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Home / News and Events / Events / An Evening With Michael Bublé
Global superstar Michael Bublé returns to Australia in February 2020 with a 36-piece orchestra in tow. He'll be thrilling Australian audiences on his five-city tour taking in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth.
Bublé said he was thrilled to be playing all of his hits plus songs from the most recent album ♥ for Australian audiences. "I'm really excited to be heading back on tour and to play for Australian audiences again," he said. "It's been six years since my last Australian tour and so much has happened in that time. I can't wait to sing some of my all-time favourites and to share my new songs and stories."
Bublé received rave reviews for a one-off show in Sydney in late last year when he performed to mark the closure of Allianz Stadium. The Sydney Morning Herald praised a performer "who holds the audience in the palm of his hand" and whose "soaring vocals absolutely knock it out of the park", while the Daily Telegraph admired Bublé's success at "wrapping his golden tonsils around some of the most iconic songs of pop history."
7th February 2020 8:00pm to 11:59pm
Elton John – Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour Olympic Park
Hugh Jackman: The Man. The Music. The Show. World Tour
2nd August 2019 to 3rd August 2019
Khalid – Free Spirit Tour


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Q: How to get Match to return an INT and not an array I have the following:
    var hashID = location.hash.match(/\d/);

Where location.hash eqs:  #/groups/58
I want hashID to equal = 58
Right now it equals an array. How can I get back just 58 as an int?
 THanks

A:   var hashID = parseInt(location.hash.match(/\d+/)[0])

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Nicola LeFanu
Blood Wedding (1992)
Novello & Co Ltd (World)
Commissioned by the Women's Playhouse Trust with funds from Greater London Arts, The Royal Victoria Hall Foundation, The Baring Foundation, The Rayne Foundation anf the Ascherberg Trust
Production directed by Jules Wright
1(pic:afl).0.1(asax:bcl).1/2110/3perc/epf (sampler)/hp/2vn.2vc.db
Duration 2 hr
Literature (incl. classic tales)
Deborah Levy, after Federico Garcia Lorca
Language Arabic
Many people will recall the essential narrative of Lorca's play. In a remote Spanish village some seventy years ago, two young people are to marry. The bridegroom is eligible, comparatively well-to-do; the bride, who lives alone wither her widowed father, accepts the marriage proposal as her way forward, to 'land, children, health'. But her passions are secretly taken up with Leonardo Felix, her former sweetheart, now her cousin's husband. Leonardo comes from a family which has feuded for years with that of the Groom. Every generation has seen senseless killings: the groom's mother lost her husband and eldest son, and at the opening of the opera she inveighs against further bloodshed. The killings continue: for on her wedding day itself, the bride runs away with Leonardo. The bridegroom pursues them and the two young men kill each other.
© Nicola LeFanu

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


(Phys.org)—NASA's Mars rover Curiosity completed a touch-and-go inspection of one rock on Sunday, Nov. 18, then pivoted and, on the same day, drove toward a Thanksgiving overlook location.
Last week, Curiosity drove for the first time after spending several weeks in soil-scooping activities at one location. On Friday, Nov. 16, the rover drove 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) to get within arm's reach of a rock called "Rocknest 3." On Sunday, it touched that rock with the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) on its arm, and took two 10-minute APXS readings of data about the chemical elements in the rock. Then Curiosity stowed its arm and drove 83 feet (25.3 meters) eastward toward a target called "Point Lake."
"We have done touches before, and we've done goes before, but this is our first 'touch-and-go' on the same day," said Curiosity Mission Manager Michael Watkins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It is a good sign that the rover team is getting comfortable with more complex operational planning, which will serve us well in the weeks ahead."
During a Thanksgiving break, the team will use Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) from Point Lake to examine possible routes and targets to the east. A priority is to choose a rock for the first use of the rover's hammering drill, which will collect samples of powder from rock interiors.
Although Curiosity has departed the Rocknest patch of windblown sand and dust where it scooped up soil samples in recent weeks, the sample-handling mechanism on the rover's arm is still holding some soil from the fifth and final scoop collected at Rocknest. The rover is carrying this sample so it can be available for analysis by instruments within the rover if scientists choose that option in coming days.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the rover.


MANCAN STAFFING has the best jobs in Marietta Ohio!
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Pregnancy & the first 6-12 months after birth are crucial times when it comes to exercise! There are many benefits of pre & post natal exercise, both for mother & baby, but it is essential that exercise during this time is done correctly. Not all trainers have the qualifications needed to safely train pre & post natal women, nor do all trainers understand the necessary modifications needed to make exercise extremely beneficial, instead of harmful or how to safely work around various pregnancy related issues. At Your Best Yet, you can rest assured as you are trained by an experienced Mum with the knowledge & Qualifications.
Ask your mother's group & come & do a 6 session Post Natal course together!
* Reduced weight gain during pregnancy, especially in the second half of pregnancy, including the deposition and retention of less body fat.
* Weight still within a normal & healthy range.
* Fewer pregnancy discomforts and symptomatology.
* More rapid physical and emotional recovery post-birth (twice as fast).
– Length of labour more than a third shorter in women who continued to exercise through to full term, compared to those who didn't.
* The combination of exercise and pregnancy has a greater training effect than that produced by training alone, including increased muscle strength & circulation benefits.
* Increased in energy levels, positive attitude and self-esteem.
* Lower incidence of respiratory tract infection.
* Decreased likelihood of varicose veins, haemorrhoids, pregnancy-induced diabetes, and low back pain.
* More restful sleep and less exhaustion.
* Improved digestion and elimination (helps to prevent constipation).
* Babies are less vulnerable to usual stresses of later pregnancy and labour.
* Improved ability to deal effectively with intermittent reductions in uterine blood flow and oxygen delivery. This means there is an additional protection in the event of unanticipated maternal stresses, specifically during serious traumatic injury, medical emergencies and/or other complications during labour.
* Lowered incidence of umbilical cord entanglement.
* Lowered incidence of stress-induced meconium output during labour.
* They tend to be lighter and leaner than babies born to non-exercising mothers, but not underweight or premature.
* Later in life, offspring from exercising mothers show lower risks of premature death, heart disease and other serious illnesses.
During pregnancy calcium is leeched from the bones, so bone density in pregnant women decreases; so much so that sometimes, after birth, many women can be classified as borderline osteoporotic. On top of this, bone mineral loss is rapid during the first few months of breastfeeding. Therefore, it's extremely important for pregnant women to strengthen their muscles in order to stress the bones and hence stimulate the laying down of bone.Aside from enhancing muscle endurance and strength, weight training also helps improve function for daily life (e.g. lifting children, hanging out washing, carrying shopping etc). Resistance training has been shown to improve bone density, improve coordination and balance, and improve overall muscle mass, which contributes to an increase in base metabolic rate.
So, as you can see exercise during pregnancy (with your doctor's approval) is a great decision for you & your baby!


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Lexington residents appalled at man's plan for unlicensed drug addiction center
By: Sarah Plake
LEXINGTON, Mo. — Lexington, Missouri residents are pushing back against a proposed facility for white males and its founder, who claims to be more successful at helping drug addicts than traditional professionals.
"We'll see. We can only find out by trying," that founder, Craig Nelsen, told 41 Action News.
In a phone conversation outside his motel room, the Washington D.C. resident said he's taking a wait-and-see approach to the concept he wants to bring to Lexington.
"The program I'm pushing is brand-new and innovative," Nelsen told us.
Nelsen wants to put a "life-treatment" center in an old grocery store on Main Street to help men overcome drug addiction.
Nelsen doesn't have a building permit, but it would be a 13-week residency program, costing nearly $2,300. It would focus on boxing, literature, poetry, butchery and mathematics to reform drug addicts. Nelsen said he'd hire instructors.
Nelsen calls it the Robinson Jeffers Boxing Club, a for-profit venture.
But it wouldn't include any state certification or drug treatment specialists.
"It's not specifically a drug treatment program," Nelsen said. "This is a brand-new way that won't have drug counselors. We won't have people there listening to people tell them about their drug habits, or why they take drugs. That's not important. We're not going to tell them what to do about the drugs. We're not going to tell them not to take them."
Many Lexington residents have heard about Nelsen's project and are appalled.
