text:
In DCTech, Startup
In with Amify and Out with Trustify
Remember back a few years ago, when Trustify was a thing? Back then Danny Boice and Jennifer Mellon were spending their investor's money like drunken sailors. With big fanfare and much press, these two crooks announced their big office opening on the 8th floor of 201 12th St. South in Crystal City. Then all of a sudden, the companies phones were turned off and one day, people showed up for work and the locks were changed. Trustify was evicted for non-payment. Boice, Mellon and the company were sued by their Landlord, JBG Smith and smith was awarded $263,477.21 by the...
In Leadership, Marketing, Uncategorized
Cranky Old Fart as Product
You can't sell to everyone. Your products and services aren't right for all people or companies. So why are you spending so much time presenting a homogenized, milk toast, bland, offend-no-one image? Why are you so afraid of offending the people who make crappy customers? When I work with clients and ask them who are their best customers, they can answer quickly. When I ask, who are your worst customers, they can rattle off a list faster than my brother-in-law heads for the bathroom when a waiter lays down the dinner bill. When I ask them what traits do they have in...
In business, there are many buckets in which we can categorize people. One of my favorites is Chef or Cook. Chef (AKA Strategist) - A Chef is creative. They are motivated by intrinsic forces That is they are driven by satisfying the internal need to discover, to learn, to do that which has never been done, to create. They do what makes them happy. Great startup, entrepreneurial CEOs are usually Chefs, they have a unique vision, the need to do what hasn't been done. They don't follow the well-worn path, they blaze the new path. Cook (AKA Executioner) - A...
From Black and White Binary to Grey-ish
My Dad was extremely literal. You know the type. If I asked him if I could go outside and play, he'd answer, "I don't know can you?" Because I didn't ask for permission, I asked his opinion about my capabilities. If he called someone on the phone, and they said, "May I ask who's calling," he'd respond, "Yes," and sit through for what felt like eons of uncomfortable silence as my Dad waited for the person to ask for his name and not just permission to ask his name. When a server in a restaurant said something like, "My name is Bob...
In DCTech, Wolves of Startupland
Attention Communiclique Judge Alston and Prosecutor Hanly
Communiclique CEO Andy Powers is out on bail while charged with 8 Federal Felony Counts (See Post). Meanwhile, while out on bail, it seems that Andy Powers continues to defraud individuals, commit crimes abusing the terms of his bail. In August 2018, a court in Virginia found Andy Powers had defrauded investors and that his company Communiclique was a complete sham (see post). In the summer of 2019, a Bankruptcy court in Declared the company bankrupt and referred Andy Powers to the US Attorney for defrauding the court (see Post). He's still out there defrauding victims! It is time for Judge Rossi...
In Rant
Atlantic Union Bank Destroys A Good Bank
On May 20, 2019, I got the news, Atlantic Union Bank acquired Access National Bank...
Awww the wayback machine! CIT Honors Danny Boice
Here's a goody from the past. On May 8, 2013, Virginia's Venture Fund, CIT Gap fund honored one of its favorite criminal sons...
Former Trustify Employees Awarded $260 Thousand Judgement
Eight former Trustify employees, Matthew Scott, Elisabeth Nugent, Kevin Wiggins, Stacy Blackburn, Bey Wesley, Matthew Blanchard, Bernadette Vielhaber and Andrew Little, seeking $35 thousand in back pay. A court awarded these former employees $259,425.49 for several weeks back-pay, lost wages while unemployed, damages and Labor Law violations. The troubles for the bankrupt company and it's two co-founders Danny Boice and Jennifer Mellon keep adding up. Good luck with collections as this group of creditors get in line with other burned creditors. Litigant Type Status Amount Commonwealth of Virginia Tax Lien Judgment $593,054.03 JBG Smith Office Rent Judgment $263,477.21 Centro GS Software Judgment $25,000.00 Eight Former Trustify Employees Back Pay/FinesDamages Judgment $259,425.49 Buckley Sanders LLP Legal Bills Judgment $245,945.00 Dini Von Mueffling Communications Press...
Another Day, Another Day In Court For Andy Powers Communiclique CEO
For the past 2 months, for the past 3 court dates, Andy Powers, the co-founder, and former CEO of a criminal enterprise and $50 Million Ponzi Scheme known as Communiclique (AKA Clique API) promised the court he would have a new attorney in just a few weeks. He's been promising to show up with his dream legal team any day now. Well, boy did he not disappoint today. At 10:55 AM, five minutes before his scheduled 11 AM Case Review. In walks Powers with a virtual "Dream Team" legal team. He's followed by super attorney Johnnie Cochrane, Justice, Oliver Wendell...
Arlington County and Culpeper Garden $12K Pitch Contest
Arlington County Economic Development and Culpeper Gardens, a seniors living housing company, are holding a Pitch Contest called the Innovation in Healthy Aging Challenge with applications to pitch due by October 11, 2019. The contest is targeted to companies that have products that improve the health, mobility, and quality of life for senior citizens like me. The sponsors describe the contest as a unique competition to provide funding and pilot program opportunities for innovative companies and technologies focused on improving the lives of low-income seniors. The announcement states that three companies will be selected to pilot their products and receive $12 thousand...


The club is ten weeks for children aged 7-12. They are interactive and fun sessions, parents can attend the last 20 minutes of the sessions. Parents can directly refer.
We also run a 6 week course for children aged 4-6 and their parents. The sessions are interactive and lots of fun.


text:
BooleantreeNode.chkDisabled

Overview[ depends on jquery.ztree.excheck js ]

1. Set node's checkbox / radio to disabled. It is valid when [setting.check.enable = true]

2. zTree support identification string 'true' & 'false'.

3. Please don't change this attribute of the nodes which have been created. If you want to disable or undisable the nodes, please use 'setChkDisabled()' methods.

4. When zTree initialize the nodes, if you need to the child nodes automatically inherit the 'chkDisabled' attribute, please see 'setting.check.chkDisabledInherit'.

Default: false

Boolean Format

true means: this node's checkbox / radio is disabled.

false means: this node's checkbox / radio is able.

Examples of treeNode

1. disable some node's checkbox / radio

var nodes = [
	{ "id":1, "name":"test1", "checked":true, "chkDisabled":true},
	{ "id":2, "name":"test2", "chkDisabled":true},
	{ "id":3, "name":"test3"}
]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Naturally, in internal Party questions the directive activity of the Central Committee was self-evident and was not hidden from anyone, but that key decisions in diplomatic, police, censorship, and similar questions are not taken under the directions of the corresponding establishments but of the Central Committee was considered as a secret… For this reason, in internal secret correspondence, when it was necessary to refer to a decision of the Central Committee, it was necessary to write "instantsiya" ['level of authority, chain of command'].
Естественно, во внутрипартийных вопросах директивность ЦК была самоочевидной и ни от кого не скрывалась, но вот что ключевые решения по дипломатическим, полицейским, цензурным и аналогичным вопросам принимаются вовсе не руководством соответствующих учреждений, а ЦК – считалось как бы тайной… Поэтому во внутренней секретной переписке, когда надо было сослаться на решение ЦК, предлагалось писать "инстанция".
Though these look like direct borrowings, you can't by any means simply backward-engineer them to the original — I think Hat does a good job on a tricky problem.
But like so much in Soviet reality, you can't give the "translation" of the word without giving a whole parenthetical explanation of context and meaning.
In Australian (and English) legal terminology, we talk about a decision at "first instance" or a court deciding at "first instance". A synonym of "instance" is "jurisdiction". So I imagine the Russian usage refers to a level of jurisdiction, whether it be judicial, administrative or whatever.
It is very hard to translate two of the key words here — "direktivnost'" and "instantsiia."… I think Hat does a good job on a tricky problem.
yes, I also think it is a very good way of translating Russian words with -ость suffix which corresponds to -ity in English. Directivity doesn't sound right, so break the word in two, one giving semantics of the main part and another the meaning of the suffix.
But both 'directive' and 'instance' come, I think, from French. Early bolsheviks were both fluent in French and, naturally, admirers of the French revolution and the system it created. Instance, widely used in modern French, simply means authority. I think it could be used in the same sense in English?
I've read both postings that LH links to here, and I, too, recommend them – and the long discussion on Boris Lvin's journal.
However, I was surprised that the author and others didn't mention the classic book about the Soviet system – 'Nomenklatura' by Michael Voslensky. The idea was suggested by Jilas, the book was first published in 1984 in Germany, I think, and in 1991, with Gorbachev still President and General Secretary, an updated version which included episodes with Gorbachev and Yeltsin was published in the Soviet Union.
Для обозначения этой вершины в номенклатурном жаргоне утвердился термин "директивные органы". По обыкновению косноязычно, но четко он выражает мысль: это не какие-нибудь там "высшие органы" государственной власти или управления, а органы, действительно дающие директивы всем этим "высшим". Выражение "директивные органы" – не просто разговорное; оно употребляется в служебных документах в качестве эвфемизма, дабы не назыать всуе ЦК КПСС.
Есть и второй номенклатурный эвфемизм для обозначения ЦК КПСС, "Инстанция". Он тоже по-своему выразителен: в системе разросшейся бюрократии общества реального социализма счета нет разным инстанциям. Но есть среди них одна Инстанция. Когда говорят: "Состоялось решение Инстанции", посвященный знает, о ком идет речь – о ЦК КПСС.
I think it could be used in the same sense in English?
My Mac's American Oxford dictionary marks publicist as dated.
It seems to me that publicist is more British, than American. British English retained closer links to its Norman roots, than American. Norman French was the legal language of England, wasn't it? I think Russian публицист comes from French publiciste.
But of course you are right about instance-instantsiya. Not only in this particular context, but in general too. It shouldn't be translated. What is also interesting, why this particular word didn't make it into international usage? Nomenklatura, apparatchik, kommissar, politbureau and even plenum made it into English, but not instantsiya with its very specific, newspeak meaning?
faux ami… My Russian helps me navigate through French too, for example magasin – магазин.
The Jordan Times uses this phrase in news pieces about crime. After seeing it in context a few times I sort of got an understanding it was about a layer of the court system, but for some reason thought it referred to a religious court system. I once tried to get a proofreading job at JT, they're very much into British English, so maybe the phrase would have more meaning to Brits.
BTW, for anyone who follows the honor crime issue, Rana Husseini's Murder in the Name of Honor is finally out. I have heard her speak–she's the courageous JT journalist who, in spite of continuous death threats, reported over and over again on honor crimes.
It is not a bolshevik-time borrowing as you can find it in Saltykov-Schedrin story of 1858.
I would not call the French word instance "widely used". I remembered tribunal de première instance "court of first instance" but I had to look in the TLFI for more examples of the word. The only other expression I remember hearing is être en instance de divorce 'to be engaged in divorce proceedings'. It is true that the word has other meanings but none of them are likely to occur in conversation, except perhaps among law professionals.
It seems that legal instance is an instance of that fairly rare thing, a borrowing from the language of the civil law (modern Roman law) into the common law. There are two main pathways for this to happen, Scots law (which began as a common-law system and to some extent remains so, but "received" civil law in the 17C) and admiralty law (which was originally part of the law of nations and theoretically uniform in all countries).
In particular, Scots law has long used the expressions first instance and second instance in the sense of our original jurisdiction and appellate jurisdiction; only the first term was assimilated by the common-law courts. In addition, the instance side of a U.S. district court sitting in admiralty considers matters of contract and delict (tort) of a specially maritime character; in the U.K. they speak of an instance court in this sense.
I suppose as the son of a law professor I was predestined to be profoundly interested or profoundly uninterested; it turned out to be the former, as part of my general interest in everything. That's why my blog is called Recycled Knowledge.


