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Tag Archives for lave
Lava in Hawai'i is reaching the ocean, creating new land but also corrosive acid mist
Dave McGarvie, The Open University and Ian Skilling, The University of South Wales
There is something special and awe-inspiring about watching new land form. This is what is now happening in Hawai'i as its Kīlauea volcano erupts. Lava is reaching the ocean and building land while producing spectacular plumes of steam. These eruptions are hugely important for the creation of new land. But they are also dangerous. Where the lava meets the ocean, corrosive acid mist is produced and glass particles are shattered and flung into the air. Volcanic explosions can also hurl lava blocks hundreds of metres and produce waves of scalding hot water.
At Kīlauea, lava is erupting from a line of vents on the volcano's flanks, and is moving downslope to the edge of the island, where it enters the ocean. This is a process that has been witnessed many times at Hawai'i and other volcanic islands. And it is through many thousands of such eruptions that volcanic islands like Hawai'i form.
The new lava being added to Hawai'i by this latest Kīlauea eruption replaces older land that is being lost by erosion, and so prolongs the island's lifespan. In contrast, older islands to the north-west have no active volcanoes, so they are being eroded by the ocean and will eventually disappear beneath the waves. The opposite is happening to the south-east of Hawai'i, where an underwater volcano (Lōʻihi Seamount) is building the foundations of what will eventually become the next volcanic island in this area.
How lava gets to the ocean at Hawai'i
The lava erupting from the current Kīlauea vents has a temperature of roughly 1150 degrees °C, and has a journey of between 4.5km and 5.5km to reach the ocean. As this lava moves swiftly in channels, it loses little heat and so it can enter the ocean at a temperature of over 1000 degrees°C.
When lava meets the sea, new land is formed.
What happens when lava meets the ocean?
We are witnessing one of the most spectacular sights in nature – billowing white plumes of steam (technically water droplets) as hot lava boils seawater. Although these billowing steam clouds appear harmless, they are dangerous because they contain small glass shards (fragmented lava) and acid mist (from seawater). This acid mist known as "laze" (lava haze) can be hot and corrosive. If anyone goes to near it, they can experience breathing difficulties and irritation of their eyes and skin.
Apart from the laze, the entry of lava into the ocean is usually a gentle process, and when steam is free to expand and move away, there are no violent steam-driven explosions.
But a hidden danger lurks beneath the ocean. The lava entering the sea breaks up into blobs (known as pillows), angular blocks, and smaller fragments of glass that form a steep slope beneath the water. This is called a lava delta.
A newly formed lava delta is an unstable beast, and it can collapse without warning. This can trap water within the hot rock, leading to violent steam-driven explosions that can hurl metre-sized blocks up to 250 metres. Explosions occur because when the water turns to steam it suddenly expands to around 1,700 times its original volume. Waves of scalding water can also injure people who are too close. People have died and been seriously injured during lava delta collapses
So, the ocean entry points where lava and seawater meet are doubly dangerous, and anyone in the area should pay careful attention to official advice on staying away from them.
Pillow Lavas form underneath the ocean.
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA)
What more can we learn from these eruptions?
Once lava deltas have cooled and become stable they represent new land. Studies have revealed that lava deltas have distinctive features, and this has enabled volcanologists to recognise lava deltas in older rocks.
Remarkable examples of lava deltas have been discovered near the top of extinct volcanoes (called tuyas) in Iceland and Antarctica. These deltas can only form in water and the only plausible source of this water in this case is melted ice. This means that these volcanoes had melted water-filled holes up to 1.5km deep in ice sheets, which is an astonishing feat. In fact, these lava deltas are the only remaining evidence of long-vanished ice sheets.
It is a privilege to see these incredible scenes of lava meeting the ocean. The ongoing eruptions form part of the natural process that enables beautiful volcano islands like Hawai'i to exist. But the creation of new land here can also bring danger to those who get too close, whether it be collapsing lava deltas or acid mist.
Dave McGarvie, School of Physical Sciences, The Open University and Ian Skilling, Senior Lecturer (Volcanology), The University of South Wales
June 10, 2018 by particularkev	Categories: Hawaii, Kilauea, Kilauea (Hawaii - USA), USA	| Tags: acid mist, article, corrosive, Hawaii, Kilauea, land, lave, new, ocean, USA | Leave a comment
Hawaii: Amazing Lava Photos
The link below is to an article with a large number of photos showing lava flowing into the sea in Hawaii.
September 19, 2012 by particularkev	Categories: Hawaii, Volcano	| Tags: article, flowing, Hawaii, lave, ocean, photos, sea, USA | Leave a comment


It may be difficult to develop an emotional connection to all of the features of filesystems and filers. Take deduplication for instance. Dedup is cool. Rabin-Karp rolling hash, sliding-window Content Defined Chunking (CDC) – those were cool 15 years ago and remain cool today. Improvements and products (and startups) keep pouring in.
But when it comes to extended file attributes (xattrs), emotions range from a blank stare to dismay. As in: wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
Come to think of it, part of the problem is – NFS. And part of the NFS problem is that both v3 and v4 do not support xattrs. There is no support whatsoever: none, nada, zilch. And how there can be with no interoperable standard?
It is difficult to say when exactly the "hyper" prefix was the first time attached to "converged" infrastructure. Hyper-convergence, also known as hyperconvergence, ultimately means a fairly simple thing: running user VMs on virtualized and clustered storage appliances. The latter in turn collaborate behind the scenes to a) pool combined local storage resources to further b) share the resulting storage pool between all (or some) VMs and c) scale-out the VM's generated workload.
That's the definition, with an emphasis on storage. A bit of a mouthful but ultimately simple if one just pays attention to a) and b) and c) above. Players in the space include Nutanix, SimpliVity and a few other companies on one hand, and VMware on another.
True scale-out always has been and will likely remain the top challenge. What's a "true scale-out" – as opposed to limited scale-out or apparent scale-out? Well, true scale-out is the capability to scale close to linearly under all workloads. In other words, it's the unconditional capability to scale: add new node to an existing cluster of N nodes, and you are supposed to run approximately (N + 1)/N faster. Workloads must not even be mentioned with respect to the scale-out capabilities, and if they are, there must be no fine print..
Needless to say, developers myself including will use every trick in the book and beyond, to first and foremost optimize workloads that represent (at the time of development) one or two or a few major use cases. Many of those tricks and techniques are known for decades and generally relate to the art (or rather, the craft) of building distributed storage systems.
But there's one point, one difference that places hyperconverged clusters apart from the distributed storage legacy: locality of the clients. With advent of hyperconverged solutions and products the term local acquired a whole new dimension, simply due to the fact that those VMs that generate user traffic – each and every one of them runs locally as far as (almost) exactly 1/Nth of the storage resources.
Conceptually in that sense, clustered volatile and persistent memories are stacked as follows, with the top tier represented by local hypervisor's RAM and the lowest tier – remote hard drives.
Adding a new node to hyperconverged cluster and placing a new bunch of VMs on it may appear to scale if much of the new I/O traffic remains local to this new node, utilizing its new RAM, its new drives and its new CPUs. De-staging (the picture above) would typically/optimally translate as gradual propagation of copies of aggregated and compressed fairly large in size logical blocks across conceptual layers, with neighboring node's SSDs utilized first..
But then again, we'd be talking about an apparent and limited scale-out that performs marginally better but costs inevitably much more, CapEx and OpEx wise, than any run-of-the-mill virtual cluster.
Great number, likely a substantial majority of existing apps keep using legacy non-clustered filesystems and databases that utilize non-shared LUNs. When deploying those apps inside VMs, system administrators simply provision one, two, several vdisks/vmdks for exclusive (read: local, non-shared) usage by the VM itself.
