👓 Creating Custom RSS Feeds in WordPress – The Right Way | Philip Newcomer

Read Creating Custom RSS Feeds in WordPress - The Right Way by Philip Newcomer (Philip Newcomer)
There are a lot of tutorials floating around the internet that describe how to create a custom RSS feed in WordPress. Most of them have you creating a new page template, copying the code that WordPress uses to generate feeds into the page … Continue reading →
I’ve run into a lot of the sort of tutorials that Philip is talking about. This way, while more sophisticated and non-intuitive to the non-profession, seems much more solid. Makes me want to play around.

🧩 World Map Jigsaw Puzzle and Matching Poster – 200-pieces | Crocodile Creek

Played World Map Jigsaw Puzzle and Matching Poster – 200-pieces (Crocodile Creek)
Crocodile Creek's World Map 200-piece jigsaw puzzle and matching poster will delight ages 6 and up. The finished puzzle measures to be 19” wide by 13” high. The puzzle has beautiful, colorful artwork that depicts the world and animals that are indigenous to specific continents and oceans. The same image is on the poster which makes putting the puzzle together easier. When puzzle is not in use, stores easily in sturdy cardboard cylinder with rope handle. All Crocodile Creek's puzzles are printed with soy-based in and made of strong high-quality blue board ensuring that the pieces will tear or break.
Had some fun putting a puzzle together until we realized one piece was missing.

It’s a cute puzzle and the materials are really solid, particularly for a jigsaw puzzle. It would have been prettier at twice the size though.

A cute little monkey also thought that the hammerhead shark should be above the dolphin which caused some of the pieces not to fit together for a while.

🎵 Feliz Navidad by José Feliciano

Listened to Feliz Navidad by José Feliciano from RCA
I suspect they switched over late yesterday, but two songs in this morning, I’ve already gotten my first dose of Feliz Navidad, for the not-quite-holiday season. Sometimes It’s taken almost two weeks of Christmas music for my first encounter.

Christmas celebrations seem to start earlier and earlier each year. Pretty soon we’ll have Labor Day and them bam! Christmas!

It’s only been in the last couple of weeks that I’ve paid more attention to the lyrics in Jim Croce’s song You Don’t Mess Around with Jim to notice that within the story unfolding in the song that the refrain changes in the end and changes the phrase “You don’t mess around with Jim” to “You don’t mess around with Slim“. It’s subtle, but underlines the inherent gruesomeness of the song.

Now I’ll have to go back and revisit his later song Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.

👓 Twenty things I wish I’d known when I started my PhD | Nature

Read Twenty things I wish I’d known when I started my PhD by Lucy A. Taylor (Nature)
Recent PhD graduate Lucy A. Taylor shares the advice she and her colleagues wish they had received.

👓 Sci-Fi Writer Greg Egan and Anonymous Math Whiz Advance Permutation Problem | Quanta Magazine

Read Sci-Fi Writer Greg Egan and Anonymous Math Whiz Advance Permutation Problem (Quanta Magazine)
A new proof from the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan and a 2011 proof anonymously posted online are now being hailed as significant advances on a puzzle mathematicians have been studying for at least 25 years.
I wonder what happens when the reverse process is run on numbers like pi? This could be an interesting thing to take a look at in my current math class.

👓 Ibn Khaldun | Wikipedia

Read Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī (Wikipedia)
Ibn Khaldūn (/ˈɪbən kælˈduːn/; Arabic: أبو زيد عبد الرحمن بن محمد بن خلدون الحضرمي‎, Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī; 27 May 1332 – 17 March 1406) was a Tunisian Arab historiographer and historian. He is widely considered as a forerunner of the modern disciplines of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography.

Concerning the discipline of sociology, he described the dichotomy of sedentary life versus nomadic life as well as the inevitable loss of power that occurs when warriors conquer a city. According to the Arab scholar Sati’ al-Husri, the Muqaddimah may be read as a sociological work. The work is based around Ibn Khaldun’s central concept of ‘aṣabiyyah, which has been translated as “social cohesion”, “group solidarity”, or “tribalism”. This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun’s analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group’s downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion. Some of Ibn Khaldun’s views, particularly those concerning the Zanj people of sub-Saharan Africa,[27] have been cited as a racist,[28] though they were not uncommon for their time. According to the scholar Abdelmajid Hannoum, Ibn Khaldun’s description of the distinctions between Berbers and Arabs were misinterpreted by the translator William McGuckin de Slane, who wrongly inserted a “racial ideology that sets Arabs and Berbers apart and in opposition” into his translation of the Muqaddimah.  

November 09, 2018 at 11:09PM

He believed that the reason why non-Arabs were accepted as part of Arab society was due to their mastery of the Arabic language.  

November 09, 2018 at 11:21PM

📖 Read pages 14-30 of 592 of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

📖 Read pages 14-30 of 592 of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Chapters 1 & 2 are an overview of prior history of ancient Greece and the “climate theory” of Aristotle and then the Genesis 9:18-29 “curse of Ham” (son of Noah) as the early roots of racism. It then moves into the slave trade of Portugal with Zuarara, Ibn Khaldūn, Las Casas, a Leo Africanus’ writings and their effect on the roots of modern racism.

Given the politics of the day, its curious to note that so many Republican party members would simultaneously be climate deniers on the one hand, and climate believers on the other.

As I look at the title of the forthcoming chapter 3 “Coming to America”, I can’t help but think about the potential ironies of the relationship to the text and the Eddie Murphy film of the same title.

On page 21 Kendi writes:

As strictly a climate theorist, Ibn Khaldūn discarded the “silly story” of the curse of Ham.

Here he references this to The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History by Ibn Khaldūn, Franz Rosenthal, and N.J. Dawood (Princeton University Press, 1969). I’m curious exactly where the “silly story” portion stems? Is it from Ibn Khaldūn directly in translation or from the more modern book? Given that Ibn Khaldūn lived from 1332-1406 and certainly didn’t write in English, I’m curious about the original translation by which the phrase “silly story” comes about. Silly has an archaic meaning of “helpless; defenseless” (roughly around the time of Shakespeare) prior to its modern definition, and prior to that it derived from the Old English word “seely” which meant “blessed”. Given that the phrase is used to describe a passage from Genesis, it’s entirely possible that the word “silly” held the “blessed” connotation here, but it’s not obvious from the context or the reference which is the proper meaning to take. Certainly taking the modern definition on its face seems like the wrong path to take here. I wonder if Kendi could shed some additional light on his sources to clarify the issue?

👓 Zero-day in popular WordPress plugin exploited in the wild to take over sites | ZDNet

Read Zero-day in popular WordPress plugin exploited in the wild to take over sites by Catalin Cimpanu (ZDNet)
Attacks started around three weeks ago and are still going on. Users should update the WP GDPR Compliance plugin to version 1.4.3 to protect their sites.

👓 Federal Judge Orders Georgia to Reveal Tally of Provisional Ballots | Bloomberg

Read Federal Judge Orders Georgia to Reveal Tally of Provisional Ballots by Erik Larson (Bloomberg)
A federal judge in Atlanta ordered the state’s election office -- overseen by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp until his resignation Thursday -- to disclose how many provisional ballots were cast during the midterm election and how the total compares with the previous two elections.