, as always, to be entertained. The people I came from were trying to get an education and better themselves, to rise above farming and blue collar professions, to keep the arts in their lives and to follow their religion. My father wanted to be a teacher and my mother a musician. They loved classical music and were both readers. For thinking men and women and for writers, it was a time of trying to come to terms with war, with struggles for freedom and equality and with finding a way to achieve the goals of mankind without mass killing.
When an individual wants power and is not himself in very good shape, he can go to the not-haves and rile them up and get them to fight for some better future life, because they have nothing to lose. Nor do they have the education or intelligence to see that they are being duped and merely used for the empowerment and enrichment of a few unscrupulous individuals. That has been going on for eons, but in the early 20th century the rise of communism and fascism was happening along with the beginnings of a new era of struggles for equality and independence amongst the downtrodden. I can see influences in the literature that could have led to my interest in the underdog, the unfortunate and the forgotten of the world. Of course, those ideas also came from my Christian upbringing, especially as taught to me by my parents, but I found that the poor, the immigrant, Blacks, Jews, women and basically all the oppressed were in the literature and minds of Americans in 1940.
The voices in these books are distinct even if they are from the same time. Richard Llewellyn is romantic, Christopher Morely ironic, Hemingway is earnest and even optimistic, Sholem Asch is dreary (of course he was also Polish), Kenneth Roberts is a bit stuffy and know-best and Steinbeck is downright spiritual. Yet all the books so far are about the plight of man and his dreams and how he adapts to change. The haves against the have-nots is a common theme as well as war. Also there are the able versus the not able, the trustworthy, hardworking types versus the riffraff, yet among the riffraff are those occasional creatures who are wily, adventurous and actually keep the others in tea and cakes or fight their battles for them.
The theme of change and what happens to those who can't deal with it is a major theme in my life, which I suppose began with the Industrial Revolution. As far as being American goes, I come from people who desired change, to whom the status quo was intolerable, who came to this country with hopes and dreams and who had the incredible work ethic necessary to make it in a new land and culture.
While reading a couple of the more frivolous books, I was thinking about how there was this terrible war going on in Europe, the Germans are just taking over countries and slaughtering people, while Americans are trying to pretend that it isn't happening and has nothing to do with them. They are buying and reading love stories while talking about how bad things are in Europe. It seemed incredible to me, but then I thought about how after 9/11, some award shows got cancelled and the Spider Man movie wasn't released because it had the Twin Towers in it and people were all upset and flying flags on their cars, but in just a few months they were mostly bored with it and the economy was going from bad to worse and really people were worried about money. The best sellers, such as The Nanny Diaries, which was a bunch of gossip about rich people, just kept selling.
I guess war is just unconfrontable. They sure have to do a lot of propaganda and PR and advertising to get people fired up enough to take an actual interest. At least that is what I have seen from reading history. A war is going on, maybe for years and years, but most people still go to work or farm or whatever and try to stay alive like they always do. If the war actually comes through where they live it is damn inconvenient, but life goes on. Babies get born and people have to eat and they always want some entertainment. Maybe there are scarcities and rationing but people make do and get by. Then when the war is over, the soldiers that didn't die come home and are shellshocked or hardened or Agent Oranged, but things go back to normal after a while and there is even usually some kind of economic boom.
When I was in college in the 60s and then after I dropped out and became a hippy, all I knew was that some guys went to Vietnam, some peoples' relatives got killed (no one I actually knew though) and we just protested and helped guys get out of the draft. Meanwhile we were learning macrobiotics and getting high and listening to our favorite music, while there were guys over there dying. I think we didn't feel we had to care about those guys because we knew you could get out of going if you even tried and we thought guys who went were stupid, straight Hawks and had no respect for them. To this day, I have never known personally anyone who fought in Vietnam. My ex-boyfriend enlisted, which we thought was the stupidest thing of all, because it meant you agreed with the war and believed all that hogwash about fighting communism.
It sounds really cold to me now and I wonder how I became such a cynic. I didn't really know much about history or what was really going on in Vietnam or how we got involved. I just knew that I thought war was wrong, that I was a pacifist and I just was not going to participate. I wonder how many people in the 40s felt that way until they got shamed into or excited into taking part in it. I bet there was heavy pressure to be "patriotic" and if you weren't something was weird about you, especially if you were German or Japanese. I wonder how my parents really felt about it.
My parents grew up with parents who had lived through World War I, either safely from here or who had friends and relatives who fought or who fought themselves. My parents were born just as that war ended and by the time they were young man and woman, there was another world war. And I was born just after that one was over. But really it wasn't talked about, it wasn't stressed. It was the space race and learning science to keep up with the Russians and Eisenhower and peace and prosperity; subdivisions and cars and money and getting ahead and cocktail parties. Mostly in my family it was church and giving money to the church and to unfortunate orphans and being good and staying away from disreputable people and being safe.
Maybe it worked. When I was in my 20s there was Vietnam and when I was in my 40s there was Desert Storm and now there is the "war on terror", but no more world wars, at least not yet. Maybe that atom bomb really did scare people enough. Now war is more localized and more covert and done with money and marketing and hostile takeovers. Still the poor get squeezed out and the rich stay rich and the middle class does all the work that isn't grunt work and on we go.
Doing the reading, it was at times extremely weird to be so much in another entire decade. The writers and readers of that time were somewhat obsessed with the coming war, the changes in society and how to make sense of it all, while in today's world we take all that for granted. The themes of independence, preserving a way of life that includes liberty and material plenty but at the same time the concern for the elements of society who are poor, suppressed, etc portray the beginnings of socialism and communism as almost acceptable instead of abhorrent ideas. It did not seem as polarized as it does today, but more like an awakening of consciousness to the whole world situation.
Patriotism and nationalism are concepts that have never done much for me. In fact, I feel a distaste for those ideas because they lead to war, to justifications of war and armaments and to an emphasis on the differences between segments of the human race. I suppose any country has its allies and enemies and has to figure out how to work harmoniously with the allies and how to defend itself against its enemies. But somehow between that decade when I was born and my young adult years, it got very muddled. By the time I went to college, I was against war, racism, imperialism, economic oppression. Of course, I don't think I was in the majority of American thought, but I am so curious to discover how I became so anti-establishment, so enamored of the hippy ideals of the brotherhood of man and so dedicated to ending war on this planet. As I continue this reading adventure, I plan to discover the answers to all that.
Labels: Reading For My Life
DREAMS FROM MY FATHER
Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama, Random House, Inc, 1995, 453 pp.
I read this for one of my reading groups. Being the non-political person that I am, I was completely unaware of who this person is, but my very political girlfriend filled me in. Obama is currently a US Senator from Illinois and a hot guy in the Democratic party these days. After reading his memoir, I am a supporter. He has a fine sense of integrity and understanding about people though I fear that the political process in this country would kill that off in even the strongest individual.
In the early 90s, Obama was studying law at Harvard and became the first Black man to be elected as President of the Harvard Law Review. The publicity engendered by this event brought him a publishing offer, so he wrote this story of his life up to that point. After winning the seat in the US Senate, the book was republished.
Obama's mother was a white woman from Kansas, whose family moved to Hawaii when she was a teenager. There at the University of Hawaii, she met an African student from Kenya. They married and had Barack in the early 60s. But the father left when Barack was only 2 years old to get his PhD at Harvard, because his scholarship money was not enough to support a wife and child. Before he could complete his degree, he was summoned back to Kenya by his government and the marriage dissolved due to time and distance.
So Barack was raised by his white mother and grandparents while his father took on the quality of a myth. When Barack was ten years old, his father came for a two week visit which only served to confuse Barack further. But he managed to complete highschool and college, by which time he had decided to live as a Black man.
After college, he went to Chicago to work as a community organizer in the ghettos of South Chicago and came face to face with the results of racism in a northern industrial city. Just before entering Harvard Law School, he finally traveled to Kenya and met his father's side of the family, finding at last the other half of his heritage.
It was a fascinating book, written in a novelist's style and hard to put down. It added much to my growing fund of knowledge about Blacks in this country, their African forebears, racism and the long slow climb of the Black race in America from slaves to full citizens of this country; a climb which is far from over.
I doubt that this country is ready to elect a Black President, but I am sure it will happen in my lifetime. If Obama can stay in politics and maintain the integrity he displays in his book, I would be glad to have him as President of the United States.
I haven't posted for about three weeks and my apologies to anyone who stopped by looking for something new. On November 20, I got a killer flu, which luckily didn't kill me. It just put me to bed for a few days. I managed to get well in time to travel to Michigan for Thanksgiving with my extended family. I also managed to gain back all the weight I lost when I was too sick to eat. Ah well.
Then I returned home and went back to work. I am a teacher and my class was in tatters from 3 days with a substitute, so that is my excuse for last week. Just too exhausted at the end of the day to do anything but flop onto the couch and read. But nothing keeps me from reading and I've got lots of books to blog about. I also have worked on the first installment or whatever (I can't decide what to call it) from the Big Fat Reading Project.
Just a few comments on that. I have all these notes I have kept while reading and all my summaries of the books plus other info, but when I try to put this together in some readable form, it seems to lose all its life and become dry and boring. So I am struggling with that. If any readers here are writers and have run into a similar problem, I would be so grateful to hear of your experiences and how you solved it. I hope to have something posted by the end of this weekend, but it may take until the Christmas break from school to get it done. Thanks for your patience.
One other item: I am currently reading The Wall, by John Hersey. It is catagorized as fiction but comes across as fact. I spent an hour searching the web today to get some info and came up with virtually nothing. Does anyone have background data on this book? I am about 190 pages into it and am finding it good, not gripping, but heavy going. It is about Jews being enclosed into a ghetto in Warsaw in 1939-1943. I understand that there is an uprising near the end but right now it is just disturbing to the point of depressing. The things that humans do to each other are just a bit much.


