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Innovation Birmingham to be sold to property group Bruntwood
Editorial Team Posted On March 19, 2018
Innovation Birmingham, the publicly-owned science park which supports start-up and growing tech and digital companies, is to be bought by private property group Bruntwood.
The campus, which sits next to Aston University on the edge of the city centre, comprises three office buildings – Faraday Wharf, iCentrum and the Universities Centre – and is owned by Birmingham City Council.
It has office accommodation for start-up and small companies and runs programmes such as Entrepreneurs for the Future and Serendip Smart City Incubator which help to grow business ideas and small companies access information, mentoring and industry expertise.
Innovation Birmingham has supported more than 260 businesses, created over 500 jobs and raised more than £18 million in equity finance since 2009.
The deal, which is recommended by Birmingham City Council's cabinet but is still being finalised, has been announced this afternoon at MIPIM, the annual international property conference in France.
The value of the deal has not been disclosed at this stage and it is unclear how the city council is planning to use the funds generated by the sale.
This deal is the latest sell off by the authority which offloaded the NEC Group for £307 million in 2015 to LDC, the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group.
Birmingham City Council leader Coun Ian Ward said: "This potential investment in Innovation Birmingham is crucial for the continuing success of the region's tech and digital businesses.
"I am confident that, when finalised, it will generate huge benefits for the city's thriving and diverse digital sector, helping to create hundreds of jobs, build businesses and drive growth in the city region as innovative tech firms are given relevant support to realise their growth potential.
"Partnerships between academia and business are essential for the growth of any city or region and students, early stage entrepreneurs and innovators need a place, often close to seats of learning, to incubate and collaborate."
Innovation Birmingham's chief executive David Hardman will continue in the post once the deal is completed.
He said: "Innovation Birmingham has moved a long way in the last nine years but we have reached a point where we need to scale.
"We have three buildings, these buildings are full, we have more than 140 businesses, we have a thriving community of people who visit here but, if we are really going to make a difference to the Birmingham economy, we have to scale and to do that we need external investment."
Family-owned Bruntwood already owns science parks and incubation hubs in the North West and Leeds and runs several office buildings in Birmingham city centre including Mclaren in Priory Queensway and Cornerblock in Cornwell Street.
Chief executive Chris Oglesby added: "Our upcoming acquisition of Innovation Birmingham forms a key strategic component of our wider science and technology business and enables us to share knowledge and expertise across these sectors.
"We understand the importance of engaging with key partners, acknowledging that what we can do together would be so much greater than we could ever hope to do on our own."
Advisers on the deal for Birmingham City Council are KPMG and Gowling with Addleshaw Goddard acting for Bruntwood.
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I'm too happy to concentrate on writing the blog post that will eventually appear here, but I wanted plant a flag in this place and time. Happiness in the fourteenth year of marriage, eleventh of parenthood, and at middle age is very different and much more oaken than a teenage romance flick, and much better.
Next Next post: On the Invention of Quiche—Now I'll Never See "Horace and Pete" by Louis C.K.


This is a screen shot showing the gameplay. The status line on the bottom of the screen is showing the following things ( left to right ): Ship Energy, Score, Hobbels out / Hobbels on board, number of Mines, number of red-green-blue keys.
This release includes 9 tutorial, 8 built in and 10 more ( quite easy ) maps in an external map set. Supporting external stored maps implies, that you can build and play your own Grafoon maps. If you consider building maps, drop me a line and I'll explain how it works. I have tested this version in no$gba and on the R4 DS card.
Copy the 'Grafoon.nds' file somewhere to your memory card and the 'user_maps' directoy to the root of your card. If you DLDI patch the binary you can select a 'map set' from the main menu.
Comments and ideas are greatly appreciated !
I would suggest maybe adding a "speed up" button. It's a little bit annoying having to wait for the hobbles to reach the craft sometimes, if they have a long way to walk. Other than that, keep up the good work. Waiting for the 1.0 release with anticipation. Definitely a keeper.
Custom control configuration is on my list for version 1.0. I tested various variation of controls an found the current one quite OK.
All in all its an impressive game and it feels professionally made but i think it will be a lot better once you implement custom controls. i only mentioned gravitation because its by far the best game of this type ive ever played and this feels very similar to it the only different being that in gravitation your goal is to kill the other player in a unique spin on dogfighting made harder by the gravity element and more interesting by the various powerups that can be used to customize how you fly and attack. the smaller dpad on the ds lite makes it harder to reverse using the down arrow so divebombing enemies from above accurately is difficult without a lot of practice without reverse being assigned to a button.
another thing, the ship shouldnt lose momentum, should it? being out in space with no atmosphere and everything.
Don't let reality get in the way of fun.
Nice game! I can see why some people mention gravity… reminds me of Asteroids, but without the momentum. Perhaps a bit of momentum would balance the challenge and "naturalness". Overall, very promising, thanks.


