👓 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.

👓 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

👓 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.

👓 Yelp craters as much as 32% as advertisers abandon the site | CNBC

Read Yelp craters as much as 32% as advertisers abandon the site by Sara Salinas (CNBC)
Friday's plunge sends Yelp to a 52-week low and makes for the stock's worst day of trading since going public in 2012.

👓 How Mueller Could Defend the Russia Investigation From Interference | The Atlantic

Read How Mueller Could Defend the Russia Investigation From Interference (The Atlantic)
The special counsel could find recourse in the courts if the new acting attorney general tries to chip away at his work.

👓 Photos Show Scores of Uncounted Ballots in Opa-locka Mail Center | Miami New Times

Read Photos Show Scores of Uncounted Ballots in Opa-locka Mail Center (Miami New Times)
Miami-Dade County announced today it has finished counting votes for the 2018 election. But photos obtained by New Times show scores of mail-in ballots sitting inside an Opa-locka mail distribution center — the same center that was evacuated last month after alleged mail bomber Cesar Sayoc's pipe bombs passed through the facility.

👓 Our book launch was botched and it’s been crazy at work trying to fix it | Signal V. Noise

Read Our book launch was botched and it’s been crazy at work trying to fix it by DHH DHH (Signal v. Noise)
I’m trying to remember when it was last this crazy at work. Before we spent a month fighting poor planning and terrible execution on the publication of our new book It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work. Was it when we got DDoS’ed over two days and were fighting to keep Basecamp on the internet? Was it when we touched the third rail and spoke about customer data in public? Or do we have to go all the way back to the early days when Basecamp went down whenever I, as the only technical person at the time, would get on an airplane?
A bizarre story of publishing what might have otherwise been a bestseller.

👓 Exclusive: Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker was counseling the White House on investigating Clinton | Vox

Read Exclusive: Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker was counseling the White House on investigating Clinton by Murray Waas (Vox)
Whitaker advised the president on launching a new special counsel while working as chief of staff for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

👓 Trump Falsely Claims Not To Know The Man He Hand-Picked As Acting Attorney General | NPR

Read Trump Falsely Claims Not To Know The Man He Hand-Picked As Acting Attorney General by Scott HorsleyScott Horsley (NPR)
Trump, who has frequently dismissed that probe as a "witch hunt," feigned ignorance of Whitaker's background. "I don't know Matt Whitaker," Trump told reporters on Friday as he left the White House for a trip to Paris. "Matt Whitaker worked for Jeff Sessions. And he was always extremely highly thought of and he still is. But I didn't know Matt Whitaker."

👓 Start with the spark, not the fire | Ben Werdmüller

Read Start with the spark, not the fire by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
Your vision can be a raging fire that might change the world. But you can't have a fire without a spark that takes hold. So, I learned not to let go of that vision, but to take my head out of the clouds and bring myself down to earth. It's easy to have a big, romantic notion; it's much harder to put the actual nuts and bolts together to get a real venture off the ground. To do that effectively, you have to find: the real people you want to serve, get to know them personally and gain really unique insights about their needs, and then build the smallest possible thing that will meet those needs.