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Q: Solving a three-variable implicit function using MATLAB I want to plot n vs theta1 from the function tan(n*theta1) + tan(n*theta2) + tan(n*thetas)= 0 in MATLAB; where n, theta1 and theta2 are variables and thetas is given. Can anyone give any pointers how to do so ?
I have tried using ezplot. It didn't work.
Next, I used this bit of code,
c = 1;
thetas = pi/4;
for n = 1.01:0.01:3.50
    for theta1 = pi/2 : 0.01 : 5*pi/6
        for theta2 = 0: 0.01: pi/2
            if(tan(n*theta1) + tan(n*theta2) + tan(n*thetas) >= -0.0001 && tan(n*theta1) + tan(n*theta2) + tan(n*thetas) <= 0.0001 && (n*theta1) ~= pi/2 ...
                    && (n*theta2) ~= pi/2 && (n*thetas) ~= pi/2)
                ns(c) = n;
                theta1s(c) = theta1;
                theta2s(c) = theta2;
                c = c + 1;
            end
        end
    end
end

And I tried to plot the result using the plot command. Didn't work out either. Mostly the plot should come as three different curves for every given value of thetas.
Can anyone help ?

A: Something like this might work? -
%%// Data (Random numbers)
thetas_array = [2 4 6]; %// Put different thetas here
theta2 = 2:2:20;
n = 1:10;

figure,
for k = 1:numel(thetas_array)

    thetas = thetas_array(k);

    %%// Since tan(n*theta1) + tan(n*theta2) + tan(n*thetas)= 0;
    theta1 =  (1./n).*atan(- tan(n.*theta2) - tan(n.*thetas));

    subplot(3,1,k), plot(n,theta1), xlabel('n'), ylabel(strcat('theta1 [thetas = ',num2str(thetas),']'));
end

Output

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Royal Palace of Caserta, the best example of Italian Baroque.
There are some walks that are unforgettable, which remain a lasting memory.
It happens when we are completely surrounded by beauty.
This year, the park oft he Reggia di Caserta has been awarded the prize as the most beautifulpark in Italy, it has already beenproclai-med a World Heritage Site by Unesco, and is one ofthe most char-ming places in Italy.
The best example of Italian Baroque, such as the Fountain of Dolphins which is nearly 500m in length, or the Eolo fountain, the project was done by Vanvitelli, or the Fountain of Diana and Actaeon, behind which is a large artificial waterfalls.
Read more: Protecting Italy's Beauty:Italy Has 43 Recognized World Heritage Sites And 50 Registered On A Proviisonal List.
One ofthe reasons which persuaded the jury to award this prestigious prize is thè recent restoration of the flourishing English Garden. Hills, glades, lakes and canals have aver the years been enriched by new plants from ali aver the world.
It was established as a walk to see rare botanica} plants, in the early years of the Nineteenth century it was a real botanical garden and stili today it is a rare beauty. You mustn't miss the Bagno di Venere, so called because afa statue ofthe Goddess as she is rising upout ofthe water afa small lake.