Here again the aforementioned aspect of hyperconvergent locality comes out in force: a vendor will make double sure to keep at least caching and write-logging "parts" of those vdisks very local to the hypervisor that runs the corresponding VM. Rest assured, best of the vendors will apply the same "local-first" policy to the clustered metadata as well..
The idea therefore is to come up with workloads that break (the indeed, highly motivated) locality of generated I/Os by forcing local hypervisor to write (to) and read from remote nodes. And not in a deferred way but inline, as part of the actual (application I/O ⇔ persistent storage) datapath with client that issued the I/Os waiting for completions on the other side of the I/O pipeline..
An immediate methodological question would be: Why? Why do we need do run some abstracted workload that may in no way be similar to one produced by the intended apps? There are at least 3 answers to this one that I'll denote as, say, probabilistic, administrative and cumulative.
Real-life workloads are probabilistic in nature: the resulting throughput, latencies and IOPS are distributed around their respective averages in complex ways which, outside pristine lab environments, is very difficult to extrapolate with bell curves. Most of the time a said workload may actively be utilizing a rather small percentage of total clustered capacity (the term for this is "working set" – a portion of total data accessed by the app at any given time). Most of the time – but not all the time: one typical issue for users and administrators is that a variety of out-of-bounds situations requires many hours, days or even weeks of continuous operation to present itself. Other examples include bursts of writes or reads (or both) that are two or more times longer than a typical burst, etc.
Administrative maintenance operations do further exacerbate. For example, deletion of older VM images that must happen from time to time on any virtualized infrastructure – when this seemingly innocuous procedure is carried out concurrently with user traffic, long-time cold data and metadata sprawled across the entire cluster suddenly comes into play – in force.
Cumulative-type complications further include fragmentation of logical and physical storage spaces that is inevitable after multiple delete and rewrite operations (of the user data, snapshots, and user VMs), as well as gradual accumulation of sector errors. This in turn will gradually increase ratios of one or two or may be both of the otherwise unlikely scenarios: random access when reading and writing sequential data, and read-modify-writes of the metadata responsible to track the fragmented "holes".
Related to the above would be the compression+rewrite scenario: compression of aggregated sequentially written logical blocks whereby the application updates, possibly sequentially as well, its (application-level) smaller-size blocks thus forcing storage subsystem to read-modify-write (or more exactly, read-decompress-modify-compress and finally write) yet again.
The block size must be small, preferably 4K or 8K. The cluster that scales under application-generated small blocks will likely scale under medium (32K to 64K, some say 128K) and large blocks (1M and beyond) as well. On the other hand, a failure to scale under small blocks will likely manifest future problems in handling some or all of the scenarios mentioned above (and some that are not mentioned as well).
On the third hand, a demonstrated scale-out capability to operate on medium and large blocks does not reflect on the chances to handle tougher scenarios – in fact, there'd be no correlation whatsoever.
The working set must be set to at least 60% of the total clustered capacity, and at least 5 times greater than RAM of any given node. That is, the MAX(60% of total, 5x RAM).
Reason for this is that it is important to exercise the cluster under workloads that explicitly prevent "localizations" of their respective working sets.
Finally, random asynchronous I/Os with 100%, 80/20% and 50/50% of write/read ratios respectively, carrying pseudo-random payload that is either not compressible at all or compressible at or below 1.6 ratio.
That'll do it, in combination with vdbench or any other popular micro-benchmark capable to generate pedal-to-the-metal type load that follows these 3 simple rules. Make sure not to bottleneck on CPUs and/or network links of course, and run it for at least couple hours on at least two clustered sizes, one representing a scaled-out version of the other..
Stating maybe the obvious now – when benchmarking, it is important to compare apples-to-apples: same vendor, same hardware, same software, same workload scaled out proportionally – two different clustered sizes, e.g. 3 nodes and 6 nodes, for starters.
The simple fact that a given hyperconverged hardware utilizes latest-greatest SSDs may contribute to the performance that will look very good, in isolation. In comparison and under stress (above) – maybe not so much.
One way to view the current crop of hyperconverged products: a fusion of distributed storage, on one hand and hybrid/tiered storage, on another. This "fusion" is always custom, often ingenious, with tiering hidden inside to help deliver performance and assist (put it this way) scaling out..
In my role at Stanford Electrical Engineering I have numerous interactions with researchers and vendors, including research projects that have now become the formative infrastructure companies in the industry. My hand in many of these has been slight, but we have had more effect in guiding the build out of usable solutions, taking many into production use first at our facilities. Among the many projects over time, we have dealt with the beginnings and maturation of virtualization in compute, storage, and networking. Today's emerging on-prem and cloud infrastructure now takes as a given that we need to have all three. Lets target the assumptions.
1) To build out a production quality solution that works well in the ecosystem, you just need to make a killer (storage/compute/network) appliance or product.
In many discussions, people may notice a mantra that most companies rightfully focus on building technology from a position of strength such as storage or networking, but miss out when they only attempt to integrate with one of the other legs of the virtualization stool. They rush to market but fail to execute well or deliver what end users actually want because the integration is half baked at most. I've worked with great storage products that focus on network access alone, but can't deal with bare-metal container hypervisors; SDN products that can help make OpenStack work well for tenants, but ignore the storage component that itself is on the network; Storage products that require dedicated use of network interfaces for I/O without awareness of virtualized interfaces; Hypervisors that use networks for storage but can't themselves hide transient network failure from the guests they host. These are just samples but they inform us that its hard to get it all right.
Although its a lot for any going concern to address, it is necessary for products and solutions to have well thought out scale-up and scale-out approaches that address all three legs of the stool. One could argue the forth leg could be orchestration, and that might need to be taken into account as well. Regardless, a focus on providing an integrated storage/networking/virtualization solution in the more simple cases, and building from there is more advantageous to customers looking to grow with these solutions long term.
2) To build a successful hyper converged product, you need to emulate how Google/AWS/etc build out their cloud infrastructure.
I'd argue that most potential customers won't necessarily want to pick a random vendor to bring AWS-like infrastructure on site. The economics and operational complexity would likely sway them to just host their products on AWS or similar, regardless of how much performance is lost in the multiple layered services offered by Amazon. In most cases, mid-enterprise and higher customers already have various solutions adopted, thus necessitating a brown field approach to adopting hyper converged solutions.
This gets to one important belief I have. The idea is that regardless of your solution, the ability for a site to bootstrap its use with minimal initial nodes (1 or more), truly enable migration of work loads onto it, and with time and confidence, allow the customer to grow out their installation. This pushes out another assumption that the hardware is uniform. With gradual roll outs, you should expect variation in the hardware as a site goes from proof-of-concept, to initial roll out and finally full deployment. All the while, management of the solution should allow the use of existing networks where possible and the phase out of or upgrade of nodes over time. There is no "end of deployment" as it is more of a continuous journey between site and solutions vendor.
You'll notice a theme, that bootstrapping of initial storage and networking, and simply, is more important than to emulate the full stack from the get go. Don't try and be Amazon, just make sure you have strong foundation storage/compute/networking so that you can span across multiple installations and even over pre-existing solutions like Amazon.
3) Just get the product in the door with good initial bootstrapping.
Extending from the above, simply bootstrapping is not enough. Support of a product tends to kill many startups or seasoned companies. However, it really bedevils startups as they strive to get initial market acceptance for their investors. In the end, a hyper converged solution is a strong relationship between vendor(s) and the customer. Deployment should be considered continuous up front, so the ability to add, maintain, and upgrade a product is not only central to the relationship, it informs the product design. Consider what hyper converged truly means. Each node it self sufficient but any work load should be able to migrate to another node, and a loss of any given node should not overly strain the availability of the infrastructure.
I don't want to take away too much from how one should focus on ease of initial deployment. That can win customers over. However, keeping users of converged infrastructure happy with the relationship requires happiness with the overall architecture and not the initial technology.
