The tiny President of France, 5"7" Francois Hollande , has to get on his tippy toes to pin a medal onto the amazonic Basketball player- Sandrine Gruda…
A cool story crossed news desks yesterday. Duluth is once again on the national radar as a very special place. Last year Outside magazine gave us kudos. Now it’s Livability.com. Here are the details.
North Korean President Kim Jong Un (Image via KCNA)
When North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un toured the sparkling new Pyongyang Airport last week, he was happy. The state-run Korean Central News Agency quoted him saying the facility had been built well “as required by modern architectural beauty and national character.” But throughout the event, the building’s chief architect Ma Won Chun was conspicuously missing.
According to The Telegraph, 58-year-old Won Chun was allegedly executed late last year after Jong Un visited the construction site and was dissatisfied with the initial design. In a report at the time, KNCA explained that the airport’s designers had “failed to bear in mind the [DPRK] party’s idea of architectural beauty, that it is the life and soul and core in architecture to preserve the Juche character and national identity.” Kim angrily ordered some changes, and Won Chun— described by South Korean media as “North Korea’s Top Architect” and officially titled the Director of the National Defense Commission Designing Department — was purportedly shot for “corrupt practices and failing to follow orders.”
North Korean President Kim Jong Un (Image via KCNA)
It’s the stuff of legend: rumors have long abounded that the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan had the architect of the Taj Mahal killed so he’d never build something so beautiful again, and a comparable tale floats around about the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. Could Won Chun’s story be a similar exxageration? It seems impossible to prove Kim actually killed him because of the airport, but given the dictator’s track record, it doesn’t seem entirely outside his purview.
North Korean President Kim Jong Un (Image via KCNA)
In April, South Korea claimed Kim executed four members of Pyongyang’s Unhasu Orchestra because of a “sex scandal.” According to Radio Free Asia, the musicians were stripped naked before a crowd of up to 500 members of North Korea’s artistic community, who were forced to watch as they were machine-gunned to death. And in the government sector, theKorea Heraldhas counted 15 senior officials who have been purged so far this year, in addition to the 41 killed last year.
Aside from being quick on the trigger, architecture is incredibly important to Kim, as it was to his father. In 1991, Kim Jong Il issued a treatise called The Art of Architecture that systemized the country’s approach to construction. It ordered architects to create buildings reflective of North Korea’s distinct national character, following the principles of Juche ideology. Kim also views architecture as the greatest aesthetic representation of the state. Defectors from the country have described him as micro-managing details like how many rooms and floors buildings have, as well as showing up to inspect construction sites — like that of a new “sci-tech complex” he’s building — in the early morning hours.
Pyongyang’s new airport (Image via KCNA)
Within this environment, Won Chun had a crucial role to fill. According to North Korea Leadership Watch, he was “tasked with exercising the the NDC’s unitary authority over the architecture, design and construction-related units” of the state. Not only did he design or supervise the design of many major facilities — the People’s Theater, the Pyongyang Central Zoo, and the Pyongyang Grand Theater, among others — but he also dreamed up Kim’s official residence as well as his vacation house. The final act in his long, illustrious, and ultimately sad career looks to have been the airport, and it seems doubtful many will want to visit it now.
But Padilla ruled in favor of Simcox, saying that “with all due respect,” the mothers of the girls were “simply not qualified” to assess whether being cross-examined by their accused molester would do damage to them.
An Arizona minuteman leader accused of molesting two little girls could soon personally cross-examine the 7-and-8 year olds because a judge ruled their mothers were not qualified to say whether it would traumatize them. Chris Simcox is representing himself in an upcoming trial in which he is accused...
So, I paint my nails pretty regularly these days. I also work as a barista/cashier pretty regularly these days. A few weeks back, I had a customer come in, a fairly typical, sheltered, suburban soccer mom, and she ordered a latte from me. She saw my brightly colored nails and said, “Wow, you’re so brave! My son asked me about painting his nails, and if it’s okay for boys to do that. Now I’ll tell him there’s a cool guy who does it too!” It was a nice moment, very cute.
Then, last week, she came in again, and said, “Hey, I’m so glad you’re here! I want you to meet someone!” She then brings her son forward, and says, “Okay sweetie, show him what you did!” And he throws his hands up, showing off his bright, sparkling blue nails. He shows them off, and I show mine off to him. He smiles. We fist bump.