text:
Home Actresses Alia Bhatt lends voice for Humpty Sharma's music
Alia Bhatt lends voice for Humpty Sharma's music
By candy -
Alia Bhatt to sing Samjhawan Unplugged for Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya.
After lending her voice for a song in 'Highway', Bollywood actress Alia Bhatt is all set to showcase her voice talent for the unplugged version of 'Samjhawan' from her upcoming movie 'Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya'. The new version which will be sung by Alia is titled as – 'Samjhawan Unplugged'.
The original track has been sung by singers sensations Shreya Ghoshal and Arjit Singh. The song is a remake of the track 'Main Tenu Samjhawan' which has been originally sung by singer Rahat Fateh Ali Khan for the Punjabi movie 'Virsa'. Alia's version of the song will be released online this week.
For her movie 'Highway', the actress has sung 'Sooha Saaha' composed by Oscar winning composer A. R. Rahman. Alia will once again be seen opposite actor Varun Dhawan after working with him for her debut film – 'Student Of The Year'.
The movie 'Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya' is all set to be released in theaters on July 11, 2014.
HSKD is directed by Shashank Khaitan and is produced by Karan Johar. Varun and Alia at present are busy promoting the rom-com film on every possible platform. The actors are making sure that the movie reaches to each and every corner of the country.
alia bhatt singer
alia bhatt song
Alia song Humpty
Samjhawan Unplugged
singer alia bhatt
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
class CreateIpAddresses < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :ip_addresses do |t|
      t.string :address, :null => false
      t.integer :user_id
      t.integer :visit_count, :null => false
      t.datetime :first_visit_at, :null => false
      t.datetime :last_visit_at, :null => false
      t.string :last_http_user_agent, :null => false
    end
    add_index :ip_addresses, :address
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :ip_addresses
  end
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Superstar Cities Are in Trouble
The past year has offered a glimpse of the nowhere-everywhere future of work, and it isn't optimistic for big cities.
By Derek Thompson
Getty / The Atlantic
About the author: Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He is also the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Plain English.
Some evenings, when pandemic cabin fever reaches critical levels, I relieve my claustrophobia by escaping into the dreamworld of Zillow, the real-estate website. From the familiar confines of my Washington, D.C., apartment, I teleport to a ranch on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho; to a patio nestled in the hillsides of Phoenix, Arizona; or to a regal living room in one of the baroque palaces of Plano, Texas.
Apparently, many of you are doing the same thing. Zillow searches have soared during the health crisis, according to Jeff Tucker, the company's chief economist. "We've seen online searches for Boise, Phoenix, and Atlanta rising fastest among people who live in coastal cities, like Los Angeles and New York," Tucker told me. Higher search volumes on Zillow have coincided with a booming housing market in the South and the West, as rents fall in expensive coastal cities.
Derek Thompson: A lot of Americans are about to lose their homes
Zillow tourism and a few affluent workers decamping for Atlanta might strike you as a fad—kind of like this whole remote-work moment. Indeed, if you're lugging your computer to the living room every day to sit on the couch for eight hours, you might not be thinking to yourself, I'm practically starting the next industrial revolution.
But maybe you are. As a general rule of human civilization, we've lived where we work. More than 90 percent of Americans drive to work, and their average commute is about 27 minutes. This tether between home and office is the basis of urban economics. But remote work weakens it; in many cases, it severs the link entirely, replacing spatial proximity with cloud-based connectivity. What knock-on changes will this new industrial revolution bring?
The best argument against the remote-work experiment having a durable impact on our lives beyond the pandemic is an appeal to human inertia: For decades, the internet was a thing and remote work wasn't, and after the pandemic, it'll just feel like 2019 again.
But the impediment to widespread remote work in 2019 and before wasn't technological. It was social. According to the economist David Autor, remote work suffered from a "telephone problem." Seven decades after the first telephone was patented in the 1860s, fewer than half of Americans owned one. Behavior dragged behind technology, because most families had no use for a telecom machine as long as none of their friends also owned one. In network theory, this is known as Metcalfe's Law: The value of a communications network rises exponentially with the number of its users.
The same has been true of remote work. In 2018, it was weird and rude to ask a boss to move a meeting to Skype, or to tell a business partner to fire up a Zoom link because you can't make lunch. The teleconference tech existed, but it was considered an ersatz substitute for the normal course of business.
"The most important outcome of the pandemic wasn't that it taught you how to use Zoom, but rather that it forced everybody else to use Zoom," Autor told me. "We all leapfrogged over the coordination problem at the exact same time." Meetings, business lunches, work trips—all these things will still happen in the after world. But nobody will forget the lesson we were all just forced to learn: Telecommunications doesn't have to be the perfect substitute for in-person meetings, as long as it's mostly good enough. For the most part, remote work just works.
From the October 2020 issue: Generation work-from-home may never recover
Last year, I wrote about how even a modest remote-work revolution—no more than 10 percent of Americans working remotely full time after the pandemic is over—could affect the U.S. labor force (e.g.: fewer hotel workers) and party politics (e.g.: more southern Democrats). But the more I researched remote work and spoke with experts, the more I realized I had only scratched the surface of its implications for the future of the economy, the geography of opportunity, and the fate of innovation. Here are four more predictions.
1. The Rise of the Supercommuter
Remote work sometimes severs the connection between work and home, and sometimes just elongates it. According to Chris Salviati, an economist at the online rental marketplace Apartment List, prices are falling sharply in the downtown areas of the biggest metros, but they're rising overall in the suburbs and in nearby cities. Some of the hottest rental markets in the country include Central California cities within a few hours' drive of San Francisco.
Referring to the internet as an "information superhighway" is retro in the most cringeworthy way. But here, the metaphor seems apt. Decades after the construction of the U.S. highway system allowed high-income families to move from downtowns to the distant suburbs, Zoom might do the same. Remote work could do to America's residential geography in the 2020s what the highway did in the 1950s and '60s: spread it out.
Today, the term supercommuting is often used to describe the punishment inflicted on lower-income workers who have to live far from their job because of the scarcity of affordable housing. But the remote-work revolution could spawn the rise of something a little different: the affluent supercommuter who chooses to move to a big exurban house with the expectation that she'll make fewer, longer commutes to the office.
"Historically, people who work from home don't commute less overall, because they just drive longer distances," Autor told me, referring to a Federal Reserve study from 2019. One shouldn't put too much stock in a survey of pre-pandemic behavior. But the logic of fewer-but-longer commutes should lead to small towns and suburbs experiencing the fastest price growth. And, lo and behold, that's exactly the story the online rental data are already telling us.