"It's an invitation for drug addicts, drug abusers to come to town to participate in a program that won't have any professional oversight," resident Brad Worthington said.
Residents are also concerned that Nelsen is not an expert on drug treatment, and the concerns go on from there.
"I know the community has dug into the background and character of this particular person. It's not very favorable," Worthington said.
In a letter sent to a former Wentworth Military Academy official, Nelsen says he wants to cater to high-IQ, white, male, heroin addicts because the opioid epidemic affects them more than anyone else. Nelsen went on to say white males are undergoing racial denigration and disempowerment. At the bottom of the letter, he says he'll accept any race.
Worthington and other residents said they don't want that element in their small town.
"All the people who are saying that this is a program for white supremacy and that I'm a racist – they're speaking out of ignorance," Nelsen said.
"The motivation for a business like this has got to be to make money," Worthington countered.
In the phone conversation, Nelsen told 41 Action News his goal is to "get rich and leave a good mark on the world."
41 Action News dug into Nelsen's past, and he got quite a bit of backlash for his two organizations, ProjectUSA and Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement, for controversial anti-immigration billboards. He later admitted to the New York Times he employed illegal immigrants at a restaurant he used to run.
In 2012, Nelsen came under fire in D.C. for running a waffle house illegally without a business license. According to a D.C. neighborhood publication, DCist, Nelsen allegedly didn't pay those employees, either.
Nelsen appeared in national news publications blaming the demise of his waffle house on coupon company Groupon. Groupon said they weren't to blame because Nelsen had already received 2/3 of his share.
Regardless of Nelsen's past, residents expect him to face an uphill battle with the city's Planning and Zoning committee.
According to a Lexington ordinance, a transitional housing facility cannot be within 300 feet of homes, churches, or schools. Nelsen's project would.
Residents plan to voice their concerns at the Planning and Zoning committee meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday night, where Nelsen will present his plan.
Lexington's city administrator said nothing has been decided, and the meeting is the first step in the process. The city would vote whether to advance it to the full City Council within the first couple weeks of February.


Cassandra Lampen - MCT inc. is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501c3 organization.
Cassandra is so excited to be touring with the Missoula Children's Theatre for another tour! She just recieved her Bachelor of Fine Arts- acting degree from Missouri State University. Cassandra started her acting career in kindergarten and since has enjoyed roles such as "Diana" in Handgrenades; "Penny" in You Can't Take It with You; and "Anne Gilbreth" in Cheaper by the Dozen. In her free time, Cassandra can be found playing board games with her fiance or taking her cats on walks. She would like to thank her amazing family, friends, and fiance for putting up with her outgoing personality and always loving and encouraging her.


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Post Position
Nick Montfort
Tag: competitions
Nano-NaNoGenMo or #NNNGM
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak November;
And each separate bit and pixel wrought a novel on GitHub.
April may be the cruelest month, and now the month associated with poetry, but November is the month associated with novel-writing, via NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Now, thanks to an offhand comment by Darius Kazemi and the work of Hugo van Kemenade, November is also associated with the computer-generation of novels, broadly speaking. Any computer program and its 50,000 word+ output qualifies as an entry in NaNoGenMo, National Novel Generation Month.
NaNoGenMo does have a sort of barrier to entry: People often think they have to do something elaborate, despite anyone being explicitly allowed to produce a novel consisting entirely of meows. Those new to NaNoGenMo may look up to, for instance, the amazingly talented Ross Goodwin. In his own attempt to further climate change, he decided to code up an energy-intensive GPT-2 text generator while flying on a commercial jet. You'd think that for his next trick this guy might hop in a car, take a road trip, and generate a novel using a LSTM RNN! Those who look up so such efforts — and it's hard not to, when they're conducted at 30,000 feet and also quite clever — might end up thinking that computer-generated novels must use complex code and masses of data.
And yet, there is so much that can be done with simple programs that consume very little energy and can be fully understood by their programmers and others.
Because of this, I have recently announced Nano-NaNoGenMo. On Mastodon and Twitter (using #NNNGM) I have declared that November will also be the month in which people write computer programs that are at most 256 characters, and which generate 50,000 word or more novels. These can use Project Gutenberg files, as they are named on that site, as input. Or, they can run without using any input.
I have produced three Nano-NaNoGenMo (or #NNNGM) entries for 2019. In addition to being not very taxing computationally, one of these happens to have been written on an extremely energy-efficient electric train. Here they are. I won't gloss each one, but I will provide a few comments on each, along with the full code for you to look at right in this blog post, and with links to both bash shell script files and the final output.
OB-DCK; or, THE (SELFLESS) WHALE
perl -0pe 's/.?K/**/s;s/MOBY(.)DI/OB$1D/g;s/D.r/Nick Montfort/;s/E W/E (SELFLESS) W/g;s/\b(I ?|me|my|myself|am|us|we|our|ourselves)\b//gi;s/\r\n\r\n//g;s/\r\n/ /g;s//\n\n/g;s/ +/ /g;s/("?) ([,.;:]?)/$1$2/g;s/\nEnd .//s' 2701-0.txt #NNNGM
WordPress has mangled this code despite it being in a code element; Use the following link to obtain a runnable version of it:
OB-DCK; or, THE (SELFLESS) WHALE code
OB DCK; or, THE (SELFLESS) WHALE, the novel
The program, performing a simple regular expression substitution, removes all first-person pronouns from Moby-Dick. Indeed, OB-DCK is "MOBY-DICK" with "MY" removed from MOBY and "I" from DICK. Chapter 1 begins:
Call Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in purse, and nothing particular to interest on shore, thought would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever find growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in soul; whenever find involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral meet; and especially whenever hypos get such an upper hand of , that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, account it high time to get to sea as soon as can. This is substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with .
Because Ishmael is removed as the "I" of the story, on a grammatical level there is (spoiler alert!) no human at all left at the end of book.
perl -e 'sub n{(unpack"(A4)*","backbodybookcasedoorfacefacthandheadhomelifenamepartplayroomsidetimeweekwordworkyear")[rand 21]}print"consequence\nNick Montfort\n\na beginning";for(;$i<12500;$i++){print" & so a ".n;if(rand()<.6){print n}}print".\n"' #NNNGM
consequence code
consequence, the novel
Using compounding of the sort found in my computer-generated long poem The Truelist and my "ppg 256-3," this presents a sequence of things — sometimes formed from a single very common four-letter word, sometimes from two combined — that, it is stated, somehow follow from each other:
a beginning & so a name & so a fact & so a case & so a bookdoor & so a head & so a factwork & so a sidelife & so a door & so a door & so a factback & so a backplay & so a name & so a facebook & so a lifecase & so a partpart & so a hand & so a bookname & so a face & so a homeyear & so a bookfact & so a book & so a hand & so a head & so a headhead & so a book & so a face & so a namename & so a life & so a hand & so a side & so a time & so a yearname & so a backface & so a headface & so a headweek & so a headside & so a bookface & so a bookhome & so a lifedoor & so a bookyear & so a workback & so a room & so a face & so a body & so a faceweek & so a sidecase & so a time & so a body & so a fact […]
Too Much Help at Once
python -c "help('topics')" | python -c "import sys;print('Too Much Help at Once\nNick Montfort');[i for i in sorted(''.join(sys.stdin.readlines()[3:]).split()) if print('\n'+i+'\n') or help(i)]" #NNNGM
Too Much Help at Once code
Too Much Help at Once, the novel
The program looks up all the help topics provided within the (usually interactive) help system inside Python itself. Then, it asks for help on everything, in alphabetical order, producing 70k+ words of text, according the GNU utility wc. The novel that results is, of course, an appropriation of text others have written; it arranges but doesn't even transform that text. To me, however, it does have some meaning. Too Much Help at Once models one classic mistake that beginning programmers can make: Thinking that it's somehow useful to read comprehensively about programming, or about a programming language, rather than actually using that programming language and writing some programs. Here's the very beginning:
The "assert" statement
Assert statements are a convenient way to insert debugging assertions
into a program:
assert_stmt ::= "assert" expression ["," expression]
A plot
So far I have noted one other #NNNGM entry, A plot by Milton Läufer, which I am reproducing here in corrected form, according to the author's note:
perl -e 'sub n{(split/ /,"wedding murder suspicion birth hunt jealousy death party tension banishment trial verdict treason fight crush friendship trip loss")[rand 17]}print"A plot\nMilton Läufer\n\n";for(;$i<12500;$i++){print" and then a ".n}print".\n"'
Related in structure to consequence, but with words of varying length that do not compound, Läufer's novel winds through not four weddings and a funeral, but about, in expectation, 735 weddings and 735 murders in addition to 735 deaths, leaving us to ponder the meaning of "a crush" when it occurs in different contexts:
and then a wedding and then a murder and then a trip and then a hunt and then a crush and then a trip and then a death and then a murder and then a trip and then a fight and then a treason and then a fight and then a crush and then a fight and then a friendship and then a murder and then a wedding and then a friendship and then a suspicion and then a party and then a treason and then a birth and then a treason and then a tension and then a birth and then a hunt and then a friendship and then a trip and then a wedding and then a birth and then a death and then a death and then a wedding and then a treason and then a suspicion and then a birth and then a jealousy and then a trip and then a jealousy and then a party and then a tension and then a tension and then a trip and then a treason and then a crush and then a death and then a banishment […]
Share, enjoy, and please participate by adding your Nano-NaNoGenMo entries as NaNoGenMo entries (via the GitHub site) and by tooting & tweeting them!