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text:
You have your Lebanon and I have mine.
Авг 15, 2022 |
You have your Lebanon with her problems, and I have my Lebanon with her beauty.
You have your Lebanon with all her prejudices and struggles, and I have my Lebanon with all her dreams and insecurities.
Your Lebanon is a political knot, a national dilemma, a place of conflict and deception. My Lebanon is a place of beauty and dreams of enchanting valleys and splendid mountains.
Your Lebanon is inhabited by functionaries, officers, politicians, committees, and factions. My Lebanon is for peasants, shepherds, young boys and girls, parents, and poets.
Your Lebanon is empty and fleeting, whereas My Lebanon will endure forever.
Gibran Khalil Gibran, "The Eye of the Prophet" 1920.
Beirut, the city of perplexing contradictions, where on one hand it is sophisticated and cosmopolitan, and on the other, it is provincial and conservative. It is best defined by its complex layers, from social structure, to political and religious. Before 1975 Beirut was unique in a sense that it was widely considered a westernized city, wherein it was called "Switzerland of the middle east", after that, however, 15 years of civil war ravaged most parts of the city, and that is where Beirut started changing, becoming drenched in the chaos of sectarianism and ideological passions. Beirut was destroyed 7 times throughout history, and its resilient people managed to rebuild it every time, however, the last civil war left permanent scars and gaping holes in the hearts of its people. Despite all that, Beirut retains its basically liberal way of life, and is still a mesmerizing touristic hub with its stone paved pavements which date back to 4000 B.C. in the Mesopotamia of Ur and Babylon, with its stunning Mediterranean Sea, its warm-hearted people and cosmopolitan way of life.
Baalbek Temple
The 2,000-year-old city located in the Beqaa Valley is a large archaeological complex that surrounds an ancient Roman town in easters Lebanon. This complex is elevated 1,130 meters and 80km east-northeast of Beirut. It was originally created to honor Jupiter and Bachus. Baalbek has three temples (Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury) known as the Romanized Triad of Heliopolis. Baalbek is considered one of the 7 wonders of the world.
Kadisha Valley
Kadisha Valley, was carved by the Kadisha river, Kadisha means "holy" in Aramaic, and the valley is sometimes called the Holy Valley. It has sheltered Christina monastic communities for many centuries, the valley is located at the foot of the Mount al-Makmal in northern Lebanon. It has many natural caves which have been used as shelters and for burials back far as the paleolithic period.
The holy valley has served as a refuge for those in search of solitude. Historians believed that the Kadisha Valley has had monastic communities continuously since the most ancient times, to the earliest years of Christianity. It was also at times a destination for Muslim mystics, or Sufis, who also visited it for meditation and solitude.
The valley's natural caves, being comfortless, scattered, and difficult to access, provided monks and hermits sufficiently isolated and inhospitable conditions to live out Christian solitude, contemplation, and devotion. Many of the caves and irregularities in the cliff-sides were adapted to serve as individual dwellings (cells), chapels, and monasteries, and such buildings were further carved out of the cliff faces of the valley. Some have interiors covered with frescoes and facades. Around the caves there are terraced fields made by the hermits for growing grain, grapes, and olives.
While there are numerous monasteries in the valley, there are several main monastic complexes:
The Kadisha Valley is near the Forest of the Cedars of God, survivors of the ancient Cedars of Lebanon, the most highly prized building materials of the ancient world. The forest is said to contain 375 individual trees, two claimed to be over 3,000 years old, ten over 1,000 years old, and the remainder at least centuries old. The Lebanon Cedar (Cedrus Libani) is described in ancient works on botany as the oldest tree in the world. It was admired by the Israelites, who brought it to their land to build the First and the Second temples in Jerusalem. Historical sources report that the famous cedar forests were beginning to disappear at the time of Justinian in the 6th century AD.[4]
Our lady nourieh
Our Lady of Nourieh, Saydet el Nourieh in Arabic, is a Marian shrine in Hamat, Lebanon. Nourieh is a derivative of the Arabic word, nour, meaning light. Thus, in English, the Marian shrine can be called, Our Lady of Light.
The story of Our Lady of Light shrine and monastery is celebrated throughout Lebanon, a country where Christianity has existed since Jesus first evangelized in Tyre and Sidon, and therefore, Lebanon is often considered part of the "Holy Land." [1] Some of the first Christian communities were set up in Lebanon during the time of the apostles.[1]
It is believed that two sailors built the shrine in the 4th century. One winter night, on a very stormy sea, the two sailors found themselves in peril. They began praying, and the Virgin appeared to them as a light and guided them gently to the shore of Theoprosopon near modern day Chekka in North Lebanon. The grateful sailors carved a cave in the cliff and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary, and called the shrine, Our Lady of Light. A Greek Orthodox monastery was built in the 17th century.[2] The miraculous icon of the Theotokos has been venerated for centuries for having glowed with light to attract wayward ships.[3]
The shrine is a popular Christian pilgrimage site in Lebanon, and tourists and pilgrims alike enjoy the beautiful view of the bay from atop historic Cape Theoprosopon.
Jbeil old town
The ruins of many successive civilizations are found at Byblos, one of the oldest Phoenician cities. Inhabited since Neolithic times, it has been closely linked to the legends and history of the Mediterranean region for thousands of years. Byblos is also directly associated with the history and diffusion of the Phoenician alphabet.
The coastal town of Byblos is located on a cliff of sandstone 40 km North of Beirut. Continuously inhabited since Neolithic times, Byblos bears outstanding witness to the beginnings of the Phoenician civilization. The evolution of the town is evident in the structures that are scattered around the site, dating from the different periods, including the medieval town intra-muros, and antique dwellings. Byblos is a testimony to a history of uninterrupted construction from the first settlement by a community of fishermen dating back 8000 years, through the first town buildings, the monumental temples of the Bronze Age, to the Persian fortifications, the Roman road, Byzantine churches, the Crusade citadel and the Medieval and Ottoman town. Byblos is also directly associated with the history and diffusion of the Phoenician alphabet. The origin of our contemporary alphabet was discovered in Byblos with the most ancient Phoenician inscription carved on the sarcophagus of Ahiram.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Experimental and Numerical Investigations of the Flow Development over Circular Cylinders with Stepwise Discontinuities in Diameter
Morton_MASc_Thesis.pdf (14.55Mb)
Morton, Christopher R
Flow past circular cylinders with stepwise discontinuities in diameter was investigated experimentally and numerically for the diameter ratio D/d = 2 and three Reynolds numbers, Re = 150, 300, and 1050. The investigation was focused on the vortex shedding phenomena occurring in the wake of the cylinders. In the first series of experimental and numerical studies, the flow development past a single step cylinder was investigated. The single step cylinder model is comprised of a small diameter cylinder (d) attached coaxially to a large diameter cylinder (D). The results show that three distinct spanwise vortex cells form in the step cylinder wake: a single vortex shedding cell in the wake of the small cylinder (the S-cell) and two vortex shedding cells in the wake of the large cylinder, one in the region downstream of the step (the N-cell) and the other away from the step (the L-cell). Due to the differences in vortex shedding frequencies between the three cells, complex vortex connections occur in two vortex-interaction regions located between the adjacent cells. The region at the boundary between the S-cell and the N-cell is relatively narrow and its spanwise extent does not fluctuate significantly. In this region, vortex dislocations manifested as half-loop connections between two S-cell vortices of opposite sign. In contrast, the region at the boundary between the N-cell and the L-cell exhibits a transient behavior, with large scale vortex dislocations causing cyclic variation in the extent of N-cell vortices. For Re = 300 and 1050, small scale streamwise vortices forming in the wake complicate the vortex dynamics within the adjacent S-cell and L-cell. There is no significant Reynolds number effect on the average spanwise extent of the vortex cells and the two transition regions between neighboring cells. Finally, formation of N-cell vortices is linked to downwash fluctuations near the step. The flow development past a dual step cylinder was studied experimentally for Re = 1050. The dual step cylinder model is comprised of a small diameter cylinder (d) and a large diameter cylinder (D) mounted at the mid-span of the small cylinder. The experiments were completed for a range of large cylinder aspect ratios 0.2 ≤ L/D ≤ 17. The flow development is highly dependent on the aspect ratio of the large cylinder, L/D. The results identify four distinct flow regimes: (i) for L/D = 17, three vortex shedding cells form in the wake of the large cylinder, one central cell and two cells of lower frequency extending over about 4.5D from the large cylinder ends, (ii) for 7 < L/D ≤ 14, a single vortex shedding cell forms in the wake of the large cylinder, whose shedding frequency decreases with decreasing L/D, (iii) for 2 ≤ L/D ≤ 7, vortex shedding in the wake of the large cylinder is highly three-dimensional, with vortices deforming in the near wake, (iv) for 0.2 ≤ L/D ≤ 1, only small cylinder vortices are shed in the wake and can form vortex connections across the wake of the large cylinder.
Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering
Christopher R Morton (2010). Experimental and Numerical Investigations of the Flow Development over Circular Cylinders with Stepwise Discontinuities in Diameter. UWSpace. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/5470
Geometry and Anchoring Effects on Elliptic Cylinder Domains of Nematic Phases
Khayyatzadeh, Pouya (University of Waterloo, 2014-01-20)
Compounds which exhibit liquid crystal phases have been widely used in display technology. The majority of display applications utilize the nematic liquid crystal phase, which is a liquid-like phase which has partial ...
On the planar flow development and structural loading of cylinders with circular fins in cross-flow
McClure, Jeffrey Ernest John (University of Waterloo, 2015-05-14)
Finned cylinders are commonly encountered in the design of heat exchangers. Critical to the design and performance of a heat exchanger are the mean and fluctuating loading on the tubes, as they relate to pressure losses ...
Evaluation of Early In-Place Concrete Performance Based on Test Results of Cores and Cylinders
Felinczak, Adam (University of Waterloo, 2018-08-21)
The evaluation of in-place concrete performance, relating to its mechanical properties, continues to remain a challenge for engineers and researchers, but is essential for determining the safety of a structure and from the ...