2. The Decline of the Coastal Superstar Cities
Beyond anecdotal accounts of bankers fleeing Manhattan and tech workers saying sayonara to the Bay Area, we have loads of private data to back up the story that superstar cities are in trouble.
According to U-Haul's annual review, California lost more people to out-migration than any other state in 2020, and the five largest states in the Northeast—New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland—joined California in the top 10 losers. Rents have fallen fastest in "pricey coastal cities," including San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York City, according to Apartment List. Zillow data also show that home values in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., are growing below the national average.
These migration trends could spell long-term trouble for cities such as San Francisco and New York, where municipal services rely on property taxes, sales taxes, and urban-transit revenue.
Absent federal intervention, "the financial situation that nearly every transit agency in America is in will certainly lead to significant service cuts, which inevitably lead to terrible spirals," Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of the New York City Transit Authority, told me. "Service reductions are bad for commuters, devastating for essential workers, and detrimental to the economy." If people leave New York—and newcomers don't immediately take their place—that will reduce the city's subway and bus revenue, which will lead to service cuts; that will make New York a harder place to live, so more people will leave the city; transit revenue will be reduced further, and on we go.
More optimistically, the federal government could bail out cities, speeding up what I've called the urban forest-fire effect. In that scenario, the pandemic pushes thousands of people out of expensive coastal cities, reducing the cities' rent and housing costs, but those lower costs attract a new generation of immigrants and middle-class families to move back into the city, which leads to regrowth. Note, however, that both the optimistic and pessimistic cases involve a difficult period of transition.
3. The Rise of the Rest
Superstar pain could be America's gain—not only because lower housing costs in expensive cities will make room for middle-class movers, but also because the coastal diaspora will fertilize growth in other places.
As home values decline in the superstar cities, they're rising in major Sun Belt metros such as Phoenix, Nashville, and Austin. They're rising in midwestern cities, such as Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. And they're going gangbusters in the Southeast, which accounts for 13 of the top 25 cities with the fastest growth in U-Haul migration in 2020. The top three cities for inbound moves were all in one state: Florida.
Why might this be a positive trend? By failing to build sufficient housing, certain superstar cities have become mere playgrounds for the wealthy—especially the childless wealthy. "The walls we've put up around our most productive cities have made it hard to accommodate more people," the economist Enrico Moretti told me.
Anti-growth housing policies in rich cities reduce national productivity, income growth, and intergenerational mobility. Thanks to zoning and land-use restrictions, the American dream has fractured: The rich cities with the greatest upward mobility are the least affordable, while the most affordable places to live have a poor record of mobility. As a result, America has grown more divided in the past few decades, not only by politics and by class, but also by geography.
"Remote work is the first change in a while that can help lean against this trend," Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at Upwork, told me. White-collar workers moving away from NIMBY areas could help solve this problem in two important ways: by reducing housing prices in superstar cities, and sprinkling high-income workers throughout the country.
Coastal cities' depopulation will not be a perfect substitute for more housing construction in those cities, but it might be better than the before world. Remote work is not a perfect substitute for higher welfare spending, either, but thousands of high-income workers moving to lower-income metros in the Midwest and the South could stimulate local job creation and raise local incomes. And remote work is not a perfect solution to regional inequality, but it will almost certainly expand the roster of hyperproductive cities in ways that could help wages grow nationwide, according to Moretti's analysis.
4. The Next Silicon Valley Is Nowhere
It sometimes takes only one little decision to create a new industrial hub. "If you look at Seattle in the 1970s, there was not much high tech, and Boeing was shedding jobs by the thousands," Moretti said. "But then this random guy named Bill Gates, who started this small company called Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, decided to move his headquarters to Seattle to be closer to his family and the family of his co-founder, Paul Allen." As Microsoft grew to become the largest company on the planet, it made the Seattle region one of the world's leaders in information technology.
If Moretti is right, the coastal diaspora is akin to a national seed-planting experiment that has the potential to grow new industrial clusters. Today, the innovation economy is unevenly distributed. Three states—New York, Massachusetts, and California—account for three-quarters of all venture-capital investment in the United States. But one of the companies on the move could take off after relocating to Miami or Austin, and trigger the complex domino effect that creates a new hub: a Quantum Valley in Austin, or Wall Street South in Miami.
The other, weirder possibility is that the remote-work revolution will eliminate the concept of a metro hub entirely, as companies embrace the reality of a permanently distributed workforce. What if the next Silicon Valley is nowhere—or, just as precisely, everywhere?
After the pandemic, it might be better to think of Silicon Valley as an idea dispersed across many places rather than a specific piece of geography, writes Kim-Mai Cutler, a partner at the venture fund Initialized. According to the company's recent survey, 42 percent of its firms said that starting a remote company was better than being headquartered anywhere, including California. (Last year, that figure was just 6 percent.)
What exactly would that look like? Say a tech-company founder based in Nashville hires a designer in Missoula, engineers in San Jose and Miami, and a product lead in Albuquerque. They Slack every morning, and Zoom in the afternoon. Although building a distributed-work culture takes lots of work, they might discover that the internet re-creates many of the benefits of a city. Cities attract similarly productive and talented people to the same area, where they can redouble one another's talent; so might the internet. Cities pool large groups of workers into the same area to increase the odds that every worker finds the job with the best fit for her skills; so might the internet.
As an urban resident of Washington, D.C., writing from my dining-room table, my claim is not that I believe the internet could or should replace the riotous physical-world collision of urban work, culture, art, and life. My humbler assertion is that 2020 has punctured my confidence that the internet cannot encroach on the benefits of urban density and proximity. Going forward, many fledgling companies may agree, as they find that the city in the cloud essentially acts as a more accessible version of the city on the Earth, eerily reproducing its forces of agglomeration, specialization, and convenience. The past 12 months have offered a glimpse of the nowhere-everywhere future of work. We're only beginning to understand just how strange that future might be.


