text:
import { Event, Emitter } from 'vs/base/common/event';
import { Disposable } from 'vs/base/common/lifecycle';
import * as platform from 'vs/base/common/platform';
import * as browser from 'vs/base/browser/browser';
import { CommonEditorConfiguration, IEnvConfiguration } from 'vs/editor/common/config/commonEditorConfig';
import { IDimension } from 'vs/editor/common/editorCommon';
import { FontInfo, BareFontInfo } from 'vs/editor/common/config/fontInfo';
import { ElementSizeObserver } from 'vs/editor/browser/config/elementSizeObserver';
import { FastDomNode } from 'vs/base/browser/fastDomNode';
import { CharWidthRequest, CharWidthRequestType, readCharWidths } from 'vs/editor/browser/config/charWidthReader';
import { IStorageService, StorageScope } from 'vs/platform/storage/common/storage';
import { IEditorOptions } from 'vs/editor/common/config/editorOptions';

class CSSBasedConfigurationCache {

	private _keys: { [key: string]: BareFontInfo; };
	private _values: { [key: string]: FontInfo; };

	constructor() {
		this._keys = Object.create(null);
		this._values = Object.create(null);
	}

	public has(item: BareFontInfo): boolean {
		let itemId = item.getId();
		return !!this._values[itemId];
	}

	public get(item: BareFontInfo): FontInfo {
		let itemId = item.getId();
		return this._values[itemId];
	}

	public put(item: BareFontInfo, value: FontInfo): void {
		let itemId = item.getId();
		this._keys[itemId] = item;
		this._values[itemId] = value;
	}

	public remove(item: BareFontInfo): void {
		let itemId = item.getId();
		delete this._keys[itemId];
		delete this._values[itemId];
	}

	public getValues(): FontInfo[] {
		return Object.keys(this._keys).map(id => this._values[id]);
	}
}

export function readFontInfo(bareFontInfo: BareFontInfo): FontInfo {
	return CSSBasedConfiguration.INSTANCE.readConfiguration(bareFontInfo);
}

export function restoreFontInfo(storageService: IStorageService): void {
	let strStoredFontInfo = storageService.get('editorFontInfo', StorageScope.GLOBAL);
	if (typeof strStoredFontInfo !== 'string') {
		return;
	}
	let storedFontInfo: ISerializedFontInfo[] | null = null;
	try {
		storedFontInfo = JSON.parse(strStoredFontInfo);
	} catch (err) {
		return;
	}
	if (!Array.isArray(storedFontInfo)) {
		return;
	}
	CSSBasedConfiguration.INSTANCE.restoreFontInfo(storedFontInfo);
}

export function saveFontInfo(storageService: IStorageService): void {
	let knownFontInfo = CSSBasedConfiguration.INSTANCE.saveFontInfo();
	storageService.store('editorFontInfo', JSON.stringify(knownFontInfo), StorageScope.GLOBAL);
}

export interface ISerializedFontInfo {
	readonly zoomLevel: number;
	readonly fontFamily: string;
	readonly fontWeight: string;
	readonly fontSize: number;
	readonly lineHeight: number;
	readonly letterSpacing: number;
	readonly isMonospace: boolean;
	readonly typicalHalfwidthCharacterWidth: number;
	readonly typicalFullwidthCharacterWidth: number;
	readonly canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow: boolean;
	readonly spaceWidth: number;
	readonly maxDigitWidth: number;
}

class CSSBasedConfiguration extends Disposable {

	public static readonly INSTANCE = new CSSBasedConfiguration();

	private _cache: CSSBasedConfigurationCache;
	private _evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout: any;

	private _onDidChange = this._register(new Emitter<void>());
	public readonly onDidChange: Event<void> = this._onDidChange.event;

	constructor() {
		super();

		this._cache = new CSSBasedConfigurationCache();
		this._evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout = -1;
	}

	public dispose(): void {
		if (this._evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout !== -1) {
			clearTimeout(this._evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout);
			this._evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout = -1;
		}
		super.dispose();
	}

	private _writeToCache(item: BareFontInfo, value: FontInfo): void {
		this._cache.put(item, value);

		if (!value.isTrusted && this._evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout === -1) {
			// Try reading again after some time
			this._evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout = setTimeout(() => {
				this._evictUntrustedReadingsTimeout = -1;
				this._evictUntrustedReadings();
			}, 5000);
		}
	}

	private _evictUntrustedReadings(): void {
		let values = this._cache.getValues();
		let somethingRemoved = false;
		for (let i = 0, len = values.length; i < len; i++) {
			let item = values[i];
			if (!item.isTrusted) {
				somethingRemoved = true;
				this._cache.remove(item);
			}
		}
		if (somethingRemoved) {
			this._onDidChange.fire();
		}
	}

	public saveFontInfo(): ISerializedFontInfo[] {
		// Only save trusted font info (that has been measured in this running instance)
		return this._cache.getValues().filter(item => item.isTrusted);
	}

	public restoreFontInfo(savedFontInfo: ISerializedFontInfo[]): void {
		// Take all the saved font info and insert them in the cache without the trusted flag.
		// The reason for this is that a font might have been installed on the OS in the meantime.
		for (let i = 0, len = savedFontInfo.length; i < len; i++) {
			let fontInfo = new FontInfo(savedFontInfo[i], false);
			this._writeToCache(fontInfo, fontInfo);
		}
	}

	public readConfiguration(bareFontInfo: BareFontInfo): FontInfo {
		if (!this._cache.has(bareFontInfo)) {
			let readConfig = CSSBasedConfiguration._actualReadConfiguration(bareFontInfo);

			if (readConfig.typicalHalfwidthCharacterWidth <= 2 || readConfig.typicalFullwidthCharacterWidth <= 2 || readConfig.spaceWidth <= 2 || readConfig.maxDigitWidth <= 2) {
				// Hey, it's Bug 14341 ... we couldn't read
				readConfig = new FontInfo({
					zoomLevel: browser.getZoomLevel(),
					fontFamily: readConfig.fontFamily,
					fontWeight: readConfig.fontWeight,
					fontSize: readConfig.fontSize,
					lineHeight: readConfig.lineHeight,
					letterSpacing: readConfig.letterSpacing,
					isMonospace: readConfig.isMonospace,
					typicalHalfwidthCharacterWidth: Math.max(readConfig.typicalHalfwidthCharacterWidth, 5),
					typicalFullwidthCharacterWidth: Math.max(readConfig.typicalFullwidthCharacterWidth, 5),
					canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow: readConfig.canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow,
					spaceWidth: Math.max(readConfig.spaceWidth, 5),
					maxDigitWidth: Math.max(readConfig.maxDigitWidth, 5),
				}, false);
			}

			this._writeToCache(bareFontInfo, readConfig);
		}
		return this._cache.get(bareFontInfo);
	}

	private static createRequest(chr: string, type: CharWidthRequestType, all: CharWidthRequest[], monospace: CharWidthRequest[] | null): CharWidthRequest {
		let result = new CharWidthRequest(chr, type);
		all.push(result);
		if (monospace) {
			monospace.push(result);
		}
		return result;
	}

	private static _actualReadConfiguration(bareFontInfo: BareFontInfo): FontInfo {
		let all: CharWidthRequest[] = [];
		let monospace: CharWidthRequest[] = [];

		const typicalHalfwidthCharacter = this.createRequest('n', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const typicalFullwidthCharacter = this.createRequest('\uff4d', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, null);
		const space = this.createRequest(' ', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit0 = this.createRequest('0', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit1 = this.createRequest('1', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit2 = this.createRequest('2', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit3 = this.createRequest('3', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit4 = this.createRequest('4', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit5 = this.createRequest('5', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit6 = this.createRequest('6', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit7 = this.createRequest('7', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit8 = this.createRequest('8', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const digit9 = this.createRequest('9', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);