Interactive Fiction Meetup at MIT, Again, Tomorrow
The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction meets once again tomorrow (Monday 2014-11-24) in its regular meeting-place, the Trope Tank. We meet at 6:30 in MIT's room 14N-233.
There is much to discuss and celebrate, such as the conclusion of the IF Comp – congrats to Sean M. Shore for his 1st place game Hunger Daemon, and to all the other winners. Besides that there's the recent release of Hadean Lands by PR-IF stalwart Andew Plotkin. And, today there's a front-page New York Times article about IF, and Twine games specifically. I'm sure I forgot some things we have to celebrate, so come by to see what those things are.
NaNoGenMo 3000!!!!
Er, sorry. I exaggerated a bit. It's actually just
NaNoGenMo 2014. But that's still really cool.
"Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words." As is traditional, the event occurs on GitHub.
Code Poetry Slam in NYC Seeks Entries
ITP (the Interactive Telecommunications Program) at NYU is having a Code Poetry Slam on November 14. And they are seeking entries now! Send them along no later than November 7.
NaNoGenMo Wraps Up and Prints Out
There are some things I absolutely must mention at this point, to highlight certain of the many interesting outcomes from NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month):
Alice's Adventures in the Whale, one of two novels created by Leonard Richardson by computationally replacing all the dialog in one novel with the dialog in another:
>Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "Can't sell his head?–What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?" thought Alice "Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?"
>Presently she began again. "Ka-la! Koo-loo!" (she was rather glad there WAS no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) "Stand up, Tashtego!–give it to him!" (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke–fancy CURTSEYING as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) "Stern all!"
>"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, "we have been stove by a whale." cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, "NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN."
>CHAPTER V. Advice from a Caterpillar
>The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
>"I say, pull like god-dam," said the Caterpillar.
>This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, "There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the Yarman! Sail over him!"
Leonard's other submitted novel used Pride and Prejudice (and Through the Looking Glass). Along similar lines, you may be interested in seeing what Pride and Prejudice looks like without any dialog.
Early in the month, Zarf (Andrew Plotkin) submitted a generated novel that is entirely dialog: Redwreath and Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate.
Ian Renton generated Doctor Who fan fiction using the technique of Bayseian poisoning, which is popular in spam generation. It's only the only fanficlicious novel; see the generated Austenesque novels of jiko.
I was implicated in inspiring Nif, a palindromic 50,000-word+ novel, the second generated novel submitted (early in the month) by catseye. A remixed and extended version was done by Michael Paulukonis.
Don't miss Aaron Reed's Agressive Passive, which details conversation between six housemates about maintaining the cleanliness of their domicile.
And finally, my entry is World Clock, which briefly describes something happening, at some location around the world, at each minute of a day.
The overall "site" for NaNoGenMo, which was the fervent brainchild of Darius Kazemi, is, by the way, this humble GitHub repository.
National Novel Generation Month Begins
Read all about it! And sign up. It's the brainchild (or brainbot) of Darius Kazemi.
The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction … Today
Boston-Area IF group The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction (PR-IF) is set to meet at 6:30pm today in my lab, The Trope Tank (MIT's room 14N-233). We'll check out some of the winners of the 2012 Interactive Fiction Competition, the 18th annual Comp, which recently concluded. Congratulations to Marco Innocenti for his 1st-place Andromeda Apocalypse, to the anonymous author of Eurydice (which took 2nd), and to Jim Munroe, for Guilded Youth, which was 3rd – and to all of the other winners!
Head Over to Overhead
I just saw an overhead projector demo, at a demo party, that simulated the Amiga boing ball demo using only transpaencies. And then another that, using pinwheels, simulated fire.
I regret that the overhead projector did not, in either case, produce the music.
Palindrome "Sagas"
Marty Markowitz, borough president of Brooklyn, said his borough was "the heart of America" in welcoming the 35th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. My heart was certainly in Brooklyn last weekend, both literally and figuratively. I was there to participate in the First Annual World Palindrome Championship on Friday and, on Saturday, to visit Big Reality, a wonderful, scruffy art show that included some of my work. More on Big Reality soon; here's a belated note about the WPC.
I made into New York in time to meet at Jon Agee's sister's house in Brooklyn with him and several other palindromists who would be competing that evening. (Agee is a cartoonist whose books include Go Hang a Salami! I'm a Lasagna Hog! and Palindromania!) The other competitors included a fellow academic, John Connett, who is professor of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota and an extremely prolific producer of sentence-length palindromes. Martin Clear, another author of many, many sentence-length palindromes, came from Australia. Barry Duncan, a Somerville resident and thus practically my neighbor, also joined us. Another competitor was Mark Saltveit, editor of The Palindromist and a stand-up comedian. And Douglas Fink, who won a celebrity palindrome contest with his now-famous entry "Lisa Bonet ate no basil," was the audience contestant selected to join us.
I met Barry and Doug later that day, and had a great time sitting around and discussing palindromes with the others over lunch. We had plenty to talk about. It was interesting to see that we also had different perspectives, interests, and terms associated with the art. Jon thought "Er, eh – where?" was a good palindrome, probably in part because he was imagining how to illustrate it or frame it in a cartoon in a funny way. The others generally thought this one was bogus. A sentence was the desired outcome for most of us, while I was a fan (and writer) of longer palindromes. And, as we found out that night, the audience had their own tropisms and aesthetics when it comes to palindromes.
We had 75 minutes to write up to three palindromes that we'd read to the crowd, which was to vote for their two favorite. There were three possible constraints given: Use X and Z; Refer to events in the news in the past year; or refer to the crossword tournament itself. Here's what I came up with, using the first constraint:
The Millennium Falcon Rescue
by Nick Montfort
Wow, sagas … Solo's deed, civic deed.
Eye dewed, a doom-mood.
A pop.
Sis sees redder rotator.
Radar sees racecar X.
Oho! Ore-zero level sees reviver!
Solo's deified!
Solo's reviver sees level: ore-zero.
Oho: X, racecar, sees radar.
Rotator, redder, sees sis.
Pop a doom-mood!
A dewed eye.
Deed, civic deed.
Solo's sagas: wow.
All of the results (and the text of the palindromes) are up on The Palindromist site – take a look!
Mark Saltveit became champ with a short palindrome about acrobatic Yak sex. John Connett got 2nd, Jon Agee 3rd, and yours truly 4th.
Which is the longest?
In mine, I count 54 words, 237 letters, and 327 characters. If "doom-mood" and the like are single words, we'd have 50 words. Mark says on The Palindromist site that it's 57 words long; I'm not sure how the counting was done there.
In Barry's, the only other possible contender, I count 70 words (as does Mark), 184 letters, and 311 characters. Some of those words are "7" and have no letters in them, as you'll note if you check out the results page.
So, they're both the longest: Barry's has the most words, while mine has the most letters and characters.
It's a sort of odd comparison, because the constraint I used (employ only palindromic words, counting things like "ore-zero" as words) let me reframe the problem as that of constructing a word palindrome with a restricted vocabulary. Of course, you should be very very impressed anyway, with my general cleverness and so on, but I think Barry chose a more difficult feat at the level of letter-by-letter construction.