Cui, Hong , Reznicek, Anton .
Authors in the Driver's Seat: Evaluating Phenotype Data Authoring Tools.
To make use of phenotype data published in a "legacy" format (e.g., taxonomic/character descriptions) in modern computation, highly trained postdoc scientists (or curators) are employed to convert them (semi-)manually to a computable format. This costly process is difficult to scale up. By one estimate, curating one character from one year's worth of English biomedical journal publications alone would take a full-time postdoc over 30 years to complete. This process also suffers from another drawback: curators may not be able to translate the original characters accurately and consistently, due to the differences in individual's systematics backgrounds and in terminology usage in the descriptions. It has been reported that inter-curator variations can be as large as 40% when translating the same set of character descriptions authored by others. The "Authors in the Driver's Seat" project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is investigating a transformative approach to address the legacy format problem. We are developing and evaluating software solutions to enable authors of biodiversity works to directly produce computable data at the time of publication, eliminating the need for subsequent post-publication data conversion. We invite systematists, especially, sedges experts, who have authored or will author a taxonomic/character description to evaluate the software prototypes we have developed last year and help shape the future of phenotypic data production and use. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to (and evaluate) the set of web-based software prototypes, including a Measurement Recorder for scientists to accurately define and record numeric measurements (e.g., beak length); an Add2Ontology user interface for scientists to add terms they prefer to use to a community-curated ontology; and a Description Editor that checks the terminology usages in a character/taxonomic description a scientist is composing and coverts the description to a computable format. The workshop will be facilitated by a sedge's expert (Dr. Anton Reznicek) and a user experience specialist (Dr. Hong Cui). Software evaluation will be semi-formal, including group discussions, Q&A, and questionnaires. The workshop involves simple hands-on exercises with the software prototypes, so participants should bring their laptop with a web browser. Participants will receive a free lunch after the 2-hour workshop and a cash honorarium ($40) for completing the evaluations.