		// monospace test: used for whitespace rendering
		const rightwardsArrow = this.createRequest('→', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		const halfwidthRightwardsArrow = this.createRequest('→', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, null);

		this.createRequest('·', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);

		// monospace test: some characters
		this.createRequest('|', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('/', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('-', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('_', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('i', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('l', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('m', CharWidthRequestType.Regular, all, monospace);

		// monospace italic test
		this.createRequest('|', CharWidthRequestType.Italic, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('_', CharWidthRequestType.Italic, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('i', CharWidthRequestType.Italic, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('l', CharWidthRequestType.Italic, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('m', CharWidthRequestType.Italic, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('n', CharWidthRequestType.Italic, all, monospace);

		// monospace bold test
		this.createRequest('|', CharWidthRequestType.Bold, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('_', CharWidthRequestType.Bold, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('i', CharWidthRequestType.Bold, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('l', CharWidthRequestType.Bold, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('m', CharWidthRequestType.Bold, all, monospace);
		this.createRequest('n', CharWidthRequestType.Bold, all, monospace);

		readCharWidths(bareFontInfo, all);

		const maxDigitWidth = Math.max(digit0.width, digit1.width, digit2.width, digit3.width, digit4.width, digit5.width, digit6.width, digit7.width, digit8.width, digit9.width);

		let isMonospace = true;
		let referenceWidth = monospace[0].width;
		for (let i = 1, len = monospace.length; i < len; i++) {
			const diff = referenceWidth - monospace[i].width;
			if (diff < -0.001 || diff > 0.001) {
				isMonospace = false;
				break;
			}
		}

		let canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow = true;
		if (isMonospace && halfwidthRightwardsArrow.width !== referenceWidth) {
			// using a halfwidth rightwards arrow would break monospace...
			canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow = false;
		}
		if (halfwidthRightwardsArrow.width > rightwardsArrow.width) {
			// using a halfwidth rightwards arrow would paint a larger arrow than a regular rightwards arrow
			canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow = false;
		}

		// let's trust the zoom level only 2s after it was changed.
		const canTrustBrowserZoomLevel = (browser.getTimeSinceLastZoomLevelChanged() > 2000);
		return new FontInfo({
			zoomLevel: browser.getZoomLevel(),
			fontFamily: bareFontInfo.fontFamily,
			fontWeight: bareFontInfo.fontWeight,
			fontSize: bareFontInfo.fontSize,
			lineHeight: bareFontInfo.lineHeight,
			letterSpacing: bareFontInfo.letterSpacing,
			isMonospace: isMonospace,
			typicalHalfwidthCharacterWidth: typicalHalfwidthCharacter.width,
			typicalFullwidthCharacterWidth: typicalFullwidthCharacter.width,
			canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow: canUseHalfwidthRightwardsArrow,
			spaceWidth: space.width,
			maxDigitWidth: maxDigitWidth
		}, canTrustBrowserZoomLevel);
	}
}

export class Configuration extends CommonEditorConfiguration {

	private static _massageFontFamily(fontFamily: string): string {
		if (/[,"']/.test(fontFamily)) {
			// Looks like the font family might be already escaped
			return fontFamily;
		}
		if (/[+ ]/.test(fontFamily)) {
			// Wrap a font family using + or <space> with quotes
			return `"${fontFamily}"`;
		}

		return fontFamily;
	}

	public static applyFontInfoSlow(domNode: HTMLElement, fontInfo: BareFontInfo): void {
		domNode.style.fontFamily = Configuration._massageFontFamily(fontInfo.fontFamily);
		domNode.style.fontWeight = fontInfo.fontWeight;
		domNode.style.fontSize = fontInfo.fontSize + 'px';
		domNode.style.lineHeight = fontInfo.lineHeight + 'px';
		domNode.style.letterSpacing = fontInfo.letterSpacing + 'px';
	}

	public static applyFontInfo(domNode: FastDomNode<HTMLElement>, fontInfo: BareFontInfo): void {
		domNode.setFontFamily(Configuration._massageFontFamily(fontInfo.fontFamily));
		domNode.setFontWeight(fontInfo.fontWeight);
		domNode.setFontSize(fontInfo.fontSize);
		domNode.setLineHeight(fontInfo.lineHeight);
		domNode.setLetterSpacing(fontInfo.letterSpacing);
	}

	private readonly _elementSizeObserver: ElementSizeObserver;

	constructor(options: IEditorOptions, referenceDomElement: HTMLElement | null = null) {
		super(options);

		this._elementSizeObserver = this._register(new ElementSizeObserver(referenceDomElement, () => this._onReferenceDomElementSizeChanged()));

		this._register(CSSBasedConfiguration.INSTANCE.onDidChange(() => this._onCSSBasedConfigurationChanged()));

		if (this._validatedOptions.automaticLayout) {
			this._elementSizeObserver.startObserving();
		}

		this._register(browser.onDidChangeZoomLevel(_ => this._recomputeOptions()));
		this._register(browser.onDidChangeAccessibilitySupport(() => this._recomputeOptions()));

		this._recomputeOptions();
	}

	private _onReferenceDomElementSizeChanged(): void {
		this._recomputeOptions();
	}

	private _onCSSBasedConfigurationChanged(): void {
		this._recomputeOptions();
	}

	public observeReferenceElement(dimension?: IDimension): void {
		this._elementSizeObserver.observe(dimension);
	}

	public dispose(): void {
		super.dispose();
	}

	private _getExtraEditorClassName(): string {
		let extra = '';
		if (browser.isIE) {
			extra += 'ie ';
		} else if (browser.isFirefox) {
			extra += 'ff ';
		} else if (browser.isEdge) {
			extra += 'edge ';
		} else if (browser.isSafari) {
			extra += 'safari ';
		}
		if (platform.isMacintosh) {
			extra += 'mac ';
		}
		return extra;
	}

	protected _getEnvConfiguration(): IEnvConfiguration {
		return {
			extraEditorClassName: this._getExtraEditorClassName(),
			outerWidth: this._elementSizeObserver.getWidth(),
			outerHeight: this._elementSizeObserver.getHeight(),
			emptySelectionClipboard: browser.isWebKit || browser.isFirefox,
			pixelRatio: browser.getPixelRatio(),
			zoomLevel: browser.getZoomLevel(),
			accessibilitySupport: browser.getAccessibilitySupport()
		};
	}