4) Containers can run well enough in virtual machines. Just build on top of VMs and then layer on top our storage and network integrations.
VMs alone are no longer the target deployment, but rather applications and/or app containers. In the rush to enable container deployment, vendors take the shortcut and build on top of existing VM infrastructure. Its worse when it comes to existing hyperconverged solutions that have heavy infrastructure requirements to support VMs. If one now sees lightweight containers as a target, ones assumptions on what makes hyperconverged infrastructure changes. Merely adopting existing mature VM infrastructure becomes is its own issue.
I love the work that Joyent has done in this space. They've argued well, using mature container technology not found in Linux, and brought Linux and Docker into their infrastructure. What makes them better than the present competition is that they run their containers on bare-metal and right on top of virtualized storage (ZFS backed) and maturing network virtualization. The solution presented works wonders for those operating the tech as an IAAS. Market acceptance of a non-native Linux solution or some of the present non-clustered FS components may limit the appeal of excellent technology. At the same time, the primary market as a public cloud places them in the shadow of the larger players there.
A Joyent-like technological approach married with full SDN integration could be the dream product, if made into such a product. Already, the tech proves the assumption of using VMs to be a weak proposition. What VM infrastructure has and containers need for wider adoption is SDNs, namely overlay networks. If we enable not only pooled storage but pooled networking, we can gain better utilization of the network stack, inherent path redundancy, and via an SDN overlay, a safe way to build tenant storage networks arbitrarily over multiple physical networks, perhaps across multiple vendor data centers. Think how this serves the customers potential container mobility.
All the above leads to this point. Taking past experience and intuition, I think that what holds back adoption of next generation infrastructure throughout the industry is in fact the religious arguments around immutability. The work loads that could make use of better solutions coming to market require some level of persistence per node/container. Though live migration may not be warranted in many cases, the ability to upgrade a container, vertically scale it, or run "legacy" applications using these new operation approaches will be required of a mature container solution. We just haven't gotten there yet. A scale-out infrastructure can allow for persistent type containers, as long as end users architect for the expected failure modes that may occur for this application profile.
What matters to customers is the ability to use the build out and scale out nature of the cloud, with known data and operational redundancy and recovery at its core. In many cases, work loads that the market presents may not yet fit into the Docker world, but they can definitely be containerized and virtualized to hyper converged storage solutions.
If you believe that these are the target users, who don't necessarily need to develop the whole solution with a ground-up "cloud" architecture, don't wish to run on the public cloud in all cases, and need a way to on-board cloud technology into the present organization in a progressive way, you will see where we all collectively need to go. Its not so much a hyper converged world, but an inviting, enabling solution space that starts simple (perhaps one compute+storage node), scales out non-uniformly using SDNs to tie in the nodes as they come and go. Customers can adopt small, and grow with you as you build out better, more complete infrastructure.
My experience shows that the IT work place is changing, and those managing data centers need to adjust to adopt the skill sets of cloud operators. There is pressure I've seen in many organizations to convert both the business and the work force to adopt cloud technology. The opposing forces are institutional resistance (or requirements) to not adopt the public cloud, or critical work loads that can't trivially be converted to Docker-style immutable containers. That is a present market condition needing solutions. A stand alone product won't work, but a long term approach the grows with an organization through this IT landscape change will serve both customers and solution providers well.
The picture is a youtube screen grab; the video itself introduces the project SPAN (github: https://github.com/ProjectSPAN) to "enable communications in challenged environments". Wikipedia has a somewhat better picture though, covering all kinds of wireless scenarios, including satellite.
Wireless ad hoc networks go back 40 plus years, to the early 1970s (DARPA) projects, with the 3rd generation taking place in the mid-1990s with advent of 802.11 standards and 802.11 cards – as always, wikipedia compiles a good overview 1 2 3.
Clearly there's a tremendous and yet untapped value in using cumulative growing power of smartphones to resolve complex tasks. There are daunting challenges as well: some common (security, battery life and limited capacity, to name a few), others – application specific. Separate grand puzzle is to monetizing it, making it work for users and future investors.
There's one not very obvious thing that has happened though fairly recently, as far as this 40 plus year track. Today we know exactly how to build a scaleable distributed object storage system, system that can be deployed on pretty much anything, would be devoid of the infamous single-MDS bottleneck, load-balance on the backend, and always retain the 3 golden copies of each chunk of each object. Abstractions and underlying principles of this development can in fact be used for the ad hoc wireless applications.
I'll repeat. Abstractions and principles that at the foundation of infinitely scaleable object storage system can be used for selected ad hoc wireless applications.
CrowdSharing (as in: crowdsourcing + file-sharing) is one distinct application (the "app"), one of several that can be figured out today.
The idea was discussed in our earlier blog and is a very narrow case of an ad hoc network. CrowdSharing boils down to uploading and downloading files and objects (henceforth "fobjects" 4, for shortness sake) whereby a neighbor's smartphone may serve as an intermediate hop.
CrowdSharing by definition is performed on a best-effort basis, securely and optimally while at the same time preventing exponential flooding (step 1: Bob (fobject a) => Alice; step 2: Alice (fobject a, fobject b) => Bob; step 3: repeat), where the delays and jitters can count in minutes and even hours.
Next 3 sections briefly expand on these points.
There's a spectrum. On one side of it there are transport protocols that, prior to sending first byte of data, provision resources and state across every L2/L3 hop between two endpoints; the state is then being maintained throughout the lifetime of the corresponding flow aka connection. On the opposite side, messages just start flying without as little as a handshake.
Apps that will deploy (and sell) over ad hoc wireless must be totally happy with this other side: connectionless transports. Messages may take arbitrary routes which also implies that each message must be self-sufficient as far as its destination endpoint and the part of the resulting fobject it is encoding. Out-of-order or duplicated delivery must be treated not as an exception but as a typical sequence of events, a normal occurrence.
Fobjects 4 are everywhere. Photos and videos, .doc and .pdf files, Docker images and Ubuntu ISOs, log structured transaction logs and pieces of the log files that are fed into MapReduce analytics engines – these are all immutable fobjects.
What makes them look very different is an application-level, and in part, transactional semantics: ZFS snapshot would be an immediately consistent fobject, while, for instance, a video that you store on Amazon S3 only eventually consistent..
Ad hoc wireless requires eventual consistency 6 for the application-specific fobjects.
On one hand, there are people that will pay for the best shot to deliver the data, especially in the situations when/where the service via a given service provider is patchy or erratic at best, if present at all.
On another, there is a growing smartphone power in the hands of people who would like to maybe make an extra buck by not necessarily becoming an Uber driver.
Hence, supply and demand forces that can start interacting via CrowdSharing application "channel", thus giving rise to the new and not yet developed market space..
On the left side of the diagram below there's a fobject that Bob is about to upload. The fobject gets divided into chunks, with each chunk getting possibly sliced as well via Reed-Solomon or its derivatives. RSA (at least) 1024-bit key is used to encrypt those parts that are showed below in red and brown.
Each chunk or slice forms a self-sufficient message that can find its way into the destination object through unpredictable and not very reliable set of relays, including in this case Alice's smartphone. Content of this message carries metadata and data, a simplified version of this is depicted above. Destination (network) address is the only part that is in plain text, Bob's address, however, is encrypted with a key known to the service provider at the destination, while the content itself may be encrypted with the different key that the provider does not have.
The entire message is then associated with its sha512 content digest that simultaneously serves as a checksum and a global (and globally unique) de-duplicator.
The diagram shows 3 "actors": Bob – uploads his fobject; Alice – provides her smartphone's resources and maybe her own home network (or other network) to forward Bob's object to the specified destination.
And finally, Application Provider aka Control Center.
act as a trusted intermediary to charge user accounts on one hand, and deposit service payments to users that volunteer to provide their smartphones for CrowdSharing service, on another..
