Directed by Brian Robbins. With James Van Der Beek, Jon Voight, Paul Walker, Ron Lester. A back-up quarterback is chosen to lead a Texas football team to victory after the star quarterback is injured.
Directed by Alex Chapple. With Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, Len Cariou. When Eddie and Jamie become overly involved in a complicated adoption case between the birth and adoptive parents, they ask Erin to help them settle the dispute without going to court. Also, Frank looks into reports of NYPD cadets cheating on their psychological exams, and Danny learns that Jack plans to enlist in the Marines after graduation.
I'm frustrated right now. I've been looking for someone to write about a technology that tons of people have no doubt used and am coming up short. Really, this is my own fault, because I was hoping I'd find someone who wasn't a white male to address the topic. There's nothing wrong with a white male addressing the topic, but I've been recommending a lot of white males to write about technologies and I was hoping to put my money where my mouth is in terms of my hopes for the diversity of the field in which I work.
I checked a bunch of related repos on GitHub and found that the maintainers were white guys and the committers were white guys and the people filing issues were white guys. So I checked the Following lists of related Twitter accounts and found.. more white guys. The few women I found either didn't blog or had Tumblrs full of inspirational quotes and cupcake photos and shit. (Which is fine. But not what I happened to be looking for an expert on.)
And so this is how I became frustrated, because I don't want to hit up people I know over and over again, and I need a way to know people are interested in and knowledgeable about certain topics, and the internet was giving me fuck-all.
Which brings me to the subject of this post, which is that you, developer in an underrepresented group who hopefully received this link somehow through the magical machinations of social media, should be blogging more. I need you to blog more. Little future developers who look or act or dress or think like you need you to blog more. Your slightly confused and defensive developer community needs you to blog more. Please please please please. And if you are like, "I give zero fucks about what those people need, I need to get off work at six and build charming birdhouses or customize my bicycle or something," the best part is giving zero fucks is totally fine.
See, if you were an ambitious type, you wouldn't need me to prevail upon you to blog more. You would be doing that and speaking at conferences and merrily on your way to becoming the next Marissa Mayer and that would be just fine for everyone. But there are a lot more not-Marissa-Mayers in the world than there are Marissa Mayers and those people need representation, lest we get it into our obsessive little developer heads that if you are not constantly being the very best at everything you should just go home. We need blog posts that aren't about big fluffy TED topics like programmer diversity and are instead about that fucking stubborn and reprehensible bug you spent five hours on today because you couldn't find a goddamned thing on StackOverflow.
The "Meet the Press" host opens up about the surprising thing he shares with the president-elect.
Sooner or later, enough people I like are going to abandon the service, and the pain-to-pleasure ratio will tip unfavorably. I don't know how Twitter will survive 2017 without making some drastic changes to its service. Maybe it's already too late.
Summits, elections, anniversaries and other momentous dates for Trump’s first year
A reporter reveals how he investigated Trump’s claims on his donations to charity.
AUROVILLE, India — In the Colours of Nature dye house, Vijayakumar Varathan is busy prepping a vat of indigo. At 51, he looks frail, with a tanned body made mostly of bones, but he runs to and fro, setting up an open fire where he’ll brew cauldrons of natural colorants made from plants.He’s worked here for 15 years. But until his early 30s, Varathan mixed chemicals in a conventional clothing factory in the same region of southern India. There he developed a disease that caused layers of his skin to peel off. Even today, it is discolored. “It was pretty bad,” he says, in his fragmented English. “But I didn’t have a choice.”
KTLA’s live-stream of the 128th Rose Parade Presented by Honda in Pasadena occurred Monday, Jan. 2, 2017. It marked our 70th consecutive broadcast of the parade, which this year had the theme “Echoes of Success.” KTLA's live-stream of the 128th Rose Parade Presented by Honda in Pasadena occurred Monday, Jan. 2, 2017. It marked our 70th consecutive broadcast of the parade, which this year had the theme "Echoes of Success." Our "band cam," a raw feed of the parade’s bands, presented by Jack in the Box, is below:
Somehow I overslept and missed the B2 Bomber flying over the house on the way to kick off the parade.
