7.3 This discussion has been dormant for a while. If no refutation of evolution is presented in the next few days based on a proper application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I will remove the part of the article in question.
Second law also says nothing about an upper bound to the entropy of a system; the entropy of the Universe could increase without limit, in principle, making the 'maximum' part wrong too.
To be fair to Philip, the increase of the Universe's entropy is a tendency, not an absolute. The total entropy of an isolated system can decrease; it's just hugely improbable on the scales we're used to dealing with. Quantum effects can lead to a decrease in entropy; one has to deal with a very small system over short periods of time to actually notice this, however. Arbitrarily large decreases in entropy are also possible, given sufficient time. This is true whether one is discussing the fluctuation theorems of QM, or good old-fashioned classical systems.
But these are not, strictly speaking, parts of the second law. Second law doesn't say anything about tendency. The rest of physics just says that second law is not absolute. So I don't think using the word 'tends' in the definition is very useful.
The main problem with the article is, of course, the part about evolution, which as Horace says is just wrong, and painfully so. It's a seductive argument to the layman; after all, entropy is all about order and disorder, and evolution clearly requires the production of order. Right?
Wrong, of course. The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about thermodynamic quantities; 'order' is not one. One can choose to define the term 'order' in thermodynamic terms, in which case the statement that the Universe must become, on net, more disordered over time is true, for certain definitions. But the price for that is rejecting one's intuitive understanding of what constitutes 'order' and 'disorder,' and going with the maths. By a thermodynamic definition of order, my hot chocolate is self-organizing as we speak. Therein lies the danger of describing esoteric physics in terms which carry the baggage of their lay definition. Better to stick with entropy, and check one's prejudices at the door.
It is impossible to construct a heat engine which, operating in a cycle, produces no effect other than the transfer of a quantity of heat from a colder to a hotter body.
Oh, yes, I forgot to weigh in on the page protection issue. Tonya Harding strategy, right?
"It is impossible for the total entropy of an isolated system to decrease, therefore the universe is becoming more and more disordered. In this way the Second Law of Thermodynamics disproves evolution."
I think we should add a section about the resurrection of Jesus and that it "technically" violates the second law of thermodynamics, but that since it was a miracle, it does not need to adhere to the second law. Thoughts?
AmesG, aren't you the person who owns and wrote for the blog Submitted to a Candid World. Many people would find it shocking and appalling that several of your close friends are engaging in polyamory (See: Atheist leaders and immoral relationships). "Do not be deceived: 'Bad company corrupts good morals.'" - the Apostle Paul.
Evolutionist theory faces a problem in the second law, since the law is plainly understood to indicate (as does empirical observation) that things tend towards disorder, simplicity, randomness, and disorganization, while the theory insists that precisely the opposite has been taking place since the universe began (assuming it had a beginning).
The second law refers to the flow of heat, it is unclear how exactly that translates into "disorder" and "order" when applied to something like life.
The second law refers to closed systems, open systems are a much more complex processes and the "law" does not apply cleanly here. Life and Earth are open systems.
Evolution is essentially a favored random walk, these systems are able to produce violations of "disorder" all the time. For example any Monte Carlo method algorithm demonstrates this beautifully, you can reach local "maximum" and avoid "minimums" by using evolutionary algorithms and many other variations on the theme.
Complexity theory and Self-organizing systems also routinely violate the maxim that order can not be created from disorder. The sorts of things needed to produce an SOS or complex system are just the kinds of things we find in life.
"What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! ". - (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II).
I have removed the statement about the Second Law disproving evolution. It is pretty obvious that Mr. Schlafly does not have a correct understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and with all due respect, his inaccurate contributions to this article must be removed. From what I understand, Mr. Schlafly's reasoning is based on his belief that evolution is "disorder changing by itself into a more ordered state," which is not true. This has been explained in most of the above sections on this talk page, so I will not rehash arguments. I just expect a better explanation if the article is to be changed back to saying that the Second Law does disprove evolution.
I suspect that the Second Law does not disprove the theory of relativity either, but I have not looked into the arguments for or against this claim so I am leaving this in the article.
Several more questions, Mr. Randal7, because now you're drifting away from the "closed" system here.
1. Is iron more complex than rust? And when iron does rust, does it constitute an improvement, or a breakdown?
2. What happens to boiling water when you turn off the stove? Does it stay the same, or does it get cooler?
Iron is generally less complex than rust. (Although "complex" is not a very precise term.) Iron is a single element, whereas rust can be a number of iron oxide or iron hydroxide compounds. Iron is usually much more homogeneous than rust. When iron rusts it is a chemical and thermodynamic improvement - it would not happen spontaneously if it were not energetically favorable. In practical terms, rusting is not an improvement because pure iron is more useful for structural or electrical applications, but pure iron does not usually stay pure for long because of its propensity to oxidate. This is why iron alloys are much more common.
When the stove is turned off, boiling water cools as heat is transferred from the water to its cooler surroundings. Entropy is generated from this heat transfer.
In the burning log example, it is true that "matter goes from an ordered state to a more disordered one," and there are plenty of other examples where this statement is true. There are also many instances where matter goes from a disordered state to a more ordered one, such as water freezing or magnetization. But in theses cases of matter becoming more ordered, net entropy of the matter and its surroundings will still never decrease. The statement could also apply to a room of spoiled brats, but in this case the term "order" is no longer being used in a thermodynamic or chemical sense.
With regards to the iron, you are wrong. Rust is a breakdown; it is a disintegration of the iron itself. The rust can be stopped; the iron can be prevented from rusting further, but rust in and of itself can never be restored into iron. It goes one-way only. Likewise the water on the stove; take away the heat which makes the water boil, and the water temperature will drop to the lowest level possible, which one can call "room temperature". Likewise the fireplace logs, likewise the living room. One-way only. Complex to simple, order to disorder. It never, ever happens in reverse.
The 2nd Law of thermodynamics is the same way. You can restrict the 2nd Law to heating and/or energy concepts all you want, but the very core of this law is the same thing cited above: order always goes to disorder; complex always goes to simple. The 2nd Law may be about heat, but turn off the fire and what do you get? Water cooling down, heat cooling and dissipating, complex to simple, order to disorder. The fireplace scene has the heat, but the logs always end up as ashes. The ashes never turn back into logs.
And the final answer to the question "what does this have to do with evolution?". It was evolutionists who stated we should accept their scenario as to how life came to be: simple organisms evolved into more and more complex ones over time. Simple to complex; disorder to order. When making scientific investigations the very first step of the scientific method that must be followed is observation; a scientist has to observe what is going on, and every single minute of every day scientists and layman alike are observing the 2nd Law in action; no one can get away from it. Observation proves complex always goes to simple; observation proves order always goes to disorder. Observation, scientific or not, confirms the validity of the 2nd Law. The examples I posted above - the fireplace, the iron, the living room, the stove top - are perfect examples of the 2nd Law in action, closed system or not. It's impossible to go into reverse.
I don't have any reason to doubt your formulas for entropy, and thanks for posting them. But for the purposes of the Second Law the dictionary definition for entropy works fine: a measure of disorder in a system. It's always increasing unless there is some kind of intelligent intervention, like God creating the world. Perhaps faith can operate to reduce entropy. Otherwise, without intervention or faith, disorder is always increasing, and the Second Law is an expressing of that logical truth. Otherwise a perpetual motion machine would be possible, and it is isn't.
While this isn't really my area a scientific expertise, there are a few things I'd like to say.
1. Perhaps a "layman's dictionary" definition of entropy could get away with just saying it's a measure of disorder, but that really isn't good enough for a web site that prides itself on its articles on science and math. Look at the Banach-Tarski Paradox for an example of the sophistication we have. By the way, my Webster's New Twentieth Century (yeah, it's out of date) Dictionary is a layman's dictionary, albeit unabridged. It gives its first definition as "a thermodynamic measure of the amount of energy unavailable for work in a system undergoing change." In any case, if you use the hand-wavy "disorder" definition, you can't then talk about thermodynamics and the fact that entropy increases. You'd have to explain how the act of cleaning one's room, or sorting a deck of cards, doesn't violate the second law. Of course we know why it doesn't, but we can't explain that without at least some thermodynamic terms. One needs to understand the connection between decks of cards naturally becoming ordered when we shuffle them, and heat spontaneously flowing from a colder object to a warmer one. It's not simple.