Does length matter?
Yes. A palindrome should be the right length. 2002 words is a good length if you're trying to write a palindromic postmodern novel. For a snappy statement, a short sentence is a good length. I think some of the best palindromes are longer than a sentence and much shorter than 2002. My last edits to "The Millennium Falcon Rescue" were to cut several words (an even number, of course), and maybe I should have cut more? And, should I revise this one, I might cut the word that was included for the sake of the Z.
What about those palindromists?
The most interesting thing about this event, for me, was a gathering focused on palindrome-writing. Kids know what palindromes are, the form of writing has been around for more than a thousand years, many people have palindromes memorized, and there are a handful of famous books … but as I see it there hasn't even been a community of palindrome-writers, discussing writing methods, coming up with common terms and concepts, sharing poetic and aesthetic ideas.
Well, perhaps there has been, in the Bletchley Park codebreakers. But I only learned about them because I met Mark, who is one of the people researching the origins of famous palindromes. And that was, due to wartime security, a very secretive group.
It was great having the Championship hosted by Will Shortz at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, with many puzzle-solver and -constructors who are interested in formal engagements with language. Of course, palindrome events would fit will at other sorts of gatherings that are focused on poetry and writing, too.
Whether or not we have another championship (which would be great), it would be nice to have another summit of some sort and to build a community of practice around this longstanding practice. Particularly if we can get someone named Tim to join us: Tim must summit!
1st Annual World Palindrome Championship
It's this Friday in Brooklyn, and I'll be one of six competitors.
This Friday night I'll be competing in the First Annual World Palindrome Championship. If you insist, you can call it the First or the Inaugural World Palindrome Championship, but that's the name of the event.
Er, Eh – Where?
The event will take place in Brooklyn at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. The competition, with a 75-minute time for palindrome composition based on a prompt, will kick off the 35th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and will start at 8pm. (Those cruciverbalists like to stay up late.) It's all run by Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times. The championship is the first thing on the tournament schedule.
Name no one man!
Actually, one man is almost sure to be named. The five competitors already selected are Jon Agee, Martin Clear, John Connett, humble narrator Nick Montfort, and Mark Saltveit. Jon Agee has authored books of cartoons illustrating palindromes, including Palindromania! Martin Clear penned "Trade life defiled art" and is making a trip from Australia for the event. John Connett is a fellow academic whose wonderful palindromic quips include "Epic Erma has a ham recipe." Mark Saltveit is a stand-up comedian and found and editor of The Palindromist, the only magazine specific to this form that I know. And I suppose I got into this by writing the 2002-word palindrome 2002: A Palindrome Story with William Gillespie. The whole list, with pictures and further links, is up on Saltveit's page for the event.
A competitor will be selected from the audience on Friday based on a palindrome written and submitted that day. If this is a woman or a pair of identical twin collaborators, there is some chance that no one man will be named. Unless one of these miraculously appears and is selected, though, we will unfortunately miss the company of my collaborator William, Mike Maguire (author of Drawn Inward and Other Poems), Demetri Martin, Harry Mathews, and many other top practitioners of the art. For a first gathering of palindrome-writers, though, who can complain?
Take This Narrative Diction
I believe that Curveship and the example game Lost One may have just recieved their first roasting, thanks to the firepower of the S.S. Turgidity and the intrepid, enterprising player character Stiffy Makane. The "erotic adventures" that unfold in The Cavity of Time, released as part of the Indigo New Language Speed IF, allow you to jump everything within reach. And, just to be clear, to fuck all of those things. If you were offended just now, let me suggest that you don't fire up this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style garden of fucking paths. Otherwise, this offering, written in the slick Undum system, may please you. Not like that. I mean it may amuse you.
Here's a snippet from the beginning of the "Hip Curves" section:
The professor notices something about the device-shaped object.
That was immediately before a glass was refreshed.
The professor will be making a comment about focus.
A dial is being turned.
"Sorry about that," he says. "What I was trying to say is that the tense shifts you are experiencing are the results of a local fluctuation in the field exerted by Hip Curves, my most diabolical erotic creation. Can I interest you in a mojito, by the way? There you go."
I feel that in addition to commenting upon this reference, I must also invite you – if you are one of the non-offended – to plunge into the work in the question, if it doesn't offend your morals. Please, drill Sam Kabo Ashwell's Cavity.
Notes on the IF Community
I was a sort of "international observer" at the latest ELMCIP Seminar in Bergen, Norway. ELCMIP is a European project, funded by HERA, which looks at the ways electronic literature communities function and foster creativity. On the first day of the seminar (Monday, September 20) I presented about the IF community, supplementing that evening's screening of Get Lamp at the Landmark Cafe. I offered some thoughts, summarized here, for those working in other types of electronic literature practices.
By "interactive fiction" (often abbreviated "IF"), I mean pretty much exactly what you will find if you Google for the term and starting looking through the first several pages of results. In my dissertation, I defined interactive fiction as: "A form of text-accepting, text-generating computer program that narrates what is happening in a simulated world in reply to input from a user, or interactor. Interactive fiction can have literary qualities and qualities of a game." In recent decades, people have used the term in different ways, but this is how the interactive fiction community understands IF today and has understood it for a while. This means that IF is not defined by a particular platform, the way that Flash games are, but that people do expect something to work like a "text adventure," with the simulation of space and objects and natural-language-like input, to be considered IF. Members of the interactive fiction community may find chatterbots, story generators, hypertext fiction, point-and-click graphical games, and other things very interesting, but these productions would not have a place in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, for instance, because they aren't interactive fiction.
I have to note at this point that I can't offer any proper sort of study of the interactive fiction community, as I am not an anthropologist by training (or pretension) and I don't understand the workings of community in the way that people with a better background would. What I can offer, as a member of this community, are some notes about my experiences and some pointers to ways I have seen the community working together. My hope is that may notes may be of some use in generating ideas about e-lit community or for someone undertaking a systematic study.
Also, I'll explain at this point that what I and others call "the IF community" is not the only IF community, even for English-language work. One other community is that of authors and players of ADRIFT games. ADRIFT (Adventure Development & Runner – Interactive Fiction Toolkit) is an easy-to-use shareware system for IF development. Another locus of interactive fiction practice and playing is "adult interactive fiction" or AIF, which prominently depicts sexual activity. The AIF community has its own annual awards, the Erins, which are analogous to the IF community's XYZZY Awards (discussed later). Beyond these communities, there are IF communities, or at least IF activity that involved several people and that I know about, in Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Russian language communities.
An important early resource for the IF community was the IF Archive, originally hosted in Germany thanks to Volker Blasius. The archive was announced on November 24, 1992 and is mirrored today on sites throughout the world, with the main site being ifarchive.org. The archive was originally accessed only by anonymous FTP and can still be reached by that method today, although there is a simple Web interface at the main site and a searchable interface at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive. The "archive" is not a repository for an organizations old, inactive files; it a system for publishing and sharing new work, including the games for each year's IF Competition.
The IF community communicated for many years on two USENET newsgroups – and some in the community still read these newsgroups. rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction were not originally devoted to what we now call IF, but those discussions came to predominate. The "arts" and "games" groups do not argue for different perspectives on interactive fiction; they are simply for discussion of making games ("arts") and playing them ("games").
A central institution in the IF community – perhaps the central one – is the annual IF Competition, which began in 1994. Now in its 16th year and run by Stephen Granade, "the Comp," as it is called, showcases a wide variety of short games, some poorly written and/or poorly programmed and others quite exemplary. While winning the Comp or placing well in it is certainly desirable, anyone who enters the comp can be sure that dozens, if not hundreds, of people will play the game submitted. Many will even write review of it, since it is a tradition among the most enthusiastic members of the IF community to review all of the Comp games. Competitions are central to many popular communities of digital practice – the demoscene as well as creators of Flash games, homebrew 8-bit games, and graphical games. These comps or compos usually do not involve substantial rewards for winners or agonistic competition; instead, they provide an event (in person in the case of the demoscene, online in other cases) that focuses the interest and energy of the community.