Prior to sending the first message, Bob's smartphone, or rather the CrowdSharing agent that runs on it, would ask Alice's counterpart whether it is OK to send. Parameters are provided, including the sha512 key-digest of the message, and the message's size.
At this point Alice generally has 3 choices depicted above atop of the light-green background. She can flat-out say No, with possible reasons including administrative policy ("don't trust Bob"), duplicated message ("already has or already has seen this sha512"), and others.
Alice can also simply say Yes, and then simply expect the transfer.
Alice's data plan and its per month set limits with wireless service provider, and more.
Bob, or rather the CrowdSharing agent on his smartphone will then review the Alice's bid and make the corresponding decision, either automatically or after interacting with Bob himself.
Payments must be postponed until the time when Alice (in the scenario above) actually pushes the message onto a wired network.
Payments must be likely carried out in points (and I suggest that each registered user deposits, say $20 for 2,000 CrowdSharing points) rather than dollars, to be computed and balanced later based on the automated review of the transaction logs by the Application Provider. Accumulated points of course must convert back into dollars on user's request.
The challenges, again, are impressive and numerous; there's nothing though that I think technically is above and beyond today's (as they say) art.
To name a few.. Downloading (getting) fobjects represent a different scenario due to the inherent asymmetry of the (Wi-Fi user, wired network) situation. BitTorrent (the first transport that comes to mind for possible reuse and adaptation) will dynamically throttle based on the amount of storage and bandwidth that each "peer" provides but is of course unaware of the consuming power and bandwidth of the mobile devices on-battery.
Extensive control path logic will have to be likely done totally from scratch – the logic that must take into account user-configurable administrative policies (e.g., do not CrowdShare if the device is currently running on-battery), the limits set by the wireless data plans 7, the ratings (see above), and more.
Aspects of the business model are in this case even more curious than technical questions.
The Go programming language was conceived in late 2007 as an answer to some of the problems we were seeing developing software infrastructure at Google. The computing landscape today is almost unrelated to the environment in which the languages being used, mostly C++, Java, and Python, had been created. The problems introduced by multicore processors, networked systems, massive computation clusters, and the web programming model were being worked around rather than addressed head-on.
When I first started looking at Go aka golang 1 it was strictly in connection with Docker, coreos/rkt, LXD and various other Containers. All of which happen to be coded in Go.
The latter were adopted from communicating sequential processes (CSP) first described in a 1978 paper by C. A. R. Hoare.
That's the power of Go.


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Around the dial: Stornaway, Stella Ella Ola, and The Format
Posted by Dennis Pilon in Around the Dial
Stella Ella Ola, Stornoway, The Format
Stornoway – "I Saw You Blink" What does this band and the official residence of Canada's Loyal Opposition leader have in common? They are both named for a small fishing village on a remote Scottish island. And what does that have to do with this English's band's music? Not much, apparently. At first listen, this song seems very folky – harmony vocals, acoustic guitars, etc. – but the catchy bass line signals it is something else and as the song goes it becomes less and less folk, particularly with great organ and synthesizer riffs that appear about half way through. The song is from their 2010 debut album, Beachcomber's Windowsill, which also features "Zorbing" and "Here Comes the Blackout."
Stornoway website
Stella Ella Ola – "Summerette" Stella Ella Ola opened for Ezra Furman at his recent Toronto show and performed a killer set. The whole band sings at different points in most songs and the performance says we're here to have some fun. This song is from their recent album I Think We Should Hang Out All the Time and oozes a great B52's party vibe. A must see live band!
Stella Ella Ola Facebook
The Format – "Wait, Wait, Wait" Before Fun broke out as major act with songs like "We Are Young" and "Some Nights" lead singer Nate Ruess had belonged to a different band that had a minor brush with success, The Format. Just as poppy as Fun but with a more restrained performance style from Ruess, The Format released just two albums before calling it quits in 2008. "Wait, Wait, Wait" has all the classic poprock elements: propulsive four piece rock and roll sound with strong hooks. The chorus sounds like the song should be called 'Don't, Don't' and really delivers on its last line: "I'll be the last sound that you hear as your eyes close." The whole first album, Interventions and Lullabies, is worth looking up.
https://poprockrecord.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/02-wait-wait-wait.m4a The Format website

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Interesting Automotive Locksmith job: the customer called from Utah USA and said they would be flying home and would we meet him at his car. He lost the keys in the US.
The new Sierra Pickup trucks use a Transponder key and are the new High-Security Side Winder keys. Also, you have to enter a 4 digit security code to program the new Sierra Pickup truck keys.


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Anaconda Reviews
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l began using it because it was open source and it was free and I knew other people who were using it. I just installed it and I got on with my testing. It was very useful for me because I could save my coding and present it to my assessor.
"The product is responsive, sleek and has a beautiful interface that is pleasant to use. It helps users to easily share code."
"One thing that hurts the product is that the company is not doing more to advertise it as a solution and make it more well known."
My only advice to people considering this type of solution is just to use Anaconda. It is a good product. Other products are good as well, but this is one you should try in this category. On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Anaconda in comparison to other products as between nine and ten. It is a very good solution. I will rate it a nine as there is always room for improvement.
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Head - Data Science (Senior Program Manager) at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
A framework with an extensive set of libraries for building predictive models
We use different data science platforms for customer-specific projects. Whatever is being requested by, or is required by the customer, we learn it. Python is one of the technologies that we have a lot of experience with, and it is part of Anaconda. Our primary use case is analytics. We use Anaconda to build models that predict the probability of an event, or it can be used for classification purposes. There are various uses for this tool. One of the things that we do is subrogation and I can explain by using the example of a car accident. When an accident happens, you take your car to your… more »
"The most valuable feature is the set of libraries that are used to support the functionality that we require."
"I think that the framework can be improved to make it easier for people to discover and use things on their own."
This is a great tool to work with, even if you are starting your career in analytics or another stream like data engineering or data science. This is a tool for everyone because you don't need to think about many things, such as what needs to be installed. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
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Solution Architect/Technical Manager - Business Intelligence at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Includes lots of pre-built libraries and has good community support
I use this solution for some of my assignments. Basically, it is used to take data from our database, analyze it, and make predictions.
"The most advantageous feature is the logic building."
"The ability to schedule scripts for the building and monitoring of jobs would be an advantage for this platform."
Our team is working on expanding the use of Anaconda. They're doing some research with respect to some of the libraries and modules, trying to do different things with existing datasets. I have been doing some slicing and analysis based on what has already been developed, and we are trying new things now. My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to start with a straightforward deployment. However, if they want to start with deep learning immediately, the functionality is there, but I would recommend the full deployment. This is a good solution, but there is a little room for…
Engineer at a university with 51-200 employees
Good virtualization, great documentation, and has an active supportive community
"The documentation is excellent and the solution has a very large and active community that supports it."
"When you install Anaconda for the first time, it's really difficult to update it."
I can't do an update on the solution, so I don't have the latest version. I'm one version behind the latest. I'm a developer. I work in data science. I work with different data science libraries like Pandas, NumPy, etc., and I use it for analyzing data. Therefore, I'm more of a customer than I am a partner. I don't have a business relationship with the company. I'd recommend the solution to others. Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's quite good. It just needs to be more stable and easier to update.
Analytics Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Interesting, user friendly, and outstanding among the other competitors
In Anaconda, we get everything: RStudio, Spyder, and Jupyter. R Studio is for R, and Spyder and Jupyter are for Python. Using these, we will be doing data wrangling and data modeling for a developing project.
"It's interesting. It's user friendly. That's what makes it outstanding among the others. It has a collection of R, Python, and others. Their platform strategy has a collection of many other visualization tools, apart from Spyder and RStudio, which is really helpful for data science. For any data science professional, Anaconda is really handy. It has almost all the tools for data science."