2. The connection between iron and rust, and the connection between wood and ashes, is not one of "disintegration". Iron does not disintegrate when it rusts. (In fact, because of its place on the nuclear binding energy graph, iron is the most indestructible element that there is.) Iron combines with oxygen. That is a chemical reaction, and it can be reversed, though, unfortunately, it doesn't naturally reverse itself when rusty objects are left outside. An understanding of how chemical reactions work, and how they can be reversed, is the result of the hundreds of years of research, first by the alchemists, followed by the more careful research of people like Priestley, Lavoisier, Dalton, Scheele, Gay-Lussac, and many others.
3. The oxidation of wood to make ash (it's more complicated than that, actually) is another chemical reaction, and it is also reversible. Trees burn down all the time. The ash goes into the ground, and, eventually, the forest grows back. The cycle repeats again and again, all over the world. The change in entropy between water and ice also goes in cycles, every year. When water freezes in winter, the entropy goes down. When the ice thaws, it goes up. Repeatedly. The heat budget of the Sun-Earth system (warm in summer, cold in winter) is easily enough to drive the entropy of all of these reactions. The same thing is true of salts going between solution (disorder, and high entropy) and crystals (order, and low entropy.) The energy needed to make these reactions go back and forth is easily available, from, say, a Bunsen burner. Or just leaving something out to dry.
4. The same sort of thing happens in the field of biology. The transition from a bunch of amino acids (disordered system) into, say, a kidney (ordered system) can take place easily, because the necessary energy is available. By the way, the force involved in turning amino acids into kidneys is related to the force turning a salt solution into a crystal. The ribosomes that put an amino acid into place are acting under electrostatic forces, albeit in a much more complex pattern than a positive Sodium ion falling into place next to a negative Chlorine ion.
5. In discussing the second law, one must keep in mind that there are two kinds of hypothetical "perpetual motion machines." A "perpetual motion machine of the first kind" violates the first law of thermodynamics, that is, conservation of energy. It is what people usually think of when they talk about perpetual motion machines. A "perpetual motion machine of the second kind" violates the second law of thermodynamics. It makes a cold thing colder and a hot thing hotter, while conserving energy. That is, it moves heat "uphill" without any external energy source.
6. Biological evolution is, of course, more complicated than all that. Whether the second law makes biological evolution impossible is a complicated question, and I have to defer to scientists who have studied this in much more detail than I.
Thank you, JudyJ, for your context and your perspective. One thing I was a little confused about was the heat budget of the Sun-Earth system "driving" the entropy of the reactions you discussed. But I think your point about materials going back and forth between high- and low-entropy states is a good one. This is absolutely possible as long as the total entropy of the materials and their surroundings always increases (so this is not true reversibility in a thermodynamic sense). Even ashes can go back to logs, but this requires substantial work, changes at the atomic level, and usually many processes, all generating net entropy.
Nearly all processes, with a few exceptions that are easily explained (such as phase changes), are thermodynamically irreversible and thus generate an increase in disorder or entropy. Only intelligent intervention can preserve order. Do you agree with that? If so, theories that defy this Law are no more plausible than suggesting that heat can flow spontaneously to a warmer location.
Even if we ignore the unfalsifiable assertion about intelligent intervention, that is not the essence of the Second Law. Order can and does increase all the time without violating the Second Law. You know this, but you choose to ignore it for the purpose of making an ideological argument about another scientific theory that you have a history of misrepresenting.
This discussion has been dormant for a while. If no refutation of evolution is presented in the next few days based on a proper application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I will remove the part of the article in question.
A zero sum game is a mathematical game whereby the gains of one player is directly matched by the losses of another. This section mentions 'zero sum game' and then goes on to state something about increasing the gains of everyone.
Mr. Schlafly, for many days I got no response from you here or on your talk page, so I decided to make some further improvements to the explanation of the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine. Now I see that these changes have been overwritten within hours. Setting aside the other changes you have made to the article, I fail to see how the current sentence about a perpetual motion machine is an improvement. It is so vague and imprecisely worded that it is almost useless in an encyclopedia article.
The phrase "even if energy remains constant" is too vague. What energy? I believe you are referring to the total energy of the machine's system, implying that the system is isolated and the First Law of Thermodynamics holds true, but this is not very clear. Keep in mind that true hypothetical perpetual motion machines are isolated systems by definition.
It is mentioned in the article that some estimate that the Earth can harbor 100 billion people. This seems like the kind of thing that should have an external link attached to it for those who want to know who "some" are. I don't know if the person who originally added that still has the relevant information handy.
This is not a scientific statement: "entropy can decrease in a closed system, but it is extremely unlikely, so not observed for all practical purposes." Statistical mechanics is a primitive, pre-quantum mechanics approach that leads some to make non-scientific claims, like the quoted one.
Could you explain why that statement is not scientific? I thought it was but might be wrong.
If a hypothesis is not falsifiable, then it is not scientific. The assertion that "entropy can decrease in a closed system, but it is extremely unlikely, so not observed for all practical purposes" is a belief, not science. The assertion is not falsifiable (or plausible with respect to the first clause).
No, the assertion is completely falsifiable. One can imagine doing experiments in which (under all the requirements of isolation) heat spontaneously moves from a colder body to a warmer one, cooling the former and warming the latter. It is not observed. It is a Statistical impossibility. So the statement of the second law effectively says "You will never observe heat flowing uphill." And we never do. It's as nice a case of theory matching observation as you can get.
No, it isn't really related to QM. Thermo makes no statement about where the randomness comes from; it simply hypothesizes randomness in the initial conditions, and indicates how that randomness unfolds in bulk matter. if QM continually pumps randomness into the system due to Heisenberg, that doesn't matter, and it is infinitesimal relative to the randomness that is continually being propagated around by molecular collisions.
You haven't actually said why stat Mach is primitive compared to qm. Just because classical stat Mach doesn't include qm doesn't mean it is useless. Besides, the scale on which stat mechanics operates is too large for quantum effects to be significant.
"the scale on which stat mechanics operates is too large for quantum effects to be significant" - not true. The underlying effects of quantum mechanics have an undeniable influence in increasing entropy at all scales.
Where is the number of microstates that corresponds to a particular macrostate.
If I recall correctly, you were user "ILoveJesustoomuch", a name obviously intended for trolling. I don't think anyone would say the sentence "I love Jesus too much" in serious conversation. People routinely get blocked for that sort of thing. So I'm writing this for other people, perhaps more serious ones, who make edits such as yours. Perhaps we can help prevent things like this in the future.
Your point was to take exception to the claim that the Second Law disproves relativity. Your point is well taken, but there are two things to note about acceptable behavior here at CP.
People coming here, creating accounts, and posting things along the lines of "You people are a bunch of idiots" or "You people are all wrong" is very strongly frowned upon here. Perhaps most strongly of all by Andy Schlafly, who happens to own this site. People are expected to earn their reputation and bona fides with constructive edits, before getting into fights. Looking through the logs, one can find numerous instances of people violating this precept and being shown the door.
You need to know that there is a big difference, in scientific and mathematical articles at least, between what is above the Table of Contents (TOC) and what is below. The material above the TOC is the property of Andy. Ordinary people may not change it, however strongly they disagree. I have had a number of my above-TOC changes reverted by Andy. Material below the TOC is maintained by regular contributors, and is generally left alone if it is well-reasoned. Perhaps the best example of this is the end of the first paragraph of E=mc². See my short essay on my user page Reinhold Niebuhr Quote.
I assume you meant "search for both ...". I did the search, and I don't see a "striking lack of reconciliation". In fact, the 1933 R. C. Tolman paper seems to show that people (much more knowledgeable than I) have thought about such a reconciliation, and have not come to the conclusion that one or the other of those theories must be false.
This page was last modified on 29 August 2018, at 00:02.


