#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
A female member of the Dread Ilk is looking for any part-time work from home that anyone might be able to offer her. She’s smart and mathematical, so anything in the accounting/book-keeping area would suit well. If you have a need, shoot me an email with WORK in the subject and I’ll pass your email onto her.
Just to be clear, it’s not Stickwick. I said “mathematical” not “PhD in Physics”.
I’ve seldom been as angry as I was a weekend ago. For the last month, Ender has worked very hard to earn his place as the youngest member of a pretty good team, literally fighting for respect from some of this teammates and doing more than his part to shore up the defense when some injuries and suspensions removed all four of the defensive starters.
However, he is also the backup goalie, which is the position he plays most often in practice. He’s as tall as the starting goalie, but being three years younger, is about 20 pounds lighter. Two weeks ago, the quasi-coach told him that he was going to play, then neglected to put him in even though the team went up three goals and was in complete control of the game. Then last weekend, we showed up to the game to discover that a) a new coach, b) the starting goalie had injured his foot at school, and c) a goalie who belonged to a different club.
It was bad enough that instead of starting the backup, they’d gone outside the club to bring in a new goalie. But that was justifiable, since Ender had a poor practice earlier that week. What was worse was that the borrowed goalie was terrible. He only gave up three goals, but that was entirely misleading because the other team simply could not put anything on net. They must have beaten him 12-15 times, but kept shooting the ball wide or over the goal. It became a bit farcical at one point when the kid was out of position, got beaten by a lob, and instead of turning around and catching it on the bounce, tried to do a bicycle kick that missed. He was bailed out by the fact that the ball happened to bounce on the hard ground of the penalty spot rather than the grass, and bounced just over the crossbar.
Nevertheless, Ender still didn’t go in, even when his team was again up by three goals. He was angry and I was downright furious. Why am I spending an entire afternoon every weekend to watch my son not play? After the game, Ender told the coach that if he wasn’t going to play even when the starter goes down and the team has a three-goal lead, he’d much rather suit up as a defensive substitute. I suspect this may have alarmed the new coach since he was suddenly faced with the prospect of having one suboptimal goalie on loan and no backups.
I didn’t question the coach’s right to decide whatever he wanted. Making bad decisions is a coach’s prerogative. What I thought was egregiously stupid from the club’s perspective was the apparent reluctance to work with what they’ve got. Ender is young enough that he could be their starting goalie for the next three years and he is their most promising candidate for the spot since the current starter will be too old next year. And he may be slight, but he’s almost certainly going to be a more imposing physical specimen than the current starter in the near future. So instead of working to develop him, you discourage him to the point of having him switch positions? It made zero sense.
The new coach must have reached a similar conclusion after Ender had two very good practices this week, as he not only started him this weekend, but didn’t even bring back the loaner-goalie as a backup. Ender was visibly scared stiff after taking the field, but the whole team was supportive and the defense did a fantastic job in the first half of keeping the pressure off him. Except for one little thing in the first ten minutes: they gave up an unnecessary penalty. Just what every young keeper making his debut needs. Ender dove right and missed the ball, but it hit the post and Ender got up just in time to make a nice reaction save on a close-range shot from the rebound.
That, along with a stuffed one-on-one late in the game were the high points. However, he let one high shot get through his hands when he jumped a little too late, and then I had to warn him when the team went up 4-1 because the defenders began to get goal-hungry and lazy about getting back to defend. To no avail, as it turned out, because the other team’s strikers rapidly put two more past him from close range that probably couldn’t have been helped, then, flustered, he blew a fourth one that he should have had. Still, his team ended up winning 7-4, he made three or four solid saves, and the general verdict was that he’ll make for a decent backup at this point. Not a great debut, but far from a disaster, and the first team coach told me that he thinks Ender has the ability to play at the next level in three years when he’s eligible. Since his own son is on the pro track, I suspect he knows what he’s talking about.