	protected readConfiguration(bareFontInfo: BareFontInfo): FontInfo {
		return CSSBasedConfiguration.INSTANCE.readConfiguration(bareFontInfo);
	}
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Silk has a luxurious past. It was worn only by nobles and merchants who could afford it. People back in the age dreamed of wearing silk clothes and sleeping in a smooth bed layered with a silk duvet.
Silk first came to the West from the Chinese. China cultivated vast silk farms which were quite popular way back in 27 Century BC. Silk was a huge rage in China then, so much so, that rules were created to prevent families from going bankrupt over it. So famous was silk that the trade route to China was named the Silk Road.
In time, China lost its hold over silk production with Arab and Western nations becoming the major silk producers. Arab nations became the first region to overtake China in its silk production, which is why you will still get the finest of silks from the Arab region. The Western nations later learned to industrialize silk creation using spinning wheels. However, China is back on its game today and is the largest producer of silk.
Do you know diamonds can become a surplus resource? Science has found a way to create industrial grade diamonds. However, similar efforts have been made with silk, only to meet with failure.
The process of producing silk gives you a completely natural material. Silk is made from the cocoons of silkworms. Cocoons are dissolved in boiling hot water and from there, silk threads are extracted. As of today, there is no artificial process to create silk. It is completely natural and that just makes it very, very special.
Thankfully, we are not in the old ages where you would have to sell off your wealth for silk. It's quite affordable. People today generally wear it in their attire, but you know where silk is best used? On the bed!
Not only will your bed be more comfortable with silk sheets, duvets and pillow cases, comforts not reason enough. Here are a few more reasons why you should have silk bedding.
Bed Bugs and Dust Mites cannot permeate into silk . Keeping these critters away from you while you sleep minimizes symptoms of allergies and breathing problems of asthma.
Traditional cotton or synthetic bedding, due to its chemical creation may have a negative effect on your skin, creating rashes or working up allergies. Silk has hypoallergenic features which mean that it is superb in preventing and fighting allergies.
Silk bedding is created using a process of layering every silk thread on top of each other. This creates an elaborate grid structure for your duvet which is essential in heat regulation. While the fibers allow heat to be trapped adequately, excess heat is allowed to escape through the openings in the grid structure.
Silk is stronger than your ordinary industrial made thread. With the grid structure, your silk bedding will last longer and will not tear easily.
Sleep on silk and you will be sleeping in the lap of centuries-proven luxury!
Luxeport was established in 2004 by Barbara who felt that there was a need for healthy allergy free bedding that was amazingly comfortable to sleep with. Her first product to come off the assembly line were silk filled duvets. These were so successful, other products were soon added. The company quickly expanded and Luxeport products are now scattered throughout North America in Department Stores, Independent Retailers, Hotels and Health Care facilities. Luxeport is passionate about duvets and have put years of product research and experience into everything they sell. They work closely with manufacturers and suppliers to ensure every duvet meets uncompromised standards, guaranteeing exceptional and healthy bedding choices. Luxeport products are made using only the finest A grade silk. Silk is naturally hypoallergenic so it is not only the ultimate in luxury but also a healthy alternative to traditional bedding. Barbara believes the best way to make you happy and keep you happy is by making sure you get great products, at great prices from a company that is easy to do business with. We make this happen by keeping things simple, pure and healthy.


Yowza! Have we been buried in mail!
Ever since Elf Frank interviewed Elf Crash the other day and Crash speculated that if Santa isn't around someone else would deliver for him our phones have been ringing off the hook and the mail coming into the North Pole Post Office has been off the charts.
Let me be clear right now: I don't think Santa plans on missing Christmas. Yes, I know Santa is missing. And I know he hasn't been around for months. But he said he would be back and I trust in that. So I personally don't think there is anything to this rumor.
But Elf Crash is pretty certain that Santa has a plan in place if he can't be here. And wait til you hear who he thinks will take Santa's place if Santa can't be here this year.
It will blow you away. Click the player below to listen!


text:
90-year-old Margaret Keenan is the first person in the U.K. to receive the COVID-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.
A historic day in the fight against the pandemic. In the United Kingdom, the first doses of Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine were distributed this morning, making Britain the first country to rollout the vaccine.
Take a look at this — this image is sure to be in history textbooks.
That's Margaret Keenan. The 90-year-old grandmother was the first person to receive a dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
And she says others should get it too.
Margaret Keenan: "I would say go for it. Go for it because it's free and it's the best thing that's ever happened at the moment so do please go for it. That's all I say, you know? If I can do it well, so can you."
Nurses lining the hall to applaud her on her way out. People over the age of 80 and those working in nursing homes are first in line to receive it. It's a two-dose vaccine, with a second shot required three weeks after the first.
Germany Passes One Million Cases, Could Be Under Lockdown Until Spring

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


With the adaptable, ergonomic mattress YUNO wants to become the worldwide reference for a 100% correct sleeping posture.
Because we want to ensure you get the perfect sleep.
Sleeping is one of the living needs of humankind and just as important as food and drinks. It is scientifically proven that sleep is indispensable for a good health. By sleeping, we can restore both mentally and physically. A wrong attitude at sleep is often caused by the use of a bad mattress and/or pillow. Result: neck and back problems and sleep deprivation.
We realize you cannot see the wood for the trees anymore due to the oversupply in sleeping systems.
That is why we want to help you with a mattress that is perfect for you.
Traditional mattresses are made for the average person, who does not exist.
The YUNO mattress, on the other hand, has been developed for the unique person.
Even the YUNO pillow is tailor-made. To this end, YUNO has followed a scientific process.
Take measurements and enter the results.
The programme recommends the type of mattress and the inlay that fits my body.
My mattress is ready. YUNO guarantees me a 100% correct sleeping posture.
Three combined strips or pads of different,well-chosen Naturalis® High Resilience foams. Each pad supports one of the zones that determine a correct sleeping posture; shoulders, waist and hips.
The inlay is always interchangeable.
YUNO guarantees me a 100% correct sleeping posture.
A five year's scientific project forms the basis of the YUNO concept. Together with Yuno, Custom8, a spin-off of the KU Leuven University, Department of Biomechanics, developed both the measuring system and the mattress composition with the different inlays.
Can be done on my PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone or at the YUNO advice point.


text:
Suntory to discontinue Hibiki 17 and Hakushu 12
16th May, 2018 by Melita Kiely
Suntory has confirmed it will discontinue its Hibiki 17 Year Old and Hakushu 12 Year Old Japanese whiskies "at some point" after this year due to stock shortages.
Hibiki 17 Year Old and Hakushu 12 Year Old will be discontinued after 2018
Japanese whisky has experienced a renaissance in recent years but as demand has soared, producers have struggled to sustain supplies – particularly age-stated liquid.
As a result, Suntory will stop selling its Hibiki 17 Year Old blend and Hakushu 12 Year Old single malt in certain markets from 2019, and limit availability of the whiskies over the next few years.
These timings may not be applicable to markets outside of Japan, however, due to shipping time lags and inventory differences.
A spokesperson for Beam Suntory said: "As demand for our Japanese whisky portfolio continues to increase, Suntory has made strong investments to increase production capacity and ensure we are primed for continued long-term growth and category leadership.
"In the meantime, due to supply constraints of certain aged whiskies, Hibiki 17 Year Old and Hakushu 12 Year Old will be discontinued in markets at some point after this year, and will have limited availability in the next few years."
Suntory Holdings apologised to whisky fans for the temporary discontinuation.
A spokesperson for the group said: "We are very sorry for the temporary discontinuation. We have already invested on the distillery and warehouse, and we will continue various investments to meet the market demand."
In 2016, Suntory's CEO Takeshi Ninami said it could take up to a decade for Beam Suntory's Japanese whisky distilleries to meet demand from consumers and retailers.
Japan-based Suntory acquired US-based Beam for US$16 billion in 2014 to create Beam Suntory.


Each canvas will arrive with edges taped and include two needles by the artist as well as a brief how-to to get you started! Please allow 2-3 weeks to ship. In the event that you need the canvas sooner, fill out our contact form with availability inquiry.


Born on October 7, 1959 .
This memorial website was created in memory of our loved one, John Nardelli 53 years old , born on October 7, 1959 and passed away on September 13, 2013. We will remember him forever.
John may be gone Mary but he isn't forgotten. You and Steven keeps your heads up high.
Today you would of been 59. I miss you so much. I know that you're up there celebrating your birthday with our son Christopher. I can't wait until I see both of you again. I love you both so much.
so sorry for you loss and pain. I hope and pray time will ease the pain for you.
I miss you so much. Its just not the same without you. The pain never goes away. I know that one day I will see you and our son Christopher again.


School Telemedicine in Arkansas (STAR) is the first ever effort to bring telemedicine care to Arkansas's rural School Based Health Centers (SBHC) by providing real-time on-the-spot care. The STAR program began September 1, 2016 and is a four year grant funded through HRSA (Health Resource Service Administration) and is a partnership between the UAMS Center for Distance Health and the Arkansas Department of Education. The SBHCs included in the grant are Jasper Magazine Malvern and Lamar. The STAR grant includes three programs: HealthyNOW!, Behavioral Health, and Oral Health.


If you have a thing you want to do, never, ever give up it.
Because you have to look after yourself.
Respect your feelings and enjoy it to your heart's content.
If you do that, you will understand that you can satisfy yourself and feel happy anytime.
Previous Previous post: Accept all your feelings.