Recent years have seen other IF events of different sorts, including "minicomps" with different themes and the "Speed IF" sessions in which several participants each write a themed or constrained game in two hours. Some of the community's events highlight the different metaphors that are in play, ones that work across literary and gaming concepts. Although works of interactive fiction are conventionally called "games" and the people who interact with them are called "players," the person who writes a game (almost always the same person who programs it) is an "author." The online "Interactive Fiction Book Club," founded in 2001, brought together those who had played a particular game for conversation modeled on conversation about books. In 2009, "Interactive Fiction Writing Month," with some in-person events that took place mainly at CMU, made an obvious connection to National Novel Writing Month. The annual XYZZY Awards for interactive fiction, on the other hand, are styled after the Oscars. Although they are awarded by popular nominations and popular vote, they are named in the manner of Academy Awards and presented at an online event. Many IF community members even virtually dress up for the award ceremony.
The XYZZY awards take place on ifMUD, a simple text-based MUD that serves almost entirely as a chat room. That is, role-playing and puzzle-construction and -solving have little place there and RPG-style combat has none. The people on ifMUD do use some of the unique MUD-like facilities to support their communications, however, and they also program new capabilities into the MUD for that purpose. There is a bot, Alex, who parrots things that he has been taught, allowing people to query him for the definition of terms and acroymns. An "automeeter" keeps track of which pairs of people have met in person. People use another bot, Floyd, to play IF together on ifMUD, participating in "Club Floyd" sessions. People also ask for programming, design, and writing help, and sometimes even discuss theoretical or critical ideas. Much of the discussion is not directly focused on IF, but when one does want to discuss IF in real time, ifMUD is a great place to do so.
There are now local groups that meet in person to discuss and play interactive fiction. The one I know most about is the one I host in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction, organized by Kevin Jackson-Mead. PR-IF meets monthly, and had a hotel room with snacks and talks, thanks mainly to Andrew Plotkin, at Penny Arcade Expo East. They have also produced a card with instructions for first-time IF players. I organized the first meeting of the PR-IF writers' group, Grue Street. And two successful events have been held in which the public was invited to play interactive fiction together: the early MIT version of Zork, in the first case, and Admiral Jota's Comp-winning game Lost Pig in the second.
By now, most people who deal with electronic literature in some way seem inclined to accept that interactive fiction falls under this umbrella term. But even if some resist this, it's hard to ignore that the community itself connects its meetings, events, roles, and practices to literary ones. Of course, simply importing the institutions of IF into other communities is unlikely to be helpful: Other e-lit communities may not need an FTP site, two USENET newsgroups, a MUD, and so on. But understanding how different structures, conventions, and tools have helped IF authors and players could have broader applicability. For instance, the IF Comp has worked to encourage the annual production of games, but it has also dominated IF production so that the best-known games are those short ones released for the IF Comp. (The community has responded with other comps and with projects to review other games, so the IF Comp is not too much of a victim of its own success.) Nevertheless, this situation can highlight the benefits and the dangers of a regular, central activity with its own format requirements. Considering the IF community may also point the way to other groups that are less obviously literary, but are creative communities of practice involved with computing.
Finally, Your 50 Character Reward!
After I presented poetry generators ppg256-1 through ppg256-5 at Banff in February, I shouted out, more or less spontaneously, "50 character reward to whoever gives us the best explanation of what ppg256 is!" Why did I say that? Childhood trauma, possibly, but the more immediate reason, as I mentioned earlier, is that the last of these, ppg256-5, is based on a section of Tristan Tzara's February 1921 Dada Manifesto, one which ends with the phrase "50 francs reward to the person who finds the best way to explain DADA to us."
I got some great answers, including "It does a lot with a little" (Chris Funkhouser) and "ppg combines atoms of language" (John Cayley). But at this point I'll skip right to the one from Travis Kirton, who did the following without having any previous experience programming in Perl:
perl -le '@a=split/,/,"illmn,imgn,ltr,mut,pxl,popl,strlz,pnctu,typfc,poetc,glmr,idl,ion,cptl,cpsl,cvl,atom,pltc,txtul,erotc,rvl";sub f{pop if rand>.5}sub w{$a[rand@a]}{print f("de").f("over").w."izes ".w."ation".f("s")."\n".(" "x45)."IS WHAT ppg DOES!";sleep 5;redo}'
The program is a modification of ppg256-5, one that answers the questions that ppg256-5 generates. That's not only clever; it showcases the expressive power of small programs and the many, if not arbitrary, uses to which a language generator can be put. This certainly earns the reward. Travis, here's an base64-encoded version of a 32-byte DOS intro, matisse, by orbitaldecay. When you run it after decoding it with a base64 decoder, it should look like this. The base64-encoded string, you will notice, is exactly 50 characters in length:
sBPNEMUPHgeLFwmXQAEJVwFL4vSsQKq5ZQDkYEh16cM=
Okay, I lied. It's only 44 characters long. Please accept base64 as the remaining part of the prize.
Now, I think Mark Markino's explanation of ppg256, which I wrote about yesterday, is also great and will suffice. It's a wide-ranging and deep study of the series of generators, similar programs I've discussed, and some relevant contexts of techneculture. I can't really decide which of these explanations is best, as they both work excellently for what they are. So I am going to offer Mark Marino a 50-character generator, too. Mark, here is an ASCII encoding of a set of tools that, used properly, will allow you to draw any image:
())\_\_\_RED\_\_\_))\_> ())\_\_GREEN\_\_))\_> ())\_\_\_BLUE\_\_))\_>
@party: Weaving thread
I spent this weekend at @party 2010, the first (and hopefully not last) demoparty of this name. The event was in the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts – a bit outside of Boston. I heard four live music performances, saw an early cut of Jason Scott's almost-finished Get Lamp documentary, and saw and heard grafix, music, and demos (wild and windows) in the Saturday evening compos. There were great tunes, a truly excellent 4k windows demo, an incredible demo running on an Arduino, and much more. Many thanks to the organizer, Metoikos, and everyone who helped her out. And, a big thanks to the demoscene!
Working with two others and using the moniker "nom de nom," I completed my first demoscene production: thread, a Commodore 64 demo that has fewer than 32 bytes of code. (There are no C64 demos this size or smaller on pouet.net, as far as I can tell.) This demo is a tribute to a BASIC program that generates random mazes, one that exists in one form in the C64 User's Guide but has also circulated as a one-liner. Here's a version of the program:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I developed thread working in person first with Le Colonial of Atlanta, a sometime co-author of mine who also writes Atari VCS games. (He's also known as Ian Bogost.) At the party itself, I was fortunate to encounter C64 expert rv6502 of Montréal, who joined me and did the heavy lifting in the second phase of this project.
After working one evening with Le Colonial in Cambridge, we had a 32 byte program that wasn't exactly like the original, but did something pretty cool. When I checked it out on my actual C64 right before I left for the party, however, it didn't work. The SID was initialized differently in the emulators I'd used than it was on the box itself – as it happened – and there was something odd happening with my video display as well.
I brought my C64 to the event rather half-heartedly, without any way of getting programs onto it other than typing them in and without a display. Alas, I wasn't going to get away from the program that easily: Dr. Claw brought me a monitor to use and NO CARRIER loaned me a flash cart – and, later, a physical copy of the Commodore 64 Programmer's Guide. rv6502 and I sat down to work further on the program. It turned out my C64's video was different that of the emulators I used, but also different from Ferris's actual C64 (which matched the behavior of the emulators I tried). So it wasn't just an emulator failing to match the metal; the two different C64s apparently have different KERNAL code in ROM. Dumping my machine's ROM and used that with my emulator would have solved that part of the mismatch.
I won't try to go into all the details of developing this demo, but there were two particularly great things about the process at a high level. First, I got to collaborate with and learn from two others at different points. Second, I got to learn a lot more about the C64, including many things I wouldn't have run up against if I hadn't been working on something like this. I'm not talking about small differences between emulation and the hardware, which were a minor part of this experience, in the end. I mean finding excellent facilities of the 6502 and the C64 to work around those which weren't doing what we wanted.
We've released thread in three versions: The canonical one, which has 31 bytes of code but is in a 33-byte PRG file, because the beginning memory location is stored in the first two bytes of PRG files. If this bothers you, there is a 28-byte version which fits into a 30-byte PRG file and has all the same colors, but displayed in a way that we think is not as pretty. We also include a simple, straightforward reimplementation of the BASIC program above: A 20-byte program in a 22-byte PRG file. I'd love to get this uploaded to pouet.net at some point, but I don't know how. For now, here's a zipfile with source and PRGs.
thread got 4th place in the Oldschool category at @party. After you load a PRG file in your emulator (or on your C64), you can run it by typing "SYS 4096".