Earlier this year I attended an annual science fiction and fantasy convention in the Boston area. Rather to my surprise, there were no panels on climate change. Even in the last few years when a few such panels had been on the agenda, I had the impression that "speculative fiction and climate" was a niche interest rather than something central to a genre that has a near-monopoly on apocalyptic scenarios.
The liveliness of the convention, its continuing concerns with interesting and worthy issues ranging from utopia to racism to international roots of spec fic—all this against the conspicuous absence of discussions on climate change—brought to mind the Yale Program on Climate Communication report "Is There a Climate Spiral of Silence in America?". According to this study, even among those who are interested in climate change or find it important (two-thirds of Americans), more than half do not generally talk about it. Thus this phenomenon that I noticed in the convention is not restricted to spec fic aficionados but is a feature of the wider society—in America, and possibly the world.
Amitav Ghosh, in his relatively brief but urgent book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, offers some possible ways to understand this silence, via excursions through the history of the modern novel, the inadequacy (as he claims) of science fiction to handle the ongoing climate crisis, and reflections on historical and political forces that have brought us to this moment in time. The essays are drawn from lectures given at the University of Chicago in 2015, and their titles—"Stories," "History," and "Politics"—are arranged in the Contents page at the corners of a triangle. The nonlinear placement of these topics suggests a concept map of overlapping ideas, as well as the possibility that the essays may be read in any order, which is more or less borne out when one reads the book.
Amitav Ghosh is a highly acclaimed Indian writer in English, whose literary fiction is deeply grounded in historical and geographical research. His nonfiction is equally respected, from the 1992 work In an Antique Land to his 2016 book on climate change. I have read some of his novels, my favorite in fiction so far being The Hungry Tide. Ghosh's concerns and fascinations are wonderfully non-Eurocentric and richly informed by history—nor do they play to Western stereotypes or expectations, a constant danger for Indian writers in English. His 1995 novel The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award (he does not regard it as science fiction, despite his avowed fondness for the genre).
I come to The Great Derangement as a writer of science fiction, a physicist with a particle physics background working in the past few years on interdisciplinary scholarship of climate change, and an Indian of the same generation who was a student at Delhi University around the time that Amitav Ghosh was there (although our circles crossed briefly, I didn't know of him until I read his works decades later). My ongoing explorations of the climate crisis are at the intersection of science, pedagogy, sociology, philosophy, history, politics, and economics. Because climate change is a subject close to my heart and my work (in and outside of fiction) this is not a review so much as a commentary and a reflection.
Running through the book as a whole is the idea of modernity—a term that connotes the ideas of individualism and freedom, the questioning of tradition, the notion of linear time going toward increased progress, a sense of the novelty of the future, and a rupture with the past. Not to be modern is to be old-fashioned, backward, barbaric, uncivilized. However, as Ghosh takes pains to point out, viewed in another light, modernity is a deeply problematic notion. Its basis is the separation of humankind from the rest of Nature—the creation of the idea of Nature as a collection of natural resources separate from and subject to the project of human civilization—the Nature/ Culture divide that also put the sciences in one realm and literature in the other (so eloquently expressed by C. P. Snow in The Two Cultures ). In the first essay, Ghosh traces the consequences of this separation on literature. Once, scientific works and literary works cross-pollinated each other; once, you could have sprawling, highly populated sagas filled with drama and romance, such as the works of Dickens and Tolstoy—but as the split widened, and as a certain uniformity came into the lives of the middle and upper classes, the novel became focused on the interior landscape of one or a few individuals, and moreover, excluded the non-human. Ghosh uses a metaphor fashioned from the history of geology to describe this shift—originally we had literary catastrophism, with its dramas, human and natural, rooted in the age-old experience of being human in a very large universe. Eventually this gave way to uniformitarianism—a literature that celebrated the quotidian, mimicking the steady, predictable nature of modern urban bourgeois life—what I would call a normal-distribution mindset. Thrown out of the respectable house of literary fiction through this "purification process" into the ghetto of genre were literatures that came to be known as science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and the like. Mary Shelley began to write Frankenstein the year after the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815; it was only retrospectively that it was considered science fiction. Ironically the very processes that brought us to modern industrial civilization—a fairly steady, moderate climate for about 12,000 years (the Holocene), and particularly the more recent development of the fossil fuel economy about 150 years ago—allowed literary fiction the delusion that the rest of Nature was irrelevant. Ghosh refers to the French philosopher Bruno Latour's criticism of modernity in this context.
The trouble with climate change, Ghosh says, is its uncanny aspect. Its extremes—superstorms, droughts, floods, sea level rise—are so beyond the conceptual grasp of modern literary fiction that it is a rare author who wrestles with it. While it might seem natural that climate change should therefore be the province of imaginative literature—science fiction and fantasy—Ghosh argues that it is not so. Unfortunately he takes a quote of Margaret Atwood's (regarding science fiction and speculative fiction as means to transport us to other worlds) as a guide to his logic. SF can't address global warming, he says, because the problem is set in our world and time, "it is precisely not an imagined 'other' world apart from ours, nor is it located in another 'time' or another 'dimension.'" He suggests also that to write climate change as imaginative literature is an ethical violation.
Having given up on both mainstream literature and imaginative literature, Ghosh explores the possibility that the problem might be language itself. Referring to anthropologist Eduardo Kohn's book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, he suggests that thinking through images might be a better means to convey, conceptualize, and engage with the climate crisis. I happen to be reading Kohn's book for the second time (an astonishingly riveting book, but with ideas so deep and slippery as to deserve multiple perusals) and I think that Ghosh is right as to its relevance.
But I disagree with him on climate change and speculative fiction (which latter I define for this purpose to be an umbrella word covering science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, magical realism, etc., and use interchangeably with "imaginative literature"). Speculative fiction's what-if experiments allow us to imagine the effects of certain technologies, or social arrangements, in negotiating our uncertain future. A great recent example of this is Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, a flawed, sprawling, brilliant novel about life and revolution in a drowned future New York: rendered in multiple voices, anchored by fascinating descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life, this story of lives inseparably entwined with each other, the city, the past and the future, and not least with the moods and rhythms of the great ocean, displays a moral courage and an imaginative exuberance of a kind unique to spec fic. In addition there are other works, from veterans of the field, such as Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower) and Ursula K. Le Guin (The New Atlantis) and a host of newer writers such as Emmi Itäranta (Memory of Water), who explore climate-changed worlds and help establish that tradition in SF.
Actually the very point Ghosh makes about the inadequacy of language suggests the relevance of speculative fiction. Kohn's argument in his book is that language is only one of three categories of communication through signals or signs. Through his categorization of semiotics as iconic (the most basic category, where one thing signals another through a lack of distinction between them), indexical (an association of icons that points to some significance beyond the icons themselves), and finally, symbolic (best exemplified by language), he aims to provincialize language; the modernist tendency to hold language above everything else is to be blind to the fact that there are other ways of communication that are beyond language, perhaps even an inter-species pidgin. But language as used in literature can be more than literal too, and not only by way of metaphor, symbol, allegory, analogy, and suchlike. These latter are well known ways in which speculative fiction, to invoke Emily Dickinson, tells the truth but tells it slant. Ghosh's interpretation of Atwood's statement that science fiction transports us to other worlds—his conclusion that spec fic therefore disqualifies itself from being able to address ours—is stupendously literal. Of course a climate-changed world is "another world" from the one we think we know. Science fiction at its best has always been about this world, our world, even when it is set in the far future, on a distant planet. By bringing to light real-world phenomena, through its imaginative "what-if" questions, it interrogates the present moment and posits alternative scenarios, technological, social, political. As Ursula K. Le Guin puts it, "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." I can think of a number of works that demonstrate this: Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, or Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape, for example. But I speculate that words might do even more. I remember, decades ago, my first exposure to the kind of poetry in which the words didn't make much literal sense but the choices and juxtapositions of words, their sounds and emphases created in me a mood, evoked certain emotions and associations. Surely it is possible that the best writers of imaginative literature do something similar, where the narrative itself transcends the limitations of language to create icons and indexical signs, to use words to do what words cannot do, to speak between the lines to our unconscious minds (I'm thinking here of some early essays by Le Guin collected in The Language of the Night that might have served Ghosh better in understanding the potential of imaginative literature).
I can only presume, since Ghosh does not elaborate, that the ethical argument against spec fic engaging with climate change is that somehow the use of fantastic tropes to describe something as serious as climate would be to trivialize it, to belittle the genuine real-world sufferings of millions of people. But this is as true of any literature as it might be of spec fic. Truly great works of literature of any kind—realist or spec fic—treat serious subjects with the honor they deserve. Thus nuclear war is serious stuff, as is gender, as is totalitarianism—but can we conclude then that Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz or Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, or Yevgeny Zamyatin's We fail to honor that seriousness by using the tools of spec fic? And surely it is also true that nonmaterial things—like paradigms, certain emotional states, phenomena beyond the individual human such as mob behavior, theories of economics—have material consequences, and therefore have their own reality. What epics (and the best spec fic works) do so well is to give these nonmaterial realities aspects of larger-than-life beings, which might allow the reader to engage with them more creatively. Climate change has both a material and nonmaterial aspect. I've argued before that the world we live in—call it reality if you wish—is so large and many-tentacled a beast that you sometimes need a vessel larger than reality to hold it.
Considering the seriousness of the crisis, surely we need every means of artistic communication, language-based or otherwise, to learn how to write, speak, sing, paint, and dance climate change. (And seriously, how many people read literary fiction anyway?) Why not a polyphony instead of a solo? (I'm thinking, for example, of Chantal Bilodeau's stunning 2014 play Sila). But to me the value of Ghosh's dismissal of science fiction in this essay is to challenge our ability to negotiate the landscape of the apocalypse before and as it is unfolding instead of after. It is certainly the case that some spec fic authors have been thinking about and writing about climate change for a while. There are valiant attempts and brave failures, as we negotiate this new world with our old words and concepts. But these works are niche interests even within the spec fic community, and beyond it they rarely get the critical attention they deserve. Barbara Kingsolver's realist Flight Behavior is a great book, but it has its limits, and where it is limited is precisely where science fiction can step in. I remember going to my public library's book club discussion of the book when it first came out. The women who gathered to discuss the book (and they were all women) loved it fiercely, but had no idea of the severity of the climate crisis, or that it wasn't inevitable but created by socio-economic and historical forces. That's less a failing of the book—which after all, isn't intended to be a thesis on climate change—than another symptom of the silence around the subject in literature as well as the public sphere. But it is also an indictment of the failure of mainstream literature to expand the mind in the radical way that the best spec fic does.
The essay on history is the shortest in The Great Derangement. Like most serious students of climate history, Ghosh has no quarrel with the charge that capitalism is the chief culprit. However he argues that empire—or colonialism—is equally important, and that the relationship between capitalism and empire is complex. Looking through this lens, Ghosh reveals the centrality of Asia in the climate crisis in riveting detail. First, Asia is likely to suffer the worst damage in terms of the number of people affected—up to 50 million people in India and 75 million in Bangladesh would have to migrate due to sea level rise alone. But Asia is also deeply implicated in the current crisis: due to their rapid industrialization, China and India emit fossil fuels at increasing rates. China has already outpaced the US in total fossil fuel emissions, although per capita both countries are still significantly behind the West. Ghosh makes a far more complex and interesting case for climate reparations (the typical position of developing nations in climate negotiations regarding the debt owed them by the West) than the simplistic us-versus-them argument, tracing the ancient history of fossil fuel use in Asia, notably China and Myanmar, and asking the question as to why these did not result in a large-scale fossil fuel industry. The short answer is colonialism. Colonialism prevented Asian countries from developing their own fossil fuel industries (with the inadvertent effect of slowing global warming), and in fact it is the decolonizing process in countries like India and China that has resulted in the increasing rate of carbon emissions. But the decolonizing project could have gone in another direction—Ghosh quotes Gandhi from India and Zhang Shizhao from China, who recognized the unsustainability of endless growth and consumption. Alternate models of development were ultimately overcome by the forces of neoliberal capitalism, but the fact that they slowed these probably kept a significant amount of carbon from the atmosphere. Ghosh's assertion is that modernity is not a sole Western invention, that alternate forms and variants emerged in Asia as well, but that the colonizing project and capitalism subsumed, appropriated, and modified all possibilities into the one we know today.