Sunshine Scherer serves as the Environmental Manager at GOJO, where she is responsible for designing and implementing strategy of shared responsibility for environmental programs and compliance in support of a sustainable organization. Since joining GOJO in 2006, Sunshine created, implemented and maintains an ISO 14000- aligned Environmental Management System (EMS) for GOJO. She also led the Water Reduction Team from 2010-2014, whose achievements resulted in a 40% water reduction.
Sunshine received the E4S (Entrepreneurs for Sustainability) Champion of Sustainability award in 2011. The work that she and the GOJO EMS team did resulted in GOJO receiving the Ohio EPA Encouraging Environmental Excellence (E3) Program Bronze Level in 2012 and Silver Level for activities completed in 2013.


text:
Q: htaccess redirect dynamic old file to new File url with the last update I had to change site folder and now old urls need to be redirected to the new path.. old was:
www.siteexamplename.com/store/index.php?product=240

new is:
www.siteexamplename.com/shop/index.php?product=240

how to redirect via .htaccess to the new path.. just to rename store to shop - the rest is the same..
thanks

A: You need to use rewrite rule-
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^oldDirectory/([a-zA-Z0-9-_.]+)$ /newDirectory/$1 [R=301,L]

A: In the root directory of your Website you need to create .htaccess file with next code:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^store/(.*)$ /shop/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


What Chicago Neighborhoods Have the Highest – and Lowest – Vacancy Rates?
When it comes to the housing market, Chicago remains a tale of two cities.
It's no mystery that when it comes to home sales, home prices and foreclosure rates, Chicago is very much a tale of two cities, but the Institute of Housing Studies at DePaul has uncovered another fascinating nuance to one of the nation's largest housing markets – long-term vacancy rate.
Great information. I just wish I could find the vacancy rates for all Chicago neighborhood.
I agree wit Naketa, it would be great if they published the full results.
Hey, thanks for your comments! If you follow the hyperlink in our story (the word "uncovered" has the link), you'll go to the original chart from the IHS, which includes information about all of Chicago's neighborhoods.


text:
#ifndef _DECAF_IO_INPUTSTREAMREADER_H_
#define _DECAF_IO_INPUTSTREAMREADER_H_

#include <decaf/util/Config.h>
#include <decaf/io/Reader.h>

namespace decaf {
namespace io {

    class InputStream;

    /**
     * An InputStreamReader is a bridge from byte streams to character streams.
     *
     * For top efficiency, consider wrapping an InputStreamReader within a BufferedReader.
     * For example:
     *
     *   BufferedReader* in
     *       = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader( System.in, false ), true );
     *
     * @see OutputStreamWriter
     *
     * @since 1.0
     */
    class DECAF_API InputStreamReader: public Reader {
    private:

        // The target InputStream
        InputStream* stream;

        // Does this instance own the InputStream
        bool own;

        // Has the reader been closed.
        bool closed;

    private:

        InputStreamReader(const InputStreamReader&);
        InputStreamReader& operator=(const InputStreamReader&);

    public:

        /**
         * Create a new InputStreamReader that wraps the given InputStream.
         *
         * @param stream
         *      The InputStream to read from. (cannot be null).
         * @param own
         *      Does this object own the passed InputStream (defaults to false).
         *
         * @throw NullPointerException if the passed InputStream is NULL.
         */
        InputStreamReader(InputStream* stream, bool own = false);

        virtual ~InputStreamReader();

        virtual void close();

        virtual bool ready() const;

    protected:

        virtual int doReadArrayBounded(char* buffer, int size, int offset, int length);

        virtual void checkClosed() const;

    };

}}

#endif /* _DECAF_IO_INPUTSTREAMREADER_H_ */


A new heartbeat detector may help rescue teams like the one pictured above locate survivors after natural and man-made disasters.
They give us hints about the origins of the universe, relay signals to our televisions, and nuke bags of popcorn when we're in the mood to watch a movie. Microwave radiation is a versatile part of our lives, and someday it could save them.
Researchers with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, have developed a device the size of a small carry-on bag that uses microwaves to detect human heartbeats in piles of rubble, which can bury people following natural disasters such as earthquakes.
Scientists and search and rescue workers tested the latest prototype this week in Lorton, Virginia, and the device may be available to buy as soon as next year. Jim Lux, the project's task manager at JPL, estimates the device will retail around the $10,000 range.
"The idea came from the Department of Homeland Security's science and technology folks who were looking for a way to speed up and improve the search capability to find victims in disasters," he said.
"[The people at FEMA] wanted something that would let them walk down a street and tell them if there was someone there," said Price. That way they could more efficiently deploy search and rescue teams to disaster areas where people are in need of rescue.
So Lux and his team, working with Virginia Task Force 1—one of two U.S. search and rescue teams that deploy around the world to help after disasters—adapted technology already developed to track firefighters tackling wildfires.
They came up with a 20-pound (9-kilogram) device suitable for going into the field with response personnel.
Called the Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response (FINDER), the lithium battery-powered device sends out microwaves that can penetrate 30 feet (9 meters) into mounds of rubble or 20 feet (6 meters) into solid concrete.
During a September 25 demonstration, a two-person team worked with FINDER to locate a person "buried" in a rubble pile at the task force's training facility in Lorton. One task force member wheeled the device-enclosed in a hard, tan-colored case-into position while a second member looked at the data coming in on a tablet-like interface.
Researchers received constructive feedback from task force members starting early in FINDER's development.
Mark Lucas, a technical search specialist with Virginia Task Force 1, said he'd like FINDER to work even faster than it does now.
Basically, FINDER looks for movement, said JPL's Lux. "Everything reflects microwaves, even rubble," he explained.
The device also picks up breathing patterns, and combined with heartbeats, it can discriminate between humans and animals.
"We have a computer program that looks at the data [from FINDER], and we have statistics on the ranges of heart rates and breathing rates for humans and other animals," said Lux.
FINDER's microwaves are very low power—about 1/100 the amount of radiation associated with cell phones, Lux said.
And the batteries last for about 12 to 14 hours, which is a typical shift for rescue workers, said Price.
"These things can run seven days a week, 24 hours a day—you just need to feed it batteries," he added. But they're meant to be used in concert with other search techniques, such as detector dogs and microphones.
The device is also designed to be easy to use.
Since JPL doesn't manufacture devices for the commercial market, several interested private companies are in talks to license the device, said Price.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Lux thinks there could be a market for heartbeat detection outside of looking for disaster victims trapped in rubble.
You could use it to search for missing children in the woods, he said. Or have it in a medevac to monitor a patient's heart rate without having to hook them up to wires.
And because the technology can discriminate between different animals, "people have asked if you could inventory animals going by on a game trail," he said.
"Fish and Wildlife is interested in [using FINDER] to count bears" or perhaps to count fish in streams and rivers, Lux said.


text:
La finale de la Coupe d'Europe des vainqueurs de coupe 1966-1967 est la  de la Coupe d'Europe des vainqueurs de coupe, organisée par l'UEFA. Ce match de football a lieu le  au Städtisches Stadion de Nuremberg, en Allemagne de l'Ouest.

Elle oppose l'équipe allemande du Bayern Munich aux Écossais des Glasgow Rangers. Le match se termine par une victoire des Munichois sur le score de 1 but à 0 après prolongations, ce qui constitue leur premier sacre dans la compétition ainsi que leur premier titre européen.

Parcours des finalistes

Note : dans les résultats ci-dessous, le score du finaliste est toujours donné en premier (D : domicile ; E : extérieur).

 : vainqueur décidé au tirage au sort.