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Essays · Mystery · SF & Fantasy
Talkin' 'bout My Gentrification: The Secret Life of The Kirlian Witness (1979)
"The city was dirty. And dirt is fertile." – Jeremiah Moss
New York City ca. 1976 was dying on the vine. With over a million citizens on welfare and the middle class bolting for the suburbs, draining its tax base, its infrastructure was collapsing. The murder rate doubled that of a decade before, and rape, robbery, and burglary stats dwarfed even that. Bankruptcy, children, was just a default away, with the U.S. President indisposed toward bailing anyone out (FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD). Off-duty police handed out pamphlets at airports titled "Welcome to Fear City." Garbage rotted in the streets, waiting for striking maintenance workers to claim it. Son of Sam had begun his murderous career. And that was before the blackout.
Partly because of all this, it was also a scene of artistic ferment. Rents were still relatively low, so those who came for the energy and the space to create and were willing to do it on the cheap could make a go of it. Disco found flower here, where hip-hop also took root. Jean-Michel Basquiat was making art on the buildings of Lower Manhattan, with Keith Haring soon to join the mix. Robert Mapplethorpe had proven what a Hasselblad could do, while ex-girlfriend Patti Smith released her fiery first two albums, part of the revolutionary punk scene that included Television, Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell, and Suicide, much of it documented in underground filmmaker Amos Poe's The Blank Generation. Martin Scorsese managed to make noir poetry of the urban hellscape in Taxi Driver, pollinating the first cinematic fleurs du mal of Abel Ferrara. And in 1976 a small group of film-school grads, acting hopefuls, and porn veterans came together to make a low-key paranormal whodunit encompassing lie detectors, gentrification, electrical photography, and sentient plants.
The Kirlian Witness, a Brian De Palma film without De Palma, germinated in a screenwriting workshop where director Jonathan Sarno (no relation, apparently, to contemporary NY erotic filmmaker Joe) met writer Lamar Sanders. Sarno's script, Sanders tells me, was half finished at the time, and completed by the two; Sanders cast the film then left over disputes, to be brought back later to resolve issues between the actors and director, only to wind up directing portions himself. Back-and-forth over who the murderer should be added to ambiguities inherent in the plot structure, so future wife Victoria added noirish narration to smooth over gaps. The film took an unusually long time to complete after its two-week shoot, but Sanders credits Sarno with hanging in and finishing it and eventually bringing it to market. After a handful of screenings it found a home in VHS rental shops and is more broadly accessible now through streaming and a DVD and novelization (titled The Plants Are Watching) hawked by the director. Sarno made two other undistinguished features before switching to travel videos, Sanders is the former chair of the Tisch School of Art's film department at NYU, but this first production is a thing in itself.
The Kirlian in the Witness refers to a camera-free photographic process discovered by Russian husband and wife Semyon and Valentina Kirlian. Using a high-voltage charge to impress images on photo plates, the corona effect it achieves was thought to represent auras or "energy fields" but has since been shown to capture simple moisture discharges resulting from the shock. The technique, previously exploited in Ray Danton's 1975 Psychic Killer, is used here as an investigative tool bringing its heroine, photographer Rilla Hart, in closer contact with the exotic plant whose owner, her sister, has been killed, in hopes of identifying the culprit. Both the process and the idea of plant communication, in addition to the application of polygraph equipment to flora, were derived from Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's 1973 nonfiction bestseller The Secret Life of Plants, which Sanders has described as a gimmick to lend the film novelty in a competitive genre environment.
Secret Life's contention is that plants respond to stimuli beyond sunlight and fertilization and are fully capable of cognition. They are, in the authors' term, intentional. Though some parts of the premise may be worthy of consideration, it's unbelievable anyone should take them to the lengths Tompkins and Bird do. Where else can you read such assertions as "we had a man molest, even torture a geranium for several days in a row" and discover that a Japanese couple taught a cactus to count to twenty? According to CIA technician Cleve Backster, who warrants a chapter for having pioneered the electronic monitoring of flora, a plant can, by being wired to a polygraph, identify out of as many as six suspects which one had done violence to a fellow plant, and may react to humans' thoughts about them from miles away. (He also claims to have been able to detect the pulse of a store-bought egg.) Other such eminences as Edgar Cayce and L. Ron Hubbard are cited, approvingly. The authors relay all this in credulous terms often bordering on cheerleading, relating the interaction of one researcher and his philodendron to the emotions evoked between lovers and allowing as how fertility rites may actually have promoted crop growth. More incredibly, their work was the subject of an eponymous documentary by Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Wild Bunch, Walon Green, in 1979, with a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder. (The book is still in print.) Sarno takes a neutral tone toward the material, which he problematizes in important ways.
There's a built-in suspension of disbelief going into any fantasy fiction experience. Witness prepares us for the more preposterous elements by kicking off in hardboiled mode, with Rilla's narration, in silhouette, lit like an interrogation, the projector light behind her creating a Kirlian halo rendering the plot an emanation of her obscure psyche. Here she describes sister Laurie's return from Scottish New-Age farming commune Findhorn to run a plant shop and set up digs in the SoHo building Rilla and her architect husband Robert have recently let. Laurie meets her end on the rooftop, and when her sister is dissatisfied with detective Lawrence Tierney's verdict of death by accident she begins sleuthing. By the epilogue two more will be dead and Rilla left a murderess, inspired by visions she attributes to a plant Laurie has assigned mystical significance.
The wild card in all this, interestingly enough, isn't the plant or even the sister who believes such bunk, but her shop help, Dusty, who wryly calls himself Laurie's imaginary friend and whom Rilla assumes has something going on with her sister. He's an enigma and a jack of all trades: plant-care provider, apprentice mystic, warehouse worker, plumber, self-professed poet, part-leprechaun and "Jungian shadow figure," according to Sanders, in addition to being homeless thanks to the gentrifying movements of Rilla's ilk. Low on affect, he's pliable under Laurie's influence but reptilian in his dealings with the Harts. (Despite his gifts, actor Ted LePlat may stir recollections of another taciturn nature-boy character in another plant-based '70s genre offering, Joe Dallesandro, in The Gardener, aka Seeds of Evil.) He's what makes this a New York story. His grievance over having been displaced, as many artists and laborers were by this time, contributes to class resentment, leading to deception, prevarication, and possibly murder.
Possibly. The movie is so layered with ambiguity and obscured motivations, it's hard to tell. In the first scene proper, Laurie guides Dusty in tuning his mind to her plant's wavelength, in distinctly seductive terms ("Think where you want to enter.…"); when she rejects him later as he makes a series of awkward passes, this man even her sister had pegged as her lover may be forgiven some confusion. (The Plants Are Watching clarifies her action as inspired by her plant's reading of Dusty's nefarious intentions, but your own tolerance for balderdash may leave you unconvinced.) Rilla's opening monolog, with its tone of detached self-pity (her first words are "If anyone was left holding the bag it would be me") betrays a questionable viewpoint that grows more complex as the plot unwinds, and plain disturbing on subsequent viewings. Her closing "I need to know more" sounds less affirmative and more like a warning shot once the murk sets in.
Like De Palma, Sarno piles on the dreams and visions with unannounced beginnings and endings till it's difficult telling whose reality is the prevailing one at any given moment. (The De Palma this film most evokes is, aptly enough, Sisters, with its themes of witnessing, criss-crossing identities, self-imperiling heroines, shifting trust-centers, confusion of reality and the delineation of events on separate visual planes, not to mention their shared New York location. Sarno is not the visual stylist De Palma had made of himself by then, accounting for some missed cues on the audience's part.) The first time we register this unmooring is when Robert counsels a weekend getaway to help Rilla deal with her loss; she demurs, but soon we see them driving to the countryside anyway, a scene that increases in implausibility as Rilla follows her sister's ethereal lead to a disturbing revelation involving her husband and Laurie's corpse. The next thing we see is Rilla waking in their apartment. Later, she rises from bed to find Dusty outside her window and leading her through the labyrinthine night city streets; when the sequence resolves with him constellating her and her sister's names in a notebook accompanied by a mandragoric plant-man illustration, it reads as a cryptic message from one part of her psyche to the other. Near the end, Sarno pulls off what may be a virtuoso feathering of each character's dreams within the others': Dusty lights up a bowl in the warehouse he appears to be squatting in, and his opium reverie enfolds Rilla's own, real dream; when she wakes to Dusty outside their apartment again and her husband pursues him to the rooftop, where he delivers an oracular spiel on what "terrible gossips" plants are (incriminating Robert), the next sequence has Robert waking alone to TV static. Was this all in the imagination of the architect, whose work it is to house and contain random personalities? Or is Rilla, as photographer, the lens we're seeing this through?
If that's the case, it's a distorted one. She admits early in her narration to having been "sick for a while," but remains silent on the nature or cause of her illness. When she sees Laurie's face in a Kirlian shot she took of the plant that supposedly "witnessed" her demise (a glancing reference to Antonioni's Blow Up) then looks again and it's gone, we're aware she's prone to delusion; that subsequent visions come only after others have suggested them tells us she's susceptible, at least, like the emulsion her images are impressed on.
The one character we can rely on, maybe, is the most peripheral: oft-mentioned but little-seen Claire. Her name is intentional. Sarno does an effective enough job building suspension of disbelief that the circumstance of her introduction comes as a moment of clarity for the viewer: Rilla meets her in the apartment she's taken on leaving Robert, whom she suspects of killing her sister; when she tries to demonstrate her plant-monitoring method, the look on Claire's face is a cue to the audience that we should be questioning her state of mind, too. When Robert tracks his wife down and brings her back home, even she realizes how all this must look by now. Her air of authority and composure affected in the beginning and spotted throughout begins to crack. Her last privileged insight from the plant that "witnessed" Laurie's death leads to her own crime, by which time we simply can't believe her anymore and have to wonder, by her closing narration, if this wasn't all an attempt to justify her own irrational deeds.
None of the principals is exempt from criticism. If Witness has a villain, it's Robert, whom Rilla – dispassionately – notes has no regard for her photography, is open in his dislike of her sister, and shows no remorse for nearly killing her. A ringer for quintessential New York chronicler Lou Reed, his default affect is contempt. When Laurie has conniptions over Robert's innocently brushing past one of her plants, her sensitivities for the plant outperform her human understanding and ability to weigh offenses; likewise, despite her humoring attitude toward Dusty in the cassette journals Rilla monitors, her severity and woundedness toward his advance seems similarly disproportionate. If the film reserves sympathy for any of its characters, it's for Dusty: displaced by the changing city at the whims of a new elite and frustrated by his own limitations as he attempts to rise among them, he's collateral damage. Thinking himself supernaturally gifted at reading people, as Laurie has tried to teach him to read plants, he's often wrong and fatefully out of his element.