Finally, these are the 31 bytes of thread:
A9 80 8D 0F D4 8D 12 D4 A8 B1 F9 8D 86 02 AD 1B D4 29 01 69 6D 20 D2 FF E8 D0 ED E6 F9 50 E9
IF Contests Everywhere
Hello from the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction.
The TWIF Comp, a contest for interactive fiction with code of 140 characters or less, recently wrapped up. (We're playing some of the games at the PR-IF meeting today.) Although it certainly had its in-joke aspects, the competition did bear amusing fruit, and it's only one example of several recent competitions beyond the traditional big annual IF Comp. Given my interest in tiny literary systems, I certainly gave some thought to entering this one. However, I've pledged to spend all of my IF-writing time working on or in Curveship, and 140-character programs in the system weren't at the top of my to-do list.
Before the TWIF Comp, there was the Jay Is Games interactive fiction competition, and after it there is the Second Annual MetaFilter Interactive Fiction Contest, which just started on Saturday. Those who read German will be delighted to know, if they don't already, that the Grand Prix 2010 has just concluded. There's also going to be an interactive fiction competition (for 30-minute-playtime games) at the Massachusetts demoparty @party. (Information will be posted on the site soon.) And Introcomp is gearing up: Interested parties should indicate their intention to enter by the end of the month. In case you're new to online competitions, comps, or "compos" as they are sometimes called, these are not furious masculinist agons; they are mainly excuses for people to complete games and have them played by a bunch of people.
At the very least, you IF-interested parties should take a look at the games being proffered in recent contests – or, see if you want your IF to be part of one of these occasions.
Up Above Once Again
I'm back from a nice slice of summer in Sydney, Australia. I spoke at the University of New South Wales when I was there, gave two talks at the Powerhouse Museum in connection with their "The 80s Are Back" exhibit, and was one of the three judges of the Global Game Jam Sydney. The people who participated in that event did some incredible work – congratulations to all. Here's some video of me, at the Powerhouse Museum, on interactive fiction and on indie and 80s videogames.
IGF Finalists Announced
The 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists have been announced. Especially interesting to me are the finalists and honorable mentions for the IGF Nuovo Award, an award intended to "honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games." My collaborator, Ian Bogost, has a game in the finals: A Slow Year, a suite of four 1k games for one of his, and my, favorite platforms … which means that he'll be brining an Atari 2600 to GDC this year to display his wares.
Post Position is Nick Montfort's blog about interactive narrative, imaginative and poetic writing (often digital), the material history of computational media, video and computer games, et cetera.
Please Discuss:
Ma?y Format on A Web Reply to the Post-Web Generation
Text-Savvy AI Is Here to Write Fiction – iTech – Blog: iOS • Android • Windows • Mac • Game • Technology on Nano-NaNoGenMo or #NNNGM
Nick Montfort on Nano-NaNoGenMo or #NNNGM
Nick Montfort on Computer-Generated Books
Stephen Pentecost on Computer-Generated Books
Months Past:


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Legislation & Litigation , Privacy , Standards, Regulations & Compliance
UK's Snowden Response: Surveillance Debate
Revised 'Snooper's Charter' Could Have Global Impact Mathew J. Schwartz (euroinfosec) • November 5, 2015
The U.K. government's response to whistleblower Edward Snowden's warnings that the United States and Britain had created a massive surveillance state has been to attempt to codify and expand those surveillance powers while also debating oversight and related matters in public for the first time.
On Nov. 4, Britain's ruling Tory party released its proposed revision of the Investigatory Powers Bill, which was first introduced in 2012, at which point it was branded a "Snooper's Charter" and blocked by leaders of the Liberal Democrats.
Home Secretary Theresa May told Parliament Nov. 4 that the revised bill is meant to reflect law enforcement and intelligence operations becoming "vastly more demanding in this digital age," which requires giving agencies expanded powers to do their jobs properly. The new bill's introduction was expected, following the Tory party securing a majority in Parliament in May. It will now be subject to legislative review and public debate, with the government hoping to pass it into law by the end of 2016.
The revised Investigatory Powers Bill seeks to put what intelligence agencies are already doing on a firmer legal footing and require Internet service providers to retain data on all the websites their customers visit for a longer period, while adding some oversight of such activities - for the first time - from a panel of judges.
The revised bill has been welcomed by many law enforcement experts but criticized by some privacy experts and civil rights groups. Furthermore, it's not clear if the provisions of the bill might survive legal challenges, especially over questions of mass surveillance rather than targeted surveillance. "These are extremely intrusive and wide-ranging powers that very likely violate the U.K.'s obligations under human rights and EU law," says human rights lawyer Sarah St. Vincent of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group.
The draft bill follows warnings released earlier this year that the U.K.'s surveillance laws lack transparency and accountability and are so vaguely written as to allow intelligence agencies to collect almost any type of data - and in any quantity.
Authorized: Nation-State Hacking
Here are some of the provisions of the 299-page draft bill:
U.K. spies are explicitly authorized to hack into any computer or phone anywhere in the world for national security purposes;
Internet service providers must retain all customer data - including lists of all URLs visited - for 12 months, rather than the current 6 months;
A panel of senior judges could now veto any "interception, equipment interference and bulk warrants" signed by the Home Secretary;
Those judges would provide an annual report on all activities;
British companies would be required to comply with all U.K. government requests to hack a device, if it is feasible.
In a notable policy shift, the revised bill would not compel businesses that use cryptography to share a "front door" key with the government to enable intelligence agencies to decrypt data, as Prime Minster David Cameron had been demanding. Then again, numerous leading cryptographers - including Matthew Green at Johns Hopkins University - have dismissed any attempt to impose crypto front doors or backdoors as mathematically impossible. And many experts continue to question how many U.K. government officials or legislators have the technical fluency required to understand or meaningfully debate either cryptography or these proposed surveillance law revisions.
'To MI5 With Love'
The move to give U.K. intelligence agencies more powers - "To MI5 With Love," the Economist has quipped, referring to Britain's domestic intelligence agency - comes as the government has also released new insights into its current bulk data collection practices.
Indeed, for the past decade, Britain's GCHQ - the British analogue of the U.S. National Security Agency - has been collecting vast quantities of telephone data "to identify subjects of interest within the U.K. and overseas," according to U.K. government documents released Nov. 4. Such efforts have been aided by laws that were "so vague that anything could be done under it," David Anderson, the British independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, tells the BBC. "It wasn't illegal in the sense that it was outside the law; it was just that the law was so broad and the information was so slight that nobody knew it was happening."
Spies Launch Charm Offensive
The U.K. intelligence establishment has been out in force in the lead-up to the introduction of the updated Investigatory Powers Bill. Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, warned in an Oct. 28 speech in London about "the scale and complexity of the three-dimensional terrorist threat we face in the U.K., overseas and online," and called for a public debate about expanding his domestic intelligence agency's powers, albeit within certain parameters. "I hope that the public debate will be a mature one, informed by the three independent reviews, and not characterized by ill-informed accusations of 'mass surveillance,' or other such lazy two-worded tags."
But Eric King, deputy director of the U.K. civil rights group Privacy International, suggests via Twitter that it's difficult to suddenly trust the government "with retained Internet connection records, when retained phone records were harvested and analyzed in bulk in secret."
Oh dear, another two-word tag. pic.twitter.com/TL5DxJN75p
� Eric King (@e3i5) November 5, 2015
Likewise, Snowden has taken to Twitter to note that the new surveillance bill "does not require individualized judicial authorization in advance of interception," adding that "such a dragnet is mass surveillance."
By my read, #SnoopersCharter legitimizes mass surveillance. It is the most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regime in the West.
� Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 4, 2015
Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, has also criticized the new bill. "Judicial review after the event is better than no judicial review at all, but it falls short of the requirement to place the power to issue a warrant into the hands of an independent judge, which is where it belongs," he says.
Some privacy experts are warning that the U.K.'s surveillance decisions could have a global impact because of data sharing with other countries, including the United States. Still, some have also cautiously endorsed the U.K.'s move to add more oversight to its otherwise secret surveillance practices.