Non-conformally flat spacetimes admitting a non-null Killing spinor of valence 2 are investigated in the Geroch-Held-Penrose formalism. Contrary to popular belief these spacetimes are not all explicitly known. It is shown that the standard construction hinges on the tacit assumption that certain integrability conditions hold, implying two algebraic relations, KS1 and KS2, for the spin coefficients and the components of the Ricci spinor. An exhaustive list of (conformal classes of) spacetimes, in which either KS1 or KS2 are violated, is presented. The resulting spacetimes are each other's Sachs transforms, in general admit no Killing vectors and are characterized by a single arbitrary function.
Van den Bergh, Norbert. 2010. "Two Special Classes of Spacetimes Admitting a Non-null Valence 2 Killing Spinor." Classical and Quantum Gravity 27 (1).
Van den Bergh, N. (2010). Two special classes of spacetimes admitting a non-null valence 2 Killing spinor. CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY, 27(1).
Van den Bergh N. Two special classes of spacetimes admitting a non-null valence 2 Killing spinor. CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY. 2010;27(1).
Van den Bergh, Norbert. "Two Special Classes of Spacetimes Admitting a Non-null Valence 2 Killing Spinor." CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY 27.1 (2010): n. pag. Print.


SLEFI Awards Resident Services Grants - St. Louis Equity Fund, Inc.
SLEFI announced the availability of grant funding for resident services programs and accepted grant applications in October 2018. Grants of up to $2,500 per property were available to SLEFI's 501(c)(3) non-profit managing and development partners and had to be used for the acitivites of the residents residing in LIHTC properties in which SLEFI has invested. SLEFI received many grant applications which included funding for excersise equipment, computers, bus passes, rent and utility assistance and assistance with job training. Based upon staff recommendations, SLEFI awarded grants totaling approximately $15,600 spread among 11 partners. Thanks to all of our partners who submitteed a grant application – we hope the services provided by these funds will have a positive impact in our residents' lives.


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Home Originals
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A World in Crisis?
Archaeological and Epigraphical Perspectives on the Late Bronze Age (13th c. B.C.) Mediterranean Systems' Collapse: a case study approach.
The years surrounding 1200 B.C. were, for the Eastern Mediterranean, a period of turmoil and crisis, a pivotal period during which significant Aegean, Cypriot, Anatolian and Levantine centres were devastated and the Hittite empire collapsed, developments variously blamed on economic or environmental disasters, invasions or social unrest. Egypt was attacked by a coalition of people known from contemporary epigraphic sources as the Sea Peoples, a loose confederation of ethnic units often linked with the Aegean and Central Mediterranean. In the Aegean basin, including coastal Anatolia, there follows a long period of abandonment, cultural stagnation and decreased social complexity, conventionally called the Dark Ages (1200-800 B.C.), during which literacy, monumental and figurative art and complex socio-political systems almost entirely disappeared. However, this epoch also brings a series of innovations in material culture and social and political organisation that herald the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age, particularly in the Levant. Still, what precisely triggered off these developments remains a major historical problem. The present project is a bottom-up approach proposing to examine one archaeological case-study in full detail – the island of Crete during the 13th century B.C. – set against the historical framework provided by the written sources of contemporary Eastern Mediterranean societies. We focus on the period that precedes and culminates in the turmoil and a region which may have felt its first effects and/or contributed to it. One advantage of such an approach is that it avoids traditional, circular arguments since the implications of the outcomes of the respective sources (archaeological for Crete, written for the Eastern Mediterranean) are not considered together till the final stages of the project and even then their relevance will be demonstrated rather than assumed. It implies on the one hand detailed site-based analyses and multi-faceted investigations of the extant archaeological and environmental sources of 13thc. B.C. Crete to fine-tune developments both from a diachronic and synchronic point of view, and on the other hand, a characterisation of Eastern Mediterranean sources with a specific focus on the possible preconditions or inciting incidents that may have led to the social instability and vulnerability resulting in the devastating disruptions and dispersals of populations that so wracked the region at the end of the century. Both approaches take place against the background of a re-examination of the relevance of crisis studies for archaeology and historical studies. In a period of rapid and global change, the awareness of specific historical contexts that ultimately shaped historical processes that are still relevant nowadays serves to underline archaeology's contribution to present societal discourse.
For a full historical introduction, see here
Mysterious Marauders – The Sea Peoples – do we need them?
Prelude to a Crisis or Precursors of Collapse?