The movie's three centerpieces involve him. First is his dissertation to Rilla, on being engaged to fix her plumbing – a double entendre fit for separate analysis – concerning his artistic frustration and weariness working two jobs yet still seeing the ends moving apart. His speech is steeped in psychological resonance: he's describing Rilla's own mental fraying and failure to achieve an inner life as much as anyone's. Though he often comes off as cloying and attempting to "play" people, his sharing here is met with stony silence; Rilla is already on her guard against him. If she's right and he's the culprit, she's protecting herself; if she's wrong, and there's every chance she could be, he may as well be addressing a rhododendron. When the plant-rigged polygraph jumps in response to his gesture toward her, she's too alienated from her own affect to understand it's a register of her emotional impulse, not the ficus's. (In some ways the film is a precursor to Philip Kaufman's Frisco-set Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, filmed a year later but released a year before, where human beings are replaced by intergalactic seed-pods.).
Next comes his colloquy with Robert, after Rilla abandons him in a panic. As in an earlier confrontation between the two in a bar after Laurie's murder, Dusty is especially cagey with Robert, thinking he knows the score when he's a page or two short on sheet music. In what plays at first like a character quirk but comes clearer once we deduce Dusty's homelessness, Robert finds him taking a bath in the fixture he's come to repair, his emergence half-wet from the w.c. a trickster sprung from his backroom womb to open up the pipes for both Harts. (In his vagrancy, he suggests a rootless piece of psychic material drifted into awareness. His effect on the tenants is an underground take on Terence Stamp's upsetting of the bourgeoisie in Pasolini's Teorema, lending color to the way we read his character.) As with Rilla, when he holds forth on his labors the message falls on deaf ears; while Robert recognizes him from the bar but not from his job across the street, he's just another worker whose place of employment will be gone soon as the city's warehouses and mom-and-pop shops make way for more banks, more condos, and more suburban chain stores. "I know what you've done" he threatens in a last-ditch attempt at power play, and even tries to dismiss Robert from his own domicile, but he's no match for the latter's white-collar cunning. The bigger bully drives him out, but the man, like his accusations, won't stay tamped down long.
Exactly what Dusty is after isn't clear. He never tries to blackmail Robert, so it isn't money. He clearly wants to be part of their club, so it may be status – more likely, simple acceptance. There's the possibility Laurie and Rilla are right and he's a creep (though a peculiarly timid one), though their touchiness and air of superiority leave room for doubt. (Try the scene where Laurie blows off a customer for the offense of wanting to buy a plant in her plant store for size. The film's irony is that neither woman, for all their heightened sensitivity to flora, is attuned to the inner life of the people around them.) Dusty's last big scene takes place on the rooftop, where he lures Robert away like a skid-row Fantomas. With the full moon behind him where he perches high above Robert putting his boots on, he's Joe Buck come back after the death of Ratso Rizzo fired up and ready to give one last go at staking that claim he'd come here for. Rilla overhears his incrimination of her husband – Dusty was on the roof that night and witnessed his scuffle with Laurie – and leaves Robert, based on the revelation. But when her next vision confirms Dusty's allegation, is it real, or has he "planted" the concept there?
Rilla's shift from electroencephalographs to Kirlian photography and then outright channeling when she fails to find what she's looking for with each previous method draws their effectiveness into question. She's using these devices to validate her preconceptions, but are her preconceptions wrong? There's an emerging discipline known as Affect Theory, which may be the next comprehensive organizing principle after psychology. Its focus is less on history and memory – the occult – and more on the sudden, immediate, emotional, tactile, and consequential. Compare this with Laurie's study of plant sensations: the most automatic level of cognition; feelings. As the character who brings disaffected Rilla into communion with the sensitive world, Laurie is the feeling-self she claims in her narration to have grown distant from. (In what may have been a rethink, the novelization gives their family name as "Hart," as opposed to Rilla's married name.) Her death means her sister has lost a part of herself, Rilla's investigation an attempt to understand what that was and why.
If the film is a supernatural whodunit, that means a spiritual crime has been committed; if Laurie registers offense on the part of her plants, that means trauma has been inflicted on the most basic level. The burning cigarette at the center of Rilla's silhouette is echoed in her examination of a Kirlian she took of Robert's fingerprint; she deduces the redness within as anger at heart, which she apparently shares. Her husband's disdain for her work is as for the feminine perspective, as femininity itself, reminding us that the women's movement was also in flower at the time; much of the sisters' paranoia is well-placed, as-yet unidentified gender resentment much like Dusty's class. Rilla's closing abandonment of the city and what it/Robert had made of her for Findhorn is a feminist rejection of that monolithic social structure her husband and others had wrought.
Which brings us back to Lawrence Tierney as the detective. His screen time here is so negligible he seems almost dropped in for name recognition alone. Still: it's Lawrence Tierney. If the filmmakers were going for hardboiled bona fides they could hardly do better than the star of Born to Kill and The Devil Thumbs a Ride, whose offscreen arrests for drunkenness and brawling put him in a league of his own. So we mull his role. ("Think where you want to enter.…") As the evidence-based detective who declines to apprehend anyone, he stands in contrast to Laurie, who apprehends all things without dint of physical evidence. (That their first names are basically the same is gravy.) He is the New York of 1976. Rilla, who placed herself in opposition to him, is the new, gentrifying city; her sister, who traffics between there and Findhorn, the catalyst for its transformation. There's a movement away from gritty realism toward a more organic mindset; also a less positive shift, toward outright fantasy. (Think in terms of Times Square, which used to be home to grindhouse movie theaters and dirty-book stores and whose rehabilitation in ensuing years has been called Disneyfication.)
As documented in Jeremiah Moss's heartbreaking book and blog Vanishing New York, the city's retreat from the brink was at least as complicated as Witness's vegetable politics. While it succeeded in lifting itself from fiscal anarchy, it was at the cost of, in Moss's words, "the working class, the people of color, homosexuals, artists, socialists and other undesirables" and to the benefit of corporations and developers in the service of tourists, entrepreneurs, and real-estate developers. "From 2004 to 2014," Moss says, "the average commercial rent in the city increased 34%. Some storefront rents shot from $4,000 to $40,000 per month, making it impossible for any business but a corporate chain or a bank to exist." Under Mayor Ed Koch, 2,300 small businesses a month closed, 10,000 under Michael Bloomberg. Landlords wanted retail chains that didn't always come, leaving ghost blocks of "high-rent blight." What had started as a crisis in social organization became a party for profiteers to whom the lowly and alien were a nuisance to be priced out, evicted, and in many cases incarcerated from sight as the city shifted its focus from the public good to that of the market, auctioning community garden lots for development. (Rudy Giuliani to the city: "Welcome to the era after communism.") Fauxstalgia saw landmarks closed and refurbished, with some décor and other nods to the past retained but with astronomical pricing for the clientele that could afford it; a high-end fashion store replaced punk haven CBGB, but you could buy $1,500 safety-pin purses and Sid Vicious pencils at the MoMA gift shop. In order to save its name, the city had lost its soul. Even the expansion of Sanders' NYU saw the demolition of Edgar Allan Poe's house in the year 2000.
The cumulative effect of all these closings as a lost way of life is recognizing how larger society has changed from unique and individual to mass and characterless: Autotune America. Is it a tragedy that New York City today isn't NYC ca. 1976, or a triumph that it's even still standing? Friends and relatives who've lived in the city post-"blandalism" (as Moss puts it) never saw the decay, only a city diverse, exciting, alive – unlike the gormless suburbs they came from – where David Bowie, Jerry Seinfeld, Jennifer Lawrence, and Scarlett Johansson lived and hung out – the home of the financial industry, Paper of Record, and publishing seat of the country. I'm not qualified to render judgment, but I do have my affinities. There's such a thing as psychological gentrification, a colonization of the mind by a form of sophistication barren of vivifying genius but driven by self-inflation, survival instinct, and a will to construct more than create. The film is a record of that too, witness to trauma and a document of its spiritual aftereffect. If the city is a mind, furrowed by buildings like the brain is by its folds and crevices, and there's decay there, significant decay, maybe the idea isn't urban renewal after all; maybe we need to look outside for answers.
Ever since the World Trade Center towers came down and we "all" became New Yorkers, I've had a hard time seeing through mystical, much less magical lenses. (How quickly a cadre of religious lamebrains demolished Kubrick's carefully constructed vision of a transcendent millennium. Or, as Johnny Rotten put it, "I don't believe illusions 'cos too much is rrrrreal.") The more I read of affect theory, with its emphasis on "shimmering" (think of the zing-y alarms Rilla picks up from her plant-familiars near the end of her story), "in-between-ness," and "perpetual becoming," the more frustrated I get in a time so caught up in its own convulsion of affect. I had built a worldview based on psychology, but there's no explaining where people's heads are at anymore. (Trump Tower SoHo was completed in 2008 and de-branded in 2017. May it be brought to ground and the rubble sown with salt.) My plant-sense tells me there's something about this affect thing, so that's where I'm going to be directing a lot of my study-time now. I can't say if it's city or soil, but like Rilla, I need to know more.
All images are screenshots from the film's DVD.
— Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson lives, works, and writes in Cleveland, where he formerly published the incomparable zine Delirious.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Do you remember a time before having to remember to move the bloody Elf on the Shelf? Before Fingerlings were on every child's present list? Before gifts were wrapped in shabby chic brown paper and tied with string? And before Pinterest encouraged us to make our table displays look worthy of Home Interiors magazines? Do you my friend remember when Christmas Day...was just a bit well crap? Not crap as in crap, crap. No believe you me my Christmas day memories are some of the happiest times in my life. Crap as in it was a bit haphazard and simple and just well a lovely kinda crap. So here are the things I will miss most about Christmas now we are all modern and sh*t.
When I asked my children what they want for Christmas they can reel off at least 50 things. Ranging from an iPad to a bloody LOL surprise doll. For us? ALL WE WANTED WAS A NICE BIG BIKE! YES! Remember? Just a bloody good big bike. That your parents would have lovingly put spokey dokeys on. Or a Barbie set. Or an Action Man. Mmmmm that was it? Also presents came in sacks. Some may say "well that sack looks like a white bin bag but with Father Christmas's face on it". And they would be right. To be folded away nicely and used the next year. Ace.
Snore. Off. X. Factor. The Christmas number 1 was like a proper massive deal! I used to tune into the Top 40 ready and waiting to find out what beauty it would be, with a tape recorder ready and poised. And you know why people loved being Number 1? As they got to sing the song on Christmas Day TOTP. Yes I am aware this is still on, and now has the added bonus of pressing the red button so you can sing along. Which would have BLOWN MY MIND in 1987. But I will be honest I would rather see Bros singing Silent Night than some random youths twerking to crunk music. Or whatever the hell it's called.
The presents were ace. The food was ace. The music was ace and the decorations? Well they were a little tiny bit dangerous and sh*t but the TV? THE BEST IN THE WORLD! TV didn't really start gearing up until about 9am-ish where you would have Noel Edmond's Christmas Presents on. I remember weeping a little bit but trying to hold it all together whilst looking at my new red walkman. Then you would sit down and talk through the whole of the Queen's speech. Next? The BIG film. Now as there were only four channels. You generally had a choice of two. Gremlins maybe? Or ET. And then on the evening? The country was united in the love that was The Only Fools and Horses Christmas Special. Or you may have spent your whole day riding around playing out on your new bike with the kids in your street. Either way? It was fab.
Did Bros really sing Silent Night? Anyway, yes, Christmas did seem less stressful inmy younger days. Then again I wasn't organising anything!
It was black magic for my mum! And Mr blobby took the top spot off my fave at the time Westlife. It broke my heart!