"It crashes once in a while. In case of a reboot or something unexpected, the unseen code part will get diminished, and it relatively takes longer than other applications when a reboot is happening. They can improve in these areas. They can also bring some database software. They have software for analytics and virtualization. However, they don't have any software for the database."
I would recommend it to anyone willing to work in data science. This will be a starting place that covers data-wrangling aspects, user relation aspects, and everything. It is a one-stop solution for everything. Anaconda is the main go-to place for analytics. This solution is very handy for almost all data science people. A lot of people I know nowadays use Anaconda. I don't think any other product can even come near Anaconda for data science. I would rate Anaconda a nine out of ten. The long reboot time and once in a while crash are the two things that lack in Anaconda. Apart from that, I…
DanishAhmad
Master Data at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Enabled me to plot the data on a graph and find the optimal area for where our warehouse should be but it needs better documentation
My position is master of data and we are a customer of Anaconda. Our primary use case was to find technological solutions to manage our warehouse in conjunction with our customer base. Anaconda enabled me to plot the data on a graph and find the optimal area for where our warehouse should be located.
"It helped us find find the optimal area for where our warehouse should be located."
"I think better documentation or a step-by-step guide for installation would help, especially for on-premise users."
I would recommend having a good background so that you know what you're getting into and whether Anaconda is the right solution for you. If you have a strong IT team to support the solution it's a very good tool to work on. I would rate the solution a seven out of 10.
Maruf-Hossain
Data Scientist Chapter Lead, Workflow & Automation at ANZ Banking Group
Good notebook features, but multi-language support is needed
We use Anaconda to develop machine learning models. Use primarily use Scikit-learn and TensorFlow.
"The notebook feature is an improvement over RStudio."
"One feature that I would like to see is being able to use a different language in a different cell, which would allow me to mix R and Python together."
This is a product that I encourage people to use. This is a good solution, but I would like to see multi-language support. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.
Sr PHP Developer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Quick to deploy and all of the add-on tools are available in one place, but it needs to have a video available on the tool itself
I was using this solution for buildings some PoCs, as well as during a hackathon.
"The most valuable feature is the Jupyter notebook that allows us to write the Python code, compile it on the fly, and then look at the results."
"Having a small guide or video on the tool would help learn how to use it and what the features are."
My advice to anybody who is researching this tool is to download and install it, then start exploring the different tools that are available. I suggest starting with Jupyter because it is easy to figure out, then move to Python tasks. This is a good tool that is quick to deploy with and pretty easy to use. I have not fully explored it yet, so I can only give it an average rating. I would rate this solution a five out of ten.
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I will start by admitting that I have a relationship to Kill Normies and have been involved with groups with tangential relationships to the Communist League of Tampa. I also generally respect both the author of the review I am discussing and Angela Nagle.
There is much to comment on in Donald Parkinson's response. He has some fair criticism and some that I agree with. For example, when he comments that Nagle's book seemed unfair to tumblr identity politics and over-blamed it for the growth of the alt-right, I am tempted to agree in part. For example, Parkinson is completely correct that "Politics happens in the real world, not on the internet. Nothing is said about the efforts of white supremacist organizers like Identity Europa or the Traditionalist Workers Party to organize frats or rural workers and what kind of visions these groups have (a balkanization of the US and the creation of an all-white "enthno state" is a common one). Rather Nagle pretends the alt-right is only an online phenomena, when these people have been trying to promote these politics for years." Indeed, when I personally voted to publish the book, I said the same thing. However, Parkinson asserts that this is "liberal and not proper Marxist materialism" but then goes on to make genealogical arguments about the history of ideas and not 'a proper materialist' analysis himself. IN fact, some of his arguments, seem to this reader as perhaps more problematic than what he is accusing Nagle.
I find some of Parkinson's responses undeveloped: "While some alt-righters might try to move towards a sort of third positionist attempt to combine anti-capitalism with their idea of counter-revolution, ultimately their ideas amount to economic nationalism and localism and don't actually challenge the rule of private property." How does one adjudicate the "ultimately" of such ideas without directly referencing any of them? Dugin, the "fourth positionist" and Eurasianist, is extremely distrustful of capitalism and in some ways would love to see the abolition of markets and solidifying of relations that frankly quasi-feudal. Whereas Moldbug and Nick Land, picking up from Hans Herman Hobbe, would argue that consistent capitalism would lead to something akin to feudalism, which they see as the privatization of government. The political impulse of leftists is tended to grand them that–except that doing see gives up fundamental socialists premises about the difference between exploitation and oppression. In granting that these differences don't matter, we undo several of our own economic arguments. In short, Parkinson argues that a movement is less internally diverse than it is, and sometimes in ways that actually hurt Marxist thinking. The thinking is muddled both by the alt-right and in response it to it.
Would require a discussion that each and everyone one of those authors not having any "tradition of transgression" as he seems to assert that counter-enlightenment is a defense of a status quo? Nietzsche's relationship to the counter-enlightenment is more difficult than this rhetorical pseudo-argument by list allow, and frankly so is Mussolini's. Parkinson is a serious student of history and knows this, but feels that linking of genealogies is enough to as proof. While this is beyond the scope of a polemic and the tension between transgression and ancien regimes is well covered by several books even the liberal historian Isaiah Berlin. Furthermore, the alt-right's history is larger than this. Richard Spencer is as likely to use modern biology and Adorno to make his points as Nietzsche; Paul Gottfried, who coined the term, was a student of Marcuse and his points against liberalism are against its managerial impulses. This does not prove that Nagle is right or wrong, and even when I vote for the book to published, I critiqued it mildly for not discussing its intellectual history; however, the phenomenon people like "Sargon of Akkad" have little to do with people like whom Spencer branded alt-light, and Sargon's influence far outreaches Spencers. The "Alt-light" of 4chan seem to come from the perspective of Sam Harris and Greg Cochran and find Schmitt, De Maistre, Evola, and DeMiastre too religious. Nick Land and Moldbug may love Carlyle and Nietzsche, but they also argue naturalization of reactionary thinking and see the religious impulse defended by people like Carlyle as somewhat weak-minded.
Really? Some of them alt-right think it is (Milo and Sargon), and some do not. Whatever the case, this could easily and IS easily reversed by alt-rightists against communists. The assertion of the rhetorical device of "actually" doesn't make that argument, and this is clearer when one sees Parkinson's support for it.
To this, one must say simply, prove it. First, it contradicts Marxist assertions that all that is solid melts into air" and the softening of national boundaries imply by global trade law? Yes, in the past, national capitalists were a more viable project, but not in an age of limited national resources and scarcely able to grow profits in internal markets. Nationalisms failures are beyond that the "necessary for the reproduction of capitalism": ethnonationalism threatens trade by destabilizing tax regimes and often threatenings transnational property claims, limits efficiency by limited the movement of populations and skilled labor, and can even act as a limit of accumulation of raw materials. This is not to say that nationalism and regimes of nations are not a benefit to particular sectors of capital: they clearly are and enable monopoly regimes and intellectual property and other state-created pseudo-commodities. However, these are tangential to capitalism, not necessary to it. The bourgeois can work effectively and efficiently in trans-national polities and multi-ethnic empires, as seen in the "New World" itself.