Ghosh's last essay—"Politics"—examines the idea of freedom, an essential aspect of modernity, which he calls the most important political conception of the modern era, central to politics, humanities, arts, and literature. Philosophers of freedom, he says, were (since the Enlightenment) concerned with how humans could escape the injustice and oppression of other humans and human systems. But implicit in the idea of freedom was freedom from the constraints of Nature, which is of course a manifestation of the Nature/Culture divide. Ironically the avant-garde, as Ghosh points out in a discussion of the role of artists in the fossil fuel economy, totally missed the boat on climate change. They did not hear what Nature was telling us (this is still true). This reminds me of Latour's famous phrase and book title "We have never been modern," pointing to modernity being a delusion of the most dangerous kind. I am also reminded of how freedom is cast in the West solely in individualist terms—as in the Declaration of Human Rights—worthy as it is, the idea of collective rights and responsibilities apparently has no place. But it is impossible to deal with climate change on an individual basis. Climate change is a threat to this idea of freedom, conceptually and otherwise.
Part of this threat comes from agencies that have long recognized climate change as a problem—specifically a security problem. Ghosh mentions the Pentagon—the Pentagon reports on climate as a major security threat are worth reading. Weather as warfare was used by the US prior to the Geneva Convention, so the idea of climate as a driver of human events is hardly new to the military and defence think-tanks. Ghosh quotes Christian Parenti's phrase "armed lifeboat" as a metaphor for rich countries' plans for climate emergencies—an essential component of which is the turning away by force or obstacle of the millions of refugees that are expected to flood the West (a process that has already started). What Ghosh doesn't mention is that climate change increases the possibility of war and conflict—as environmental conditions change and people get desperate for food and water, the chances of extremism and violence also go up dramatically. New arenas of conflict are already on the horizon—the Arctic Ocean, protected from the depredations of governments and corporations, is now ringed by vested interests as the ice melts and vast reservoirs of oil and gas become accessible.
The essay analyses two crucial climate documents: the Pope's Laudato Si and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. It briefly discusses the role of popular movements (which Ghosh says will take more time to build than we have). Where Ghosh finds most hope is in the possibility of people of faith and popular movements coming together.
I wish that Ghosh had looked at the history of social movements in general and their potential for engendering systemic change, and then examined climate justice movements in that context. In particular the role of indigenous peoples the world over is worth bringing to light. Not only has indigenous resistance stopped or stalled fossil fuel projects, but the experience of peoples from the Dongria Kondh in India to the Standing Rock Sioux in the US reveals the brutal face of industrial civilization. Our modern urban lifestyles, now spread the world over, depend on the continued oppression of multiple and multi-species Others. This inconvenient truth gives the lie to the ideas of freedom, equality, and justice that are claimed by civilized people. The other inconvenient truth is that civilization as we know it is doomed—if we are to engage with climate change in a way that allows us to survive, we need wide, sweeping infrastructure changes that emerge from alternative ways of thinking and being. Indigenous cultures offer us some of these alternative visions.
Ghosh makes another important point almost in passing—speaking of engineers who built cities, bases, and nuclear power plants in regions of high risk from cyclones or tidal waves (Fukushima, for example), he notes that hubris and predation are not the only reasons why such risky propositions became normalized. The scales of natural phenomena were such as to be beyond the imaginations of these practical men, used as they were to the "regularity of bourgeois life." But also they were able to function through creating discontinuities, "breaking problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself." This is, of course, reductionism. Although Ghosh does not discuss this idea further, it is very relevant. Reductionism and its manifestations—from individualism, human isolation, social atomism, and mainstream economics with its idea of the individual exercising rational self-interest for the good of all—are features of a certain paradigm that one might call Newtonian (although its roots precede Newton, who would have balked at some of its implications) or Mechanistic, its model being the Clockwork Universe: the universe and everything in it presented as a giant machine. A history-of-science lens would have added some richness to Ghosh's analysis, especially given his ability to illuminate history's relationship with our present.
One can argue that Newtonian paradigm extends beyond science to socio-economic aspects of modern industrial civilization. Perhaps it is both the offspring and the parent of modernity. I would love to read a historian's informed and detailed elucidation of all of this, but from my scattered and eclectic readings on the subject, a certain irony becomes evident that is centered on physics. Despite the apparent prevalence of the Newtonian way of thinking in every aspect of our lives, the universe is not Newtonian. We are well aware that quantum physics and relativity tell us this, but they are far removed from human scales. There is another less famous ongoing revolution in physics (and indeed it goes beyond science) which is the science of complex systems. Despite its roots in the 1800s, complex systems science has had a very late start. This is—I suspect—in part because of the phenomenal success of the Newtonian paradigm, and its easier cooptation by power. (That anything can be coopted, however, is exemplified in the popularity of "systems thinking" in the business world—hear that buzzing sound?) But it is complex systems science—or more likely, some future formulation of it—that can eventually help us engage with real-world systems like global climate. Complex systems cannot be understood solely by examining their "parts"—reductionism only goes so far. For them, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," as Aristotle famously said. Current explorations of complex systems (and perhaps the field itself) are still handicapped by a Newtonian way of thinking. Notably, old cultures, including many indigenous tribal cultures, typically view the world from a complex systems perspective.
Thus, climate is a complex system—land, biosphere, air, water, ice caps, and human civilization interact so strongly with each other that Cartesian predictability and determinism are of limited usefulness and relevance. While certain predictions in the aggregate are possible, complex systems present us with an array of "new" phenomena—stabilizing and destabilizing feedback loops, tipping points, and unintended consequences. They call for alternate ways of conceptualizing, thinking, living, and being. They are the cracks in the imposing edifice of the Clockwork Universe. While the implications of climate data are clear—we must stop the emission of greenhouse gases and the destruction of carbon sinks such as tropical forests—the possible pathways to that future are complicated and uncertain. We need a huge worldwide shift to green energy infrastructure, a process that is already underway (if slowly), but we also need an equally seismic shift away from consumerism, the foundational basis of the globalized neoliberal economy. This is a complex (but not necessarily very long) process that cannot be modeled mechanistically.
While ecologists and endocrinologists (for example), have known for a long time that mechanistic models of ecosystems or of the endocrine system are of limited usefulness, certain applied physicists and technologists have yet to learn that lesson. The idea of geoengineering, or climate engineering—the large-scale tinkering with Earth's systems to cool the planet—is a case in point. Apart from its ethical implications and the troubling fact that it has been incubated in fossil fuel companies and big US government labs, the problem with geoengineering is that it treats the Earth like a Newtonian machine rather than a complex system, with all the implications—the separation of the scientist-technologist from their object of study, the assumption of simplistic and deterministic "solutions," the desperate, fear-induced seeking of control, which can only be illusory, and the looming shadow of unintended consequences, which could potentially make the problem worse. Geoengineering is the illusion that we can avoid the long, hard road, the paradigm shift, and instead, "fix" what is broken in the Earth's climate. A friend who attended a geoengineering conference recently reported to me that when he asked the attendees about the sociopolitical and ethical aspects of their work, most of them demurred, saying they were "just scientists," a response that is surely in the same ethical category as "I was just following orders," or "I was just doing my job." This separation of the person from the task and the task from its possible consequences is surely a kind of moral reductionism.
Perhaps the usefulness of that oft-contested term paradigm  lies simply in making us aware that our default assumptions, our frameworks for making sense of the world, are not absolute givens. I wonder if we can explain, in part, the actions of the engineers who built Fukushima in violation of the warnings placed by their ancestors on that troubled shore, or the geoengineering fantasies of technological quick-fixes, as resulting from (for lack of a better phrase) paradigm blindness. What if they are so immersed in a particular way of constructing reality that they have no other way of seeing? Here lies the true value of imaginative literature—the potential to free us from our mental constructs, so that we may question our default assumptions and see what we didn't see before. To think that matter matters only to the extent of being able to manipulate it to the ends of the current socio-economic system is to ignore what it is also telling us about its complex entanglements across geographies and times.
To theoretical physicists anyway, even those raised in the reductionist traditions, matter has always mattered in the deepest sense. It is fundamentally the case that laws of Nature constrain how matter manifests and behaves. Thus the idea that there are natural limits to human activity, that we are subject to boundaries due to Nature's laws, is hardly surprising. Stockholm University's Resilience Center has come up with nine planetary boundaries, within which lies humanity's "safe operating zone." Only mainstream economists seem to have a problem with this concept, and indeed with the first two laws of thermodynamics. But they have forgotten that matter also speaks, and it does not always say what they want to hear.
My own explorations (as the wide-eyed physicist) in the realm of new materialism, a collection of movements in different fields that challenge anthropocentricism and bring in non-human and inanimate actors, convince me that these ideas are important (and also that they are not new—as various unheard Others might attest). The works of many of its explorers and adherents suggest that when we interact with each other and with the animate and inanimate universe, we build worlds, and that matter and non-humans co-create these worlds with us. Concepts to which we ascribe an independent existence truly arise from how we build worlds—that is, without context they are meaningless. Such approaches promise to provincialize ideas and concepts that modernity takes for granted, and perhaps modernity itself. The threat of backwardness is in part the driver of "development" in previously colonized nations, as Ghosh points out. I believe it is also a convenient excuse for the ongoing war against indigenous peoples being waged by neoliberal governments from India to the US. Thus "progress," "development," "backwardness" are terms that need to be looked at not as self-evidently meaningful, but in the context of their socio-cultural emergence. Ghosh does refer indirectly to new materialism concepts, but a deeper treatment (including exploration of the ideas of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad) would have enriched the work (a volume II?).
At one point in the book, Ghosh wonders whether we will ever ask questions like "where were you when—" in the context of climate, as we do for catastrophic events like 9/11. Where was I when the Larsen C ice shelf broke off? On July 12, 2017, I was in a classroom, co-running a workshop on climate change for middle school and high school teachers, feeling inadequate before the enormity of the task. The ice shelf had been expected to break off for some time, but when it did, I felt a shock, a sinking of the heart, a faultline separating "before" and "after." What allowed me to survive the feeling was the presence of others in the room and in the world who experienced something similar. If we are to ask such questions—where were you—when the Larsen C ice shelf broke off—when the North Pole became ice-free in summer for the first time—when the Himalayan glaciers melted—if we are to ask them, we must be willing to gaze into the possibility of sheer hell. Who wants to do that? And who can do that alone?
These are some of the most chilling words I've ever heard, rivaled only by the obedient silence of the students. One problem with our collective silence on the subject of climate change is that while we pretend life is going to go on as usual, there are others who are deliberately planning for control of a climate-changed world. Imagine a highly militarized, totalitarian, automation-based, habitat-destroying, water-starved future of perpetual war within and among nations, with captive populations ground down by scarcity and failing infrastructure, held in thrall by contrived loyalties and addictions peddled by mass media, where mass extinctions and the deaths of millions of refugees are barely noted except with a Malthusian shrug of the shoulders—while the super-rich live in fortified, climate-protected luxury bunkers or occupy a greening Antarctica and fly to the corporate-owned moon for vacation. It sounds like a bad science fictional dystopia. But some of the steps along that path have already been taken. There is a steep price for silence.
Despite Ghosh's dismissal of SF in the context of climate change, the book is dotted with science fictional references. The opening page recalls a scene from Star Wars; then there is the mention of Mount Tambora's eruption that gave us Frankenstein; and a certain starship on a popular television show shares a name with the first coal-fueled steamer service (1825) between India and England—The Enterprize. Science fiction—speculative fiction in general—resists being denied. Climate change, that great multi-headed monster, is the creation of a certain section of humankind, a certain overarching mindset or paradigm (despite the all-embracing term "Anthropocene"). As Ghosh acknowledges, it is ultimately a problem of the imagination. We must acknowledge that imaginative literature—no literature—can ever be enough. We are called to do much more than write or run workshops—to face the possibility of hell itself, and then to get to work. But when we pick up the pen, can we write to the challenge? Can we move beyond apocalypse-du-jour to radically imagined, seismic conceptual shifts whose reverberations change minds, hearts, and worlds?
Can we begin by breaking the spiral of silence?
A magnificent essay, some of the most important writing SH has yet published. Thank you so much.
Fantastic essay. She never once mentions cli-fi though. Weird. Uncanny. Is she blind? Or just prejudiced as a member of the sf cult? Professor?