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In the Winter Dark is a 1998 Australian feature film adaptation of the 1988  novel by Tim Winton, which was released by Goalpost Pictures on 10 September 1998. It starred Brenda Blethyn, Ray Barrett, Richard Roxburgh and Miranda Otto and was directed by James Bogle.

In The Winter Dark was nominated for three Australian Film Institute Awards, for Best Actor (Ray Barrett) and Best Supporting Actress (Miranda Otto), and Best Cinematography.

Cast
Brenda Blethyn as Ida Stubbs
Ray Barrett as Maurice Stubbs
Richard Roxburgh as Murray Jacob
Miranda Otto as Ronnie
Steve Le Marquand as Nick
Justin Monjo as Circus Man
Les Dayman as Minister
Marjorie Child as Cat Woman

Reviews
Andrew L. Urban wrote: "Superbly made in every respect, In the Winter Dark is as tough as the Australian bush on one hand, yet as sensitive as a pregnant girl on the other; a rich if puzzling film that introduces Bogle as a fascinating new filmmaking talent."

David Stratton wrote: "Bogle's handsomely produced film is completely successful in exploring a mysterious, threatening environment peopled by a quartet of seriously disturbed characters. Comparisons can be made to Samantha Lang's 1997 "The Well," a similarly bleak tale of psychological frissons, and those who were unable to tune into the Lang film will probably have similar problems with Bogle's chiller."

Cinephilia wrote that "given that this was shot in under 6 weeks and helmed by a director on his first major feature this is an impressive effort even if its potential is not fully realized."

Paula Nechak wrote: "In the Winter Dark is too internalized and segregated to rate as a successful film. Because we see from Maurice's eye and through his mental state of being it's near impossible to find the perspective (or the compassion and empathy) that would allow us access to the other characters."

Film Threat wrote: "The story is unstructured at times and leaves numerous plot elements unexplained. Martin McGrath's cinematography of rural Australia is phenomenal and complements Bogle's directing to create this harrowing portrayal of the dark side of human madness."