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" Surviving the E-Voting Titanic "
Surviving the E-Voting Titanic
Democracy's need for lifeboats in the form of hand-marked paper ballots...
By Ernest A. Canning on 8/30/2019, 9:35am PT
Like those who took part in the ill-fated maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic as it blindly traversed the Atlantic, many American citizens are rushing headlong towards a pivotal 2020 election, unmindful of the potential for yet another e-voting catastrophe.
In 1912, in defiance of science, passengers and crew mistakenly believed that the Titanic was "unsinkable". In 2019, far too many Americans are either unaware of or have chosen to ignore repeated warnings from computer scientists. For many, the very idea that a Presidential selection could be the product of election fraud or failure in the form of undetectable, malicious manipulation or error of electronically tabulated ballots in disparate local, county and state-run election systems across an entire nation is simply unthinkable.
In 1912, ignoring the danger led to the deaths of 1,500 of the Titanic's 2,224 passengers and crew --- paltry numbers when measured against the threat to humanity's very survival that would be embodied in another four years of the Trump Administration's greed-over-science, anti-environmental policies.
Over the past two decades, the central problem for both computer scientists and election integrity advocates has not been the question as to whether all e-voting and electronic tabulation systems are vulnerable to manipulation via external hacks, mis-programming or malicious insider manipulations --- they are! Instead, they've been stymied by the near impossible task of proving that a given election result was fraudulent. That inability is occasioned by the fact that, in the absence of timely forensic access to the system, its ballot programming and its source codes, electronic theft is largely undetectable in any system that does not deploy hand-marked paper ballots.
While e-voting vulnerabilities to all manner of manipulation, as well as unintended programming errors, have always been present, both the threat of wholesale electronic theft and the dire consequences of that threat in 2020 have never been greater.
Fortunately, just as help for the surviving Titanic passengers and crew was just over the horizon in the form of the HMS Carpathia, democracy itself may be saved as the result of the valiant efforts by the Coalition for Good Governance ("the Coalition") to help compel the State of Georgia to conduct verifiable elections on hand-marked paper ballots. The help may not only save Georgia, but save the entire country, eventually, as evidenced by the extraordinarily well-informed 153-page ruling [PDF] that was recently handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg…
Systemic vulnerabilities
As we warned in 2017, there are some basic election integrity truths that need to be understood.
The first basic election integrity truth, as The BRAD BLOG reported in 2009, following a stark presentation by a U.S. intelligence officer to the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), the nation's only federal agency at the time devoted to overseeing the use of electronic voting and tabulation systems, is that all electronically stored and/or processed data --- registration records, poll books, ballot definition scripts and, most importantly, computerized vote tabulators --- are vulnerable to malicious cyber intrusions.
The second basic truth is that election system vulnerability is not confined only to malicious hackers. All electronic vote tabulation systems are vulnerable to malicious manipulation by insiders, whether by elections officials or the private contractors they hire to oversee state, local and federal elections.
Those basics were recently reiterated in an academic paper [PDF], authored by computer scientists, Andrew W. Appel (Princeton), Richard A. DeMillo (Georgia Tech) and Phillip B. Stark (U.C. Berkeley). That academic paper addressed the vulnerabilities on the newest form of e-voting systems --- currently being deployed in jurisdictions across the country, many in key battleground states, in advance of 2020 --- known as touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs).
BMD-generated "paper trails" are not reliable because they cannot be known after an election to reflect the intent of any voter.
"Every computer in every system," the authors of the paper released this past May observed, "is vulnerable to compromise through hacking, insider attacks or exploiting design flaws." This is true with respect to Direct Recording Electronic (DREs) --- usually touchscreen machines, which are 100% unverifiable with or without a so-called "paper trail". That vulnerability also exists with respect to BMDs, which are essentially expensive electronic pencils. A voter uses a touchscreen to express their selections to the computer, which then uses a printer to mark a paper ballot --- with a human-unreadable barcode and/or human-readable selections --- to be subsequently tallied by yet another computer system, an optical-scanner.
"Like any computer," Appel et al observe, "a BMD is vulnerable to hacking, installation of unauthorized software and alteration of installed software."
Those vulnerabilities are especially troubling in the case of BMDs that produce paper printouts bearing "human unreadable" barcodes, which are, according to the computer scientists, "impossible to verify":
Any coded input into a computer system poses the risk that the input-processing software can be vulnerable to attack via deliberately ill-informed input. In the worst-case scenario, an attacker could gain complete control of the system. If an attacker were able to compromise a BMD, the barcodes [can serve as] an attack vector for the attacker to take over an optical scanner too.
These forms of illicit manipulation can go undetected during pre-election "logic and accuracy testing" because BMDs, like DREs, "can be programmed to behave properly when they are tested and misbehave in use." That is what Volkswagen was caught doing for years in 2015 with their so-called "clean diesel" automobiles. When the vehicles sensed they were being tested in the garage they gave one value to emissions testers. But, once on the road, they emitted pollutants at levels as high as 150 times that of normal cars.
Recently, Wired's Kim Zetter debunked the claim made by BMD vendor, ES&S, that its systems were safe because its BMDs are "air gapped" --- essentially, disconnected from the Internet. Researchers, Zetter observed, discovered "nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states connected to the internet in the last year, including some in critical swing states". [Listen to Brad Friedman's chilling BradCast interview with Zetter on that here.]
Those findings mirrored an earlier revelation that prior and subsequent to the pivotal 2016 Presidential Election, the computer servers used to administer Georgia's 100% unverifiable Diebold touchscreen DRE voting system --- including administrative passwords --- had been left wide open where anyone could access them on the Internet.
Hoping to retrieve a few documents that would facilitate an understanding of the security procedures utilized by Georgia's election administrator, in August of 2016, Logan Lamb, a 29-year old former cybersecurity researcher at the U.S. Oakridge National Laboratory, logged onto Georgia's elections website and wrote an automated script to scrape information from the site; then left for lunch. When he returned, Lamb discovered he'd retrieved what Zetter described as a "mother load": 15 gigabytes of data that included "registration records for the state's 6.7 million voters; multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central server on Election Day," and access to the database of GEMS, the computer election management system which, among other tasks, is used to "tabulate votes and produce summaries of vote totals."
Per Appel et al, vulnerabilities to external hacks exist even when a system has been air-gapped. "Before each election," they noted, "administrators must transfer ballot definition into the voting machine by inserting a ballot definition cartridge that is programmed on election-administration computers that may have been connected previously to various networks". As a result, "vote-changing viruses can propagate via ballot-definition cartridges" even on voting machines that officials claim are never connected to the Internet.
Central tabulation vulnerability
It's vital to understand that e-voting vulnerabilities are not confined to the machines people vote on, either when they are warehoused or operated at the precinct level. A malicious hacker could potentially effectuate wholesale changes to vote totals whenever the tabulations are transmitted over the Internet or at any other moment when the computers which program them may be accessible via the net.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) attempted to address that issue when he introduced the Protecting America Votes and Elections (PAVE) Act of 2019, which would, according to Zetter, "effectively ban transmission of votes via modem and prohibit connecting any election-reporting or election-management system to the internet or to a telecommunications network at any time."
The risk, of course, is not confined to hacking. There remains, for example, a distinct possibility that the 2004 Presidential Election may have been stolen as a result of a man-in-the-middle attack that altered the vote totals in Ohio via the diversion of e-voting data from the Ohio Secretary of State's office to a Republican operative's server in TN before it was posted on the Buckeye State's elections result website.
One could hear an echo of the concerns surrounding the possibility that the 2004 election was stolen in the recent revelation that, according to Marilyn Marks, the Executive Director of the Coalition for Good Governance, Georgia outsourced its election management "to three people operating in a garage" for its still-controversial 2018 elections.
Vote flipping
Judge Totenberg's decision to prevent GA from using their 100% unverifiable touchscreen DREs in 2020 (and thereafter) was based, in part, upon the sworn affidavits from 137 voters, poll workers and election officials, who described multiple problems, including "self-casting ballots, DRE machine malfunctions, voters' candidate selections flipping to other candidates on the DRE screens, and ballots being cast without a chance for the voter to review his or her selection."
Totenberg detailed a number of instances in which votes in the 2018 GA Governor's race intended to be cast for Democrat Stacy Abrams were flipped on-screen to Kemp, the Republican. For some voters, it was necessary to delete and recast the vote three times before the machine appeared to record the vote as intended. On other occasions, voters, with poll worker assistance, had to start the process over from scratch before their votes could be registered onscreen for Abrams. (Whether those votes were actually tabulated internally by the computer itself for Abrams is a separate --- and unknowable --- question.)
Some of the malfunctioning machines were taken out of service, resulting in long lines and people leaving the polls without voting, Totenberg observed, adding that no voter who saw their votes flipped onscreen "could verify whether their intended votes for particular candidates were actually cast as the DREs in use provide no audit trail or printout for voters to review for confirmation purposes."
Willful destruction of likely incriminating e-data
In a recently filed legal brief [PDF], the Coalition alleged that the Georgia Secretary of State's Office deliberately deleted electronically stored information from its servers and devices after the 2016, 2017 and 2018 elections, in order to prevent expert inspection and analysis. By wiping, deleting and overriding that electronically stored data, Georgia's election officials destroyed "evidence that could establish vulnerability, unauthorized access by malicious actors, and possible result-changing manipulation of Georgia's election system," the Coalition alleged.