text:
DI DII DIII
Home Scores Bracket Rankings Stats Video History BROADCAST SCHEDULE
Central Missouri athletics | December 5, 2013
Fifth-ranked Jennies take care of Nebraska-Kearney in five sets
DULUTH, Minn. -- Fifth-ranked Jennies rallied to win against No. 11 Nebraska-Kearney in five sets 20-25, 21-25, 25-23, 25-20, 15-11 in Romano Gymnasium in on Thursday afternoon. The Jennies had 70 kills, eight serving aces and seven blocks in the match.
The Jennies took at 3-0 lead in the first set and held the lead until the Lopers tied the score at 12-12. The Lopers led the Jennies for the rest of the set, and the set was finished with an attack error by Haley Thompson. Taylor Goodness had six kills and hit .600 in the first set.
The Lopers were quick to catch the Jennies in the second set, catching the Jennies at 4-4. Nebraska-Kearney held the lead until the Jennies tied the score at 14-14, and were able to hold the lead for the following seven points. The Lopers regained their lead after tying the Jennies at 18-18. The second set finished with a service ace by Annie Reilly. Maddie Jones and Sojka both had three kills in the set.
The Jennies started the third set with a 3-0 lead, and held the lead for a majority of the set through 11 tie scores. Sojka scored the last five point for the Jennies, with four kills and a block assist. Sojka had seven total kills in the third set.
The Jennies took the lead at 2-1 in set four, and went on to score the following nine of 10 points consecutively. The Jennies held the Lopers to under 10 points for a majority of the set, but were able to reach 20 points before an attack by Goodness finished the set at 25-20. Goodness had eight kills, and hit .500 in the set.
The Jennies were able first to be able to string together two points in a row, taking a 7-5 lead in the set. Central Missouri scored another three points in a row to take a 13-8 lead. The final point of the match was won with a kill by Sojka.
Goodness lead the Jennies with 22 kills, and hit .367 in the match. Sojka earned a double-double with 21 digs and 21 kills. She also had three blocks in the set. Thompson had nine kills and two blocks. Jones had seven kills and four blocks. Becca Blaise had six kills and two blocks. Reilly had 24 digs and a serving ace. Julia Bates had 52 assists, six aces, four kills, and three blocks in the match.
The Jennies will face Concordia-St. Paul at 5 p.m. Friday in the semifinals of the NCAA Central Regional.
3 can't-miss games in DII women's college basketball this weekend
There are some really good DII women's college basketball games this week, including undefeated Nebraska-Kearney at Central Missouri on Saturday.
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text:
Q: Given a collection object, would like to assign to a local variable of specific type I'd like to recover type information using reflection.  I have
public Foo(object coll, string tValue)
{
   var x = col1 as IList;
   if (x != null)
      x.Action();

   var y = col1 as IDictionary;
   if (y != null)
      y.Action();
}

But would like to have
public Foo(object coll, string tValue)
{
   var x = col1 as IList<TValue>;
   if (x != null)
      x.Action();

   var y = col1 as IDictionary<int, TValue>;
   if (y != null)
      y.Action();
}

Is it possible to arrive at and use generic interfaces instead of the old-school non-generic collection interfaces, given only the contained class name?
Once the local variable type is established, I'd like to avoid paying the reflection and dynamic invocation penalties when looping over the collection.
Another example, maybe clearer:
     var list = new Dictionary<int, MyObject>();
     list.Add(100, new MyObject());

     object listObject = list;

     var x = listObject as IDictionary<int, dynamic>;
     if (x != null)
     {
        foreach (var entry in x)
        {
           Console.WriteLine(entry.Key);
           Console.WriteLine(entry.Value);
        }
     }

x is null...

A: I'm not sure if you intend to call a method on generic collection for every item in the collection or if you just want the values from the generic collection.
For your third block of code, you could continue to use the non-generic interface and use an enumerator.
        var x = listObject as IDictionary;
        if (x != null)
        {
            var en = x.GetEnumerator();
            while(en.MoveNext())
            {
                Console.WriteLine(en.Key);
                Console.WriteLine(en.Value);
            }
        }

If you intend to call a method without knowing the exact generic types for the generic IList or IDictionary, then you'll have to use MethodInfo.Invoke. Cache the MethodInfo outside of the loop for a small performance boost.
CreateDelegate would be faster, but you'll need to know the exact generic types. You could get around that with expression trees, but the amount of code to maintain might not be worth the performance gain. Check out MagicMethod in Jon Skeets article
Making reflection fly and exploring delegates


text:
Q: Compare Ajax Data Results I have an ajax function which is set to run every few seconds through a setInterval function, which is fine and it works. The data is being logged in the console and it's returning "5" for example, so every few seconds the number 5 is being logged in the console. But if I click a button, the data will change and log the number 6 for example, so now after a few seconds, the console is logging the number 6. I just need to know how do I get the ajax call to recognise when the number changes to a different number? How do I essentially compare the data between each ajax call and if there is a difference between the latest call and the previous call, then do something with that information?
Any information would be incredibly helpful. Thanks in advance!


text:
Showing posts with label British man faces nine years in prison for allegedly defrauding an urbanisation community in Nerja. Show all posts
British man faces nine years in prison for allegedly defrauding an urbanisation community in Nerja: "Capistrano Playa Urbanisation's own prosecution is calling for a 12 year sentence
The prosecutor in the Provincial Court in Málaga has requested a nine year prison sentence for the 51 year old British man, Michael Thirkettle, who is accused of accounting irregularities when President of the Capistrano Playa urbanisation in Nerja between the years 2006 and 2009.
Diario Sur reports the civil responsibility in the case has been placed at more than 150,000 €.
The prosecution contends the Briton, who was arrested by the Guardia Civil in May 2009, withdrew cheques from the community account for 31,980 € with the excuse of paying for work which was allegedly not then paid for."