See also
Australian Cinema in the 1990s
Australian Horror Films, 1973-2010
Cinema of Australia
The New Biographical Dictionary Of Film 6th Edition
Official Trailer
SBS In the Winter Dark

References

External links
 Australian Screen In the Winter Dark
If the Winter Dark at Oz Movies

1998 films
Australian drama films
Films based on Australian novels
Films set in Australia
Films shot in Australia
1998 drama films
1990s English-language films

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


A farmer has to cross a river in a tiny row boat. He has a goose, a fox, and a sack of grain. He can't leave the goose alone with the fox or with the grain. He can only fit one item in the boat with him. How does he get across the river?
I could never bear to tell the ending of our journey to Fort Lauderdale, but it has been over 16 months since the last leg of our trip, and it's time to finish the story. I have it in my head that I have cursed Catmandu by leaving the last chapter unpublished. She hasn't been herself since I stopped writing. Our friends, Dan and Jaye Lunsford, called it "The Curse of the Blog." So, here's the ending – or maybe another beginning.
When we arrived at Vero Beach City Marina in January of 2014, we rafted up with Robin's Nest, a 25-foot derelict sailboat that looked like it would sink at any moment and drag Catmandu to the bottom. I had to climb aboard the derelict to attach lines, being careful not to step where I might fall through. I was hoping the slimy creatures hanging from the light blue hull would not jump ship and attach to Catmandu. Poor Catmandu was probably ashamed to be rafted up or associated in any way with Robin's Nest, and we had left her there for three weeks, until we could have a three-day weekend to get her home to Fort Lauderdale.
That chance came on Valentine's Day, a Friday night with a full moon. We made a pact not to exchange gifts, but together bought a red heart-shaped box of chocolates to bring with us, and a box of our favorite red wine. Boxes of wine are a boon for boaters, who don't like to have glass aboard.
Saturday we tanked up and motored out of Vero Beach. The wind was against us in the morning, but by afternoon it was a strong and steady northwest breeze. Since we were sailing south in the wide Indian River, we could put up the genoa and sail. We sailed on a broad reach for most of the afternoon with a full genoa – and at one point, we were going 7.4 knots. For Catmandu, that's speeding.
We spent the night in Manatee Pocket, a large anchorage that marks the beginning of the Okeechobee Waterway. It heads west to Florida's largest lake. In Manatee Pocket, there were many boats anchored, but no manatees. The sunset was remarkable and the moon nearly full. I wished this were my life again: living aboard, sailing and anchoring in a different spot each afternoon, spending most of my time outside on the water.
Manatee Pocket just before sunset.
We started out early on Sunday. We had a long way to travel, and many bridges. For those who don't know, bridges generally open just two times every hour, and if you're just a minute too late, it's a half hour wait until the next opening. We hoped to reach Loggerhead Lantana Marina, but bridges slowed us down quite a bit. We crossed Hobe Sound and came to Jupiter Inlet where we motored past the dark red tower of Jupiter Light.
Jupiter Inlet Light, and Phil.
In Lake Worth we experienced the worst "waking" incident of the whole trip. The boat traffic was amazing. There were hundreds of boats, mostly power boats moving at very high speeds. Our little sailboat was bounced around from multiple directions, and the water was choppy from boats going too fast. One large boat pulled up way too close to us on our starboard side and then took off with its three large outboard motors roaring. The wake was huge and came at us like a tidal wave. Catmandu leaned over dangerously and I saw the mast swing down toward the water. It knocked me off the seat, dumped everything off the starboard shelf onto the deck below, and – worst of all – knocked over our cooler. We lost all of our ice, which is our only refrigeration on board.
Yes, I remember the name of the boat. It was Timber. So, Timber, here's a maritime lesson you should learn: You are responsible for your wake. If you had injured us or caused any damage, you would have to pay. Please, power boaters, be considerate of sailboats and watch your wake.
We made it to Palm Beach that night and anchored south of the city. We were one of two sailboats in the anchorage, and after the chaos of Lake Worth, we loved the solitude. We could hear live music from a city park and enjoyed the nice sunset and the almost-full moon.
Hillsboro Inlet lighthouse. We've climbed this one.
There were some concerns, though. The engine seemed to quit at every bridge. It started again, reluctantly, but only ran well at slow speeds. On Monday, we passed Hillsboro Inlet and were faced with four more bridges before we got to our slip in Fort Lauderdale.
In Lake Boca, the engine failed completely. While I lounged on the deck and watched the party going on all around us (poor me), Phil was below, working on the engine. He installed a new electronic ignition, but it didn't solve the problem and 20 minutes later, it quit again. Phil got it started, and the boat limped along at low speed into the afternoon.
Phil saw two manatees at Oakland Park Bridge in the fading light. We were almost home, but had to stop for another bridge. While I was spying my own manatees off the bow, Phil saw two real manatees and pointed them out. I wasn't quick enough to see them and mine turned out to be coconuts. The engine was barely going, fading and rallying half-heartedly as we limped along through the highly populated canal.
Just a mile or so past the bridge, the engine quit and would not start again. We raised the mainsail and I tried to sail a little while Phil worked on the engine, but the wind was nearly still and the sail useless. We dropped the anchor. We had motored and sailed the 31-year-old boat for nearly 1220 miles from Annapolis, and three miles from our final destination, she refused to go on. She was on her last legs.
I can't say enough about the towboat drivers for TowBoatUS. From the pair of ill-fated North Carolina rescuers who towed us from their own broken boat through the Alligator-Pungo Canal in the dark, to the skilled solo captain who came to rescue us in Fort Lauderdale, these guys are good. They go the extra mile, so to speak, and I have seen them skillfully bump the sailboat gently into a slip, stern first, and never endanger a piling. It's remarkable.
Shortly after we anchored in the waterway, a police boat came by just to be sure we weren't staying there. The towboat came five minutes later, helped us raise the anchor and put on the tow bridle. He opened the Sunrise Bridge for us, and we were on our way. However, we had never been to the slip by water, and only by land during the day. It was full dark by then, and we didn't know where we were going. With the tow boat driver's local knowledge, and Phil's GPS coordinates, we made our way to the right canal (among many canals) and overshot our slip by a few hundred yards.
"Oh, no problem," the tow captain said, "I'll just do a 360 here and get you back." In the narrow canal, with mega boats on either side, he managed to make a U-turn with us in tow, return to the right slip, and nudge us into place. We could only help by attaching our lines to the pilings and pulling Catmandu, stern-first, up to the dock. We were home.
Catmandu in her new slip on Isle of Venice in Fort Lauderdale.
Except that we had left a car in Vero Beach. "Not tonight," Phil said. "We'll get it in the morning." We got into the rental car and went to our apartment. Finally, our home and our boat were in the same city. With the engine out of order, our travels were over for the time being.
Don't think Catmandu became an abandoned derelict like Robin's Nest. Every weekend, Phil tried one repair after another, getting closer each time to solving the mystery of why the engine quit and wouldn't start again. Personally, I think she was just tired and needed to rest. She gave all she could and nearly got us there but couldn't go one more mile. Exhausted after 1200 miles, she deserved a quiet respite and she got it.
Meanwhile, Phil is planning weekends on the water, looking at charts of Miami and south, dreaming of a week in the Keys. We are bound to venture out soon, and so this isn't the last blog post. I'll never forget the trip south on the ICW, when we had to arrive somewhere down the line every day. But now, we have nowhere special to be and can truly explore the warm waterways and anchorages that surround us. Maybe we will see dolphins and even manatees. Surely we will see spectacular sunsets fringed by palm trees; we will feel warm ocean breezes and enjoy the tropical beauty of our new home. Catmandu will sail again.
June 14, 2015: Catmandu is still having trouble. We've been out for weekends but can't stray far from home because the engine is unreliable. Last May, we planned a long weekend in Biscayne Bay, but around the first bridge, the engine started sputtering and we turned around. Recently, we planned to visit Lettuce Lake a few miles north and had to sail the last half mile. The engine quit and wouldn't start again. Finally, many repairs and new parts later, we thought it was fixed and took the boat to Loggerhead Marina a few miles south of here. We were ecstatic! The boat is fixed! But coming back, just before the 17th Street Bridge, the engine quit again. We put up the sail and barely made it under the bridge. We had to drop the anchor. TowBoat came to get us.
Is it the heat? Is the boat just afraid of bridges? Or is it the Curse of the Blog? Now, we will find out.