My own season has been personally satisfying but somewhat frustrating from a team standpoint. We tied our first two games against a very good team and a bad one while I contributed essentially nothing besides a few near misses. Last week, I found myself losing my starting spot, although it might have only been the captain wanting to save me for the second half when the defense is tired and the field is more open. He’s well aware of my age and limitations. We lost to our number two rivals 4-2, although I did get an assist when the right midfielder put the ball past the defense down the line for me. I pulled the two central defenders and the keeper to me as I approached the box, then chipped it over them towards the far post, where Julien, a tall attacker who plays for us as well as the first team, effortlessly headed it in. It was pretty; after the game the opposing team’s goalie came up to say what a nice attack it was. Of course, its easy to be magnanimous when you win. We have a bit of a history, as three of the last five games between our teams have come down to me going one-on-one with him at the final whistle. The edge is his at this point, 2-1.
This weekend, I not only started, but had to play the whole game, as we had lost two of our four attackers, including Julien, to injury, and our third attacker couldn’t make it. Fortunately, we were playing a lesser team and the midfielder who was moved up to the other attacker’s position was in the mood to pass, which isn’t always the case. I scored the first goal when he went one-on-one with the keeper, then slid it over to me to put in the empty net. Unfortunately, the clueless referee waved it off for offside, which was impossible since I was BEHIND both the ball and the player who passed it to me. I got a second goal, which actually counted, when the same guy put a long cross-field pass past the defense, I ran onto it, and slid it across the face of goal.
Then I got a third one by jumping a careless backpass from a defender, rounding the keeper as he came out for it, and walking it into the net. I should have had a fourth when Sergio sent a perfect ground cross through the box, but I leaned back too far and hit the crossbar. Stupid, stupid, stupid… I knew the moment I hit it that it was going too high. I had another great opportunity later cutting in from the right, but Giorgio called for it so I drew the goalie and slid it across to him and he was about a step behind where he should have been. He barely managed to get his foot onto it so the ball went wide. That cost us, because two defensive blunders gifted them a pair of easy goals and we ended up with a 3-3 tie. Two goals is great and all, but I legitimately had three and probably should have had five.
On the one hand, it’s good to know that even at my advanced age I can still help the team, and on a good day, compete favorably with the guys in their late twenties and early thirties. On the other hand, almost everything hurts and I’m walking like a man twice my age today.
Fifty years ago! And they wonder why Generation X can’t wait to euthanize them all:
Fiftieth reunions are not new, of course. They’ve been celebrated for
decades — by small numbers at first, and larger numbers as more people
lived long enough to put a party together. But this year, there is one
difference: The Class of 1964 is the first graduating class of the
post-World War II baby boom and the leading edge of the generation
retreating — however reluctantly — from the center stage to the backlot
of retirement.
Well, if that’s not a news item, I don’t know what is. I mean, no one has ever had a 50th high school reunion that involved Baby Boomers before! But I’m sure we can all come together in celebrating the fact that this landmark means the Baby Boomers are one step closer to all of us never having to hear about their idiot generation again.
Don’t be bitter, Boomers. We just hoped you’d die before you got old too.
Now Floria wants to see Baltimore’s president, general manager, coach, and possibly owner to be hounded from the league as well:
The Ravens contend that the ESPN report contains “numerous errors,
inaccuracies, false assumptions and, perhaps, misunderstandings,” but
the Ravens have identified none of them yet. Apparently, the list
alleged errors, inaccuracies, false assumptions, and perhaps
misunderstanding is coming next week, after their game against the
Browns.Sorry, but that’s not nearly good enough. One of the league’s
billion-dollar network partners has pinned on the Ravens and the NFL a
report that, if accurate, should result in the termination of the
employment of Cass, Newsome, and perhaps even Harbaugh. Likewise, real
questions should be raised about Steve Bisciotti’s fitness to own the
team, if the report is accurate and if he had any knowledge of the
coverup. (Or perhaps even if he didn’t.)