The Coalition's brief observed while we'll never know for certain what the destroyed evidence would have established, "the inescapable inference is that the [deleted] evidence...was of such a nature that the State Defendants made sure that it could never be seen" --- an allegation that suggests the evidence was deliberately destroyed to prevent a revelation that Georgia's election results from elections conducted between November 2016 and November 2018 might have been the product of electronic theft.
While Judge Totenberg has, as yet, not ruled on the question of spoliation of evidence --- a ruling that could allow the court to assume the worst about what was deliberately deleted --- in her preliminary injunction ruling, she not only rejected the contention made by the Georgia Secretary of State's Office that the servers had merely been "repurposed" for some other use, but also noted that "this course of conduct cast a disturbing shadow on Defendants' posture here," euphemistically chiding "Defendants' inconsistent candor with the Court". Totenberg's observation came after the Coalition, in a Reply Brief [PDF], argued that the Defendants' use of the word "repurpose" was nothing short of Orwellian. "Repurposing," the Coalition argued, "is code for wiping servers and destroying data, much like shredding documents 'repurposes' them into trash."
E-Vote Tabulation Lifeboats: Hand-marked paper ballots
Perhaps the only truly verifiable solution to all forms of 21st century e-voting insecurities can be found in a relatively simple and inexpensive 19th century technology: hand-marked paper ballots, publicly hand-tallied with the results posted at each precinct on election night before ballots and tallies are sent off to central county headquarters. That ideal solution, Democracy's Gold Standard, was applied by Germany's highest court in 2009 after it banned all forms of e-vote tabulation because they lack transparency and the possibility for public oversight of result tabulation.
As reflected by the Appel et al academic paper, many election integrity advocates see Democracy's Gold Standard as time consuming. Their solution is the use of hand-marked paper ballots that can be optically scanned and tallied, together with a post-election "Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA) --- manually inspecting randomly selected paper ballots following a rigorous protocol. The audit stops if and when the sample provides convincing evidence that the reported outcome is correct."
Under that second scenario, hand-marked paper ballots --- preserved by a secure chain of custody after the election --- essentially serve as democracy's life boats. They provide the ultimate source of verifiable outcomes, which is the apparent reason that Senator Wyden included a proposed mandate that all federal elections be conducted on hand-marked paper ballots (other than for disabled voters who may need assistive devices) in the PAVE Act.
If passed, PAVE, allowing for a hand-marked paper ballot for every voter in the country, could all but eliminate the risk of a stolen 2020 Presidential Election.
Unfortunately, to date, the legislation has been bottled up in the Senate. There's no indication that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will permit a vote on the PAVE Act, despite a bill with a similar mandate already passed on a bipartisan basis in the U.S. House.
Unique incentive
There are several factors that suggest the risk of a stolen Presidential election is greater in 2020 than in any previous election.
We have, in the person of Donald J. Trump, a pathological liar, who, according to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, could face a criminal indictment the moment he leaves office. Thus, from his perspective, there's a great deal more at stake than simply losing the power of the Presidency.
This past June, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that sophisticated Russian hackers targeted election systems in all 50 states during the 2016 election. While the Intelligence Community and the FBI have insisted they have seen no evidence that votes were changed, as revealed by the case brought before Judge Totenberg in GA, there is simply no scientific way that anyone in those agencies could know that with any degree of certainty.
Indeed, when asked by Wyden, during a June 21, 2017 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, whether "the Department conducted any kind of post-election forensics on the voting machines that were used in 2016," Homeland Security's Jeannette Manfra, a top-level cybersecurity official, conceded: "We have not. Our Department has not conducted forensics on specific voting machines."
While the number of jurisdictions that utilize easily hacked and 100% unverifiable DREs had been dwindling, last year, according to attorney and hand-marked paper ballot advocate Jennifer Cohen, a number of states and counties were "flocking to buy" the unverifiable, touchscreen barcode BMDs.
In the case of Georgia, the sequence of delay, obfuscation and timing suggest that Kemp and a GOP-controlled legislature could see that the handwriting was on the wall. Given the scope of information that was before the federal District Court, an order barring the continued use of 100% unverifiable DREs was inevitable. They appear to have turned to BMDs, via a $107 million contract with Dominion Voting Systems, in order to prevent the one thing Kemp seems to fear most: a verifiable election conducted on hand-marked paper ballots.
While much has been made of Kemp's resort to voter suppression tactics, the mainstream media has paid scant attention to the distinct possibility that the 2018 GA Governor's race --- which he oversaw as Secretary of State before certifying himself as the Peach State's new Governor --- may have been electronically stolen.
But it isn't just the minority of states utilizing unverifiable DREs that are of concern. Los Angeles County, CA, which accounts for the nation's largest single block of voters, decided to move to expensive, unverifiable touchscreen BMDs, at a cost of some $300 million, in advance of the 2020 Presidential election. So has Philadelphia, in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, and many others.
It would be a silly question to ask whether Trump, who previously admitted he'd accept Russian help to get reelected, would be unscrupulous enough to electronically steal the 2020 election if he and his unscrupulous foreign and domestic allies could get away with it. The real question is whether they'd be so brazen as to seek to flip what would otherwise be a lopsided defeat in a heavily Democratic-leaning jurisdiction like L.A. County? If they did, there would likely be little chance of the theft ever being discovered on the questionable new systems currently being rolled out before the 2020 primary elections.
The constitutional principle that formed the basis for Judge Totenberg's August 15 decision in Georgia was a recognition that voters have a fundamental right to not only cast a vote but also to have their votes accurately counted. The decision formally recognized that a state's use of the 100% unverifiable GEMS/DRE touchscreens over these past 17-years has resulted in --- and, if continued, will continue to inflict --- irreparable harms not only to voters but to democracy, itself.
Totenberg's injunction was limited to the use of Georgia's GEMS/DRE voting system. The court did not enjoin the installation of a new, unverifiable touchscreen BMD system, according to Marks, because that issue had not been raised in the Coalition's motion for a preliminary injunction. Georgia had formally selected their new system only after the hearing on the motion and just a week before the judge issued her order. Both the language in the decision and, according to an interview with Marks on the day of issuance, Judge Totenberg's comments over the course of multiple hearings, suggest that the court will be receptive to a motion to prevent the use of BMDs as well, if the need for the additional injunction is factually established. Marks says the Coalition will "absolutely" be filing such a motion.
The Coalition, along with the Constitution Party of Georgia, then submitted a petition to GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger. The petition contains a demand for Raffensberger to re-examine the Dominion touchscreen BMD (bar coded) voting system that he certified on August 9. The Coalition alleges that the Dominion BMD system is fundamentally flawed and that the Secretary violated GA election laws and rules by rushing to certify it without first obtaining a report from an appointed expert after performance of legally mandated security and functionality testing and evaluation. The Coalition additionally alleged that, because it prints human unreadable bar codes, the Dominion BMDs violate GA law, as well as the U.S. Constitution.
The Coalition petition meets the criteria of a legal doctrine that requires it exhaust administrative remedies before seeking court intervention. It's now well positioned to seek an additional injunction if Raffensberger clings to his previous certification.
Published U.S. District Court decisions, unless or until overturned on appeal, can be cited as a judicial precedent in federal court cases throughout the nation. In this case, the court's (a) extensive coverage of the disastrous performance of Georgia's Diebold GEMS/DRE voting system throughout its 17 years of misuse in the Peach State, (b) its detailed discussion and factual findings with respect multiple expert studies, analysis and testimony, and (c) the court's determination that "any new system…should address democracy's need for transparent, fair, accurate and verifiable election processes that guarantee each citizen's right to cast an accountable vote," provide a bases for challenging unverifiable DREs and BMDs in every state which deployed them.
If the catastrophe of a stolen 2020 election could lead not only to the destruction of our constitutional form of representative democracy but also endanger the very survival of our species, major voting rights organizations must now step forward to challenge these electronic black holes (both DREs and BMDs) in federal courts across the nation. But they must do so promptly, or risk running afoul of the Purcell Principle --- a U.S. Supreme Court doctrine that admonishes District Courts to not hand down significant election law rulings too close to an election, lest the court's decision cause confusion and chaos at the polls.
Given the uncertainties of the legal system, We the People can't stop there.
Over the past 15 years, computer scientists and election integrity advocates, like Brad Friedman, once dubbed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as a "Paul Revere of the election integrity movement", have been sounding the alarm with respect to the dangers posed to democracy by reason of the lack of transparency and public oversight of our nation's voting systems. Those stark warnings have all too often gone unnoticed.
This article is intended as a clarion call to the America electorate. There's an iceberg dead ahead. If We the People do not rise up immediately and demand transparent elections that can be publicly overseen, that great American experiment we call democracy, like the Titanic before it, could founder and forever be lost.
* * * Ernest A. Canning is a retired attorney, author, Vietnam Veteran (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968) and a Senior Advisor to Veterans For Bernie. He has been a member of the California state bar since 1977. In addition to a juris doctor, he has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science. Follow him on twitter: @cann4ing
Article Categories: Election Irregularities, California, Election Reform, Georgia, Election Fraud, Paper Ballots Legislation, Touch-Screen DREs/BMDs, Accountability, Environment, FBI, U.S. Senate, Los Angeles, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Ron Wyden, Robert Mueller, Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams, Brad Raffensperger, Election 2019
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"Surviving the E-Voting Titanic"
(2 Responses so far...)
... Dredd said on 9/1/2019 @ 5:58 am PT...
Very, very well said Ernie.
Nomenclature is titanic too (Good Nomenclature: A Matter of Life and Death).
... Matt Froelich said on 9/2/2019 @ 3:54 pm PT...
Evil races about the world releasing havoc while Good is still awakening to the problem. I don't know that there is time to stop Evil from its triumph before Mother Nature sweeps humanity into the dustbin.