The family is crucial for the reproduction of people being regulated by capital, but the family is also atomized by the market commodification and alienation of relationships. Again, family bonds are threatened by needs of capital requiring skilled labor movement–it literally breaks up relationships. The oppression of women–generally from the lack of compensation of their domestic labor–remains in capital even, or especially, in the cases where "the family "is in decline so as in the case of working class, poor mothers who disproportionately are unmarried and whose labor costs them the ability to earn in the market. While conservatives and alt-rightists would assert that this is not sexism but a result of the market, many former libertarians who used to champion this not see this as dangering sexual relations. The alt-right says this alienation is bad (which it is) but its answer is to return an ideal that unrealistic given the contraints of labor. While gender abolition also threatens this dynamic as does expanded notions of sexual identity, the family's tensions are pre-capitalists and capital has melted it down for good and ill. To merely assert the contrary is both lazy and doesn't follow the empirical facts. Capitalism needs "the family" only selectively, and the romanticization of the past is only convincing because of this. However, it is much more honest to point out that not only is a return to prior norm, romanticized, but that it would be economically unviable to the very people to whom it would have the most appeal.
Indeed, while much has been made about the dangers of economism, and much hey has been made about the dangers of the determinism, the problems of alt-right show the limitations of both as assumed modes of analysis. The success of the alt-right and the left's lack of the ability to address, which Nagle, however, "liberal" one finds it as being, must be addressed in terms of the multifactored analysis, not just in the defense of a nebulous left and their "lived experience." One can, as Parkinson does, understand that popularity of the tumblr left comes out of the atomization is a result of the same processes as the alt-right on a different kind of person. However, one cannot pretend that alt-right is just the assertion of the status quo defending itself or, worse, as Parkinson implies the result of frustrated libertarian thinking about the status quoe. Yes, I agree with Parkinson, we all know libertarians who became alt-rightists, but we also all know plenty of those who came from other kinds of thinking. Furthermore, while I am sure both Nagle and Parkinson know, there have been plenty of liberal and Marxist leftists who moved to the alt-right too. The reasons why cannot be reduced purely to ideology.
Parkinson does the get a strain of thought in libertarianism right: "There is a sort of vulgar positivism to libertarian ideology that bides well with race realism. Libertarianism ideology, at its most extreme in anarcho-capitalism, has even flirted with endorsement for monarchism over democracy such as in the works of Hans-Herman Hoppe. Seeing markets as more democratic than any kind of state institution, free market liberalism is itself is critical of all that is egalitarian and democratic and therefore in its most extreme variants biding well with the ideology of the alt-right" but ignores that this happened on the left with both National Bolshevism (a la Francis Yockey) and with Lyndon LaRouche.
This is far too volunteerist a reading, and in critiquing Nagle for lack of materialism ends up being not particularly materialist itself. IF the hierarchies of racialized capital are weakening, it is capitalism, itself, not leftism or Marxism, which until 2007 has been in global decline, that has weakened it. Furthermore, his conclusion,"Yet opposition to identity politics from the left has led many self-proclaimed communists to embrace the book, despite the inherently conservative nature of Nagle's arguments. While it is true that identity politics can be used as a way to suppress class politics, Nagle doesn't even seem to think that class politics should replace identity politics." Nagle actually explicitly says the contrary but doesn't have the same idea of class politics as Parkinson. Instead of debating the meaning of that, Parkinson does what I see as an idealist move, one that has infected Marxism since Lenin's argument that "monism" was materialist (although how there can be a substance other than the material in materialism remains beyond me), of a label substituting for an argument, but in doing so, he has made not made the materialist counter-argument well enough.
I agree with him that in some ways "Her primary problem with identity politics seems to its "oversensitivity" and "extremism", not their failure to adequately address exploitation and oppression in a materialist manner" although Nagle thinks that oversensitivity is a result of a lack of class politics being popularly available. A fact that Parkinson's own critique is dependent on; for without that fact, tumblr politics isn't defensible. So while I agree that Nagle may be not as radical as presented, I think it is useful in that it attempts, even flawly, to explain "why now". Her answer is volunteerist, but so is Parkinson's here, who points out the long history of the movement, but ignores their lack of viability until recently. In short, while I agree with Parkinson that Nagle doesn't deal with the long history of alt-right and limits it to the online politics, and I agree with the Parkinson that Nagle ultimately is not materialist enough, but on many points he answers Nagle's volunteerism with volunteerism, and leaves this in the realm of a question answered by will, which in the end doesn't explain much at all.
I invite Donald Parkinson to respond to these points if I am being fair and clarify his critique. I suspect interesting thinking may come out such a dialogue, or, at least, if my readings of Parkinson's position need further clarification.
"For the past few years, "free speech" has become a shortcut for shifting the frame of argument away from the content of bigoted speech itself and toward broader discussions of the value of free expression—a value we all share. The strategic advantage is obvious: It's much easier to defend the right to bigotry with grandiose statements about freedom of expression than it is to defend the substance of what speakers have to say.
Thus, when a campus is embroiled in protests (speech) over bigotry or disinvited speakers, the real censorship happens by ripping the debate away from the substance of marginalized students' concerns and focusing instead on "free speech"—that is, on the sensitivities of those who would rather not have to think about their capacity to hurt or offend. But an intellectually honest free-speech advocate wouldn't cry censorship; they'd instead address the substance of the speech being censored or marginalized, and argue for why that speech deserves to be heard on a college campus in the first place.
Aaron Hanlon's argument seeming makes sense as the move to the lofty rhetoric of freedom of speech hits many attempts by the right-wing to censor speech itself, and that many of the protests are grounded in legitimate grievance. This is true and far, but it doesn't really work as it defines the "reasonable" free speech defense in defending content before it is stated off of an assumed past.
Hanlon's concerns appear to reject the right's framing; however, the anyone who is defending the absolute act, including most leftists of the past, would say, Hanlon has conflated two issues. Hanlon's other responses about censoring accessing being based on law around institutions also conflates the argument of law and with the argument of rights, although this is fair since almost all arguments about rights are rooted in law as natural law justifications of rights (which the Bill of Rights itself was justified in) seem no longer sustainable in a post-Deistic world.
That is, I take the castigation of someone for what they genuinely don't know or can't reasonably be expected to know as a justice issue unto itself, a problem related to what the philosopher Miranda Fricker calls the "epistemic injustice" of allowing prejudice to shape one's impression of another's credibility as a knower. Epistemic injustice may work in the other direction, too, in the bad-faith supposition that someone ought to know something is offensive when broader society has failed to treat it as such (therefore that person deserves to be shamed, scorned, or ridiculed for not knowing).
There's a time for activism and a time for education. If the social justice movement is going to be successful, it needs to do a better job of identifying teaching opportunities amid perhaps more obvious occasions for activism, and thus to discern the difference between those who utter clichés of questionable meaning and those who should be confronted for their bigotry. This is particularly the case for those of us who hold positions of educational or socioeconomic privilege, who are at least partially insulated from certain kinds of bigotry.
If we want our communities to be more just, open, and inclusive, we need to make adjustments. This means accepting the reality that a lot of people, even intelligent and thoughtful people, really don't understand the implications of quite a lot of everyday language not typically associated with bigotry. It makes little pedagogical sense to lecture these people, to tell them bluntly what they can and can't say. We need to approach such scenarios not simply with the willingness to question, but also to listen to and countervail the kinds of answers we don't like to hear. As with any teaching and learning scenario, we need to understand our audience before we can facilitate its understanding.
Interestingly, the epistemic privilege argument he is making here sounds like an argument about fallability of position updated to our times. Now, it is not the same thing exactly, but it is related and sounds something like part of Mill's argument for free speech.
The problem still remains that it is possible to prove, for sure, what a person will say before they say it. So viable arguments against "low-value" speaker, which while I agree with Hanlon is full of assumptions about the value that he himself doesn't really assert, are impossible to make soundly and validly if our concerns are the content of their speech. They can only be made probabilistically.
Furthermore, there are a ton of practical considerations about access that these free speech debates don't consider and Hanlon is right about that. But one must establish a principle before tackling the caveats or limitations and not conflate several related issues that overlap but are not, strictly speaking, the same.
Why is it important that Hanlon, however, is carrying a conflict out of Mill? Was not Mill the absolutist on freedom of speech on Utilitarian grounds? How then is Hanlon also a representative of that tradition?