This is getting BEYOND ridiculous. The idea that an organization might *gasp* attempt to protect its own interests rather than embark upon an anti-domestic violence crusade aimed at one of its employees is not even newsworthy, let alone a rational basis for decimating its employees. There is no “coverup”.
As I have said from the start, the NFL should announce that domestic violence is, like every other crime, neither its responsibility nor its concern, and declare that it is leaving all such matters up to the relevant criminal justice system. For the obvious reason that it isn’t.
And Roger Goodell needs to be fired. Not because he is insufficiently concerned about the poor widdle womens who ain’t never done nothing but get beat on, but because he opened this whole can of worms with his own posturing attempts to curry favor with the Social Justice Whores.
I found this New York Times article by a female scientist to be amusing on several levels:
My story is not unique. In July, Kathryn B. H. Clancy and her co-authors Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford and Katie Hinde published a survey of 666 field-based scientists in the journal PLoS One and reported that 26 percent of the female scientists surveyed had been sexually assaulted during fieldwork. Most of these women encountered this abuse very early in their careers, as trainees. The travel inherent to scientific fieldwork increases vulnerability as one struggles to work within unfamiliar and unpredictable conditions, but male respondents reported significantly less assault (6 percent).
I know several women with stories like mine, but more often it is the men of one’s own field team, one’s co-workers, who violate their female colleagues. The women surveyed by Dr. Clancy’s team stated that their “perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.”
The first level is the way in which the actual behavior of scientists contrasts with the way laymen are supposed to trust them. Remember, we are supposed to believe that these scientists are individuals who will only report the true and proper results of the scientific process without any bias or dishonesty or corruption because they are trained to do so. So, what can we conclude from the fact that they can’t go out into the field without raping their female colleagues? It would appear that they are not being taught not to rape, would it not?
Second, notice the way the woman blithely skips over the fact that the whole reason these “trainees” are brought along into the field in the first place is as science totty. Women in science, particularly attractive women in science, are handed every possible opportunity by their male superiors chiefly because those superiors are looking forward to the possibilities created by spending large quantities of time with them in exotic locations. It’s not an accident that this attractive woman, pictured to the right, “landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation.” She probably genuinely believes that her rapid advancement was solely because she was so “promising” and talented. This complete lack of self-awareness is perhaps understandable in a large-breasted weather girl, but it is both funny and sad that an otherwise accomplished scientist could be so inobservant.
Third, it would be very informative to know how many of the 74 percent of the female scientists surveyed voluntarily had sex with men “predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.” Based on what I know of female science majors, I would estimate at least three-quarters of them, and 100 percent of the attractive ones, did.
Of course, the push to encourage women in science is only going to cause more such sexual assaults to take place, which is one more reason why it is a bad idea. Science doesn’t need more women, especially if more women in the field are going to help transform otherwise good male scientists into rapists and sex criminals.
And the long slow decline into military irrelevance continues:
Members of the U.S. Air Force will no longer be required to say “so help me God” during their enlistment oath. A legal review of rules that required the phrase occurred after the American Humanist Association threatened to sue on behalf of an atheist airman. The unnamed airman at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was denied re-enlistment Aug. 25 after crossing the phrase out of the oath.
It would be interesting to see the USA try to defend itself if Christians simply refuse to serve it any longer. Of course, allegiance to the state is rapidly disappearing as the connection between nation and government becomes increasingly tenuous.
A German knows what Germany is. The Scots, for all their fear of independence, know what Scotland is. What does “America” mean any longer? It’s certainly not “One Nation Under God” anymore.
But the USAF is on the verge of technological irrelevance anyhow. It won’t prioritize the one mission for which it is actually needed, infantry air support, and the combination of anti-aircraft lasers and unmanned drones will supplant its other missions.
Isn’t it amazing how many traditions that have been around for decades, if not centuries, are being belatedly discovered to have been unlawful all along?