Charleston South Carolina is a city considered by many to be the best preserved example of the Old South in the state and even throughout the entire southern region. The buildings alone make a statement; more than 70 buildings are in place from before the Revolutionary War, more than 130 are in place from the late 18th century, and over 600 buildings are still in place from before the 1840"s. The feel of these charming and mostly well-maintained structures adds an air of historical importance to any Charleston vacation and contribute to making Charleston tours through the city delightful as well as educational.
The history of Charleston South Carolina begins in 1670, when the town was first settled by colonialists from Great Britain. Currently, Charleston is the second largest city in South Carolina (after Columbia, the state capitol) and has attracted the nickname, "The Holy City" due to the high number of churches found in the city and the line of steeple outlines visible in the city"s skyline. Charleston South Carolina today is also one of the major tourist attractions in South Carolina, with travelers coming from around United States to view the historical Charleston attractions and enjoy some of the authentic southern cooking found in many of the city"s restaurants.
Planning a Charleston vacation often includes a stay in one of the many Charleston hotels. Travelers will find for the most part that the city tends to shy away from the larger chains and focus more on older, smaller and privately owned hotels. Most of the downtown hotels are close to many of the most popular Charleston attractions. One of the most popular downtown Charleston attractions is a joint tour of Patriots Point and the Fort Sumter Monument. Patriots Point is a naval and maritime museum located on the shores of Charleston Bay near downtown, and features hundreds of war time ships and fighter planes. Interested travelers can also purchase a ticket to take a boat ride (less than an hour) to the Fort Sumter Monument and Museum, where they can tour the fort that was the site of the first fired shot and battle of the American Civil War.
Downtown Charleston tours of the many historical buildings are also popular for travelers. For tourists who plan to visit multiple buildings, it may be worth investing in the Heritage Passport Ticket. The ticket costs around $40 and grants the holder access to the Gibbes Museum, the Edmonston-Alston House, the Nathaniel Russell House, Drayton Hall and Middleton Place. These homes are the most popular stops on historical Charleston tours and each has an entrance fee of around $15, so if you plan to visit a few, the Heritage Passport Ticket is a good idea. Tickets can be purchased at any of these homes in person during daytime business hours.
A favorite feature of Charleston vacations for families with children is the South Carolina Aquarium. This is one of the largest aquariums in South Carolina and has some great exotic aquatics from around the world. For Charleston vacations during the early summer, be sure to stop by the Spoleto Festival, the largest arts and cultural festival in the south. Spoleto Festival takes place between mid May and mid June each year and features hundreds of dramatic presentations, operas, musical shows and more. Tickets can be purchased in person at any of the event locations.