text:
Critical Flaws in VxWorks affect 200 Million Connected Things
July 29, 2019 11:00 by Paul Roberts
Serious and exploitable security flaws in VxWorks, a commonly used operating system for embedded devices, span 13 years and could leave hundreds of millions* of connected devices vulnerable to remote cyber attacks and hacks.
The security firm Armis on Monday published a warning about 11 critical, zero day vulnerabilities in the VxWorks operating system, which is owned and managed by the firm Wind River. The vulnerabilities expose more than 200 million devices and could allow attackers to remotely take control of everything from networked printers and security appliances to industrial and medical devices, according to Ben Seri, the Vice President of Research at Armis.
Move over, EternalBlue!
At least a couple of the flaws were described as "more serious" than EternalBlue, the Microsoft Windows flaw that powered both the WannaCry and NotPetya malware outbreaks. SCADA and industrial control system devices, healthcare devices like patient monitors and MRI machines, as well as networking equipment, networked printers and VOIP phones are all potentially vulnerable to the flaws, Armis said in a blog post Monday.
Six of the 11 flaws discovered by Armis are so-called "remote code execution" or "RCE" flaws, which are considered among the most dangerous kinds of software hole, as they allow remote attackers to place and execute their own code on vulnerable devices. The remaining flaws are a mix of denial of service flaws, information leak vulnerabilities and other lower risk security holes.
All versions of VxWorks beginning with version 6.5 onward are affected by the flaws, which were found in the operating system's implementation of the TCP/IP networking stack: a critical component that is used by any networked device running VxWorks, according to Seri. "Any device that is built upon this operating system that has networking capabilities and that is using an impacted version of VxWorks will be impacted by this vulnerability."
Ben Seri is the Vice President of Research at Armis.
The flaws discovered by Armis are not new; VxWorks Version 6.5 was released in 2007.
The risk to organizations is considerable. Armis claims that, collectively, the Urgent/11 flaws can be used to target a vulnerable VxWorks device regardless of whether it sits on the network perimeter or behind it. The flaws can enable remote attacks that could take complete control over a targeted device with no user interaction required. Depending on the attack, hackers may be able to use the flaws to bypass perimeter security as well as NAT (network address translation) solutions that can mask the location of IT assets to outside attackers.
Old features can still bite
Flaws in TCP/IP implementations were common in consumer operating systems in the 1990s but have become rare. However, VxWorks obscurity means that bugs that appeared in the operating system may have lingered.
"Through mutually embraced Responsible Disclosure, Wind River has been working closely with Armis to ensure customers were notified and provided remediation. This shared, collaborative process was designed and executed to help device makers mitigate any potential risk to their users," said Arlen Baker, chief security architect, Wind River in a statement.
Despite being one of the most widely used operating system, VxWorks has not been extensively researched, Seri told The Security Ledger. "Normally when you have an operating system that is used in 2 billion devices, the name of it and how it is being used are well known. But VxWorks is a bit in the shadows, perhaps because it is not used in consumer devices as Windows and Android are," he said.
While TCP/IP is ubiquitous, not all features of the TCP/IP networking stack are commonly used and many have been largely abandoned. However, VxWorks, which was first released in the late 1980s, includes support for many of these legacy features. The flaws discovered by Armis were mostly found in these largely abandoned and overlooked parts of the TCP/IP stack, Seri said.
Among the affected features is one known as "Urgent Pointer," which allows an application using TCP to process and forward any data that must be dealt with immediately, without the data having to sit in a send queue for processing. The feature was used in applications like Telnet and FTP in the 1990s, but is no longer commonly used. Four of the remote code execution vulnerabilities were found in the Urgent Pointer feature, thus the name "Urgent/11." In the IP layer, Armis found a hole in the IP parsing of source routing options. The feature is not used and is blocked by many routers because of prior security holes associated with it, but could be leveraged by an attacker on the same network as a VxWorks device, he said.
The flaws do not affect specialized versions of VxWorks including VxWorks Certified and VxWorks 653. That is because those versions, which are designed for use in high risk applications such as automotive and aviation, have disabled unneeded TCP/IP functions as part of efforts to harden the operating system from attack, Armis said. Still, many safety and life critical devices use standard versions of VxWorks that have not been hardened, including many life sciences and life sustaining medical devices, he said.
A long road to patches
Wind River acquired the TCP/IP networking stack used in VxWorks with the purchase of a company called Interpeak in 2006. The software, known as IPnet, was licensed by Interpeak to other software makers prior to 2006, however, so the Urgent/11 flaws may not be limited to the VxWorks platform.
"We know three of the vulnerabilities existed in the source code that was purchased by VxWorks with Interpeak in 2006," Sims told The Security Ledger.
Armis worked with Wind River to address the flaws. That company has released patches for all of the Urgent/11 security holes. However, those patches will need to be incorporated into firmware updates from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and other software vendors. And, with a wide range of vendors affected including Siemens, ABB, Emerson Electric, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi Electronic, Samsung, Ricoh, Xerox, NEC and GE, it could take months before customers who own affected VxWorks devices have access to a patch for the flaws.
Seri and Dor Zusman, a security researcher at Armis, will present the Urgent11 vulnerabilities at Black Hat 2019 in Las Vegas on Thursday, August 8, 2019. Their talk will demonstrate attacks on three VxWorks-based devices including a Sonicwall firewall, a Xerox network printer and a medical device. A full report detailing the flaws is available here.
This isn't the first time that a serious security hole in so-called "Realtime Operating Systems" (RTOS) has generated alarm.
A serious security hole in the MQX RTOS made by the firm NXP Semiconductors prompted a warning from the Department of Homeland Security Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) in late 2017. In October 2018, a number of serious flaws were discovered in FreeRTOS, an open source Internet of Things operating system that is used by Amazon.com, among others.
(*) Correction: an earlier version of this story claimed that billions of devices were affected by the Urgent/11 flaws. Two billions devices run the VxWorks operating system but Armis estimates that some 200 million devices are affected by the flaws. The story has been updated to reflect the correct number of affected VxWorks devices.
Tags: critical infrastructure, Internet of Things, software, vulnerabilities
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Home/Definitions/What is Photochemistry definition/concept
What is Photochemistry definition/concept
Color is present in everything around us and its understanding is integrated into a discipline: photochemistry. As its name implies, this discipline focuses on the chemical transformations that occur in organisms as a consequence of the effect of light.
The prefix photo comes from photos in Greek and means more precisely light.
Newton's experiment on the nature of color meant the definitive advance of photochemistry
In antiquity, some sages tried to explain the phenomenon of the rainbow or the appearance of colors in soap bubbles when the light is intense. However, it was Isaac Newton who definitively understood the mechanisms of nature that make it possible to distinguish colors.
Newton placed a prism in a beam of light and thus produced a spectrum. With that he deduced that the prism was what distributed the colors. This experiment established the first step in understanding how light intervenes in color formation. Currently, it is understood that the shorter wavelengths are those that reflect with greater intensity and the longer those that reflect less. Photochemistry
Color generation through the use of lights is known as trichromy. The principles of trichromy are found in television screen technology
The knowledge of trichromia has been crucial to understanding how the specialized cells of the human eye (cones and rods) capture light and allow us to see reality in color.
In the process of photosynthesis performed by plants there is the so-called photochemical step or light phase. Light waves focus on plant pigments to produce chlorophyll.
The principles of photochemistry are also applied to medicine, as they allow us to visualize the body's processes on very small scales.
photochemical smog
This phenomenon is a form of contamination of the atmosphere . Automobiles and some industries generate gases such as nitrogen monoxide. When released into the air, it produces nitrogen dioxide, which is broken down by the effect of sunlight and eventually forms ozone. When this happens the sky appears with a reddish color and a thick appearance.
It is called photochemical smog because the polluting gases in the atmosphere react to sunlight and in turn produce other contaminating effects, such as tropospheric ozone.
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4x4" screen printed, kilnformed glass coaster. This coaster features Beyonce printed with gold mica onto indigo blue glass, then fused in a kiln to about 1400 degrees. Each coaster has clear bumpers on the bottom to protect your surfaces.