text:
Q: Android option menu hidden by software buttons I have a problem with the option menu on a tablet equiped with the software buttons. On my smartphone (with physical buttons) everything looks correct: smartphone screenshot
but on the tablet option menu is partially hidden by the software buttons bar:
tablet screenshot
I looked at other aplications and they just display menu above the s/w buttons... I don't know what I did wrong? Google search don't gave me any useful hints, maybe someone here will know how to avoid this behavior? Aplication is written in Monodroid but I don't really think that it has any importance. On Android emulators this problem exists as well.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Coronavirus, North Dakota News
Rapid COVID-19 screenings to be offered in Fargo, Bismarck
BISMARCK, N.D. (KVRR) – The North Dakota Department of Health is hosting two free mass screening events using rapid antigen tests this weekend in Bismarck and Fargo. The Bismarck screening will take place at the Gateway Mall on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. In Fargo, a screening event will be…
Community, Coronavirus, Coronavirus-MN, Health, Local News, Minnesota News, Moorhead
Mass COVID-19 Testing Over Memorial Weekend At Moorhead Armory
The testing results are expected to take between 2 to 3 days to come back after the weekend
MOORHEAD, Minn. — At the Moorhead Armory, the National Guard is collecting information and getting people in line for COVID-19 testing. The Guard expects to get through hundreds of tests at the Moorhead site and up to 7 thousand across the state through the weekend. National Guard Major Scott Hawks says it's all about accessibility, as anyone can walk in…
Community, Coronavirus-MN, Minnesota News
Minnesota Conducts Nearly 5,000 COVID-19 Tests In One Day
ST.PAUL, MN (KFGO)- The Minnesota Department of Health conducted 4,993 test in a 24 hour period nearing the goal set by Gov. Walz. Of the latest results, Minnesota saw another 702 cases for 10,790 total; 24 more deaths were announced bringing that total to 534. There was a slight uptick of patients in the hospital from 473 to 476. Intensive…
Coronavirus, Coronavirus-MN, Health, Minnesota News
Minnesota Reports 28 New COVID-19 Deaths Friday, Matching Daily High, for 371 Deaths Total
KVRR Staff,
Minneapolis (FOX 9)–Minnesota reported 28 new deaths attributed to COVID-19 Friday, matching a daily high, as the state's death toll from the disease rises to 371. There were 4,553 new tests completed over a 24-hour period, more than 1,000 higher than the previous high-water mark set the day before and within shouting distance of Gov. Tim Walz's goal of 5,000 tests a…
Coronavirus, Coronavirus-ND, Local News, North Dakota News
Cass County Surpasses Burleigh County for Most COVID-19 Cases in North Dakota
The NDDoH reports 32 confirmed cases in Cass County.
Kendra Beneke,
CASS COUNTY, N.D.–Cass County has officially surpassed Burleigh County for the most confirmed COVID-19 cases in North Dakota. The North Dakota Department of Health confirmed an additional eight cases in Cass County on Tuesday bringing the total to 32. Governor Doug Burgum addressed the number of cases in North Dakota and in Cass County during a press briefing on Monday….
Minnesota has 1,700 Frozen Samples Waiting on Coronavirus Testing but Tests are in Short Supply
Walz says he is hearing the same thing from other governors.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9)–Governor Tim Walz says he is deeply concerned there is not enough testing available in Minnesota for officials to combat the coronavirus outbreak. As of Wednesday, the governor says there are 1,700 frozen, untested samples waiting to be tested for COVID-19. In recent days, state officials, along with other leaders around the country, have said the…
Business, Community, Health, Local News, News Landing Page, North Dakota News
At Home Colon Cancer Screening Test Many Don't Know Exist
Colon cancer can be detected early but many are reluctant to get tested because of the colonoscopy, but this gives people a second option
FARGO, N.D. — March is Colon Cancer Awareness Month. Many people aren't aware about an alternative screening test you can do in the comfort of your own home. "Any Lab Test Now" offers the screening in Fargo that you can pick up without going to the doctor first. Colon cancer can be detected early but many are reluctant to get…