Match

Voir aussi
 Finale de la Coupe des clubs champions européens 1966-1967
 Finale de la Coupe des villes de foires 1966-1967

Notes et références

Lien externe
 European Competitions - Cup Winners' Cup 1966-67

1966-1967
Compétition de football en Allemagne
Événement sportif à Nuremberg
Face-à-face du Bayern Munich
Face-à-face du Rangers FC
Football en 1967
Sport en Allemagne en 1967
Sport en mai 1967

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Today, September 14th, is the kickoff of the 2012 Solar Decathlon, and this year it's being held in sunny Spain.
Twenty teams of students from across the globe have been selected to build and present their idea of the most efficient solar home possible… right next to the Palacio Nacional in Madrid. The homes are open to the public, and will score points based on energy performance, carbon footprint, and efficiency of design.
Why do we care? Because solar energy is free. It's just the harnessing of it that has been so expensive. With every new brain that's put to work on it, we get closer to a cheap, sustainable way to build homes in the future. Solar panels increase in efficiency every year, but now folks are thinking outside the panel: solar paint, solar fabric, even photovoltaic cells printed on paper. As collection of solar energy becomes easier, we're also making appliances and homes that use less of it, with smarter orientation to the sun and better insulation.
Next year the Solar Decathlon is back in the U.S. in Irvine, California. I can't wait to see what they think of next!


This year's flowers have just started to open on this tree during the week so I thought I should share it with you.
The branches look a bit untidy at the moment. Callistemon flower on the tips of the shoots that grew last year. For many years I kept it well trimmed but, of course, was cutting off all the potential flowers every time I pinched the shoots. With advice from Derek, a master with Aussie plants as bonsai, I learned to allow the shoots to grow and mature so it can produce flowers. After flowering it is pruned quite hard then new shoots are again allowed to grow and mature for the following year's flowers.
You will note that the flowers on this species are rather less impressive than many we see in gardens but I think the pale pink blush is nice on this bonsai. Flowers are also smaller than many which fits in well for a bonsai sized tree.
This entry was posted in Aussie natives as bonsai, pinching and pruning, Uncategorized by Neil Padbury. Bookmark the permalink.
I have a fairly mature Callistemon species – don't know what type as it was a hand-me-down bonsai rescued from a shopping centre plant tub when they were being thrown out.
It seems that one years shoot growth doesn't produce a flower as you describe. I tried for several years to prune in autumn and hope that the growth into spring would produce the goods – but shoots only extended and no flowers appeared. This time I let it go completely for another year – no pruning. The four largest 'branches' extended this spring and about a month ago produced a flower. They were red. Now I know that at least.
Do you have any experience that suggests a critical pruning time, fertilising regime, species peculiarity or something else that would help explain my experience ?
As far as I am aware all Callistemon flower on growth from last year so yours should too given the right circumstances. The secret is pruning only in Spring and early Summer then leaving the resulting new shoots untouched until the following spring. The WA native bonsai guru, Derek, told us to prune hard immediately after flowering then leave the subsequent shoots to grow untouched until they flower the following spring. For those of us who are used to pinching often to keep a nice neat outline it can be difficult to leave the lengthening shoots alone but this is the method I have followed and it does work. You can see that my Callistemon is quite untidy at flowering time. I have removed some of the shoots without buds just before it flowered so the flowers are shown a bit better but that is the only pruning it has had since last spring. Other flowering species produce more, better flowers after fertilising with high K (potash) fertiliser and Callistemon also seems to respond. There is no specific flowering bonsai fertiliser but anything that is aimed at flowering or fruiting plants – azalea, rose, tomato, citrus, or just 'flowers and fruit' fertilisers are all pretty similar and have the higher levels of K that are required to stimulate flower bud formation. Note that flower buds are actually forming during the autumn before so use your high K ferts during late summer and autumn for best results the following spring.
Hi Neil and Mike, great tree Neil. With Callistemon you can cut branches hard after flowering and between then and March the new shoots should / can still be pinched and pruned. The cut off is no later than March and then aftert which DO not pinch or trim any growth. This will allow setting of all flower buds coming into Spring. Leaving long shoots will not give a display with the Most flowers available. Hope you can get some great flowers shows nwext Spring. Thanks and cheers, regards Craig.


For a complete list of changes, see the "Release Notes" section below.
2ndQuadrant Unified Data Analytics (2UDA) is a data analytics application suite that unifies databases, spreadsheets, data mining and visualisation in one seamless desktop installer. 2UDA (pronounced 'tudor') is packaged and ready to install on your personal computer, with a choice of operating systems: Linux, OSX and Windows. Once installed, 2UDA gives users access to the dramatic data visualisation and data mining capabilities of Orange 3, working directly against the powerful PostgreSQL 9.5 relational database, as well as spreadsheet function of LibreOffice 5 Calc, 2UDA provides all three of these open source applications through one, easy to use installation package.
A 'Report' button that can prepare reports of performed analyses.
2ndQuadrant is pleased to announce further enhancements to 2UDA (pronounced 'Tudor'), our new data analytics application suite currently under development, and available to try now.
The 'Platinum Production Support for z/Linux' offers users of IBM's z System the reassurance of one of the best enterprise-class support offerings available from any vendor, with 24/7 coverage and guarantees of 15 minute response, 4 hour work-around and 24 hour bug fix for severity 1 issues with PostgreSQL.


Dell EMC today announces several advancements to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, the world's top selling server portfolio2, offering improved management, security, performance and scalability for customers' everyday and most demanding workloads. These advancements to PowerEdge servers and OpenManage systems management further enable a secure, scalable compute platform as the ideal foundation for cloud, analytics and software-defined data center initiatives.
"As organizations rapidly keep pace with growing sets of information and data, they're also adopting more advanced applications to generate greater insights with digital transformation efforts," said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, Server and Infrastructure Systems, Dell EMC. "Making the industry-leading PowerEdge server portfolio even stronger, we are enabling our customers to benefit from additional automation, control and security with more responsive and powerful systems."
Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory will be available for hands-on trials through a Dell EMC customer proof of concept program and through Dell Technologies Customer Solution Centers beginning this April and generally available globally later in the second quarter of 2019 on select two- and four-socket PowerEdge servers.
Follow the latest news on Twitter from @DellEMC and @DellEMCServers.
"We run a demanding cloud-based managed application network where performance is critical. With 90,000 access points and the largest SD-WAN network globally, Cybera customers are accessing our application network any time of the day, all across the world, to successfully run their businesses. We are able to meet high performance demands and continually add new services by using Dell EMC PowerEdge servers as the foundation for our scalable, secure and reliable multi-cloud services platform. The improved performance of our PowerEdge infrastructure with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors will enable us to accelerate our response times and continue to exceed our customers' expectations."
"We are seeing the IT system and service management software market growing more than 7% through 2023. This is driven by a need to automate and manage greater efficiency across increasingly complex on-premises, private cloud, public cloud and multi-cloud environments. We're seeing Dell Technologies refining its OpenManage suite of capabilities to deliver a robust management platform for these more modern, dynamic IT infrastructures."
Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies. This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions. Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 99% of the Fortune 500 – with the industry's most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.
Join us April 29 - May 2 in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, the company's flagship event that brings together latest emerging trends, technology and gurus, from the edge to the core to the cloud. During the event, experts from all of Dell Technologies businesses will demonstrate to customers and partners the connected ecosystem of IT infrastructure, applications, devices and security that can enable real transformation across their organizations. Register here.
1Based on Dell EMC internal testing in March 2019 comparing a PowerEdge R740xd with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 2 x 1.6TB Mixed Use NVMes using Microsoft SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3, VMware ESXi 6.7U1 and a RHEL 7.6GA vs the same R740xd configuration except for substituting the NVMes for 12 x 256GB DIMMs of Intel OptaneDC Persistent Memory. Workload used is derived from TPC-C to SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3 performance. The results obtained with the derived workload are not comparable to published TPC-C results. Actual results will vary.
2 Source: IDC Quarterly Server Tracker, Q4 2018.
3 Preliminary results based on Dell EMC internal testing comparing a PowerEdge R740 with Intel Xeon Scalable processors (first generation) Silver 4116 vs. a PowerEdge R740 with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors Silver 4216 running SPECcpu2017 int_rate_base, February 2019. Actual results will vary.
4 Results of the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark 69,500 Users; Average dialog response time: 0.97 seconds. Throughput: Fully processed order line items per hour 7,600,330, Dialog steps per hour: 22.801.000, SAPS: 380,020. SAP benchmark with enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ASE 16; SLES15; with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 CPUs (4 CPUs, 112 cores and 224 threads) and 1536GB of memory. Certification number: 2019023. Results as of March 2019. Comparison is to a similarly equipped PowerEdge R930 server, 43,300 Users; Average dialog response time: 0.98 seconds. Throughput: Fully processed order line items per hour 4,730,330, Dialog steps per hour: 14,191,000, SAPS: 236,520.: SAP benchmark with enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ASE 16; RHEL 7.2; with Intel Xeon processor E7-8894 v4 CPUs (4 CPUs, 96 cores and 192 threads) and 1024GB of memory. Certification number: #2017001 from 2017-02-06. Details regarding this benchmark are available upon request from hardware partner or SAP AG.
5 Based on Dell internal analysis, comparing select PowerEdge servers using Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs and/or DRAM DIMMs vs just using DRAM DIMMs, January 2019.
6 Based on Dell EMC internal testing, March 2019, using INT8 benchmark for image classification with ResNet50 comparing Intel® Xeon® Scalable Gold 6148 vs Intel® Xeon® Scalable Gold 6248 processors on a two-socket Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420. Actual results will vary.