Premod panels designed according to Low Voltage Switchgear Systems IEC 61439-2.
Has a modular structure and mounting types are available for ABB,Legrand,Eaton,Schneider and Siemens switchgears.
The system enables panel assembly by the vertical and horizontal mounting types of these 5 different switchgear brands.
Premod cabinets are one of our wall mounted and free standing type system solutions.
Structure consist of 250 mm depth system solutions with single module.
Modules have different alternatives sucha s 400, 600, 800 mm width; 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200 mm height for wall mounted types and 1400, 1600, 1800, 2000, 2200 mm height for free standing types.
Provides different solutions from IP31, IP43 up to IP55 protection degree.
Premod cabinets with specially designed corners, provides several advantages to our customers about quality and easy installation.
Even though it has a modular structure, due to the gasket channels on the parts at top, bottom and sides; protection degree is available up to IP55 .
Due to the modular structure Premod cabinets are available in flat pack for shipments.
Beside all these, it provides an esthetical outlook.


text:
Victory for Polish Women's Rights
Posted byprotocolmagazine1 October 22, 2016 Posted inEuropeTags:abortion, protests, womensrights
A controversial abortion bill was rejected by the Polish parliament on Thursday, 6 October after public protests throughout the preceding week. The law was rejected by a large margin of 352 to 58, with 18 abstaining votes by members of the lower house of parliament, called the Sejm. The bill would have limited abortion to only lifesaving instances. This law would have prevented women, including those who had suffered rape or incest, from obtaining abortions. Women who miscarried could have been investigated as the bill would have made the "death of a 'conceived child' punishable with a prison sentence." The Catholic Church supported the bill originally, but the bishops recanted their support due to the suggestion that women who opted for abortion and doctors who performed abortions should be punished, including imprisonment for up to five years. The bill originated with Ordo Iuris, a conservative think tank and "an anti-abortion citizens' initiative" that gathered around 450,000 signatures.
In Poland, abortion is banned for most women after the 12th week of pregnancy, and the only exemptions from this include the "severe and irreversible damage to the foetus, a serious threat to the mother's health, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest." Medical professionals already have access to the 'conscience clause,' which can be used to opt out of performing an abortion in addition to the large number of medical restrictions. Poland, as a Catholic state, maintains one of the most severe stances on abortion in Europe. Countries with more strict laws include Malta, the Vatican, the Republic of Ireland, Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, and Northern Ireland. All of these states are officially Catholic.
A sign from the protests that reads 'Your Parliament, Our Bodies'
Due to the bill's clause that would have allowed for the punishment of medical professionals, there was concern that medical personnel would have become afraid to conduct "invasive prenatal tests and lifesaving operations." Additionally, it is widely felt that the bill would not have prevented abortions, but caused them to take place illegally. During illegal terminations, the danger to the woman increases dramatically. If this law had passed, a larger proportion of the estimated 21 million unsafe abortions that typically take place in the developing world each year would take place in European, developed countries such as Poland. Currently, illegal abortions far outnumber legal ones in Poland, with conservative estimates ranging widely from 10,000 to 150,000 in comparison to around 1,000-2,000 legal terminations.
The bill was protested en masse on 3 October during the Black Protest, which saw women marching in a peaceful protest wearing black clothing. The march was closely followed by social media with the hashtag #CzarnyProtest trending on Twitter and Facebook. Radio Poland estimated that millions of individuals participated in the protest across the nation and in Warsaw alone, thousands of peaceful activists participated in the march on what has been deemed Black Monday. Feminist groups from within Poland and across the globe supported women's rights from Gdansk, Lodz, Wroclaw, and Krakow to Chicago and European cities such as Berlin, Brussels, Dusseldorf, Belfast, London and Paris.
Witold Waszczykowski, Poland's Foreign Minister was a prominent opponent of the protests on Black Monday. She said "We expect serious debate on questions of life, death and birth. We do not expect happenings, dressing in costumes and creating artificial problems" and proceeded to call the protests "marginal" and claim that they were "making a mockery of important issues." In stark contrast, Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Gowin sought to comfort the protesters by saying it was unlikely a complete ban on abortion would be voted through the parliament, especially one that included rape victims or put the woman's life or health at risk. The majority of Polish citizens agree with this view. An opinion poll conducted by Ipsos a mere eleven percent of respondents preferred more strict abortion laws. Additionally, nearly half of all respondents answered that the current legislation should be unaffected, however, over one third of participants answered that legal terminations should be more accessible.
After the parliament voted against the bill, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the Law and Justice Party, stated that he supported "the protection of life," and that he believed the legislation would not have aided in that endeavour. Beta Szdlo, Poland's Prime Minister, echoed Kaczynski and additionally declared "a new program to support families who decide to give birth to, and raise, children who have disabilities from difficult pregnancies." She also announced an educational campaign to promote pro-life values in lieu of the bill after it did not pass. The government said that protests against the bill had given ministers "food for thought" on Poland's hard stance against abortion. Thus, the protests on 3 October 2016 were a victory for women's rights as they created a change in government policy and persuaded the parliament to reject the bill, which would have damaged women's health and reproductive rights.
The protesters are not the only ones asking the Polish government for answers justifying the strict abortion laws. The European Court of Human Rights has joined in on the debate and The European Parliament debated whether its members should criticize the restrictions on reproductive rights in Poland and the proposed law. It chose to request that the "Polish government to abide by its international and European obligations and end this attack on women's rights," bringing further attention to the issue. The EU has condemned Poland "for taking control of state media appointments and for reforms to Poland's constitutional court" after Law and Justice became the ruling party in 2015.
You can learn more information about the protest on OpenDemocracy.net and the Czarny Protest Facebook Page.
Artists: the Human Rights Activists of Our Time
Nigeria and the Unspoken Effects of Boko Haram

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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More buses for Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain>
More buses for Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain
Date: 05 Aug 2014 Source: MyCiTi News
Statement by Mayoral Committee Member: Transport for Cape Town, Councillor Brett Herron
The City condemns the criminal acts of sabotage that left thousands of commuters without public transport for a number of days last week, crippling our residents' efforts to earn an income and our local economy in general.
It has become quite clear to us that this well planned sabotage poses a serious threat to the City, our residents, our infrastructure and our service delivery efforts. Acts like these cannot be tolerated and we urge those who have information about perpetrators to come forward and assist us in protecting infrastructure that is paid for and maintained with public funds.
Since last week's incident, Transport for Cape Town (TCT) has been deploying between six and eight additional MyCiTi buses on the N2 Express route on week days, providing alternative public transport to affected commuters who have to travel between the Cape Flats and the Cape Town central business district.
This equates to an additional capacity of at least 400 passengers during the morning and afternoon peak hours, over and above the service's current capacity of approximately 1 800 passengers.
The additional capacity was intended to assist commuters who were stranded or experienced significant delays due to the sabotage of Metrorail's infrastructure. Despite the fact that the trains are now running normally, TCT will continue deploying additional buses on the N2 Express route as we are now experiencing a significant increase in the demand for this service.
In fact, since last week, the demand for the N2 Express service has more than doubled and we will continue to deploy additional buses on this route until further notice. Furthermore, a total number of 3 457 free myconnect cards have been issued to residents of the Cape Flats since 21 June until Friday 1 August 2014.
The N2 Express service provides a safe, convenient and scheduled alternative for travel to the CBD, with the first buses departing at 05:30 from Kuyasa in Khayelitsha and the Town Centre in Mitchells Plain on week days. A single trip from Kuyasa to the Civic Centre station on the MyCiTi Mover Package costs R11,60 during peak hours and R9,70 off-peak; while a single trip from the Town Centre to the Civic Centre station on the MyCiTi Mover Package costs R10,40 during the peak hours and R8,70 off-peak.
Due to last week's problems with the Metrorail service, TCT also extended the deadline of the issuing of free myconnect cards to the residents of Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha, up until 31 August 2014.
We are acutely aware of the fact that some of these households have already spent a significant proportion of their income on Metrorail tickets and therefore do not have the resources to buy a myconnect card to travel on the N2 Express service. We believe that these free cards will go a long way towards giving more residents access to the MyCiTi service.
Residents are urged to please collect a free myconnect card as cash is not accepted on the buses. A myconnect card usually costs R35, but over the next four weeks the free cards can be collected from the following venues on weekdays:
In Khayelitsha at the Desmond Tutu Hall on the corner of Japhta Masemola and Cekeca Roads; and at the Khayelitsha Multipurpose Centre on the corner of Walter Sisulu and Steve Biko Roads, from 08:30 until 16:30.
In Mitchells Plain at the Golden Arrow Bus Service kiosk in the Town Centre from 08:30 until 16:30.
Residents will have to pay R30 for the Mover Points which will be pre-loaded on their free myconnect cards and they are requested to please take along their identity documents or birth certificates for children four years and older in order for the cards to be registered in their names (passengers younger than four travel free on the MyCiTi service).


text:
Akysis fontaneus és una espècie de peix de la família dels akísids i de l'ordre dels siluriformes.