This, combined with socionomics will explain why we’ve been seeing all the pandemic-related television shows of late:
Right now we’ve had more than 5,000 cases of Ebola, and at least 2,600 people have died. Some scientists, like Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University in Boston, are taking numbers like that and putting them into computer models to see where this epidemic is going. “For instance, in our modeling, by mid-October, we’re already between 10,000 to 25,000 cases,” he says.
Five thousand cases of Ebola is bad; 10,000 to 25,000 is unbelievable. And that’s where the exponential curve comes into play. “Well,
an exponential curve is a curve that doubles every certain amount of
time,” Vespignani says. And with this outbreak, cases are doubling every
three to four weeks. So if help doesn’t arrive in time — and
the growth rate stays the same — then 15,000 Ebola cases in mid-October
could turn into 30,000 cases by mid-November, and 60,000 cases by
mid-December.
Meanwhile, aid efforts are hampered, to put it mildly, by the local fauna:
The bodies of eight people, including several health workers and three journalists, have been found days after they were attacked while distributing information about Ebola in a Guinean village near the city of Nzerekore, according to Reuters.
“The eight bodies were found in the village latrine,” Albert Damantang Camara, a spokesman for Guinea’s government, told Reuters on Thursday. “Three of them had their throats slit.”
Quarantine and closing the borders, as Sierra Leone is doing, would suffice to keep Ebola out of the West. So, naturally, the globalists in office prefer to literally import the disease and expose thousands of soldiers and aid workers to it in Africa, thereby risking a global pandemic, rather than simply leave the independent African nations to their own resources and permitting the epidemic to safely run its course.
And if the World Health reports that the statistics are being underreported are correct, the exponential curve may already be in effect.
Calling all interested programmers:
We have a potential problem down the road. Our favored means of making ebooks is to construct them manually, which permits us to create very clean, professional ebooks without all the extra HTML trash that is an artifact of converting files from the various word processors. We do this with a program called Sigil, which is open source software, but unfortunately Sigil is no longer being maintained.
Some of the functionality of Sigil is being brought into Calibre, which is an excellent Open Source program, but is not focused on ebook production and has an editor that is more limited in its capabilities. Calibre also now requires QT5, which means those using older OS like XP cannot use it.
Now, other than a few minor features it would be nice to add for the sake of efficiency, Sigil works perfectly fine now. It’s not an immediate problem. But, as the EPUB standard changes over time, that may not always be the case. So, I’d like to find a programmer or two with OSS experience, and one or two programmers interested in gaining OSS experience, to keep Sigil alive. We have the server space that can be used to host it and are quite willing to provide it, so if you’re a programmer who is genuinely interested in helping maintain and improve Sigil, please shoot me an email with SIGIL in the subject.
If you want to have a look at the source code first, you can DL the 12MB file here.
UPDATE: Good news. The project leader, John, says that the project was merely pining for the fjords for lack of contributors. He’s quite happy to advise and so forth. We’ve got six or seven volunteers so far, so I’ll get in touch with everyone via email tonight and we can discuss what to do first.
The big question/problem is QT. John’s current plan is to go foward with QT 5.3, which rules out XP and that user base. So, the question is what is the best way to get the new user features into a version that does not require the latest QT short of a fork.
YouGov announces, on the basis of exit polls, that the Scottish independence referendum has failed by 54 to 46 percent:
YouGov bases its prediction on the responses of 1,828 people after they voted today, together with those of 800 people who had already voted by post. Today’s respondents had previously given their voting intention earlier this week. By recontacting them, we could assess any last-minute shift in views. Today’s responses indicate that there has been a small shift on the day from Yes to No, and also that No supporters were slightly more likely to turn out to vote.
Obviously, this is not an official result. But from the socionomic perspective, it would appear that the Scots made their move for independence too early in the global economic downturn.