text:
Category: Latest Posts
Literature, Letterature, Liturgy
July 7, 2016 June 19, 2017 David Porush3 Comments
When the Hebrew Bible was first transcribed, the Jews used the newly-invented alphabet to write it. No matter whether you believe it was simply the Ten Commandments or the entire Five Books written in fire on stone by the Finger of God that Moses brought down from Sinai, or even if its core was fabricated by a bunch of authors in the 13th-8th centuries BCE, the medium must have been the alphabet.
Earliest archeological evidence, like the stone idol from Serabit el-Khadem, places the origin of the alphabet in the South Sinai (!) about sixty miles north of Mount Sinai, around the 15th-14th C BCE (!), just when tradition places the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt.
Hebrew for about four centuries after remained a primitive alphabet, lacking vowels, or spaces between words, or punctuation of any kind. It was scrawled boustrophedon – as the ox plows the field – that is, left to right until the end of the line, then right to left, and so on.
In short, the Torah that Moses brought to the Children of Israel was one long, breathless, written word. It awaited an oral enunciation to place the cuts between words and determine their meaning.
To quickly illustrate this, how would you read the following letters?
nthbgnnggdcrtdthhvnndthrth
It would take some puzzling and context and familiarity to recognize this as
"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."
But lacking complete authority and assurance – nothing short of playing telepathy with the author – any reading would admit of several competing interpretations, including some that may seem at first nonsensical but may hide lurking messages if you stare at them too long:
In the big, no-nagged court doth have nine, death, or thee.
Hebrew readers to this day read texts without vowels and have to disambiguate individual words either by familiarity, or context, or memorizing them with the aid of another text with vowels. Consider the word in Hebrew דבר – DBR. The consonants could mean dvar (word), dever (plague), davar (thing), daber (speak), dibbur (speech), and others besides.
In short, even individual words in Hebrew invite – even demand – that the reader play this puzzling game. This is the sort of game English students come into contact with in literature classes when they are asked to interpret opaque or dense poetry (John Donne's works are my favorite) or literature filled with word play and deliberate punning, like Joyce's Ulysses.
Not-yet-words
But I would draw a nuanced distinction and say because Hebrew words lack vowels, they are not -yet-words. This is true even when we consider the words as instructions for speech: consonants are the hard sounds stuck in the mouth that await the explosive of a vowel to be pronounced. Try to pronounce 'T'. All you have is the instruction for placing the tongue at the top of the mouth, behind the upper teeth, waiting for a vowel for it to burst forth.
Because all words in Hebrew are to some extent not-yet-words, lambent with meanings that are always becoming, emergent, not-yet-utterable, then all Hebrew texts written without vowels – even a grocery list (see A Canticle for Liebowitz, for instance) – are a form of literarature, one might even say poetry: difficult, opaque, demanding interpretations.
Compared to the ideal of clarity we inherited from the Greeks, who perfected the alphabet by adding vowels, Hebrew without vowels is a hopeless muddle. When the eminent Yale scholar of the transition from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, Eric Havelock, declared that the ancient Hebrews could not hope to create a true (read "Greek") literature, he was right, though for the wrong reasons. His assumption was that the primitiveness of the Hebrew mind and social organization, and the impoverishment of its alphabetic script, could not allow for the elevated thinking, clarity, and expressiveness of classical Greek.
Yet, armed with our understanding of the essential ambiguity-generating early Hebrew script, we can see that vowelless Hebrew is already a form of literature, inviting interpretation of almost every word. Indeed, the question What is literary? makes no sense as we try to apply a Greek understanding to a Hebrew communications technology and textuality. We need a whole new word for the kind of discourse engendered by these letters which form words that are never-quite-words.
Letterature… and prayer
In reading Hebrew, I propose that we are perpetually reading a kind of letterature, where sense is suspended between our decoding of the letter and our reading of the word, as we shuttle back and forth in interpretive suspense attempting, often vainly, to be sure of the intended meaning. This is really literary reading tending not towards clarity but dyslexia. As Amos Oz quipped, "There is no word in Hebrew for fiction."
Perhaps even the truth value of any text is suspended between the ever-threatening catastrophe of ever-promulgating interpretations that at the first reading defeats the illusion of telepathy – clearly understanding what's in the Mind of the Author, but at another opens hailing frequencies to a very animated and dynamic metaphysical and cognitive plane.
I don't know about how you take your literature (or should I say, how your literature takes you), but this sure feels how I take and am seized by mine, in all its debilitating pleasure and transporting joy. A good poem or a dense novel exiles us for a time to an inward realm. We read and get lost somewhere in the wilderness between multiple competing possibles and mutually-enriching meanings. If we linger there long enough and if we climb the mountain, then perhaps revelation will come.
Reading Hebrew thus becomes the Ur-type of literary reading: a devotional, a form of prayer, and the engagement with its letterature a form of liturgy.
Perfect Storm: How ISIS and the Media Make Us All Israelis and What We Can Do About It
July 7, 2016 June 19, 2017 David PorushLeave a comment
Prophecy in Exile? We Are All Esther
April 19, 2016 March 19, 2019 David PorushLeave a comment
What is the status of prophecy today? Can we communicate directly with God and speak for Him? Are those who claim to be modern prophets, though they speak with inspiration and profound insight, really channeling the Divine, or are they mistaking personal inspiration for the real thing?
Continue reading "Prophecy in Exile? We Are All Esther" →
Trumposaurus Rex: What I Saw at AIPAC
March 31, 2016 October 9, 2018 David Porush3 Comments
Trumposaurus Rex
Dear K.,
Yes, I was in DC for the Trump speech, and Hillary's, Cruz's and Kasich's, to the 18,000 folks at AIPAC.
Yes, it must have been scary for you to see thousands of highly educated, mostly well-meaning and politically sophisticated Jews of all stripes stand and cheer for Donald Trump.
I don't know what they televised, or what the cameras focused on, but I saw and heard some things that few seem to be talking about. What I saw gave me an insight into the Donald Trump phenomenon, and why – and maybe how – it can be stopped. Certainly, all other efforts so far have failed and, if anything, have helped his inexorable march to the White House. And yes, K., I think he can defeat the anti-telegenic Hillary Clinton. But how is it a buffoon who couldn't pass a tenth grade civics test might be the next President of the United States?
As you know, because you so roundly berated me, I was looking forward to Trump's speech hoping that there was more there there. I was hoping that Trump had some kind of plan, or strategy, to disrupt politics as usual with a populist and centrist vision, run the government as a rational business, reduce the debt, show strength to allies and enemies abroad, undo the Iran nuclear deal, and pick his way sensibly and free of party ideology or lobby money through domestic issues.
I came away convinced we're on the cusp of a dangerous moment in history, one to which Jews should be especially alert.
The Verizon Center venue for AIPAC was perfect for Trump. We might as well have been attending a Wizards game, or the Barnum and Bailey Circus (which was there all this week). A runway from the locker room led to a slowly-rotating circular center stage. Hillary, Cruz, and Kasich simply walked unaccompanied down the long bull run and mounted the stage to standing ovations. Trump, ever the showman, made his entry surrounded by beefy private bodyguards, each as large as an NFL linebacker, wearing sunglasses and black suits. They weren't Secret Service. Everyone had already entered the arena through Secret Service and Israeli security. He was entering the ring as if for a WWF bout. It was ridiculous, because he was trying to communicate … what? His life was in danger from these 18,000 Jews? He was more important than the others? More powerful? Was this a prizefighter, a rap star, a Mafia boss? Or maybe he really is a coward and needed the extra layer of protection.
The entry with cartoon bodyguards also told us that Trump profoundly misunderstood the setting he was in, his audience, and the occasion. It reminded me of D.B. Norton, the newspaper tycoon in Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe." The movie should be required viewing for everyone in this election season. Norton raises a private police force in preparation for hijacking the John Doe populist movement and running for the presidency. His plan is to begin a fascist regime in the U.S. The 1941 movie is clearly reflecting on the rise of Hitler and Mussolini. Capra is warning America that we are vulnerable to the same forces at home.
As Trump took the stage about 15 yards away, I found myself both looking at him directly and also watching his Wizard of Oz magnification in the four enormous overhead monitors. Trump's weird head was blown up even more than it is on tv. His crazy, swooping owlish comb-over, comb-forward and comb-back "do" is a doesn't: it doesn't hide his baldness when lights shine from atop. He's fat. The blubber on his face, rippling like Jabba the Hutt's, doesn't seem to be connected to any muscle or bone, and certainly not to any emotion except self-satisfaction. The tanning bed orange face and white around the eyes are fluorescent. He's an alien. You wouldn't invite him back to the party unless it was to have something to titter about the next day, because he looks like the guy who eats all the hors d'hoeuvres. He might also make a play for your wife.
Jackie Oakie as Mussolini in Chaplin's"The Great Dictator" (1940)
Imagine you told our sons when they were 10 years old to go up on stage in front of their friends and pretend to be president or emperor. They'd thrust out their jaws, tilt their chins up at an absurd angle, shake their jowls, purse their lips, puff themselves up, and nod in imperial self-affirmation. "Yes. That's right. I'm the President. Uh-huh! That's me. I'm the President. Do this! Do that! Drop some bombs. I'm smart! I have a good brain!" They'd have us howling.
One of Trump's tics is to say, "Believe me. Believe me!" The more he said it, the more the crowd giggled. The broadcast mikes may not have picked it up. We giggled because he was so unbelievable and obvious a liar.
Then, at one point, the crowd lost it and howled in spontaneous unison. His script – and amazingly he read from a script, unprecedented in Trump world – had him claim that he read the Iran deal. But his compulsion to inflate took over and jumped out of its cage. "Yes, I read the whole thing," he ad libbed. "That's right. In fact, I know more about it than anyone else." The AIPAC crowd had been living and breathing the Iran deal for at least a decade and had heard every manner of expert. They hooted. Trump, as is his wont, interpreted the derision as affirmation. "That's right, that's right!" he went on, misinterpreting the rolling laughter, his jowls quivering in delight.But then, I saw the Trumposaur. It had been let out to feed.
The Trumposaur is to blame for the moment that has given ammunition to the anti-AIPAC press. Trump's script said, "And in this, the last year of Obama's presidency …" Another ad lib erupted from Trump's lips, one syllable: "Yay!" The crowd laughed, this time with him. The Trumposaur had awoken. "Obama is the worst thing that has ever happened to Israel," it declared, totally winging it. The crowd rose to its feet in approval.