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Q: How do start a background sudo task on startup (like a daemon)? I am familiar with controlling preconfigured system daemons (as packaged by Debian) with the systemctl command. I also have a custom "service" that I start manually with:
sudo process --option

Because it runs with sudo I can't add it to the "Startup" list (that start when I log into my desktop session). In any event, I would prefer to run it:

*

*on system startup

*in the background

*as root

Ideally I would also like the option to:

*

*stop/start it from the command line (with or similarly to systemctl)

In other words, treat it like any other system daemon. How can I configure my custom service to act like a regular, preconfigured one?

A: Any recent tutorial about systemd will give you the basics about running services with systemd.
# cat /etc/systemd/system/foo.service
[Unit]
Description=myservice

[Service]
ExecStart=/path/to/myservice/executable

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then activate it:
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable myservice
# Start / Stop
systemctl start myservice
systemctl stop myservice

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Top Gear's Chris Evans Reportedly Threatened To Quit
The new Top Gearhas not had an easy time so far. There's an entire laundry list of issues regarding the show, and the latest bullet point is that new host Chris Evans reportedly threatened to quit due to interference from the BBC executives.
http://jalopnik.com/is-the-new-top…
Is The New Top Gear A Total Shitshow? Is The New Top Gear A Total Shitshow? Is The New Top Gear A Total Shitshow?
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According to reports from The Mirror, sources said executives caused Evans so much frustration with "constant interference" that he considered walking away just six months into his three-year contract. The interference likely comes as a result of trying to revamp the show—and for good reason, since the former Top Gear guys are in the midst of their own project—but a source said Evans began to wonder "if it was all worth the hassle."
Per the report, sources said Evans perceived the controlling environment to be a "lack of faith" in his decisions. From The Mirror:
Sources claimed one of the reasons for him being "driven to distraction" was BBC2 controller Kim Shillinglaw's perceived "micro-management" of the show and reluctance to give him the same free rein enjoyed by ex-host Jeremy Clarkson.
They claimed that the 49-year-old star – who remains determined to make a top-quality show – felt "drained and disheartened" after a series of heated run-ins with his BBC paymasters over the future direction of Top Gear.
There were problems among the executives too, including producer Lisa Clark and script editor Tom Ford bailing just a few months in. Shillinglaw—who left BBC last week after missing out on a new position—reportedly didn't get along with Evans and his team from the beginning, and The Mirror's source claimed Evans "just didn't feel the love coming back from certain BBC executives."
While The Mirror quotes BBC acting director Mark Linsey as stating Shillinglaw's departure "has absolutely nothing to do with Top Gear or the utter nonsense that she has been 'meddling' in the show," this is what the source had to say about Evans' time with the BBC group:
"Things got so bad that he made his feelings very clear. It was more or less a 'butt out or I'm out' situation.
"Whether he would have carried out the threat is another issue – but the message was obvious."
If anything, it sounds like there are a lot of messages being given to folks on that set. Spokespeople for both BBC and Evans declined to comment on the Top Gear matters, per The Mirror.
Photo credit: Getty Images/Frederick M. Brown/Stringer
Contact the author at alanis.king@jalopnik.com.
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We asked industry experts what the 'Uber of Healthcare' will be — here's how they responded


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National Gallery of Art Makes 4 New Hires, Including First Curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art
by Victoria L. Valentine on Jan 13, 2021 • 1:58 pm 1 Comment
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART (NGA) announced four new appointments today, including hires for three newly created positions. Kanitra Fletcher is the Washington, D.C., museum's first-ever associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic art.
Chief Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Officer Mikka Gee Conway and Eric Bruce, head of visitor experience and evaluation, are also inaugurating their positions. In addition, Nick Sharp is joining the museum as chief digital officer, filling a vacancy.
"I am thrilled to announce the appointment of these dynamic new leaders, who will help us to advance our goals to serve the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity," NGA Director Kaywin Feldman said in a statement.
"Each of our new colleagues comes to us with deep expertise in engaging audiences and inspiring curiosity about art, history, and culture. Now more than ever, we must model the America that we expect and hope for. As the nation's art museum, we must articulate and live up to our values, including excellence, empathy, diversity, inclusion, and deepening the public's understanding of art."
Conway started in September 2020, reporting directly to Feldman. She oversees diversity and serves as Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) director. An attorney with art history degrees, Conway previously worked at the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, where she was associate general counsel for six years and a founding member of the Getty's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council.
NGA joins a handful of art museums that have hired an executive focused on diversity in the wake of the racial reckoning that occurred across the nation last summer, with staff and former staff at numerous cultural institutions publicly decrying leadership for either ignoring or fomenting toxic and racist work environments. The Getty was the target of such complaints in July (and issued a response).
FLETCHER'S TENURE at the National Gallery of Art begins Feb. 1. She will focus on modern and contemporary painting and sculpture by African American artists, working within the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, while also collaborating with other curatorial departments, such as Photographs and Prints and Drawings.
She joins NGA from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she started as a curatorial assistant in 2017, and rose to associate curator. During her tenure in Houston, Fletcher handled major traveling exhibitions, including "Jack Whitten: Odyssey" and "Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power." She has also been working on "Afro-Atlantic Histories," a sprawling show organized by the Museu de Arte São Paulo (MASP). The exhibition features a vast selection of "450 works by 214 artists ranging from the 16th to 21st centuries and centered on the 'ebbs and flows' among Africa, Americas, Caribbean and also Europe.," and will be on view at MFA Houston later this year and travel to NGA in 2022.
Kanitra Fletcher joins the National Gallery of Art from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she handled major traveling exhibitions, including "Jack Whitten: Odyssey," "Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power," and the forthcoming "Afro-Atlantic Histories."
Since 2013, Fletcher has also been serving as curator of Landmarks Video, a public art program at the University of Texas at Austin. She received a BA in English literature from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, holds a masters degree in Latin American studies, art history, and Brazilian studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and earned a Ph.D. in the history of art (Black aesthetics and the avant-garde) from Cornell University (2019).
NGA's collection of African American art was greatly enhanced five years ago when the museum acquired more than 190 works from the nearby Corcoran Gallery of Art after that museum permanently closed. The cache included the Evans-Tibbs Collection, prime works by the likes of Richmond Barthé, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Lois Mailou Jones, Hughie Lee-Smith, Betye Saar, Henry O. Tanner, Alma Thomas, and Hale Woodruff, among others. Prior to the additions, NGA held about 500 works by African American artists. (The museum's entire permanent collection numbers more than 150,000.)
The museum has continued to make significant acquisitions of African American art, more recently including nine cartes-de-visite of African-American subjects, Frederick Douglass, among them (2018); four early photographs by Gordon Parks, dating from 1941-49 (2019); and the first works by Theaster Gates (2018), Mickalene Thomas (2020), and John Outterbridge (2020) to enter the collection. In 2020, the museum also acquired a large triptych by Oliver Lee Jackson; five works by Emma Amos; and in late December, NGA announced the addition of 40 works by 21 African American artists from the U.S. South from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, including nine quilts by Gee's Bend, Ala., artists.
Announcing the four new hires, the National Gallery of Art said the "positions advance [its] strategic priorities to make the museum more visitor-focused, inclusive, and equitable, as well as to provide deeper connections to the museum's content through digital access to its collections, exhibitions, programs, and research." CT
IMAGE: Kanitra Fletcher. | Courtesy National Gallery of Art
"The Art of Romare Bearden" by Ruth E. Fine documents a major retrospective of Romare Bearden presented at the National Gallery of Art in 2003-04. The exhibition was the first major solo show at the museum dedicated to an African American artist. More recently, "Gordon Parks: The New Tide: Early Work 1940–1950" was published to accompany an exhibition at NGA in 2018-19.
Tags: Kanitra Fletcher, Kaywin Feldman, Mikka Gee Conway, National Gallery of Art
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Michael Auld says:
Congratulations for joining the real world of art.
Beginning in 1963, my most revered professors in the Department of Art, College of Fine Arts of Howard University were, Lois Mailou Jones Pierre-Noel, James Wells and James Porter. Although I was a foreign student, they were like family. (Mrs. Pierre-Noel was our first son's godmother, and my wife has a couple of Mr. Wells' paintings, although he is known as a Harlem Renaissance based printmaker.) As a 19-year-old art student from Jamaica then, I also became steeped in the Black Power movement's philosophy, and artists from the African Diaspora. I ended up teaching in that art department for five years and becoming the only sculptor in Jeff Donald's AfriCOBRA arts collective. Although classified as an African American with years of exhibition experience, and reviews, I have had little success in getting exposure in any major museum in my adopted city.
Notwithstanding my years of experience in promoting multiethnic artists locally and in traveling exhibitions, it is good to see a long awaited change in inclusiveness. This is almost 60 years after being introduced to the deeply discriminatory arts culture in DC, spoken of then by my HU professors who were not "discovered" by the mainstream during their lifetimes. Our children will greatly benefit from the National Gallery's bold move. I hope that the nation follows.