"While it's a positive step to include some additional oversight of surveillance orders at least where content is concerned, we remain concerned about how thorough that oversight will be, and whether it is actually capable of preventing serious abuses," CDT's St. Vincent says. She also notes that bulk metadata collection - of the type revealed by Snowden's Prism leaks - will apparently continue without any judicial oversight.
Such matters will no doubt continue to be debated throughout the coming year. Taking a big-picture view of the proceedings, however, Green - the Johns Hopkins cryptographer - has lauded Britain's move to at least publicly debate its surveillance practices and related oversight mechanisms.
Proud to live in the USA, where we get our surveillance laws from a secret court, rather than sneaking it through Parliament like cowards.
� Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) November 4, 2015
Legislation & Litigation
Malware Used to Launch DDoS Attacks
NIST Publishes Application Whitelisting Guide
https://www.bankinfosecurity.co.uk/uks-snowden-response-surveillance-debate-a-8660


text:
{ print("hello"); // comment
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The purpose of this research is to provide readers with an initial understanding of white grape varietals, including Albarino, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, and many more. Lighter varietals are expected to gain market share in the future. Other Tiburon research topics focus on red varietals & related beverages. All of these topics are part of Tiburon's wine industry research varietals.


text:
Toiling while sick no good for co-workers
By L.M. Sixel Dec. 26, 2012
It's cold and flu season. And the No. 1 biggest sickness-related pet peeve according to frustrated workers? Co-workers who come to the office sick.
It's bad enough when colleagues show up coughing and sneezing, according to a recent survey of working mothers with children at home. But what's worse, according to 23 percent of those surveyed, are the folks who drag themselves in and then talk openly about how horrible they feel.
The online survey of 501 women, which has a margin of error of 4.4 percent, was commissioned by Vicks, the giant over-the-counter brand of cold and flu supplies. But it hits a nerve.
In today's just-in-time working environment, it's difficult to get sick and stay home. There may be no one else to get the job done, and people are counting on you so you shiver and shake your way into the office, the plant, the store or the warehouse. Announcing "stay away from me because I'm sick" is also a way of telegraphing your dedication, especially during unstable economic times.
And for many folks, staying home means they don't get paid because their job doesn't come with paid sick leave.
"All the time I hear from my patients that they won't be paid if they don't go to work," said Joshua Septimus, clinical associate professor of medicine at the Methodist Hospital in Houston.
Septimus, an internal medicine physician at Methodist, sympathizes with his patients because he's self-employed. If he doesn't go to work, and he didn't one day recently because he was sick, he receives no revenue yet he still has to cover his overhead. That includes rent and his nursing staff.
"You have to look out for the health of others," he said.
"When you have flu-like symptoms it's likely putting a virus on every doorknob, on every keyboard and every telephone," Septimus said.
People do not need to stay home if they have a sniffle, he said. But you need to stay home if you have flu-like symptoms or a fever over 100 degrees.
Septimus said he is glad to hear that sick co-workers are such a big pet peeve at the workplace. "Hopefully, they won't come to work sick if people make a stink."
And that is sometimes what it takes.
Every employer, it seems, has multiple examples of sending their obviously sick employees home before they wipe out the entire office.
The 20K Group, a public relations firm in Houston, has an unwritten policy that it's better to stay home if you're sick.
If you're up to it, you can work from home, Vice President Courtenay Siegfried said. Otherwise stay in bed and don't worry about it. Employees do not lose pay by staying home.
But there have been times when sneezing and wheezing employees have been asked to leave and not to come back until their cough is finished and they feel better.
"We don't want anyone coming in with a bug that will take out the team," Siegfried said.
One way to make sure employees stay home when they're sick is if the boss does it, too.
Leaders need to set an example, said John Sweney, CEO of the Brookwoods Group, a staffing firm that fills positions in marketing and communications in Houston. They can't be dragging into work sicker than dogs and then expect their employees to follow the mandate about not coming into work sick.
Sweney said he tells his new employees during the orientation session about the importance of staying home when they're sick. And then he sets the tone around the office by talking about how he handles his colds and flu by curling up with the dog and watching old movies.
To make it easier for his 37 employees to manage the time off, Brookwoods uses a "paid time off" system that provides each employee between two and five weeks of annual time off, depending on seniority.
Employees can use the time for any reason, including sick time. It has worked well, said Sweney, and in some rare instances when medical problems have eaten into too much of the time-off bank, the company has added some days.
No one has had to ruin their vacation plans, he said, because they had to stay at home sick.
L.M. Sixel is a columnist for the Houston Chronicle.
lm.sixel@chron.com
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July 17th, 2019 AAAA
Keyword::
Wed 17 July 2019
Warszawa (PL)
Praha (CZ)
Bratislava (SK)
Budapest (HU)
Mayor: Budapest, govt to complete Budapest e-ticket system jointly
The Hungarian government and the Budapest city council will complete Budapest's e-ticket system jointly by 2021, Mayor Istvan Tarlos told commercial television. The project has not collapsed but will "probably" be taken over from the Budapest Transport Centre (BKK), Tarlos said. On Friday, Tarlos told the press that the municipal council's contract with the EBRD remains in force and the project to set up an automated fare collection system will continue. Earlier in the day, he initiated firing BKK managing director Kalman Daboczi because of the e-ticketing project. According to an agreement with Innovation and Technology Minister Laszlo Palkovics and Interior Minister Sandor Pinter, the city's e-ticket system will be coupled with the national system, Tarlos said on ATV.
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'Braves' on the frontlines of Hong Kong's protests
Hong Kong anti-extradition protests. 50,000 protesters took to the streets of kowloon on Sunday to oppose a controversial extradition (Photo by Paul Wong from Shutterstock).
by Yan ZHAO
Ryan began the day pretending to his parents that he was off to play football and ended it with a rubber bullet to the leg sustained in clashes with Hong Kong's police.
The 19-year-old bespectacled student is one of what Hong Kong protesters have dubbed "the braves" — hardline pro-democracy activists who have embraced violence and specialise in fighting police.
Were it not for Hong Kong's summer of rage, Ryan might have been enjoying the holidays and getting ready to start university later this month.
Instead he has spent most of the past 14 weekends on the barricades of the city's huge and sometimes violent anti-government protests, a frontline role he has managed to keep secret from his parents at home.
He joined the protests at the start, initially as a first aider.
But he soon found himself radicalised after police used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear demonstrators outside the city's parliament on June 12.
He remains unapologetic about turning to violence, saying Hong Kong's pro-Beijing leaders have spent years ignoring peaceful pro-democracy marches.
"When I saw so many companions being hurt and badly battered by the police, I started feel awakened at that moment and thought it was time to do something," he told AFP, in between clashes with police on a recent weekend close to the parliament.
"I am with burning anger," he added. "I want to let the police know that they can't beat us, they can't beat the residents with no consequences. They have to pay the price."
Wizards and firefighters
A culture has built up around Hong Kong's "braves" who are hailed by supporters as heroes and reviled by their opponents as nihilists.
Ryan, who declined to give his surname, classifies himself as a "charge boy" — those tasked with fighting the police.
Protesters who throw petrol bombs are known as "wizards" while teams who extinguish the fizzing tear gas canisters fired at them by police are dubbed "firefighters".
When things are quiet, Ryan explained, his main task is to set up roadblocks and use zip-ties to build barricades.
"But if the police charge forward, I will throw bricks to slow them down. Or if necessary, even fight hand-to-hand with them," he said.
On 31 August — a day when protesters defied a police ban and marched through the city — Ryan slipped out of the small flat he lives in with his parents.
He could never tell them he has joined the braves, he explained, because his father is "blue ribbon" — a staunch supporter of Hong Kong's police and Beijing.
That day's protest turned violent outside the city government's offices and parliament, a frequent flashpoint over the last three months.
Police used water cannon and tear gas to disperse protesters who fought back with slingshots, bricks and Molotov cocktails.
Unlike some of the braves who don reinforced gloves and body armour, Ryan dressed in a simple black T-shirt, saying he preferred to be mobile.
Along with goggles and a gas mask he wore the movement's trademark yellow construction helmet which he had daubed with "Free Hong Kong, Revolution Now" and the dates he had taken to the streets.
Like on previous days, Ryan avoided communicating with fellow protesters, turning up to the gathering on his own.