In AIPAC's defense, because it's hard to imagine this gang of thousands of Jews utterly losing its senses in unison, many if not most there did think the statement is patently true. Even The Washington Post has called Obama out for the disaster that is the Iran deal. Obama is the worst President for Israel since the Jewish State was founded. The applause erupted unanimously and spontaneously. We would have applauded had anybody said it. So don't overestimate or misunderstand the applause or ovations for this line. These were not Trump supporters. It is AIPAC's tradition to cheer for good rousing lines. Standing ovations are not endorsements. On the other hand, you can see how the cameras may have shown us being turned into a Trump mob. And maybe we were. Maybe you would have stood and cheered, too. Yet at the very moment I became part of the mob, I had this sudden schizoid flash of rational clear sight into Trump. I saw, I mean really saw, the Trumposaur in its naked, primitive state.
The Trumposaur is not a reasoning beast. It's dumb, really. It neither plots nor plans. It leaps on every perceived threat or prey. It is impatient. Its antediluvian grotesquery is there in plain sight. It's too big to hide and too big to need to hide, after all. It is all instinct and impulse and appetite and forward lurch.
You would think a hunter would need to be aware of its surroundings and have keen sight, but it's almost blind, which explains Trump's inability to see what's in the mirror.
When he perceives an attack, his hearing is quite keen, but he is mostly deaf, which explains his dumbfounding inability to hear howls of execration, his shouting over others, his inability to hear a question asking for specifics. It explains his David Duke excuse (the sound was muffled) and his even more astounding string of idiot lines whenever he's asked a question about the real world outside himself, about hot button issues like abortion or immigration, about foreign or domestic policy requiring knowledge of the actual workings of the Supreme Court, executive branch, policy, or precedent. NYC cabbies and newly-minted citizens understand the U.S. government better.
The Trumposaur's primary sense is olfactory. It not only smells the rising blood of the mob, it knows how to bring it out, to get it flowing, to let it bleed, the better to sense its prey and feed. Its only goal is to get bigger and stay big. And to this end, to get the blood flowing, almost any rising emotion will do: fanaticism, hatred, outrage, revenge, envy, adulation, injustice, and, this is critical, fear. Fear is very effective.
Fear summoned the Trumposaurus in the first place. In the very earliest stages of the campaign, when Trump was just running a test flag up the flagpole, before even Fox gave him any significant air time, CNN seized on Trump. It gave him billions of dollars of free media coverage. I don't know what they were thinking. Maybe they thought Trump was the most ridiculous of the clowns coming out of the Republican Party clown car. Maybe they thought Trump was a good boogey man who would sell a lot of airtime, like his cousin Godzilla. Maybe they thought if they could prop up Trump as a presidential candidate they would deliver the presidency to Hillary. But like any good Greek chorus, they amplify what "The Donald" says, even when they think they are providing counterpoint. The lead story of CNN virtually every hour of every day for months has been Donald Trump's presidential campaign. They're doing a great job making him President.
Even Obama berated the press (March 28, 2016) for its irresponsibility in feeding the Trumposaur. CNN became furious and defensive. Yesterday, they turned on their favorite son to defend themselves. One of their anchors defended the coverage of Trump's campaign because it was like their coverage of Obama in 2008. But no matter. The effect has been, and continues to be, pumping up the Trumposaur. Trump is catnip to the media and he knows it. The media just blink and bloviate in surprise and dismay at his success, caught like deer in the headlights, unwilling to admit they're feeding him.
The Trumposaur has no idea who he is or how to behave in his guise as a candidate or even as a person. He sees everything and anyone coming at him as either enemy or food. His two modes are fight or feed. Like a frightened boy who happens to be a bit slow and gigantic for his age, he has no idea how he really looks or why people respond to him the way they do. Some edge away slowly when they see the Trumposaur. He's found by using his size, and puffing himself up even larger, and making loud noises, he can scare away much of the opposition. Those who still come at him he pounces on or eats. On tv, Trump responds to threats by yelling louder, interrupting, bullying.
The beast fills its human host with pathological vanity, narcissism, insensitivity, appetite, and fear. It bloats his belly and distorts his features. It invades his brain so that his world is seen through lizard eyes as a jungle of predatory deals, lawsuits, bankruptcies, deceitful associates, partners, and wives. Look at his pathetic trail of lawsuits in his bio on Wikipedia. Like Mussolini, though he's had multiple wives and lovers and boasts about them, you have the feeling his promiscuity is just lizard promiscuity. He lurches to mate with any woman who enters his field of vision. He tried to court Princess Diana.
To survive, the human Donald Trump has had to create a character, a skin, a persona, to enable the Trumposaur to interact with its terrifying environment. This persona also gives voice, if barely articulate, to the impulses of the Trumposaur. It serves as bait for its prey. It explains why the persona is always interrupting himself with some boastful, mindless ad lib. It is the Trumposaur trying to sound human. Meet "The Donald." And I really mean the scare quotes.
No rational attempt to defeat the Trumposaur has done anything but propel him because the Trumposaur has primitive magic. His call summons its prey, the voting, democratic populace on which the Trumposaur, like any good populist demagogue, feeds – otherwise known as the mob. When "The Donald" in one of the earlier debates said, interrupting himself, "I LOVE the uneducated!" he really, really meant it.
And the secret of a mob is that we are all candidates for the mob while denying we could ever be part of one. Are you going to point to a roomful of people and single out exactly who belongs to the mob? Are you sure membership in the mob is reserved for those others, hose _________ (fill in the blank): uneducated, unwashed, hillbilly, redneck, naïve, young, Southern, Western, Midwestern, Rust Belt, urban, working class, unemployed, union members, seniors, veterans, working poor, rural, Texans, racists, sexists, soccer moms, angry white men, Republicans, disenfranchised …? No, we're too educated, sentient, refined, knowing, and civilized to be part of that mob.
But we're wrong. Trump has the numbers to prove it. His constituency is growing, cutting across all classes and the neat little demographic niches pollsters and pundits love, including the educated, some lifelong Democrats, women, and even some minorities. That's why all the syndicated columnists, party fathers, analysts and smart broadcasters not only get it wrong, but are FEEDING THE BEAST. I know PhD's, billionaires, doctors and lawyers who say they're going to vote for him. If you don't know anyone who will, you're living in a bubble.
That's becaus we all carry a lizard brain around in us. It's there, waiting for the right signal to emerge. Yes, we spend a lot of time filtering it, caging it, burying it, forgetting it. But it's there. Why else do democracies persistently vote themselves into tyrannies? Why do mobs form? Against all reason.
Acknowledging this is the secret to the defeating the Trumposaur. There are only a few routes left to slaying the Trumposaur, now. The first is to starve him. That would require CNN and Fox and even PBS and all other media obsessed and addicted to him to ignore Trump, take the needle out of their arms, turn the cameras off him. Ain't gonna happen.
The second is procedural and bureaucratic: to hope the Republican party has the wit and courage to turn away Trump's assault through its own arcane nomination procedures. As Sen. Lindsey Graham said to AIPAC, the Republican party may have to lose an election to save the Republic. Do you want to leave the fate of the nation to the wisdom and courage of the Republican Party? Anyway, as I watch (3.25pm PST Mar 30, 2016) Trump has emerged from his meeting with the RNC. I bet he's cut a deal with them.
We might hope the Trump is exposed as a clown by the broadcast media more convincingly than he already has been, but I don't see how. They're trying awfully hard with little success at finding the line between negative coverage that just gets him more votes, and really wounding him. The posture of The New York Times and CNN and Fox and The Washington Post and all the stately newspapers and news channels that disapprove of Trump openly, is disgustingly pathetic, unconvincing, and misses the point. Forget about my name-calling. The attention they pay to him in attempt to quell his rising force is demonstrably, empirically having the opposite effect. His voter base is growing. He even plays the victim and appeals to how unfairly he's being treated, poor guy, by the media, the RNC, his opponents, debate moderators … whoever. It works to get him more votes because it feeds everyone' sense of outrage at the powers that be, that hazy "Establishment."
We can hope Trump realizes he never wanted to be president anyway, and goes home to parlay his success into more money and fame, but his megalomania is being pleasured too much for that to happen. Maybe we could have turned the tide a few months ago. It's too late now.
The real solution is much harder. In some senses, it has nothing to do with Trump. It has to do with everyone, you and me and the media as individuals, and all our friends. We have to stop being astonished, like deer in the headlights, stop pretending we're confused, and stop being dismayed, and stop being so goddamned superior than those Others who are voting for Trump. We have to stop supposing that all the millions of people who have already voted for Trump are simply ill-informed or stupid or credulous fools. We have to stop thinking We are not Them. We need to dig deep, introspectively, to feel the draw of The Donald, the pull of his authoritarianism, his promise of dark redemption. We need to tune in and commune with the lizard brain inside us. We need to feel the logic of his allure beyond logic and stop being so goddamned civilized. We need to admit, before it's too late, that "The Donald" is an ultimate disruptor. He defies all civilized or political wisdom and decorum because he defies all logic. Then, and only then, can we steel our instincts and sharpen our weapons to fight The Beast in its own jungle. History, and Trump's march, prove fairness and objectivity and reason and dignity and elitist judgments and the decorous belief we're above the fray are no match for a tyrannical bully, a Trumposaurus Rex. We have to join the fray.
The alternative, I'm afraid, ends tragically as it always does when the beast summons the mob. First, the Muslims. Then the Mexicans. Then the blacks. Then the Jews. Or maybe the Jews go before the blacks. Then other enemies of the state. Then his personal enemies. How many times do we have to see the film? Don't think his Jewish grandson will protect Jews, any more than all the Jewish philosophers and scientists and Jewish good Germans saved themselves from Hitler. Once you unleash the lizards in all of us, no one is safe.
Our pal Stephen Berk (Professor of History at Union College) has shown that throughout the Diaspora, with the precision of a machine, every four generations after Jews immigrate to a country they are slaughtered or expelled or both. By my count, we're the Fourth Generation in America.
I'd say cheers as I usually do, K., but let us leave the cheers for the mob.