Dear Listener,During the winter of 1971 I was a freshman at NYU, and I read two books that changed me. The first was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—a book I read in a single afternoon-to-dawn sitting. The second was Invisible Man, an astonishingly artful and complex work of literature written by a man I heard was actually teaching a course at NYU the next semester.
Over the next three years, after Ralph Ellison allowed me into a small seminar focused on the American vernacular, and a year after that, when he took me on as a tutee every Wednesday afternoon until I graduated, one of the greatest of all American writers taught me how to read. Ralph also helped me gain the courage and occasional insight to write, and I went on to make a living as a writer for 20 years after that. Ralph encouraged me and spoke up for me publicly until he died in 1994.
I learned from Ralph Ellison that Americans worked to create an identity from a synthesis of divergent cultures. We created a distinctive way of talking and telling stories, which led to the distinctive voice in the way we wrote. I understood from Ralph that the American experience derived from the process of a nation constantly making and remaking itself, a place that needed to create its own myths and art and even its own sounds because we had to. While Ralph Ellison taught me that Americans needed to create our own archetypes and myths, he also conveyed that in a nation creating itself without kings, a new order was created based on the color of people’s skin.
Because of Ralph I always heard the sound of what I read and what I wrote. Well-composed words sound like music to me, and after being a writer for 20 years, this led directly to an idea that became Audible.com and our 20-years of applying new technologies to the celebration and elevation of the unbridled power of the well-spoken word.
A few feet from my cube is the Ralph Ellison room, and the following is what I wrote about Ralph for the glass wall I see every day: Ralph Ellison’s understanding of the power of the oral tradition and his ability to hear the music in well-wrought arrangements of spoken words informed the vision and mission of Audible from the beginning. Ellison was the teacher and mentor of Audible’s founder. According to Ellison, the way the early American vernacular embraced storytelling around campfires, the braggadocio of our salesmanship, and the sound of our lamenting in the fields became the distinctive voice that defined American novels and our singularly “conscious and conscientious” culture, a culture that created itself “out of whatever it found useful.” Ellison loved the melodies in language and he told stories in a voice that sounded like a coal car coming out of a mine. He loved enormous cigars, jazz, and ideas. In many ways Audible exists to honor his legacy.
Don’t let anyone ever tell you that great teachers can’t direct the course and meaning of a life.
Don Katz
CEO, Founder of Audible
When Ralph Ellison published his first novel, Invisible Man, in 1952, it took the literary world by storm. Orville Prescott, a literary critic at The New York Times, wrote in April of ’52:Ralph Ellison’s first novel, “The Invisible Man,” is the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read. Unlike Richard Wright and Willard Motley, who achieve their best effects by overpowering their readers with documentary detail, Mr. Ellison is a finished novelist who uses words with great skill, who writes with poetic intensity and immense narrative drive. “Invisible Man” has many flaws. It is a sensational and feverishly emotional book. It will shock and sicken some of its readers. But, whatever the final verdict on “Invisible Man” may be, it does mark the appearance of a richly talented writer.
Last year, we highlighted a 1956 video from RCA Victor which demonstrated how vinyl records were made back in the good old days. If you have 23 free minutes, you can get a pretty good look at the production process — the live audio recording, the making of a master disc, the production of a mold, the eventual mass production of vinyl records, etc.
Almost 60 years later, vinyl is making a comeback. So why not let Ben Krasnow, a hardware engineer at Google X, give us a much more modern perspective on the LP? Above, watch Krasnow’s stop motion animation, made with an electron microscope, which shows us a phonograph needle riding through grooves on an LP. Much of the 9-minute video offers a fairly technical primer on what went into making this stop motion clip in the first place. So if you want to get to the action, fast forward to the 4:20 mark.
If you hang with Krasnow’s video, you can also see him take some microscopic looks at other media formats — CD-ROMs, early forms of DVDs, and more.
For all sorts of reasons, some people have a problem with updating WordPress installs properly. I will state now that for both our free and premium plugins we do not support anything but the latest and the prior to last version. At the time of writing that’s WordPress 4.5 and WordPress 4.6 . If you’re running anything else, we can’t help you. But mostly, I want to convince you to upgrade by dispelling all the reasons why you shouldn’t or “couldn’t” upgrade.