Guys, I’ve only wanted to cry once at work before, and that was when someone ordered a large dry soy cappuccino on ice.
This time, though. This was a good cry.
I was expecting something where someone was being judgemental and nasty but got a pleasant surprise I love this
Sonia Manzano has announced that she is retiring from Sesame Street and, after 45 years, the show is going on without Maria.
That news makes me a little wistful about the passage of time, naturally. Maria showed up on the Street in 1971, five years before I was born. As a little kid, Maria was my favorite of the human characters on the show. Sonia Manzano is just so charming and talented, and in addition to teaching me how to count to 10 in Spanish and all about Latino Christmas traditions, she's also probably the reason why I always find myself so powerfully drawn to Latinas. I had the kind of crush you have on a woman when you're way too young to understand what the infatuation means. So the way I processed that as a kid was that I really wished Maria could be my mother. Kids.
In celebration of her time with Sesame Street, the show has put up a very nice album of photos of Manzano from her four and a half decades with the show. Everyone whose childhood was touched by Maria will remember her. She has a memoir coming out later this year, Becoming Maria, which I can't wait to read.
Fun game for ladies: In front of a geeky dude, say “Silence, Earthling! My name is Darth Vader! I am an extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan!”
If he gets all mad, condescendingly explains to you why you’re wrong, or starts talking about that “fake geek girl” nonsense, not only do you know that you should stay far, far away from him, but you also get to tell him he’s one to talk about people not having enough nerd cred
Because you just watched a “Back to the Future” reference fly straight over his head
Take a look at this picture. Do you know who it is?
Most people haven’t heard of him.
But you should have. When you see his face or hear his name you should get as sick in your stomach as when you read about Mussolini or Hitler or see one of their pictures. You see, he killed over 10 million people in the Congo.
His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.
He “owned” the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal slave plantation. He disguised his business transactions as “philanthropic” and “scientific” efforts under the banner of the International African Society. He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources and services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations, executions, torture, and his private army.
Most of us – I don’t yet know an approximate percentage but I fear its extremely high – aren’t taught about him in school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the widely repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social construction of the white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit neatly into a capitalist curriculum. Making overtly racist remarks is (sometimes) frowned upon in polite society, but it’s quite fine not to talk about genocides in Africa perpetrated by European capitalist monarchs.
Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule“, where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. It’s 49 pages long. Mark Twain is a popular author for American public schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them (Orwell’s Animal Farm for example serves to re-inforce American anti-Socialist propaganda, but Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind – this is never pointed out). We can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but King Leopold’s Soliloquy isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom well. From the point of view of the Education Department, Africans have no history.
When we learn about Africa, we learn about a caricaturized Egypt, about the HIV epidemic (but never its causes), about the surface level effects of the slave trade, and maybe about South African Apartheid (which of course now is long, long over). We also see lots of pictures of starving children on Christian Ministry commercials, we see safaris on animal shows, and we see pictures of deserts in films and movies. But we don’t learn about the Great African War or Leopold’s Reign of Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do we learn about what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, potentially killing in upwards of 5-7 million people from bombs, sanctions, disease and starvation. Body counts are important. And we don’t count Afghans, Iraqis, or Congolese.
There’s a Wikipedia page called “Genocides in History”. The Congolese Genocide isn’t included. The Congo is mentioned though. What’s now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo is listed in reference to the Second Congo War (also called Africa’s World War and the Great War of Africa), where both sides of the multinational conflict hunted down Bambenga and ate them. Cannibalism and slavery are horrendous evils which must be entered into history and talked about for sure, but I couldn’t help thinking whose interests were served when the only mention of the Congo on the page was in reference to multi-national incidents where a tiny minority of people were eating each other (completely devoid of the conditions which created the conflict no less). Stories which support the white supremacist narrative about the subhumanness of people in Africa are allowed to be entered into the records of history. The white guy who turned the Congo into his own personal part-plantation, part-concentration camp, part-Christian ministry and killed 10 to 15 million Conglese people in the process doesn’t make the cut.
You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you aren’t called ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture don’t produce fear, hatred, and sorrow. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name isn’t remembered.