Entanglement, Chesed, and the Quantum Theology of Incense
February 21, 2016 December 2, 2018 David Porush2 Comments
After the end of the Sabbath service meant to recall the sacrifices in the Temple, we recite a curious addendum. It's a recipe taken from the Talmud (Kereisos 6b) for a kind of incense that was used in the Temple. It required eleven ingredients in specific measures, including "galbanum," a terpentine-smelling extract of gum plants, and "Carshina lye," which is toxic and can be substituted for by urine. Indeed, it sounds altogether foul, although if you knew the ingredients of the most expensive perfumes out of Paris, you'd turn up your nose, too. Likewise, together these eleven substances produced a divine smell. Furthermore, the mixture was so sacred, violating the formula by one jot was punishable by death.
Although the Amidah is meant to substitute for the Temple service, and the spreading of smoky incense was the conclusion of the service, this technical, arcane process from a relatively obscure Talmudic passage seems out of place. The rest of these Shabbat prayers are about holiness, peace, and the greatness of God. The fact that it is so insistently technical, earthy, materialistic and sensory, even more so than the original in Exodus 30, makes it jarring.
Kabbalists connect ketores to the kabbalistic sefira (aspect) of God called chesed, usually translated as "kindness," but meaning much more. [1] The ketores produces a transformative scent. It influences all who smell it. Reading is solitary. Hearing is transient, instant. Seeing shifts. But smell lingers and suffuses.. It creates an alter, changes the ecology of a room. Sharing a scent in the air binds people together. The kabbalistic analogy is clear: Like acts of kindness, ketores emanates and spreads throughout the congregation and out into the world in unforeseen ways that bind humanity together and elevates them.
It naturally makes ones think of the concept of entanglement in quantum mechanics. Ok, that's weird. Let me try to explain.
Quantum Biology Breaches the Wall of Our Reality
For the last century, most physicists treated the troubling and enigmatic implications of quantum mechanics as something to be banished to the realms of philosophy and metaphysics, trying to keep the nose of the consciousness camel out of the tent of strictly causal and objective physics. Physics still largely quarantines the absurdity of subatomic shenanigans from the observable macroscopic world we live in by claiming the two realities are unconnected. The world we experience continues to behave in an orderly, Newtonian, commonsensical fashion. Things don't change each other by magic. Reality is there whether someone's looking at it or not. Stuff can't be in two places at once and no where at all.
But in the last decades, this quarantine has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Science itself has stormed its own comfortable cliches with experimental results that show consciousness, human or at least intelligent consciousness, is implicated in determining reality even in the macroscopic world we experience directly through our senses. Experiments in the 1960s and 1980s have shown that two objects separated by any conceivable connection, even at other ends of the universe, are entangled and somehow affect each other instantaneously. Still, physics had a whole armory of ways to wall off these disturbing phenomena from commonsense reality. saying that when the quantum world interacted with a macroscopic phenomenon, that macroscopic entity "observed" the probabilistic quantum, collapsing it into a stable realism. Its formal name is "Decoherence."
But in the last ten years, quantum biology has shown that behaviors in our familiar world of nature are directly connected to and reliant on quantum processes. The orientation of migrating birds. The operation of genes. Photosynthesis. The comfortable quarantine that has kept our sense of reality simple and free from philosophy and metaphysics has now collapsed. And that collapse is utter and complete. It can't be confined, because it is now likely to be shown that the whole universe interacts at all levels with quantum weirdness.
One of those quantum phenomena that is impossible to ignore at the macroscopic level is entanglement: the spooky coordination between the behavior of objects that have no material, physical or any other possible connection either invisible or theoretical. Even objects – photons – that are traveling apart at the speed of light or are separated by vast distances instantaneously coordinate their reality. When one is tickled, its entangled twin across the universe laughs.
Perhaps we can get comfortable with the way this betrays our commonsense notions of reality for photons, because they are weird little buggers to begin with, both wave and particle, expressions of a probability formula that ineluctably shows they don't even really exist in any proper sense of the word until they are observed. But entanglement isn't confined to photons and other sub-atomic particles. As two physicists explain in a recent book:
"We talk in terms of twin-state photons because that situation is readily described and subject to experiment. In principle, however, any two objects that have ever interacted are forever entangled. The behavior of one instantaneously influences the other. An entanglement exists even if the interaction is through each of the objects having interacted with a third object. In principle, our world has a universal connectedness.
"Quantum entanglement for large objects [like chairs or people] is generally too complex to notice. But not always."
Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, QUANTUM ENIGMA: PHYSICS ENCOUNTERS CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford UP, 2006)
This wasn't written by tripped-out tree-hugging Zen Juddhist ecstatic hippies, but by two well-respected tenured physicists at UC (admittedly, it is Santa Cruz, but nonetheless…). Their book, published by the well-respected Oxford University Press, chronicles how orthodox physics has suppressed those enigmatic but unavoidable conclusions of quantum mechanics. And the most disturbing of these enigmas is the conspiracy between human consciousness and the way it binds our reality to the spookiness of the quantum level. Once things including human things, interact with quantum weirdness, it is entangled with it. And, by the way, everything in the universe interacts.
These aren't just mystic metaphors They are the serious and real, if often censored, consequences of quantum physics. They troubled Einstein and generations of brilliant physicists since, but experimental evidence shows they are incontrovertible.
The science that studies how quantum mechanics breaches the wall of biology is called Quantum Biology. One of the known ways that behavior in our natural, observable world is actually produced by quantum events is the navigation of birds. Another is photosynthesis. A third is enzymatic reactions, including those that transform the nature of one organic substance into another, like milk into cheese via rennet, or juice into wine via yeast, or flour and water into bread, also via yeast. These have rituals attached to them in many cultures. But in Judaism, the metaphysics of their physics (or organic chemistry) is revealed, if we read it through this lens, by the halacha attached to them: cheese, wine, bread.
Another event that relies on quantum biology, and all the metaphysical implication it brings, is smell.
I always wondered why ketores is recited after the end of the Musaf amidah. It seems like such an odd and specific intrusion in the climax of the service. But connecting the incense with chesed brings it all together. When we recite these technical instructions for making the incense as a prayer, we are reminded of the elaborate instructions for building the Mishkan, the Sanctuary of the Temple from which these verses are taken. We both remember and look forward to rebuilding it. Ketores is designed to create the most beautiful, pungent, memorable, unique, and transporting scent, wafted on smoke to fill the Temple. We're supposed to remember that Divine smell – or rehearse the rabbis' memory of it – and also remember their pain at its loss. As Proust knew, no sense evokes memory more than smell. We are supposed to long for that smell as we long for the Temple, with the curious admixture of ache and inspiration, in the hope of the time when we can smell that smell again in the rebuilt Temple. This is an ultimate nostalgia, nostos algia, pain for home.
Metaphysics in the physics (and chemistry) of incense
The recipe for ketores specified in the Talmud, specifically the part of the formula that will produce an emanating smell I believe, is an enzymatic reaction produced by lye, which as I said above, relies on quantum mechanics. Lye, which is highly alkaline, catalyses and binds all the other ingredients into an active, dynamic new compound that transcends the sum of its parts. The siddur specifies that urine could be substituted for lye to rpoduce the same outcome, but it is undignified for use in the Temple. It makes sense: it would introduce the same highly alkaline catalysis, depending on the diet of the donor. (At the risk of boring you, lye is produced by a membrane cell chloralkali process, which is itself a quantum biological process.)
When we learn that ketores means chesed because it spreads out and connects all of us in unseen and ineffable ways, it is not just metaphorical. It is literally true at the level of physics.
From the viewpoint of orthodox science, the ultimate heretical implication of quantum mechanics is what I would call the "Quantum G-Hypothesis."
THE QUANTUM G- HYPOTHESIS
The universe is sustained by an unimaginably dynamic and omniscient Universal Consciousness.
It (or properly, Who) observes every one of the infinite number of infinitesimal quantum events occurring everywhere in every sub-nanosecond.
This continuous observation by a Universal Consciousness enables reality to unfold.
The Quantum G-Hypothesis actually does away with some fairly absurd and, so far, unprovable assertions (think of them as contortions designed to preserve logic in the face of experimental and mathematical proofs that show logic's limitations): The Many Worlds Hypothesis, String Theory, A Universal Robot Consciousness; Decoherence; Random Collapses of the Wavefunction, and some other gyrations too technical to delve here.
These still dominate the way orthodox physics is taught today. I predict they will be short-lived.
On the other hand, embracing the G-theory explains plenty of scientific mysteries without introducing any idea not consistent with what science itself has shown. It explains the "Unreasonable Efficacy of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," as Eugene Wigner described it in his 1960 paper. It explains the otherwise unreasonably, inexplicable, and statistically far-fetched coincidence of constants in the universe that have enabled life to arise: Planck's Constant, the strength of electromagnetic, gravity, and weak forces, among others. It solves philosophical problems, too. It explains how Free Will and Determinism can both exist without contradiction. And it explains how consciousness arises from matter.
At the same time, this vision – or scent – of a Quantum-Mechanical, Reality-Unfolding, All-Observing God moves in the opposite direction, from science to an appreciation of spiritual matters. It gives us a pretty good understanding of what Jewish mystics see in God: an Unfolding Ever-Present Consciousness observing every infinitesimal event in the universe, even at the ineffable and impossibly infinite quantum level.
[1] This blog was inspired by a Shabbat drash (2016), by R. Yitzchok Feldman of Emek Beracha in Palo Alto in which he expounded on the mitzvah of the incense used in the Temple,
Explore the Infinite Sign
December 5, 2015 December 9, 2015 David Porush1 Comment
This was a hypertext originally published by Mots Pluriels no. 19, October 2001. It was later redesigned by Reza Negarestani, the amazing post-everything author of Cyclonopedia, whose journey out of Iran and into the center of world discourse is an epic in its own.