Referències

fontaneus

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Heating : Baysider features a host of Heating listings from around the world. The best things in life happen on a Bayside, so what better place to explore our Heating directory.
The professionals at One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning can help if you need AC repair in Houston. We can also handle many of your other important HVAC needs such as furnace and water heater repairs. Call today.
Pagano's Hardware Mart, located in Alameda, services the locals with products and services at their Alameda hardware store and their "Down The Street"outdoor and seasonal shop, located just a few doors away from the Pagano's entrance on Lincoln Avenue. They supply all hardware and accessories as well as outdoor products and furniture.


The productive efficiency of the crushing machine refers to the quantity of the materials that are crushed by the crushing equipment in the unit time which is often ton per hour. The quantity of the materials that are crushed in the unit time directly determines the output of the final stage of the ore beneficiation. For this reason, improving the productive efficiency of the crushing machine is the top priority in the ore beneficiation industry.
Generally speaking, there are mainly six factors that have influences on the production capacity.
1. The hardness of the materials. The harder the materials are, the more difficult the crushing will be. And at the same time, the hard materials will seriously abrade the equipment. The crushing speed is slow, and then of course the crushing capacity of the machine will be low. That is to say we should select the materials with proper hardness.
2. The moisture of the materials. If the water content of the materials is high, then the materials will easily stick to the crushing equipment, and then they will block the crushing chamber in the conveying process, which will reduce the crushing ability. In order to solve this problem, when choosing the materials, the workers should strictly control the moisture of the materials. If the materials to be crushed are too wet, then the workers can expose them in the sun or dry them with the air in order to decrease the per cent of the water in the materials.
3. The fineness of the materials after crushed. The finer the materials crushed are, the lower the production capacity of the crushing machine will be.
4. The composition of the materials. The more the fine powders contained in the materials before crushing are, the lower the crushing capacity of the crusher will be since these fine powders will stick to the machine and influence conveying. The materials containing many fine powders should be screened with vibrating screen before being crushed.
5. The stickiness of the materials. Sticky materials will stick to the internal wall of the crushing machine. If they are not cleaned in time, it will seriously influence the working efficiency of the crushing machine.
6. The abrasion of the crushing part of the crushing equipment such as the hammer and the jaw plate. These parts determine the service life of the machine itself. For this reason, the workers should regularly repair the crushing parts and timely change the damaged part for fear that it might influence normal work of the crusher.


interrupters (GFCI) to ensure the safety of your home.
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Security Electric serves all of Southwest Florida from Marco Island north to Pt Charlotte. To receive a comprehensive estimate of your Residential Electrical Repair and Service needs complete our online request form. For the fastest response please call our main Ft Myers office at (239) 433-0939.


This entry was posted on November 20, 2010 by croshame. It was filed under Blog Stuff and was tagged with blog.
I'm just about to repost that very image 🙂 Its craftastic!
I actually just posted about this this morning! Your stuff is great, I'm looking forward to seeing what you have in store. Keep it up!
I just posted about your Sid and Nancy set on my blog.


Fermented Foods---What's the Big Deal?
Add a Twist to Your Taco Tuesday!
Non-Stick Cookware—How Safe IS It?
Why There's Never Enough Cherries!
Girl Scout Cookies all year long?
Grill 5 extra hot dogs. When cooled, slice them into coins and store in a resealable plastic bag. Use them for Meal 5 in the Mac and Cheese with Hot Dogs.
Meal 2: Summer Vegetable Panini With Lemon Aïoli and Mozzarella?
If you have time today to make the dough for the Crunchy Breaksticks for tomorrow, you will save time with the rising. Store the dough in the refrigerator About 1 hour before baking, remove from refrigerator and roll into sticks. Let rest until sticks have risen. Bake as directed.
When making the Mac and Cheese, grab the hot dogs you grilled for Meal 1 and add them to the cheese sauce. Heat on low heat until the dogs are warmed.


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Home/Sports/Football/NFL/NFL Betting – Teams that Will Disappoint in 2013
NFL Betting – Teams that Will Disappoint in 2013
Dirty Follow on Twitter January 25, 2013
The online football betting world is still abuzz about Super Bowl XLVII, but there are plenty of teams working hard to improve for 2013. No matter how hard some teams work, they will not be able to achieve their goals of playoff success. As the sports betting world gets ready to put a period at the end of the 2012 season, let's look ahead to the 2013 season to see which teams will disappoint their fans and miss the playoffs.
Jets fans will have to resign themselves to the fact that the next couple of years are going to be difficult. The sports betting sites are comfortable with the notion that many of the Jets' problems were due to the incompetence of former general manager Mike Tannenbaum. Rex Ryan is a good head coach that is able to mold a good team into a winner, but the Jets are not a good team. New York will need to completely repair its offense including needs for a new quarterback, new wide receivers and new running backs. But the process in New York will be long and difficult, which will make 2013 a disappointment.
The Buffalo Bills have a talented roster in spots, but there are still plenty of openings that need to be filled before Buffalo can be considered a winning team. The team needs a new quarterback. If new head coach Doug Marrone tries to head into the 2013 season with Ryan Fitzpatrick at quarterback, then Buffalo fans can look forward to an even more disappointing season than 2012. The moves in Buffalo, so far, have been token moves that any team would make. Now comes the hard part of making real football decisions, and that is something the Bills have never been good at.
Thursday Night Football Betting — Colts and Broncos must operate without chief ground-gainers
NFL Preseason Week 4 Pick- Seattle Seahawks at Oakland Raiders
Handicappers Hideaway Sportsbook For the Month of August: GTBets
The football betting experts feel that quarterback Cam Newton is in trouble. His horrible attitude in 2012 permeated the rest of the team and contributed greatly to the fall of the Panthers. Newton has the skills to be an elite NFL quarterback, but most people are questioning whether or not he has the right mindset. Even if a new and improved Newton takes the field in 2013, he still has a bad defense and subpar receiving corps to deal with. It seems like the Panthers stopped building when it drafted Newton. In reality, that should have been the beginning.
The Detroit Lions have not made many changes so far this offseason and that is a bad sign. Obviously, the system is not working in Detroit. The players are out of control and head coach Jim Schwartz is incapable of reigning them in. The Lions should be on the way to becoming a Super Bowl contender by this point. But the inability for key players on the team to grow up and act like adults, along with Schwartz's inability to reach his team, will make for another disappointment in 2013.
Read more about the NFL and the teams that will disappoint in 2013.
2013 NFL Season BetOnline Sportsbook Buffalo Bills Carolina Panthers Detroit Lions Free Picks Live Lines New York Jets NFL Online Gambling Sports Forums Sports Gambling
Sunday Night Football: Packers Host the Bears
NFL Saturday: Redskins vs Titans
NFL Betting – What Will Next Season Look Like for These 2012 Quarterbacks?
NFL Week 4 – Our Quick Picks on Sunday's Early Games
NFL Preseason Pick of the Week : New Orleans Saints at Baltimore Ravens- Thursday, Aug. 13


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The Satanic Verses Affair
Aired March 7, 2009 on BBC 2
Twenty years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was a wanted man with a million pound bounty on his head. His novel, The Satanic Verses, had sparked riots across the Muslim world. The ailing religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had invoked a little-known religious opinion - a fatwa - and effectively sentenced Rushdie to death. Never before had a novel created an international diplomatic crisis on such a scale, and never before had a foreign Government publicly called for the killing of a private citizen of another country.
This film looks back on the extraordinary events which followed the publication of the book and the ten year campaign to get the fatwa lifted. Interviews with Rushdie's friends and family and testimony from leaders of Britain's Muslim community and the Government reveal the inside story of the affair. Rushdie himself was forced into hiding for nearly ten years. Arguably this was the moment when religious identities, in Britain and abroad, became more important than ethnic and cultural belonging.
Thanks TroisVitesse
Tags: BBC, Documentary, Muslim


text:
<?php declare(strict_types = 1);

namespace Nextras\Dbal\Utils;

/**
 * @internal
 */
class Typos
{
	use StrictObjectTrait;

	/**
	 * Returns the closest word to the $current word or NULL if such word does not exist.
	 * @param string[] $words
	 */
	public static function getClosest(string $current, array $words): ?string
	{
		$maxDistance = strlen($current) / 4 + 1;
		$closest = null;
		foreach (array_unique($words, SORT_REGULAR) as $word) {
			$distance = levenshtein($current, $word);
			if ($distance > 0 && $distance < $maxDistance) {
				$maxDistance = $distance;
				$closest = $word;
			}
		}
		return $closest;
	}
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


About 3,883 sq. ft (per appraiser) in this well kept 5 bedroom, 3 bath, all brick, walkout basement home in Ironbridge Subdivision. 3 car garage. Split bedroom floor plan. Hardwood floors on main level. Kitchen has breakfast bar. Master bathroom has double sink vanity, step-in shower and jetted tub. Walk-in closet. Basement has huge family room with wet bar, 2 bedrooms and full bath. 2 storage areas plus John Deere Room. Wood deck. Nice view of trees in back yard.