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Q: CVS to SVN migration and Branch within a branch I did a recent migration from CVS to SVN using cvs2svn tool. In the newly migrated project for one of my projects the latest version is part of a branch say branch A(Parent Directory). Within this project, I have a subproject, whose latest version is another branch say Branch B.So basically trunk doesn't have the latest version of my Main project.
So in CVS once I checkout my parent folder(Branch A), I would browse upto my subproject > Right+Click > CVS > Update Special > choose Branch B (As Branch B has the latest for subproject). This would checkout the latest version for the subproject and I would have the latest version of my Main Project.
In SVN however, I do not see this option. SVN as far as I know, can only update with a revision and not a branch. I am new to SVN, so there is more probability that I'm wrong. Is there a way to do what I was trying to do in the CVS scenario?
I figured out a round about way to checkout the main project(Branch A) and then checkout the sub-project separately(Branch B). Then I would delete this subproject from the first checkout(Parent project-Branch A) and replace it with the second checkout version of subproject.

A: You may be able to accomplish your goals with svn externals.  The subproject would be an external to another repo.

A: It sounds like you were attempting to do Sparse Branching. In Sparse Branching, you have one branch as your base (we'll call Branch A) and on another branch (we'll call Branch B), you only put the changes from Branch A, and not the entire branch.
This is sometimes done in CVS because branching takes a long time to do. We found it taking 20 minutes for small projects, and up to an hour for large projects. However, it ends up being very difficult to track, and I've found that sites that use it tend to lose track of how checkouts are suppose to be done. Continuous build systems also cannot handle CVS Sparse Branching setups.
Subversion doesn't do Sparse Branching (at least very easily), but branching in Subversion is quick and simple to do. Creating a branch takes less than a second. In Subversion, you should take Branch A, and create Branch B off of Branch A. Then, you put all the differences between Branch A and Branch B onto Branch A. Changes to Branch A must be merged to Branch B on a regular basis.
The problem with sparse branching is that if a file is changed on both branches, it is never picked up. With merging, the changes on both branches are added to the file on Branch B. It's why so few sites do Sparse Branching.
You need to create a new Branch B from Branch A, and then make all the changes that are on your old Branch B onto this new Branch B and check it in. Then, Branch B will contain all the files it needs, you can use continuous integration systems, and checking files in and out is a one step operation.


Somerset Medical Center will offer flu vaccines for anyone age 18 and older from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 24 on a first-come, first-served basis while supplies last.
The flu shot clinic will be held in the Tarantino Promenade, just off the medical center lobby, at 110 Rehill Ave., Somerville. The fee is $20 but immunizations are free to anyone who presents a Medicare Part B card. The flu vaccine will not be administered to pregnant women. There is no pre-registration required.
For more information about the Somerset Medical Center flu shot clinics, call 908-685-2814.


@jowood: Try SQX. It also creates solid archives and can of course update such archives. works the same as every other solid format btw - if you want to update file, whole archive needs to be re-compressed, so basically it is hardly an updating :-). Same goes with extracting files, other files need to be extracted as well.


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text:
Q: Segmented Regression to find breakpoint with on many different groups - summarize I essentially have a glmm model that I am trying to break up to assess where the best breakpoint should be for the data which is compromised of many different sites over multiple years of data.  I expect there to be just one breakpoint where the population changes from declining to increasing/stable.  Attached are some made-up data:
df2 <-data.frame(site=c('bh',   'bh',   'bh',   'bh',   'bh',   'h1',   'h1',   'h1',   'h1',   'h1',   'h1',   'h1',   'h1',   'ha',   'ha',   'ha',   'ha',   'ha',   'ha',   'ha',   'ho',   'ho',   'ho',   'ho',   'ho',   'ho',   'ho',   'ho',   'sb',   'sb',   'sb',   'sb',   'sb',   'sb',   'sb',   'wm',   'wm',   'wm',   'wm',   'wm'),
                 ysw=c(0,   2,  3,  5,  12, 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  13, 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  8,  0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  13, 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  13, 1,  2,  3,  5,  12),
                 lam=c(-1.94246067889122,   0.674238379117774,  0.123986076653627,  1.42751957163926,   -1.30153581808348,  -0.424812155072339, -0.775553269663735, 0.845160077651946,  -0.366964611913739, -0.175440305426086, -0.300162274132754, 0.602168551378997,  0.35237549500052,   0.0568625203766551, 0.0310733148322787, -0.300162274132754, -0.0866196954685079,    -0.213169737066003, -0.0409152237837699,    0.0417873189717518, -0.111072044919427, -0.9810987245661,   0.301247088636211,  0.243286146083446,  0.155205859770556,  -1.46428403001449,  1.00004342727686,   0.699056854547668,  -0.351206453188803, 0.0972573096934199, 0.431524584187451,  -0.526810501182215, -0.424812155072339, 0.602168551378997,  0.628491104967123,  0.778223626766096,  -0.300162274132754, -0.475820321699244, 0.477265995424853,  0.301247088636211
                 ))

I essentially want to run a segmented regression analysis for each site separately and then create a dataframe of the different estimated breakpoints so I can figure out on average what 'ysw' is when most sites recover from a decline.
I have looked at this
Performing lm() and segmented() on multiple columns in R and How to use segmented package when working with data frames with dplyr package to perform piecewise linear regression?
I now need a way to put the output (at least where the breakpoint should be for every site) in a dataframe. Any help would be much appreciated.
    #Attempt 1:
out <- df2 %>%
      nest_by(site) %>%
      mutate(my.lm = list(lm(lam ~ ysw, data = data)),
             my.seg = list(tryCatch(segmented(my.lm, seg.Z = ~ ysw),
                                    error = function(e) list(NA))))


text:
Giants hope Road Warriors re-enlist
Head coach Tom Coughlin of the New York Giants looks on in the first half against the Atlanta Falcons. (Jan. 8, 2012) Credit: Getty Images
By Tom Rock Updated January 11, 2012 1:06 PM
They're back. Or, more to the point, they're going away.
Whatever happens from here on out the Giants will be playing away games. It starts on Sunday at Lambeau Field. One thing is for sure, though. The Giants won't be playing any more games at cozy MetLife stadium where they have trounced their last three opponents in must-win games.
It's enough for Tom Coughlin to trot out the old nickname for the 2007 team, an identity that was even engraved on the Super Bowl rings.
"'Road Warriors' coming out of the woodwork," Coughlin said of his message to the team. "Time to go on the road, renew some of those thoughts about playing on the road. The togetherness, the team, the all for one, the one for all, the mental toughness. We're going to need all of those things there."