Leopold was just one part of thousands of things that helped construct white supremacy as both an ideological narrative and material reality. Of course I don’t want to pretend that in the Congo he was the source of all evil. He had generals, and foot soldiers, and managers who did his bidding and enforced his laws. It was a system. But that doesn’t negate the need to talk about the individuals who are symbolic of the system. But we don’t even get that. And since it isn’t talked about, what capitalism did to Africa, all the privileges that rich white people gained from the Congolese genocide are hidden. The victims of imperialism are made, like they usually are, invisible.
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It’s sad I learned about him in college.
This was required summer history reason in my high school but it DEFINITELY needs to be more wide spread
Your daily reminder that white people are spawns of the devil.
Update: It turns out even the more reliable websites sometimes get things wrong!
According to YotaPhone’s CEO Mr. Vlad Martyanov the company has no developing plans with Jolla at the moment but that does not mean it will not change in the future.
We do not have any ongoing development of Jolla version of YotaPhone. I can’t say how things will turn in the future. May be Sailfish will obtain a certain market share as mobile OS.
At this point of time, we are fully committed to Android and recently migrated our customer base to 5.0 and working on the next generation of Android OS.
But, according to “The Digital Reader” this also can be a little bit tricky as I quote:
I think we’re going to have to take the denial with a grain of salt. A reader that there’s context to the story which is being missed because it’s not being widely reported outside of Russia.
For one thing, the Russian govt wants to start using a mobile OS which is not controlled by an American company (for security reasons, obviously). They’ve chosen Sailfish, there’s even a report that a Russian Minister held a Yotaphone running Sailfish. What’s more, a Yota Devices rep has confirmed on a Russian forum that the firmware exists. They also said that it’s not nearly ready to be shipped. (All this background suddenly explains why two different Russian news sites reported this story last week.)
In short, yes, there is a Sailfish firmware and it might one day be released for use by the Russian govt. But it almost certainly will not supplant Android on the consumer models. So the story going around is still 95% wrong.
Let’s see what the future will bring us then!
Original post: You know your news is heating up when Yahoo News writes about your technology happening!
Today the news has it for us as Yota Phone, the recently famous Russian [Android] phone manufacturer with their revolutionary “two-faced” phone has dropped their near-stock Android OS in favor of our beloved Sailfish OS which has raised a fair bit of keyboard warriors to attack the comments section on some websites saying things like “Why dumping the most popular OS in the world for the least popular?” Uh, excuse me as your most popular OS (Which I admit I am an Android user alongside Sailfish) does not care about user’s privacy and wants to send everything directly to that famous and most hated agency in the world! (NSA)
Anyhow, I might not make bold comments like that in public all the time but people must understand the purpose of the happenings around them as well, #JustSaying
YotaPhone has not confirmed if their new OS will reach their older devices such as the YotaPhone 2 which is retailing for €599 in Europe.
I personally cannot wait to see how Sailfish OS will look on a black and white E-paper display!
In the meantime, while Russia is planning to Adopt Sailfish OS and Russian manufacturers are actually being eager about it, My TOHKBD is here and soon a video overview of it will hot our YouTube channel so make sure you’re subscribed!
I would love to help create an open source Medium clone, so you don't see things like this. An open source program putting user advisories in a silo. This is wrong. These docs should be put in a place that has some chance of longevity.
Can you figure out how to merge the two? I want to make the text area part of MyWord Editor to use medium.js, and do it in a nice way. Once we have that, I can take it from there.
I put a fair amount of time trying to get this to work, but failed to get a reasonable subset of medium.js to work in a standalone app. Once we have this connection, we'll be most of the way there. Not only will we have an editor, but the content will be stored in an S3 bucket. If you want to run the back-end, that's open source too.
For the right person this is probably a two-session job. A good chance to work together to help the web.
PS: This is a perfect project for Independence Day weekend!
PPS: Here's an example of a page rendered by MyWord Editor. Click the hamburger icon for a list of other examples.
Update #1
Somehow I got on the trail to Medium-Editor, which, knock wood, appears to be just what I was looking for.
The difference between it and the others is simply docs. Their docs lead you step by step through integrating it with your app. I was able to put together a quick prototype in a half-hour and didn't hit any glitches along the way. It. Just. Worked. That's what I aspire to with my own published toolkits.
So, unless anything terrible happens, and of course it could, I expect to have a new version of MWE that uses this editor in place of the plain HTML <textarea>.
Here's a page I edited with the new version. Look at all the wizzyness.