The second outpost, OverEasy Orchard (2015) at Liat Towers reinvigorates a once vibrant shopping belt with its lively ambience. It stands out with its trademark moxie and interiors inspired by the iconic 1980s Memphis design movement. Paying homage to American culture, OverEasy Orchard is housed within a space once occupied by Singapore's first McDonald's, continuing the story of an iconic destination.


text:
Ruger® Complete Guide MINI-14, Mini Thirty, & Deerfield Carbine Gun-Guides®
R2-MIN
Model: Ruger Complete Guide MINI-14, Mini Thirty, & Deerfield Carbine Gun-Guides®
RUGER® COMPLETE GUIDES RUGER MINI-14, Mini Thirty, & Deerfield Carbine
UPDATED March 2016!
• The only current printed manual that includes information on ALL models from 1972 ~ 2006.
• Includes all serial numbers and manufacture dates for all models from 1972 ~ 2015!
• Easy to use -- Comb binding lies open and flat on your work surface.
• 56 pages & 66 high-resolution grayscale images.
• Cardstock cover. Bright white paper.
Excerpt from this Ruger Guide:
The Mini-14
At first glance the Mini-14 looks very similar to a combination of a M1 Garand Rifle's rotating bolt and the overall appearance of
the US Military M14. The M1 Garand (.30.-06 caliber) was adopted by the US Army in 1932 and was carried by most US troops until the 1950's. The M14 (.308 caliber) was adopted by the US Army in 1957 and was later replaced by the current AR-15/M-16 rifle. (.223 / 5.65mm caliber).
Design and Series of the Mini-14
The Ruger Mini-14 was designed by Bill Ruger. Early versions from 1972 ~ 1975 were produced in Southport, Connecticut and have serial numbers with the three digit prefix of "180".
The Ruger Mini-14 180 series have a few minor internal and external design changes that make it incompatible with most of the commercial and aftermarket accessories that are specifically made for the later 181 and 182 series rifles.
These early 180 series rifles are sought after by collectors.
Most "shooters" prefer the later models.
The Ruger Mini-14 series 181 was introduced in 1977 and offered an updated rear site, a larger gas piston, magazine release, and a modified bolt mechanism. In 1980 Ruger added a series 182 which introduced a new satin finish to the Mini-14. Early stainless steel receivers were recalled due to cracking because of excessive hardening of the metal during production. Recalled stainless guns had a serial number below 182-51929. Ruger Rifles that have been repaired have two proof marks. ("R" in circle.)


When music enthusiast & Shrunken Head owner Andreas Kleinert met sound engineer Nick Magoteaux, the two gentleman recognized in each other a shared passion for sound and support of Columbus' local music scene. Being musicians themselves, the two of them understood the the struggles musicians can face in getting quality, affordable recordings.
After months of brainstorming, late-night phone calls & drafts, Andreas & Nick came up with the Shrunken Head Studio.
The Shrunken Head studio currently offers live-recordings and studio recordings utilizing various spaces in the venue.
Andreas & Nick plan to build an echo chamber in the basement where local musicians will have access to a unique recording space & obscure, modernized instruments.
Built for local musicians, by local musicians, The Shrunken Head Recording Studio has begun its journey.