I maintain many open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere (over 160 as of this writing). I have merged and/or closed thousands of Pull Requests (PRs) and patches in the past few years, and would like to summarize here many of the reasons I don't merge many PRs.
A few of my projects have co-maintainers, but most are just me. The bus factor is low, but I offset that by granting very open licenses and encouraging forks. I also devote a set amount of time (averaging 5-10 hours/week) to my OSS project maintenance, and have a personal budget of around $1,000/year to devote to infrastructure to support my projects (that's more than most for-profit companies who use my projects devote to OSS, sadly).
I don't like closing a PR without merging, because a PR means someone liked my project enough to contribute back. But sometimes it's necessary. I'm not trying to be a jerk (and I usually start by thanking the contributor to try to soften the blow of a closed PR), I'm just ensuring the continued health of the project. Below are the principles behind how I maintain my projects, and hopefully by reading through them you'll understand more about why I choose to close PRs instead of merging.
That's a question I've been stewing about for the past few weeks, ever since reading the results from a quiz (at http://www.nature.com/…/three-minutes-with-hans-rosling-wil… ) in the scientific journal Nature, from Hans Rosling.
The quiz contains 8 fundamental questions about the state of the world: questions about poverty, life expectancy, wealth, population, and so on. All big, important questions.
What has me stewing is that respondents to the quiz - I presume, nature.com's readers - do far worse than chance. That is, they would have done much better overall if they'd simply guessed their answers at random (the questions are multiple choice). Only on 2 of 8 questions do respondents do appreciably better than chance. On most questions they do worse than chance, sometimes much worse than chance. A chimpanzee pushing buttons at random would have done better than nature.com's readers.(By the way, I'm not certain the response data is from nature.com's readers. It may be separate data, perhaps from Rosling's audiences. If that's the case, it weakens my argument below.)
I'm not usually bothered by this kind of thing. Media love to bemoan surveys showing lack of basic scientific knowledge among the general population. That kind of thing doesn't alarm me. We're a society in which most people specialize, and it's not surprising if most of us are ignorant in major areas; collectively we can still do pretty well. But this data from Rosling - the Nature survey - really got under my skin. It's a survey of a group (one I'm part of, I guess) that often seems to think it has special knowledge of solutions to big, important problems - things like climate change, energy, development, and so on. And what I take from Rosling's data is that that group isn't just ignorant about the state of the world in some fundamental ways. They're actually anti-informed.
So, why does this matter?
On Twitter, I regularly see people like Rosling, Max Roser, Steven Pinker, and Dina Pomeranz post graphs showing changes in the state of the world. Often, those graphs are extremely positive, like Roser's wonderful graphs on poverty, education, literacy etc over the last 200 years:
(See the images below, or: https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/811587302065602560… )
It is absolutely astonishing to read the responses to such tweets. Many people are furious at the idea that some things in the world are getting better. Many responses boil down to "Nah, nah, can't be true", or "I'll bet [irrelevant thing] is getting worse, why don't you focus on that, you tool of the capitalist conspiracy."
Of course, while those responses are irritating, & illustrate a certain kind of wilful ignorance, they don't really much matter. What bothers me more is that some of the most common responses are variants on "It doesn't matter, climate change is more important than all your graphs"; "Where are your climate graphs?"; "Nukes are going to kill us all"; etc.
This type of comment seems wrongheaded for more interesting reasons.
First, appreciating Roser's (and similar) graphs does not mean failing to acknowledge climate change, nuclear security, and other problems. Roser, for instance, has repeatedly acknowledged that the challenges of climate are huge and critical.
But I think the more significant thing is that graphs like Roser's don't happen by accident. They are extraordinary human achievements - the outcome of remarkable technical, social and organizational invention. If you don't know of these facts, in detail, or if you underplay their importance, then you cannot hope to understand the underlying technical, social, and organizational invention in any depth. And it seems to me that that kind of understanding may well be crucial to solving problems like climate, etc.
To put it another way, the anti-Pollyannas, including much of our intellectual elite who think they have "the solutions", have actually cut themselves off from understanding the basis for much of the most important human progress.
What's the solution? I'm not sure. But this line of thinking is deepening my appreciation for the work done by people such as Roser, Rosling et al. And it's making me think about how it can be scaled up & incorporated more broadly into our institutions.