The films produced by the world-renowned Studio Ghibli are whimsical without exception. Breathtaking scenes follow typical child protagonists on fantastical adventures, and the audience is left in the end with a profound feeling of awe. Viewers are moved by unconventional characters with enough depth to carry the unique story arcs uncharacteristic of the common Western-world movie.
The extraordinary elegance of the hand-drawn animation has a distinct Japanese beauty. Serene landscapes and dreamy soundtracks set the stage for every story. A consistent staple of Ghibli movies is an aerial scene. Nearly every film has one, and all are done with exceptionally idealized cinematography meant to amaze the audience.
While some aerial scenes aid an important plot point, others seem to serve the sole purpose of being an aesthetic cherry on top of an already beautiful film. The flight scene in "Spirited Away" is a good example of how Miyazaki uses the natural beauty of the sky to contribute to the storyline. As the two main characters soar through a night sky, the line between memory and reality blurs as the protagonist remembers a time from her childhood in which she fell into a river. The viewer is met by a comparison of the night sky and the river, as clips of both are embedded seamlessly into each other to create a dichotomous effect.
The scene ultimately reveals why this contrast is relevant to the plot and the sensation of freedom quickly adopts an uplifting resolution, aided by the soundtrack. Flights in other Ghibli movies may be less profoundly emotional than this particular example, but still capture the allure of the sky. Films like "Castle in the Sky," "Porco Rosso" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" particularly capitalize on this aerial element.


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Анкарсвэрд ( — фамилия шведского происхождения. Известные носители:
 Анкарсвэрд, Карл Хенрик (1782—1865) — шведский политик.
  (1742—1838) — шведский военный и политик.
  (1833—1898) — шведская феминистка.

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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


As with face-to-face courses, online courses must be continually revised to maximize student learning and satisfaction. Changes may be made for many reasons. Examples include research progress in the field of study, updates to best practices in teaching and learning, new technology, student feedback, and more. Applying instructional design principles can make building and refinement of online courses more efficient and effective.
In this presentation we will discuss the initial design and re-design of an online course in Biopsychology. We will show how the course website structure allows course content, assessments and schedules to be easily modified without the need for a major overhaul. In addition, the effects of relatively small changes on student learning and satisfaction will also be discussed. Last but not least, we will share a few strategies for course redesign that can be applied to any discipline. A particular emphasis will be placed on alignment of learning outcomes with assessments and incorporation of collaborative learning.