Update #3
Well, the docs aren't actually that good. What I need is a simple app that does most of the things a text editor does, so we have code to crib that works. Because it doesn't exist, I have to create it before I can attempt to make it work for real inside MyWord Editor.
Here's a test app. It saves the text you type into localStorage, as you type it.
When you go over 6 lines, something very bizarre happens. The lines appear outside the box. And they display in a very odd way. Here's a screen shot.
Ideally, I'd like it to behave like a normal textarea, and when the text grows longer than the box, a vertical scrollbar appears. I'd settle for it working without these display glitches. I'll keep experimenting to see if I can stumble on the right way to do this.
Shocking news today out of Washington state: For the first time since 2003, a resident of the United States has died of measles. If you wondered, based on my last post, what happens when measles infects unvaccinated people and travels with them in an untrackable manner, this is the answer: It sickens and kills people who are vulnerable for reasons over which they have no control.
As the Washington State Department of Health reported today, the victim is a young woman from Clallam County, which is the northwesternmost point of the state. (The county is pretty thinly populated—most of its area lies within Olympic National Park—so to preserve her privacy, the state department is not giving out too much information.) Because of other health problems, which the department hasn’t specified, the woman was taking drugs that suppressed her immune system. Drugs such as those also suppress immune protection to measles from vaccination or from having had the disease.
The woman was getting medical care at a local facility in Clallam County (update: according to further state information, a local community health clinic), and crossed paths there with another patient who later developed the telltale measles rash—but, because this is how measles unfolds, was capable of infecting others before the rash developed. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted last week, while investigating a case in which someone was infected just by walking through a gate at an airport, measles is extremely contagious. Any one case of measles can infect on average 18 other unvaccinated/unprotected people; the equivalent number for HIV is 4, and for Ebola is 2. (The American Academy of Pediatrics, not known for being alarmist, calls measles “one of the most highly communicable of all infectious diseases.”)
According to investigative work by the state department, the woman had been vaccinated, though spokesperson Donn Moyer told me her mother was not able to locate a vaccination record. (Update: According to further state info, the woman learned she might have been exposed to measles; had her degree of immune protection checked, and discovered she would have had enough immunity to protect against measles if she had not been taking the immune-suppressing drugs.) Nevertheless, because of the immune suppression, she became infected. And, also because of the immune suppression—this is important—once the disease developed, she did not experience the characteristic rash. Instead, she developed pneumonia. That was one of the chief causes of death from measles in the pre-vaccine era. But measles pneumonia is now so rare—because measles itself is rare, though not as rare as it was—that it is not the first explanation that leaps to mind when a case of pneumonia occurs.
The actual cause of the woman’s illness was only revealed after she had been hospitalized at a second medical facility, and died, and underwent an autopsy. According to the state health department: “The cause of death was pneumonia due to measles.”
I asked Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, her thoughts about the Washington case.
“Measles can be serious, even deadly, and in this case it was,” she said by phone. “As we have been telling people, we need to achieve very high rates of measles vaccination to protect the most vulnerable: babies and people who are immunosuppressed. While measles can be deadly in anybody, it is more likely to cause this kind of complication in people with immune-suppressing conditions.”
It’s no secret that the protection afforded by measles vaccination is crumbling in the US, thanks to parents who have been given bad information turning away from the vaccine. Last year—a year in which the US experienced a record number of measles cases—CDC research found this: “Despite a national MMR vaccination coverage level of 91.9%, one child in 12 in the United States is not receiving their first dose of MMR vaccine on time, underscoring considerable measles susceptibility across the country.”
When people prevent or delay their children’s vaccinations, it isn’t only their children they put in danger. The fence of protection that vaccine-induced immunity throws up around all of us protects not only those who are vaccinated, but those who can’t be: infants too young to get the vaccine and anyone who, like the Washington woman, possesses an immune system undermined by medical treatment or biological hazard. (And, most of the time, older people whose immune systems are decaying—but not in the case of measles, because anyone born before 1957, when measles was common, has natural immunity to the disease.)