Continue reading "Explore the Infinite Sign" →
December 3, 2015 December 9, 2015 David Porush3 Comments
The poetry we learn to read in school is famous for its difficulty. The difficulty comes from layers of possible interpretation. For many, the encounter with poetry is thankfully brief, but whether a joyous or horrid experience it introduces us to reading as the opposite of what good communication is supposed to be: clear, unambiguous, efficient.
Now imagine a genre of ultra-poetry, written in an alphabet on beyond zebra, where every word, every letter multiplies possible meanings. Such a literature would invite the reader into a mad tango of interpretation. The promise of unfathomable depths would beckon our imaginations into an embrace with the lure of transcendence, a sacred psychotropic drug. Call it letterature.
The Torah is written in primitive Hebrew. It lacks vowels, which means the same consonants can represent multiple words. As originally written, the Hebrew Bible also lacked spaces between words, so it was in essence one long word. It wasn't until groups of Jewish scribes, the Masoretes, who worked between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, added definitive breaks, punctuation and vowel marks that the Torah was frozen and reduced into a canonical version. The Masoretes created what was in effect a translation, and all translations are partly treasonous –traduttore tradittore, as the Italians say. Choices of meaning were negotiated based on intense and sacred scholarship from the Talmud, the centuries-long interpretive Jewish tradition. But as negotiations in committee, they cut off alternatives that remained alive in the original text as multiple coexisting potentials and mutually-illuminating layers. That's why I call the Masoretic project, with all due respect, a "catastrophe."
So many of the most radioactive words in the original Hebrew -(dbr דבר or et את) are not-yet-words or something-more-than-simple words. They are lambent with meanings that are always becoming, emergent, autopoetic. In short, almost all Hebrew texts are always already a form of literary, one might even say poetic, expression: difficult, opaque, demanding interpretation.
By the standard of the Greek ideal of clarity, Hebrew without vowels is a hopeless muddle. Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy (1988) and Eric Havelock in The Origins of Western Literacy (1982) both show how perfecting the alphabet as a tool for transcribing and preserving speech brought about massive cultural and congnitive innovation. Indeed, Havelock places this innovation at the root of the origin of Western Civilization. But both scholars have pernicious biases about the origins of literacy among the Hebrews, dismissing Hebrew as primitive and incapable of either inspiration or literature, which is of course laughable in the face of the Bible.
Yet, armed with our understanding of the essential alephtavian style of an ambiguity-generating script, we can see that vowelless Hebrew is already a form of hyper-poetry, generating difficulties and inviting interpretation in almost every word and letter.
Indeed, the whole literary/non-literary dichotomy makes no sense as we try to apply a Greek understanding to Hebrew textuality. We need a whole new word for the kind of discourse engendered by these letters which form words that are never quite words with fixed meaning as the Greek ideal demands.
In reading Hebrew, we are perpetually reading a kind of letterature. Sense is suspended between our decoding of the letter and our reading of the word. We shuttle back and forth in an interpretive frenzy attempting, often vainly, to be sure of the intended meaning. This is really literary reading tending not towards clarity but dyslexia. As Amos Oz quipped, "There is no word in Hebrew for fiction." Perhaps even the truth value of any text is suspended between the threat and promise of the infinite sign, ever-promulgating interpretations that at the first reading defeats the illusion of telepathy, but at another opens hailing frequencies to a very animated and dynamic metaphysical plane.
I don't know about how you take your literature (or should I say, how your literature takes you) but this sure feels how I am seized by mine, in all its transports of pleasure, the joy of possibility and the enticement of revelation to come.
A good poem – or a dense novel striving to become a hypertext – exiles us, for a time. We read and we are lost somewhere in the wildness of the possible and the wilderness of mutually-enriching meanings, in bemidbar. The opacity of the text tells us that if we wander there long enough, and if we climb the mountain, then perhaps revelation will come. Reading the Torah then becomes devotional, a form of pray. This letterature is liturgy.
Now, in our age of virtual reality, the fate of this constant assault of multiple mutually self-altering meanings becomes relevant again. Hypertext in its ideal form makes every part of the text central, a hub with spokes to many possible links, and therefore marginal. The principle of hypertext is the intelligence of the reader wandering in a wilderness of texts, each become like a letter in an alphabet that goes on beyond tav, omega, zebra.
The premature insistence on presence and intimacy in our culture has led to the urge for a technology of telepresence or virtual presence or cyberpresence. This urge has metaphysical roots. And it has obvious ramifications. In what sort of voice does God address Moses? Will He again address humanity?
To most readers and others fascinated by VR, nothing could be more remote or uninteresting than the quasi-religious subjects of this blog. As one e-mail correspondent put it, "I wish sleep on the good rabbis and the Church fathers." In other words, the eyes of most readers are on the future, on a gleaming technological horizon that is seductive and brings with it promises of utopian reorganizations of capital, labor, play, communication, sex, and intimacy, or at very least, interesting new cultural terrain to explore and colonize, interesting new configurations of old relationships.
This blog is exploring a continuity from the time we scrawled on cave walls to the day coming soon when we have a form of art that relies on brain-to-brain communication. This continuity shows that it has always been brain-to-brain communication, or at least mind-to-mind. And the technologies which we so often view as doing something to us, as autonomous forces like The Terminator, are extensions of all our qualities. Our media technologies can even be a form of prayer.
The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 4
December 3, 2015 December 10, 2018 David Porush5 Comments
The arc of all media
The view from Mount Sinai
Whether or not one believes that the Hebrew alphabet was a divine revelation to Moses on Sinai, we can understand why the cultural moment of its invention would be recorded as one of the most transformative revolutions in history.
We can see how the conception of an omnipotent, omnipresent and invisible God is coeval with it. We can understand why a powerful leader would want to expel or eradicate those who possess this potent new tech, especially of they were slaves: there's lots of them and they have an ax to grind with Pharaoh's rule. We can understand why slaves attribute to it mythologies of redemption, revelation, and revolution. That it coincides with the best evidence we have for the actual historic origins of this new technology of the alphabet lends force to the argument.
As such, the origin of the alphabet becomes a model for other moments in history that were wrought by sudden eruptions and deployment of disruptive technologies, especially technologies of communication, since they inevitably bring a new ethos, new cognitive tools, new arts, new epistemologies, and new gods. Telegraph, telephone, radio, television, the Internet – all were born amid prophesies for their transformation of civilization and even the invention or summoning of new gods.
Continue reading "The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 4" →
The arc of all media is long and bends towards telepathy… and Facebook?
December 2, 2015 December 11, 2015 David Porush1 Comment
We've seen in previous posts that, if we read the Hebrew closely and cleverly, the Bible tells the story of the origin of the alphabet as a gift from God to Moses on Mount Sinai. God instructs Moses to teach this new disruptive communication technology to the Children of Israel. Moses and Aaron use it to liberate them from slavery in Egypt by showing its disruptive power to Pharaoh in his court.
Whether or not one believes that the Hebrew alphabet was a divine revelation to Moses on Sinai, we can understand why the moment of its invention would be recorded as one of the most transformative revolutions in history. We can see how the conception of an omnipotent, omnipresent and invisible God comes with this new cognitive weapon. We can understand why a powerful leader would let those who possess this new technology would be torn between expelling them and eradicating them. And we can see why a culture of slaves who seem to come out of nowhere attribute to it mythologies of redemption, revelation, and revolution that changes humanity for millenia. That it coincides with the best evidence we have for the actual historic origins of this new technology of the alphabet lends force to the argument.
Continue reading "The arc of all media is long and bends towards telepathy… and Facebook?" →
We've seen (in Part 1 and Part 2) that the Bible tells the story of the origin of the alphabet as a gift from God to Moses on Mount Sinai. God instructs Moses to teach this new disruptive communication technology to the Children of Israel and use it to liberate them from slavery in Egypt. He and his brother Aaron then stage a contest of scripts in the court of Pharaoh. Pharaoh summons his hieroglyphic scribes to show that the new writing system is not so special. The war of demos takes the form of magical-seeming transformations and "signs" (the Hebrew word for "thing" "plague" and "word" are the same). Water turn to blood. Frogs crawl out of the slime. But on the third contest, when Moses strikes the "dust of the earth" and summons "lice" all over Egypt, the Egyptian scribes are defeated. They throw up their hands and exclaim, "This is the finger of God!"
Charlton Heston about to demo the third plague in front of Yul Brynner in "The Ten Commandments" (1956)
But why do the Egyptians give up now after having no trouble matching the transformation of water into blood or summoning frogs from the mud? A clue is in the nature of the transformation. Hieroglyphic signs for frogs and blood are well-known. What are hieroglyphs for dust and lice?
In Egyptian, the spoken word for lice is "tiny" or "diminutive" (the same word used for little girls). But they didn't have a glyph for it in the older hieroglyphics in use at the time of Moses, nor are there glyphs for any adjective, because they are abstractions, a quality attached to a thing and enormously hard to represent by itself (you could color a tunic or show a small person, but how what is the picture for "smallness"?) Nor does there seem to be a hieroglyph for "dust." Lice, like dust, are ubiquitous but nearly invisible little nothings. They are like the finger of a ubiquitous but invisible Deity stirring the pot of the universe and history. Kinim [כנם], the Hebrew word here translated as "lice," is used in Israel to refer also to those tiny gnats that make a buzzing sound but which can't be seen. In the American South, we call them "noseeums."
Furthermore, the Hebrew letters for plague are D-B-R [דבר]. By supplying different vowels from those in traditional interpretations, these letters can also signify words or things or statements or even commandments, as in the Ten Commandments. As a word, DBR דבר is, like EHT את, a one-word demonstration of the power and facility of this new script to add abstraction and multiply layers of meanings. Hebrew without vowels, the Hebrew of the Bible, intrinsically adds complexity and even poetry to even simple texts.


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