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Let There Be Peace On CSS
Cristiano Rastelli speaking at Front-End London in August, 2017
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About this talk
In the last few months there's been a growing friction between those who see CSS as an untouchable layer in the "separation of concerns" paradigm, and those who have simply ignored this golden rule and found different ways to style the UI (typically applying CSS styles via JavaScript). This debate have brought division in a community that used to be immune to this kind of "wars". This talk is my attempt to bring peace between the two fronts.
Hello, my name is Cristiano Rastelli. I am a front-end developer and designer. I am a passionate web designer and developer. And I'm in love with systems architecture, style guides, and the atomic design. I like to work at the interception between business, design, and development. And I'm also in regard in the, of conferences, meetup, also I speak and organise some of them when I'm in London. I work at Badoo as Front-End engineer. I work in the Mobile Web Team. Badoo is probably the largest social network for dating. We have more than 350 million users across the world. And using Badoo, people can meet, chat, or date. And we cover all the possible platform, iOS, Android, Windows phone, desktop web and mobile web. And I work in the mobile web team. So this means essentially a browser, any possible browser on any possible device. Big fan. I'm also a big fan of Front-End London. It's been the first meetup I attended when I first moved to London four years ago. Since then, I've been in love with this event. I'm extremely honoured and also thrilled to be here tonight and speak in front of you. This evening, I'm here to tell you a story. It's a story of war, and hopefully of peace. It's a war of words, so I won't use mines, but those of the protagonists. Let's start from the war. But what war? This was the question that a friend of mine asked me the first time I told him that I wanted to prepare this talk. Maybe I'm the only one seeing this war. Maybe it's just my point of view. I share with you some examples of what I think is this war, and then at the end we can decide if actually it's a war or not. So let's start with the war declaration. Everything started with this. The war declaration was this slide. Who has seen this slide before? Please raise your hands. Huh, not many of you. Around 800,000 people viewed, have seen this slide on Speakerdeck. This is the opening slide of a talk in which Christopher Chedeau, a developer in Facebook, proposed a new approach, a new technical and methodological solution to the problems that he was facing when trying to use CSS at scale in Facebook. The solution that he proposed, and that he called CSS in JS, was a completely new different way to style the UI elements of an interface, in React but not only. And the thesis of this talk is that CSS has inherent problems, and that this limitation prevents CSS to work at this kind of scale. People went mad on this. I mean, from that exact moment on, the community was split in two. An intense debate in which on one side people was seeing the CSS as an untouchable layer in the separation of concerns parting, so content, presentation, and behaviour. But, on the other side, other people were simply ignoring this golden rule and was looking for different ways to style the UI, typically using JavaScript to apply CSS styles. The debate has become more and more intense everyday, bringing division in a community that used to be immune to these kinds of religious wars. Here are some examples of comments, reactions, and opinions that I have collected in the last year or so from well-known and respected members of the community. Jeffrey Zeldman, talking about an amnesiac community that will turn the web into a wasteland of walled gardens. Lea Verou, considering atomic CSS a joke. A language designed by assembly coders. Aaron Gustafson threw up a little bit after reading a blog post about the new CSS. CSS Tricks, one of the most known and important follower resources for CSS developers, dismissing these new technologies as a, just a way to avoid writing CSS. On the other side, things were not much better. React developers completely dismissing every possible argument raised by the CSS community, and labelling these arguments as groundless. Simply scare mongering intended to spread fear, doubt, and uncertainty. People bashing tools and methodology. The problem with BEM, BEM is a tool, it can't have problems. It's the way in which you use it that may be wrong or not suitable for the purpose. Dave Shea, comparing tachyons, a well-known function of the CSS library, to the worst web dev idea of all times. Now look at this tweet and tell me if you don't see a call to arms in them. We are blowing up the work of 20 years of thousands of intelligent, visionary humans. We are in the time where the majority of web dev folks simply do not know how to use CSS at all. Thomas Fuchs, looking at the separation of concerns in React and JS, and saying, okay everything went south. And the responses to these arguments, on the other side, are sarcastic, like in this one. Or even a fancy, what is this? Some kind of scale of values that automatically imply that if I'm using SASS or BEM as some kind of primitive. Thierry Koblentz, they considered harmful the opinions of some leaders of our community. Jeffrey Zeldman, well-known, with a rant. Kiss my classname. Nice pun. Non-semantic last names that refer to visual styles will always be a bad idea. Hm absolutistic, no? James Kyle, the claim that web documents are dead. Or be in favour of web applications. The CSS is broken saga. Now this is a series of articles that I have collected. Despite the titles, not all of them are against CSS or CSS in JS. But I'll give you just an idea. CSS is broken. CSS is not broken. CSS sucks. CSS is fine, it's just really hard. CSS is broken. It went on and on. Now I don't know how you call it, but for me, this is a war. And the landscape that they surround me, not great for the CSS community. But what is exactly the matter in dispute between these two fronts? Well essentially, there are people that see that these new approaches are against the principle of separation of concerns. They think that they are breaking the web, that these people are relying on excessive tooling. Essentially that these people use this kind of technology because they don't know CSS. On the other side, you have people that think CSS has inherent problems. That cascading, inheritance, global name spacing are the worst of all evils. Essentially that CSS doesn't scale and was never meant for this. If you see, both parts probably have good reasons, but they don't listen to each other and listen to each other's reasons. But this is not the first war. We have seen many wars on the web. Religion wars in the last 10, 15 years. Let me just recall you some of them. Early days of the web. The browser wars. Explorer versus Netscape. And Best Viewed With in the footer of every possible webpage. Dynamic HTML, people started to use JavaScript and scandal. No no no no. You can't use JavaScript in a webpage. A few years later, the rise of an unobtrusive JavaScript, and again, JavaScript should not be used with HTML. This one was really a religious war. Everyone was sure that Flash was going to kill HTML, but we don't know how this ended. Steve Jobs' letter was essentially the tombstone, the beginning of the end for Flash. And again Flash versus HTML. More recent years. The first JavaScript war. The war, the battle for the best JavaScript library. Then the rise of native applications, so the HTML 5 at the time versus Native. Again, Native application will kill the web. Well we know how it ended. The second JavaScript war. The battle for the best modern framework. The never-ending battle for the emancipation of JavaScript and HTML and CSS as real programming languages. Still on. But in the last few years, no more big wars on thqe JavaScript community. Only small scuffles. Too many frameworks, right? No. Too many tools, right. But somehow this worked amongst the JavaScript community and been put to an end with the advent of React. Now we have seen the CSS war, we have seen it's not the first one. So how can there be peace? Well I have a plan. And my plan is this one. Recently I started to ask myself. Why this war? What is causing it? I don't want to take a position. I think that there are good reasons and valid points on both sides on the contention. What I want to do is try to understand the reasons behind the war because, and do my part to stop it because if you know what is causing this war, maybe you can try to find a solution, or at least a truce. So let's look at the bright side. Let's look at the peace. What are the main causes of this war? Well definitely an important role is played by this dichotomy between documents and web apps. But it's not only that. There's more. Surely there's the factor of old generation versus new generation, and old generation developers telling to the new generation, no kids, don't touch. No no no no. This is not how things work. No no no. This is not how we used to do things here. No no no. And the new generation of developers, the cool kids on the block, using the word modern as flag, they are challenging the existing best practise, ignoring the experiences and the lessons learned, and the progress made by the community in the last 20 years. Sure. For sure there's a misunderstanding I would say, not given our view, of what is the definition of separation of concerns. Separation of concerns doesn't mean necessary, it's a separation of technologies. It's separation of context. That's why they are saying the same thing. But they are looking from two different angles, two different perspectives, two different point of view. And they are both valid, depends on the context. Up to this point, I've used the words of the other people, of the protagonists of the story, I would say this saga. I want to give my personal interpretation of what for me, is the main reason behind this war. And the reason is that the community of CSS developers is young, not CSS itself, it's 20 years old. But the community of CSS developers that work at large scale on large web applications, side by side with JavaScript developers, with designers, maybe in cross-functional teams, maybe on a big application. Keep in mind that web applications are what drives the industry now. Think to the experience, and everyone knows about Guardian, BBC, Financial Times. What used to be something which is document or content-oriented, we had this website, that are now very complex web applications, that led the way and paved the way of what will be the best practise and standards of the future of our industry. So probably CSS or the CSS community is undergoing some kind of metamorphosis that JavaScript developers went through years ago. When they move from some cool guys working on JavaScript to real professional developers with its own dignity and business impact, then the business values. Standard patterns and architecture then emerged and developers somehow stopped to fight some battles for the best framework. Everyone understood that the best framework is the one that suits you. Maybe that's what is happening to the CSS community too. We have CSS developers, a real role in a company, with specific roles, and as a community, we started to discuss about CSS architecture. How to use them in the specific context of web applications. Maybe we are simply too young a community in that sense. We never had the necessary discussions and conversations about who we are and what we want to do. Just to give a simple idea. The JavaScript community has solved the problem of the global name space years ago, and no one would argue about that to them. Also not everyone is willing to make war. There are a lot of moderate people out there. People that don't think only with prejudice, sometimes with bias. But a more positive, constructive approach. People that it's worked for follow and listen to. So I want to give you some example of them. Max Stoiber, he's the co-creator of cell components, one of the best, sorry, most known CSS in JavaScript libraries. CSS in JS isn't a campaign against CSS. Mark Dalgleish, co-creator of another well-known CSS in JS library, CSS Modules. Very active member of the CSS in JS community. Bright person, one of the brightest minds I've ever met. In particular, this tweet made me think about this idea of linear history. We look back at the history of the technology and the web and we think there is something linear. Oh yes, there was jQuery, then there was this one and then. Actually it's not what happens. This is not how evolution works, this is not linear. The survival of the fittest. We had multiple paths and we remember only the ones that survived. I love how Oliver Turner tweaked this image with some great irony. Another person for me to follow is Stuart Robson. Former London's Meetup organiser. He's absolutely right, stop blaming tools. Those are just tools, they are good or bad per se, no. It's how you use them, in which context, under which circumstances. A limitation, and maybe business needs. That makes the difference. Adam Onishi, probably some of you know him. I love this blog post in which he compares web development to a recipe for chilli. Every one has its own recipe and no one would say yours is not the right way to do it. Ben Frain, an endless source of inspiration for me. Web development is not something holy sacred, against which we commit a cardinal sin. Chris Coyier, founder of CSS Tricks and CodePen, suggests to avoid dogma, to show empathy for people doing things different than us. Lastly I suggest to watch these two talks, presented this year at CSS Conf EU in Berlin. They both show how much love, how much respect for CSS there is in the CSS in JS community, especially from the founders, from the most prominent members. The first one is from Mark Dalgleish, creator of CSS Modules. In this talk, he proves beyond any possible doubt, how CSS in JS is not against CSS, but it's a natural evolution. It's the consequence of the convergence, the cross-platform code base that nowadays we have. The fact that now they are becoming the source of truth, and styling, merging in this single source of truth, in CSS too, is becoming part of this process. Second one is from Glen Maddern, co-creator of CSS Modules and style components. In this talk, he tells the reason why he invented, or led him with Max Stoiber to decide to create style components. Mark and Glen are two of the most prominent figures in the CSS in JS community. And both with their talk showed how much love, how much respect, CSS in JS was born out of love for CSS, not against it. We have come to the end of this talk. We have seen that there is war and there is also peace. This is my call for a truce. A call for me, for you. For every CSS developer or architect. For every developer in general. Especially for you in this room this evening. I'm not in the position to influence an entire community, but what I can do is try to convince you that there is a better way than fighting each other. These are my suggestions. The web is an ever-changing medium, based on continuously evolving technologies. Embrace it, embrace its nature. Be careful with words, they can hurt. Be pragmatic, not dogmatic. Most of all, be curious. I leave you with these words from Leo Tolstoy. Let's give time to time, and the web will find its way. And win anyway, as we know. That's it, thank you.
Cristiano is a passionate web designer & developer.
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When I cracked open the Tarte Tarteist Pro Amazonian Clay Palette for the first time, I immediately noticed two things. First, the shadows smell like vanilla cupcakes (but in the best, most subtle way possible). Second, it's all about the burgundy. With the new Kylie Cosmetics Kyshadow burgundy palette and recent all-red collections from Chanel and Shiseido, the first color in the rainbow is becoming a fall beauty staple. Yes, red lipstick has been around since our great-great-great grandmothers and theirs were alive, but red eye shadow is proving itself to be just as much of a go-to trend as cat eyes. OK, I might be exaggerating. However, if you've seen Olivia Wilde's look at the Oscars this year, then you understand.
The new Tarte 20-shade palette has plenty of reddish options to choose from. There's Mod (a raspberry), Drama (a maroon), Minx (a metallic burgundy), No Filter (a purple mauve), and Whimsy (a brick). I love how versatile red eye shadow can be. You can use it in your everyday look for depth in your creases or make it bold with a metallic shade swept across your entire lid. Because the palette comes with so many shades, you can work with the others to create the perfect burgundy look for your style. For a more neutral eye, you can blend out one of the matte shades with the creams and browns in the palette. Or you can make a statement with Minx and the darker shades in the palette. If you're still unsure of how to pull off red shadow, you can find more tips here. Just remember to keep the rest of your makeup neutral, minimal, and cool-toned, so you don't look like you're in the thick of a cold.
Of course, if you aren't ready to give the trend a go, the Tarte Tarteist Pro Amazonian Clay Palette still comes with shimmery golds and creamy basics to work with. My favorite shade, besides Minx, is Trendy. The color actually looks teal in the pan, but when you brush it on, the peacock-like shade gives off a purple vibe with a bit of a blue shift. I'm seriously hoping Tarte starts selling it separately.
The Tarte Tarteist Pro Amazonian Clay Palette is available now for $53 on ulta.com and will be in Ulta stores November 13.