But once on the streets, he explained, people treat each other as firm friends, united in anonymity by their political convictions.
Bricks and petrol bombs
Using an umbrella to shield himself from rubber bullets and tear gas, Ryan began his offensive by throwing a packet of yellow paint at riot police lined up the other side of a barricade surrounding the government offices.
Next it was a brick he was hurling over the wall.
Then he used his umbrella to shield another protester who lobbed a petrol bomb.
Police fired back with sustained rounds of tear gas, enveloping the chanting crowds with acrid smoke.
"Of course I'm scared and it is a normal feeling," he said. "I believe no one is fearless when they are at the front".
The skirmishes went on for much of the afternoon with Ryan and other hardline activists retreating through the city.
Hong Kong's unprecedented protests were sparked by a proposed bill allowing extraditions to the authoritarian mainland.
Opponents saw it was the latest move by Beijing to chip away at the city's unique freedoms.
But as Beijing and city leader Carrie Lam refused to budge the movement morphed into a broader campaign calling for democratic reforms and police accountability.
For months Lam struck a defiant tone and refused to yield to protesters. Then last week she surprised many by announcing she was scrapping the hugely unpopular extradition law.
Protesters across the spectrum dismissed the gesture as too little, too late and have vowed to keep up their campaign.
Among their demands is an amnesty for those arrested, an inquiry into the police and universal suffrage — all rejected by Lam and Beijing.
Prepared for arrest
Which is why Ryan says he and other braves will keep hitting the streets.
"I want to let the Carrie Lam government know how people urgently desire the five major demands and how people are forced to come out to fight at any cost," he said.
But the risks are high.
Since early June more than 1,100 people have been arrested, many facing riot charges that carry up to 10 years jail.
"I have prepared for arrest," Ryan said, adding he had given his details to a number of close friends.
"If I don't contact them after I go out for a protest, then they will send for legal assistance," he explained.
"It is worth it, to be arrested for my own rights, for the next generation," he said, adding that he still hopes for victory and dreams about one day taking off his mask and getting to know his fellow protesters.
By evening Ryan and other hardline protesters found themselves facing off with riot police in the popular shopping district of Causeway Bay, known for its luxury fashion stores and malls.
Ryan was hit in the thigh by a rubber pellet fired by riot police.
He let out a yelp and fell to the ground before being carried away from the frontlines.
The injury was not serious, but it was painful enough for him to call it a night.
"I must never let my mum know about this," he laughed, before changing into a fresh t-shirt and taking a subway train back home.
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Destination Comics – A New Publisher From Comicsgate's Richard Meyer and Chuck Dixon? With Sylvester Stallone-Written Expendables, And More
In recent days, Richard Meyer has launched an Indiegogo campaign for a new graphic novel with the Expendables license, Expendables Go To Hell. The graphic novel is to be written by Bane co-creator Chuck Dixon, who wrote previous Expendables comics when Dynamite owned the license and will be co-written by Expendables star and producer, Sylvester Stallone. The comic will be drawn by fellow Bane co-creator Graham Nolan as well as Butch Guice, Jason Johnson, Kelsey Shannon and more. In three days, the campaign has already raised over $80,000, well above its $10,000 goal. The graphic novel sees the cast of the movies waking up in Hell, and dealing with armies from across history. It includes the main characters from the Expendables movies – but seemingly only has facial likenesses for Sylvester Stallone's character Barney Ross. Stallone's official Instagram account posted the following.
Images from the next Adventures of the EXPENDABLES – GO TO HELL!! … Thank you Chuck Dixon and your amazing team for working on this. Go out and get the graphic comic which is going to drop soon
Bleeding Cool understands that Dynamite Entertainment let the Expendables license lapse, is not involved in this publication, and the graphic novel will be published by a new publisher formed by Chuck Dixon and Richard Meyer, dubbed Destination Comics, and that future comics involving Sylvester Stallone will see publication there. I have been told that they already have digital distribution via Amazon's ComiXology and Kindle services. As for the direct market, I am told that Destination Comics will be entering an arrangement with an existing publisher, just as Image Comics once did with Malibu, to establish themselves a place in Diamond Previews catalogue, before splitting off on their own. If such a deal is finalised, it may increase said publisher's marketshare considerably, at least initially, as well as granting Destination Comics in instant and prominent position within the Diamond Previews catalogue.
UPDATE: After publication, Meyer contacted Bleeding Cool to say "I have not had any discussions with any other companies to do a Malibu-Image type of publishing deal. Nor has a deal of that type been offered to me by anyone."
Meyer has proved a controversial figure in recent years. A US veteran who had published a number of comics, his involvement in early comics cancel culture saw him successfully demanding that the writer of GI Joe be fired. Creating a YouTube channel that tackled what he saw as overly-liberal voices in comics, or what he saw as token hiring by publishers, with rapidly increasingly insulting language, he gained a large audience, culminating in his Dark Roast video that made many deeply insulting claims against comics industry figures. A leading figure in the outrage activist group Comicsgate, he channelled that attention into crowdfunding his graphic novels, with similarly-minded creators. He is also involved in an ongoing legal case against Mark Waid on charges of defamation and tortious interference, denied by Waid, over Meyer's publishing relationship with Antarctic Press. This happened after Antarctic dropped the planned publication of his crowdfunded graphic novels, and Meyer distributed contact lists of retailers who said they wouldn't stock his comic, to his followers.
Chuck Dixon is a longstanding legendary comic book creator, who may have written more published comic books than anyone else. The co-creator of Bane, he is best known for writing Batman, Punisher and many war comics. Of late, his published work has become a little more political, including political, usually right-wing, polemics. These have included the graphic novel adaptation of Clinton Cash, Trump's Space Force and the Vox Day comic, Alt-Hero. He also wrote the original Expendables comic series and has worked with Sylvester Stallone on other projects over the years.
No doubt, there will be plenty of commentary about such a new publisher and its place in the direct market. This is also the third comics publisher with well-known names to emerge this week, including Dinesh Shamdasani, Hunter Gorinson, Warren Simons and Jason Johns' Bad Idea Comics and Eddie Berganza and Eric M Esquivel's Alternate Empire. It could get a little crowded out there.
Bleeding Cool talked to Chuck Dixon when preparing this article, as well as other industry sources, but Richard Meyer did not return e-mails sent this morning. UPDATE: After publication, Meyer contacted Bleeding Cool with the correction noted above.
Posted in: Comics | Tagged: chuck dixon, comicsgate, indiegogo, richard meyer, sylvester stallone
Nubia Gets A New Weapon Tomorrow (Spoilers)
Darryl Banks' cover of tomorrow's Nubia And The Amazons #4 by Stephanie Williams, Vita Ayala, Alitha Martinez and Mark Morales shows Nubia fighting


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It's the time of year I start wishing I had a beach in the backyard. Even one within a 250-mile radius would do! Because summer days are meant for collecting sea shells, building sand castles and relaxing with a good book. Everything should be easy – even your jewelry! And if you're a bracelet lover, you've probably noticed that delicate bracelets are in. The trend is all about wearing a "tiny stack" of several smaller, simpler pieces for your arm party. My favorite way to wear this trend is to group together several (3 or 5) of the same kind of bracelet in slightly different colors. And sea glass is perfect for a beachy summer vibe!
The soft purples and clear water blues of sea glass instantly makes you think of the beach. Found in the mosaic section of the craft store, the shapes come in a random assortment of sizes, making some perfect for delicate bracelets and others just right for simple stud earrings.
Using the E-6000, glue a small jump ring on either side of the sea glass piece. The edge of the jump ring should extend out from the sea glass a tiny bit. Let this dry overnight. (Note: I originally tried to drill a small hole on either side – no luck! If you have the necessary diamond drill bit, definitely give that a try.) After the glue is completely dry, attach a small jump ring to each side.
Cut two pieces of the silver chain and attach them to the sea glass via the jump ring. Measure your wrist and trim the chain length with the pliers.
Attach a small jump ring on each end of the chain and add the lobster clasp to one side. Repeat to make as many bracelets as you want!
To make earrings, simply find two small pieces that are roughly the same size and glue a stud backing on one side of the glass. If you like your earrings to dangle a bit more, glue a jump ring to the top of the glass with E-6000 and attach a French earring wire hook.
Now, who else is really ready for a trip to the beach?