Those unknown vulnerables represent a lot of people: cancer patients undergoing treatment, transplant recipients taking anti-rejection drugs, people living with HIV, anyone with an inborn immune deficiency, anyone getting high doses of steroids—and the 4 million children in the United States who at any point are less than 12 months old, the recommended age for the first dose of measles vaccine. As New York physician Kelly A. Chiles said on Twitter, hearing about this case:
If any vulnerable child were infected in a clinic or a waiting room by another, unvaccinated child, that death would be horrific, because it would have been preventable. Perhaps the legacy of this woman’s sad death will be to make that horrific possibility less likely.
Going forward, a great resource for understanding parents’ vaccine hesitation is journalist Tara Haelle. For further news about this case, a good person to follow will be JoNel Aleccia, the excellent health reporter at the Seattle Times. And for the sad story of why parents turned away from vaccines, you cannot do better than Seth Mnookin‘s book The Panic Virus.
Brazil, June 26th 2015 - Public debate between one of the country’s most homophobic pastors / ministers (left) and the president of the LGBT Brazilian Association (right). This picture says a lot.
@vashtie Soooo, you know you weren’t supposed to mess with it right?? The mother won’t take it back Unless, you’re keeping for a pet — Suga (@supreme_suga) June 21, 2015
Others say the bit about mothers rejecting the babies is a myth; just put the bird back. And some people simply can’t bear to leave a struggling baby, and fill Facebook and Twitter with photos of their rescues.
Right now, many baby birds are taking their first flights from the nest—in bird-nerd speak, they’re fledging. A lot of small birds have fledged or are fledging now, but more (including those farther north) will leave the nest throughout the summer. I was in Mississippi in late May, and it seemed like it was raining dead baby birds there. One fell onto my car, and another mysteriously turned up on the porch steps. It was too late for those birds, but what do you do when faced with a little peeper like this?
I just spent 20mins tryna get a baby bird back to his mom, then I found his sister on the road!! I hope they survivepic.twitter.com/prdQ5nrAQo
First, you should ask yourself how cute the bird is.
Okay, that sounds cruel and judgmental. But it’s basically true. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology gives excellent advice: The first thing you need to know is whether the baby is a nestling or a fledgling. Most of the birds people find are fledglings. Fledglings have feathers, can hop, and are “generally adorable and fluffy, with a tiny stub of a tail.”
“When fledglings leave their nest they rarely return, so even if you see the nest it’s not a good idea to put the bird back in—it will hop right back out. Usually there is no reason to intervene at all beyond putting the bird on a nearby perch out of harm’s way and keeping pets indoors.”
And if you’ve got an ugly little unfeathered friend?
“If the baby bird is sparsely feathered and not capable of hopping, walking, flitting, or gripping tightly to your finger, it’s a nestling.
If you can find the nest (it may be well hidden), put the bird back as quickly as possible. Don’t worry—parent birds do not recognize their young by smell. They will not abandon a baby if it has been touched by humans.”
So leave the cute ones alone, and put the little ratty-looking ones back in the nest.
There are plenty of adorable Bird Cam moments, like this fledgling hawk returning to the nest and checking out the camera.
But it wasn’t all pretty. “This has been probably our toughest year on record,” says Charles Eldermire, who runs the Bird Cams program. The ospreys were hit by dime-sized hail a week before their eggs were to hatch, cracking all the eggs. A baby owl died, and the parents fed it to its siblings. Eldermire even had to put up warnings that viewers had to click on before watching particularly bad things happening.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
“We started this project in part to help people learn about what happens in nature,” Eldermire says. “We’re aware that many have never had an unfiltered view of what happens in nature.”
But the Bird Cam folks make a point of not interfering. “We can learn by letting it play out. Any intervention could have a negative impact; if we feed that baby owlet to save it, maybe it’s sick, or maybe the environment won’t support another barn owl.”
I love what Eldermire said next. Think about this as you watch the ospreys in the video above hunker over their eggs in a hailstorm: “The struggles that we go through as people in our own lives aren’t all that different from the animals on the screen.”
“The truth is we can’t control everything in our lives. One thing we can all learn from watching wild things and how they survive is that sense of resilience that is really at the core of any wild thing.”
A cool story crossed news desks yesterday. Duluth is once again on the national radar as a very special place. Last year Outside magazine gave us kudos. Now it’s Livability.com. Here are the details.
Sonia Manzano has announced that she is retiring from Sesame Street and, after 45 years, the show is going on without Maria.
Unless, you’re keeping for a pet 
— Suga (@supreme_suga) June 21, 2015
pic.twitter.com/prdQ5nrAQo