File 770 sounds a little disappointed to discover that an SF “bestseller” on the NYT Bestsellers List doesn’t necessarily indicate the mainstream adoption of SF:
I’m a science fiction fan, yet I’m constantly being surprised to discover how that shapes my thinking. Although I know bestseller lists are artificial constructs, I also know they are constructs dominated by mainstream fiction and literary biases. Consequently, when a science fiction writer appears on the New York Times bestseller list I don’t ask how, I just shout “Hooray!” But now a Higher Critic has explained why I should be dissatisfied and suspicious about how they got there.
And now I am.
Vox Day unfavorably compared John Scalzi to Larry Correia based on alleged manipulation of the bestseller list. But isn’t Correia’s status as a bestselling author the same reason people believe Correia is the gold standard?
Even here, all Larry Correia ever did was point out two times when his books made the New York Times best seller list. Which they did. But both times the books disappeared from the list the following week. One and done….
I’m perfectly happy that Larry Correia is an NYT bestselling author. (Which I said in the post.) But since Correia and Scalzi both have experienced the same one-and-done pattern, then why would anybody doubt that Scalzi’s listings are also the result of real sales, Vox Day notwithstanding?
Actually, I didn’t compare them. I merely referenced Scalzi’s own comments on the subject. As always, Larry Correia is perfectly capable of speaking for himself. As for me, I answered Mr. Glyer on his own blog as follows: There are two reasons for the difference between Scalzi’s one-week showings and Mr. Correia’s. 1. Correia’s Amazon rankings at the time correlated correctly with his NYT bestseller listing. Scalzi’s Amazon rankings aren’t egregiously off, but they’re not high enough to be credible. 2. Baen Books is not known for attempting to game various awards and bestseller lists. Tor Books, which has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher 27 years in a row, among other things, is.
Does anyone really and truly believe that whereas OLD MAN’S WAR and THE GHOST BRIGADES did not sell well enough to make the NYT Bestseller list, FUZZY NATION did?
All one had to do was look at the Amazon rankings to see that LOCK IN was not selling well enough to have made the bestseller list without a bulk-sale marketing campaign. And as noted on File 770, I had an inkling LOCK IN would not only be on the NYT bestseller list, but be there for a single week before disappearing.
These faux bestsellers aren’t any great secret. It’s just one of the ways the Big Five publishers promote their favored authors. Talk to a top editor or a publishing executive if you don’t believe me; I’m not making this stuff up. Tor is simply trying to massage public perceptions to bump a high mid-list writer into reliable bestseller status.
And then, as it happened, the Washington Examiner happened to address the issue of the unreliability of this particular list today:
The New York Times Book Review, which has a history of belatedly recognizing conservative bestsellers, has banished conservative legal author David Limbaugh’s latest, Jesus on Trial, from its upcoming best seller list despite having sales better than 17 other books on the list.
According to publishing sources, Limbaugh’s probe into the accuracy of the Bible sold 9,660 in its first week out, according to Nielsen BookScan. That should have made it No. 4 on the NYT print hardcover sales list.
Instead, Henry Kissinger’s World Order, praised by Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post, is No. 4 despite weekly sales of 6,607….
The September 28 list of the top 20 print hardcover best sellers includes one book that sold just 1,570 copies.
Limbaugh, published by Regnery, has been a New York Times best seller, so the newspaper should have been looking out for his high sales numbers. And as a hint, they could have looked at Amazon, where Limbaugh’s Jesus hit No. 1 recently. On Thursday, it ranked No. 6 in books sold on Amazon.
Note first that Mr. Scalzi’s LOCK IN is presently ranked #3,566 on Amazon and did not make the September 28th list. The #20 book to which the Examiner presumably refers is I AM MALALA which is presently ranked #992 on Amazon. Keep in mind that there are two different lists and that non-fiction usually sells more than fiction.
The New York Times bestseller list is simply not what it claims to be. It’s mostly a marketing device manipulated by media ideologues and marketing departments. Some books make it legitimately. Others don’t. Fortunately, Amazon gives us a means of distinguishing between the two.