A problem on analytic forms of logic is that they are poor grounds for justifying "right" and that analytic formulations of logic–including deductive and inductive–have trouble justifying rights too as they cannot adjudicate on the soundness of premises in and of themselves. We can assert abductive reasoning, but the abductive case is always limited on matters of rights for reasons I will get into later.
Mill attempted to lay down an objective argument for freedom of speech without Lockean reference to natural law (although he does share some Lockean assumptions that make this problematic). Mill realized that Benthamite utilitarian thinking would have no such space for that kind of right.
My friend Douglas Lain who has interviewed Finkelstein was convinced by the argument. However, unless you bracket out most of Mill's framework and justification, you still can't reason yourself to a principle to oppose Hanlon and company's soft caveats. After all, this is institutional, not legal, censorship; and is not Mill also the prophet of harm-reduction as a principle of ethics and legality?
First, let us put forth an attempt to formalize Mill's infallibility principle, and then I will get to the rest of the argument and what I see as a limitation of both in answering an intelligent moderate supporter of Campus censorship like Hanlon.
A) Humans do not have precognitive powers.
B) A claim to know a thing prior to argumentation, debate or cognition is a claim of precognitive power.
C) Human claims to know a thing prior to argumentation are false.
If Human claims to know things prior to argumentation are false, then an argument must be allowed so that those beliefs can be defeated.
Now, I actually think this is a problematic argument because the premise A) would have to be proven and it seems SO far removed from the debate–a debate about cognition and physics–that it seems hardly worth arguing, but to admit the validity of Lain's argument would imply that either you have to reject the first premise or accept the latter. Furthermore, the conflation of argument, debate, or cognition, actually equates two forms of discourse with all conscious brain activity, which is questionable. However, this conflation is to avoid problems of A priori distinctions, both analytic (such as tautologies) and synthetic (things that are contingently necessary for formal logic).
In short, Lain and Finkelstein see the primary strength of Mill as moving the argument away from ethics and harm-reduction, and into the epistemology, thus limiting the applicability of harm reduction arguments.
One notices quickly that Mill's argument mirrors my friend's deductive argument, but isn't a deductive argument. Lain brackets out the fourth proposition and doesn't deal with the third. In the case of colleges versus strong conservative and reactionary speakers, the consensus of society is generally with neither.
The liberal will respond quickly to Doug though that most of these days, on either side, are not about truth. Lain would response, rightly, that you can't know that. But the opponent would then bring up harm-reduction and unequal access as other limiting factors and that censoring some conservatives just on campus does not limit those ideas from spreading, but that the speakers could harm remaining students with their words.
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. (1978, 16)Such liberty should exist with every subject matter so that we have "absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological" (1978, 11). Mill claims that the fullest liberty of expression is required to push our arguments to their logical limits, rather than the limits of social embarrassment. Such liberty of expression is necessary, he suggests, for the dignity of persons. If liberty of expression is stifled, the price paid is "a sort of intellectual pacification" that sacrifices " the entire moral courage of the human mind" (1978, 31).
Mill justification for his epistemic argument is not arguing for epistemically but on the grounds of self-sovereignty and self-ownership (a la Locke), and that same principle means that harming another sovereignty would put both in conflict and thus to avoid that conflict, some restrictions apply. One sees this puts some nebulous limits even on MIll's strong argument, and that it is justified in ontological and metaphysical premise that may be shared.
Similarly, he states that "The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance" (1978, 53). In the latter parts of On Liberty Mill also suggests that distasteful people can be held in contempt, that we can avoid them(as long as we do not parade it), that we can warn others about them, and that we can persuade, cajole and remonstrate with those we deem offensive. These actions are legitimate as the free expression of anyone who happens to be offended as long as they are done as a spontaneous response to the person's faults and not as a form of punishment.
But those who exhibit cruelty, malice, envy, insincerity, resentment and crass egoism are open to the greater sanction of disapprobation as a form of punishment, because these faults are wicked and other-regarding. It may be true that these faults have an impact on others, but it is difficult to see how acting according to malice,envy or resentment necessarily violates the rights of others. The only way that Mill can make such claims is to incorporate an offense principle and hence give up on the harm principle as the only legitimate grounds for interference with behavior. Overall, Mill's arguments about ostracism and disapprobation seem to provide little protection for the individual who may have spoken in a non-harmful manner but who has nevertheless offended the sensibilities of the masses.
It seems, like many from Marx to later liberals, argued abductively for the principles of Mill. Debate is likely to increase knowledge, even if it is knowledge of the actual position of one's enemies. Relying on institutions or the state can be used by people who control them or fund them against you. So instead of increasing the access of a stage of the marginalized at the expense of reactionaries, one may simply lose the stage in a way factors the powerful.
Note that this can't be deductively argued or even argued on absolute utilitarian grounds. It can be argued as likely inferences to outcomes in a system. The problem with Hanlon's argument is that it places either consensus or funders in charge of deciding who is of high value. It is unlikely that they would side with either side at the current. However, I cannot argue this as absolute principle of reason. I can't root in the seeming rock hardness of ontological status, epistemological certainty, or even historical progression. I can only argue it pragmatically based on abductive logic applied with historically most likely outcomes in a system.
If we save Mill's point, we actually cannot protect or determine on the system he used to make that point.


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Jared Leto reportedly tried to stop 'Joker' from happening
Reports suggest the 'Suicide Squad' Joker was jealous.
Looper/YouTube
Rachel Kiley— 2019-10-20 04:12 pm
Jared Leto's obsession with playing notorious Batman supervillain the Joker has been well-documented. As has the psychotic behavior his castmates were subjected to when he decided he needed to truly become the Joker on set. So it comes as no surprise that he was less than thrilled when it was decided someone else would also be taking on the role in a standalone movie.
But according to the Hollywood Reporter, Leto may have gone so far as to try to get Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix's Joker stopped from the start.
He reportedly complained to his talent agents, who also happen to represent Phillips, about the movie and asked his music manager, Irving Azoff, to call the higher-ups at Warner Bros. and kill the film.
Azoff and Leto no longer work together, and Azoff declined to comment to the Hollywood Reporter. A source close to Leto denied the accusations.
The 30 Seconds to Mars frontman had spoken diplomatically about the project in the past, noting that even though he loves the character, "it's a big universe and when you play the Joker, there's no ownership there." But even that well thought out remark was taken with skepticism by anyone who had been paying attention to Leto's rollercoaster of emotions leading up to and following the release of Suicide Squad in 2015 and 2016.
The Daily Dot previously documented Leto's long road of drumming up publicity for the DC ensemble film at length, a film in which he ultimately only ended up appearing in as the Joker for around 10 minutes. The Hollywood Reporter suggested that Suicide Squad director David Ayer was unhappy with Leto's performance. Ayer has since denied the claim.
"That is inaccurate information. Not my words or actions," Ayer wrote in response to a fan who questioned him about the reports.
That is inaccurate information. Not my words or actions. https://t.co/1jBRB4Sqvp
— David Ayer (@DavidAyerMovies) October 20, 2019
Nevertheless, that 10 minutes was enough for many to declare him the worst Joker of the bunch.
Leto subsequently complained that a bunch of his footage had been cut, switched his narrative to claim that he had been "tricked" into the film, and was vocal about not having watched the final movie himself.
And yet, he still wanted Warner Bros. to give him his own standalone Joker film, so much so that he might have been willing to try to sabotage another one simply because he wasn't in it.
While at one point it seemed possible, if not likely, for Leto to get his wish and showcase his abusive Hot Topic maniac for more than 10 minutes of critically panned screentime, it seems unlikely now. Phillips' dark take on Arthur Fleck's origin story far exceeded original expectations at the box office, and to follow it up with one starring Leto would probably see diminishing returns.