text:
#6: Frances
(USA, 1982; dir. Graeme Clifford; scr. Eric Bergren, Christopher DeVore, and Nicholas Kazan; cin. László Kovács; with Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard, Kim Stanley, Bart Burns, Jeffrey DeMunn, Lane Smith)
IMDb // My Full Review // Leave a Comment
Clifford Odets isn't at all surprised that his star actress and extramarital consort Frances Farmer is being called back from Broadway to fulfill her contract at Paramount. "Sure, they know you've got something," he says. "But they don't know what it is," she insists from the bed. "Do you?" he asks. Do I? Frances is one of the toughest movies to write about in this whole series, because it's been an abiding favorite forever and I have a hard time decoding why, much less articulating it. I don't even remember when I first saw it, or how many times I'd been through it when I wrote this unimpressive review, which lavishes praise on Jessica Lange but has trouble finding anything else in the film worthy of compliment. The movie is a patchy experience on its own terms, probably too long, perfunctory with most of its second- and third-tier characterizations, and erratically committed to the voiceover narration of Sam Shepard's Harry York, himself a blatant and opaque construct of the screenwriters. The various asylum sequences are such egregious reprises of Snake Pit–Suddenly, Last Summer booby-hatch clichés that the facilities where Frances was filmed demanded an exculpatory credit at the end. Rudimentary research into Frances's life reveals that, for all her well-documented tribulations, she likely didn't have the lobotomy that dominates the last twenty minutes—an almost certain myth that the movie helped to consecrate as fact. Even László Kovács's handsomely gloomy lensing, a major asset in giving Frances some tonal coherence when its story skips or stumbles, gets punctured at odd moments, like a hitchhiking scene at a dusty, inexplicable crossroads that is so garish and awkwardly shadowed that it looks like a process shot.
There'd be no rationalizing these demerits in any objective critique of Frances, but in my ongoing emotional response to the movie they are immaterial, or even constructive despite themselves. In the story of a headstrong, ambitious actress fighting so many battles and losing, it's arresting to watch Lange duke it out with a movie that's often fraying all around her and still come out on top. Much of the press about Frances focused on Lange's remarkable about-face from her inauspicious early years in Hollywood, and it's always exciting when previously negligible performers suddenly prove their mettle. Maybe Lange's triumph feels categorically different to me than Charlize Theron's or Hilary Swank's or Ally Sheedy's because I saw hers first, or because she more single-handedly rescues a more faltering vehicle than Monster, Boys Don't Cry, or High Art. A closer comparison might be what Marion Cotillard pulls off in La Vie en rose, a movie I admired quite a bit but have avoided revisiting, and which struggles, as Frances does, with narrative architecture, basic transitions, and histrionic relationships to fact. Cotillard has proved as consistently ingenious as Lange did, which further cements the comparison. But Édith Piaf was a momentous figure by any measure, demanding virtuosity from her interpreters. Part of Frances Farmer's tragedy is that we barely know how good she really was, given her wobbly body of film work, the varying reviews of her theater outings, and the chauvinist, industrial, familial, medical, and penal apparatuses that denied her talent any fuller hearing. Lange achieves galvanizing solidarity with someone she likely outclassed in their shared vocation, without playing up or down to her, and with little evident vanity. She works through most of the ugly affects you can conjure on a screen—fury, despondency, aggression, self-righteousness, recklessness, booziness, helplessness, hollowness—and still makes it clear that Frances deserves our respect. She reaches precipices of feeling that Lars von Trier's or Mike Leigh's or Michael Haneke's characters sometimes reach, but she gets there without a von Trier, Leigh, or Haneke to guide or protect her. The closest creative ally she's got is Kim Stanley, an actress as hard-charging as she is, but their job on camera is to extinguish each other, and even on her kindest day, Kim Stanley is no earth mother. If there is anything precious or Oscar bid-y about Frances, and there isn't much, it's snuffed by the impression of a new artist, prodigious but still green, taking an astonishing risk. The loneliness is tangible. Immolation seems like a real possibility. When Clifford demands that Frances stop "acting desperate" on stage, fulminating that "I want you to be desperate," we hear his counsel as punitive and dangerous. Lange must know that, too, but in pursuit of a tough but fragile character's truth, she takes the enemy's advice.
One area where Frances deserves credit is its refusal to couch the narrative as the silencing of a great artist. The script includes no scene where Frances performs. Instead, like Lange, it seems hooked into a notion of Frances as a woman of squelched ideas, a thinker for whom Hollywood might already have been a step in the wrong direction, even in that brief interlude when the going was good. The moving, economical opening privileges a prize-winning speech Frances gave at 16 years old about crises of faith and the death of God. The editing gives this articulate meditation at least three guises: something Frances thinks, something Frances wants her mother to hear, and a vehicle by which Frances provokes her community. But it's also a fourth and rare thing: immediate evidence of a woman's intelligence, treated sympathetically in a Hollywood film that isn't "about" intelligence, per se. Movies about non-ridiculous smart people, almost always men, tend to be filled with digital swirls of numerals and fractals that only they can see, on their way toward some momentous but embattled contribution to the human brain trust. Neither A Beautiful Mind nor The Imitation Game nor The Theory of Everything, to take three recent examples, really expects the audience to grasp what these men know, or how they think. Frances relates differently to intelligence, conjuring Frances's complex thoughts on a difficult subject as a virtual overture, anticipating that we will not only follow them but empathize with her through her pensiveness. This is all the more extraordinary given how few female voiceovers you or I can recall in Hollywood movies that are not bluntly expository, man-focused, lightly comic, and/or redundant to the images. Lange never turns Frances's braininess into a mannerism or an eccentricity. Her smarts are an embedded presumption of the screenplay and performance, as Frances taunts judges and cops with witty repartee, or fights a smirk at the dim puns and weak analogies offered by studio chiefs and psychiatrists. The climactic lobotomy may not be based in truth, but it's more than just a broad indicator of Rock Bottom. Frances has constructed its heroine as an intellect with too few outlets and supports, further plagued by erratic judgment when she finds them. Artist biographies often treat muted creativity as a cardinal injustice, but Frances and its team seem more aggrieved that this feisty, skeptical, ambitious but misdirected thinker can no longer think.
So forget, just for a second, the question of how Frances Farmer wound up in mental asylums, over and over. What was she doing in the movies? How does a high school student with questions about God and curiosity about Communist Russia wind up posing for photos before a wall of fake flowers, or "acting" "scenes" where she pratfalls repeatedly in the mud? Frances deserves some blame for not telling us. Possibly for reasons of frugality, we don't accompany Frances on her life-changing trip to Moscow. We also don't hear much of the intellectual and political foment in and around Harold Clurman's Group Theatre. A stronger movie might have shed more light. But Frances, wittingly or not, despite its harrowing portrait of studio machination and motherly fame-whoring, also evokes the mysterious pull of Hollywood in unique ways. What, after all, is Lange doing in movies? There is so much rage in her performance, such palpable contempt for the industry's stupidity—and this in her big coming-out performance as a Hollywood star. She barely asks the viewer to admire her acting, or acting in general. Whereas Meryl Streep's meticulous craft in Sophie's Choice is almost a relief, giving you something to marvel at when the horror of the story is too much, Lange affords no such margin for critical appreciation. For all the tremendous empathy Frances conjures (and John Barry's unexpectedly harmonica-heavy score deserves some credit here, too), you spend most of the film scared of Lange and scared for her, too. Without the quick follow-up of Tootsie, you wonder if she'd have run into the problems that Stanley herself did, or Emily Watson did: being brilliant in ways that limit people's casting ideas or make them nervous to collaborate with you. In the thirty years since Frances, Lange has been admirably unbashful about the shortcomings of the industry and frequently critical of her own films. Sometimes you feel her contempt within the film. When she's bored or trapped, she retreats into perma-scowl and default affectations. There are few film actors in my lifetime who have excited me more than Lange, and few who have made me wonder more often if this work really makes them happy. But maybe she has no choice. The best explanation I can find for these riddles is the formidable mixture of conscious will and demonic possession that Lange taps into as Frances, and which Frances expresses more fully than any of her other films. Just as the character won't give up on her mother, even as Harry begs her to, Lange won't give up on Frances, even as it asks too much of her, or furnishes too little, or asks the wrong things. She hasn't given up on movies, either, as infuriating and frivolous as they can feel, and as many times as she's pledged to quit.
None of this precisely explains why I love Frances so much, or why it shook me so as a college student (I think?), or why I've screened it so many times since, or why I forced my partner to watch it once for my birthday, or why I'm doting over it on my homepage. I'd give anything for more movies to value their characters' intelligence, especially women's intelligence, or to register how will and intellect tend to freak people out. I don't exclude myself. Frances's particular smarts always intimidated me. At least in the movie's version of events, she asked tougher questions at 16 than I ever did, she traveled further and took bigger gambles, and she refused to rescue herself from looming disaster, even as it became clear that nobody else would help. Maybe she was so inquisitive that even catastrophe made her curious, rather than sparking any self-protective urge. Frances is The Piano if Ada stuck her foot in the rope every 15 minutes, and nobody jumped after her. The grimness and sharp edges of so many of my favorite films reveal that I have some of that curiosity, too, but for better or worse, I'm much less fearless than Frances, and less fearless than Jessica Lange. Watching her commit so fully to this performance, inviting glory as well as injury, emphasizing that aspect of Frances that bit every hand that fed her, reminded me of people I knew in school who were smarter than I was and thought bigger thoughts but bridled at rules and questioned The Game, often to their detriment, even if they didn't see it that way. Their spirit and savvy manifested in ways that galvanized me in my obedience, for which reason I couldn't or wouldn't duplicate or grasp their example. I have always channeled my incorrigible love of movies into intellectual endeavor, pedagogical role-modeling, and pleasure in other people's art. Lange seems as smart as they come, as moved by art and as skilled at making it as anyone, but there's an itch beyond intellect or artistry, maybe even beyond empathy, that she seems to scratch with acting. To do it, she uses emotions I've luckily been spared for most of my life, and often too scared to touch—especially anger and despair. She advocates too strongly for Frances Farmer to be accused of merely using her in the pejorative sense, but she does use her, to express something enduring and insatiable that both astounds and escapes me. I understand it a little better every time I watch Frances, but it never loses its mystery. It's something private between Jessica and Frances, or between Jessica and the world. In that sense, the weird fitfulness of the movie actually helps, concealing or distorting much of what it purports to disclose.
I'm still perturbed at how hard it's been to spell out these thoughts, and how unconfident I am of having done so, but I suppose that's the point. Frances is about a person I like to imagine I'd have embraced and understood, but whom I might not have. She is brought to life by an artist I idolize but whom I also might not understand, who has been to the third rail and back. I don't envy her, but she seems able to handle this unnerving gift, and I at least relate to whatever keeps her returning. I can't stop coming back to movies, either, even to some that fall visibly short of apparent aspirations. I like feeling unequal to people and things I admire, and perplexed by what excites me. As broken and compromised a text as Frances is, it's always inspired sublime feelings—not the serene sublime of the well-wrought urn but the mystifying and overpowering one of the Prelude, all thwarting winds and raving streams, but majestic nonetheless.
Hey, Reader: What's the performance or who is the actor you idolize in ways that surprise even yourself?


Georgia and Florida's back-and-forth battle for first place continues. Week 1 brought us first-place Florida. Week 2, first-place Georgia. Week 3, first-place Florida. And this week, two points give the spelling-challenged Dawgs the nod for No. 1. These teams have essentially been deadlocked the whole season, and unless one gets upset, the argument won't be settled until they meet in Jacksonville on Nov. 1. LSU isn't far behind; Alabama has a ton of ground to make up. Auburn and Vanderbilt round out the top half.
Then comes a yawning 50-point gap before Kentucky comes in. By contrast, only 25 points separate the Wildcats in 7th place and the Volunteers in 10th.
And Arkansas has now fallen into possession of the "Worst of the Best" Cup, as Mississippi State's dominated performance against Georgia Tech isn't quite enough to underwhelm Arkansas' self-immolation against Alabama. This race should also go down to the end, as each team looks to one-down the other.
Voters expand upon these thoughts after the jump.
What does Kige think about all this? We want to know!