Jared Leto is as confused about DC's multiple Joker movies as you are
A brief history of Jared Leto's thirst for Joker publicity
'Joker' is catnip for Batman's toxic masculinity fandom
H/T Vulture
Rachel Kiley
Rachel Kiley is a writer who sometimes writes things and sometimes is based in L.A., but is definitely always on Twitter @rachelkiley.
Jared Leto Joaquin Phoenix Joker Suicide Squad


I began my research by looking at bags made of reusable materials, and thought about how some birds have begun using man-made materials like plastic to form their nests. The white model below was based off images of hanging birds' nests. While I eventually shifted my focus from birds to silkworms and moths, I still was really interested in maintaining the idea of constructing organic forms from inorganic materials.
These were the first models I made. This first cocoon/chrysalis model transforms into a larvae, but I needed the transformation of the bag to strengthen the awareness I wanted the bag to bring.
Here are the preliminary drawings of the chrysalis bag. I marked the parts where the zippers will connect with colored pencil.
After making patterns, I began fusing plastic bags together and cutting them out.


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Q: magento front page 404 error my front page cannot be found now.
First I change my catalog.xml file and refresh my cache then my front page is not working.
Page cannot be found!! But back-end is working.
My version is 1.6.2.0.

A: Check your default CMS page in the admin.  Go to Admin -> System -> Configuration -> Web -> Default Pages and ensure that the CMS Home Page exists and is allowed in your current Store View.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Just to clarify my last mail [20 November] (and the responses to it!) - I think it is laudable that the thought has been made vis 'Golden rice', without making any comment as to its chances of success (as I said previously). The emphasis seems to have been overlooked.
Incidentally, so far as I am aware little if any 'public' money has been 'wasted' on this project, since it was privately funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. As I have pointed out, private organizations, companies or individuals are free to spend their investment money how they wish, and we should not expect such expenditure to help the poorer regions of this world (because it generally doesn't) - but when sometimes an effort is made it should be congratulated.
I get the impression from much of the debate on this issue (and not just here) that anything that has been touched by big corporations or biotechnology is anathema in certain quarters and will be rejected outright on principle, which seems to be in danger of becoming part of the problem. I hope a flexible view can prevail, however, where the useful can be adopted (and the failures dumped) regardless of source or politics.
My name is Stanley Robert. I am a molecular geneticist studying fatty acid biosynthesis in marine microalgae with a view to modifying oil composition in crop plants. I also have hands-on experience in small, organic family farms and an interest in agricultural technologies and their impacts.
There are two main viewpoints, on the route to developing countries' food security, that appear to be in conflict.
On the one hand, aid workers, NGO's and well nourished greenies believe that the solution will be found in community access to land and preservation of agricultural diversity peppered with ecologically-based land management and the occasional high-tech device (e.g. solar-powered water pumps).
On the other hand, many developing country politicians, Western politicians, biotech companies, stock market analysts etc. believe that the route to food security is via the developing countries "exporting" themselves out of poverty. Then, they argue, the developing country people will have money to go to their local McDonalds.(I am no economist but I cannot see how, with the present system and the developed countries' rates of consumption, all countries could be "developed").
For Solution 1, biotechnology appears to be a very low priority and many people in this conference have said so.
Solution 2 would make ample use of biotechnologies and the consolidation of small farms into large exporting farms.
I think that many biotechnology scientists, when arguing (or simply stating) that biotechnology is the tool for food security, without necessarily realising it, are supporting Solution 2.
Given that most biotech scientists aren't economists and therefore, like me, would be unable to visualise the effects of the shift away from subsistence agriculture to export agriculture, this support is uninformed and therefore unwise.
Does anyone believe that biotechnology is or can be a central part of solution 1?
The report on "Transgenic Plants and World Agriculture", compiled by the Royal Society of London, the US National Academy of sciences etc, makes interesting reading, although it is sort of bland in terms of its critique.
The two most interesting sections are those dealig with the role of public and private sector, and intellectual property rights (IPR). Given that this is written by members of the scientific community, the conclusions they draw are all the more striking and fascinating. For instance, they argue for a balance in research funding between private and public sector funding. The reasons being, as the report notes, is that in the private sector "research priorities are driven by market forces." and elsewhere, the report continues this line - "Whereas fundamental research is still being carried out by the public sector, the strategic application, in sharp contrast to the "Green Revolution", takes place largely in the private sector where much of the intellectual property is controlled". The report's next insight argument is that the main reason why public sector funding should not diminish, as is the case now, is simply, "If such research were wholly private, even in perfectly functioning market, the demands of rich consumers for innovation in their own interests would overwhelm the price signals from poor consumers and small-scale farmers".
On intellectual property rights, it raises caution about the increased private sector control over intellectual property, and the lack of similar counter-balance from the public sector. In particular, it points out that historically, the private sector has benefited from knowledge and resource transfers from the public sector and the CGIAR institutes, and has not in any significant way ploughed back the returns from IPR to these institutions. The issue of IPR raises questions as to whether in fact this is likely to stifle further innovation, or constrain the public sector's ability to use knowledge or resources that help new innovations to be generated. In fact, the report is suggestive that while Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURT) can have benefits, the private sector uses them to control the use of their technologies. And, given the tradition of seed saving in developing countries, especially small-scale and subsistence farmers, GURT technologies, or what are referred to as terminator seeds, are likely to have negative economic consequences on these farmers.
The report initially struck me as yet another exercise by scientists to push us further down the track of uncritically looking at the issue of GE technologies, but in fact, as one reads further, one gets a sense that there are finer political nuances and an attempt to be balanced emerging from the text. A useful reading I think, if anybody is interested. The web address was given by one of the participants earlier.
I think the comment about the 'two solutions' to alleviating food insecurity and the possible impact of biotechnology may possibly be true for the majority of the industrially orientated biotechnology products - as has been the case for the industrialization process in general (people moving / being moved from rural areas to the growing cities, thus feeding the labour markets and the demand for more industrial type products etc. etc.).
But with the changing technology perhaps it does not have to be like that (but only perhaps), and certainly biotechnological offerings (as distinct from 'products') do not necessarily have to play the role suggested in such a process. Although often lumped together, biotechnology is bigger than just the companies involved.
As a 'biotechnologist' I take a fairly jaundiced view of what the technology has to offer developing countries food supply problems, at least in the short term (Golden rice etc. is a medium term option, and in the longer term who knows ?), for reasons I have noted previously. But, the best approach is simply to make available whatever there is, which is at least theoretically suitable for a particular region, and see what happens. If people like it, they will use it, but if they don't - then they won't, as per the operation of any market. The risk of failure is high when attempts are made (however well meaning) to impose rigid paternalistic solutions on (other peoples) complex problems - a warning which surely applies across the board to all aid programmes.


India's quest to become a serious space player just took another big step forward, after the country successfully used a missile to shoot down a satellite.
India's foreign ministry said in a statement that Mission Shakti took out a live satellite at an altitude of almost 300 kilometers (186 miles.) This is a pretty low orbit—not as far out as the International Space Station—so it should create relatively little harmful debris compared with China's messy 2007 anti-satellite test, which took place at around 865 kilometers.
The test is not necessarily seen that way in neighboring Pakistan, however, the airforce of which recently clashed with Indian jets in a flaring-up of tensions over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
"Boasting of such capabilities is reminiscent of Don Quixote's tilting against windmills," the Pakistani statement added, colorfully.
Mission Shakti is the latest step in a flurry of Indian space activity. A couple years back, India made a show of launching 104 satellites at once. The country is also planning to launch a lunar rover in a bid to find water and nuclear fuel in the moon's crust — that mission, Chandrayaan-2, was supposed to take place last year but is currently scheduled for next month.