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Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley of country duo Florida Georgia Line have a lot to celebrate this week.
For starters, today marks the release of their debut album, Here's To The Good Times, on Republic Nashville. On top of that, their single "Cruise" has sailed its way to the top of the radio charts, earning the duo their first-ever Number One record.
As Tyler explains in a recent interview provided by the label exclusively to CBS Local, "we knew we had something special" with "Cruise," though "I don't know if we knew the magnitude of what we had."
"Every single night we get to see sold-out clubs singing every word to us. As songwriters, it's a dream come true."
As for making the music video for "Cruise," they agree that it wasn't as nerve-wracking an experience as it might have been. "We had a great time that day," says Tyler about the video shoot. "Other than the temperature, it was about 105 degrees. We had a lot of friends and family" on the set, as well as quite a few fans. "The cameras didn't really bother us."
"Cruise" of course appears on the band's debut album, Here's To The Good Times. Which, as mentioned, was released today (Dec. 4).
Record release day. Been dreaming about this day all our lives. #phoners #herestothegoodtimes… fb.me/1IUdaUEmp
— Florida Georgia Line (@FLAGALine) December 4, 2012
The album title, says Brian, "represents our vision for Florida Georgia Line." That vision, he explains, is to represent something of a respite or an escape from the issues of daily life. "We want our show and our music to be a place where people can go, forget about their worries, forget about what's outside those walls" of the club, or wherever they might be listening.
The songs on the record, Brian continues, "really represent who we are and what we want to say."
And as Tyler also notes, despite the album's title, they're not just all party tunes. The songs, he says, represent a "wide spectrum of who we are." Some are what he calls "life songs" that "may take you back to high school," while others while others are about "having a good time and tipping it back."
"We like having a good time, but that consists of a lot more than just partying," he says. "We're not just two dudes who like to throw a party every night."
Florida Georgia Line's new album Here's To The Good Times is available now.
– Kurt Wolff, CBS Local

subset: commoncrawl


text:
It's State Fair time in Dallas as the annual State Fair of Texas opens for the 126th year.
Gates opened Friday at 10:30 a.m.
Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples opens the 40th anniversary of the Texas Department of Agriculture's Food and Fiber Pavilion a short time later.
The Girl Scouts will also mark their centenary with an exhibit in the Hall of State auditorium.
Want to see a really big Frito pie? Plano-based Frito-Lay North America Inc. is marking the 80th year of the iconic corn chip with what it's billing as the world's largest Frito pie on Monday in the Big Tex Circle.
And on the Cotton Bowl gridiron, Grambling State will face Prairie View A&M on Oct. 6 and Oklahoma takes on Texas on Oct. 13.
Copyright AP - Associated Press


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Magic Johnson offers LeBron James $1M to participate in dunk contest
LeBron James dunks through his legs with ease. (Issac Baldizon/Getty Images)
By Ben Golliver
NBA legend and ESPN commentator Magic Johnson challenged Heat forward LeBron James to enter the Slam Dunk Contest, dangling a large cash prize as an incentive.
Speaking on ESPN, Johnson said he would offer James $1 million if he participates in the NBA's annual All-Star Weekend showcase.
"I'm going to put up a million dollars," Johnson said during a telecast Friday night. "One million dollars to LeBron, please get in the dunk contest. I go every year, I want to see you out there. A million to the winner."
Johnson, 53, has an estimated net worth of at least $500 million.
Entering this season, James, 28, had earned more than $92 million in salary during his NBA career. Including this season, James has more than $79 million remaining on his contract with the Heat. His net worth has been estimated in the $100 million range.
The Associated Press notes that the dunk-contest winner is paid $100,000 while the runner-up earns $50,000.
James is regarded as one of the NBA's best dunkers -- if not the best -- but has not participated in the dunk contest, unlike Hall of Famers Michael Jordan, Julius Erving, Dominique Wilkins and Clyde Drexler. James "preliminarily" pledged to participate in the 2010 contest, only to back out.
In February, James said he was "very close" to participating in this year's competition, which Raptors rookie guard Terrence Ross won.
"I was very close," he said. "I was very close to getting into the dunk contest, man. For me, I've always been an in-game dunker, man. When you've got to be in the dunk contest, you've got to be creative, figure out ways to do something that no one has done in the dunk contest. I couldn't figure that out. I couldn't figure that out. I was entertained by being in the three-point contest, too."
RELATED: The 10 greatest Slam Dunk Contests | The 5 worst Slam Dunk Contests
James' dunking has taken center stage over the last few weeks because he's thrown down multiple pregame slams that are contest-worthy. Earlier this week, he went through-the-legs off of a self alley-oop. Before that, he jump-tossed the ball through his legs off the glass for a monster finish.


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Alexander Chee | How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
"How to Write an Autobiographical Novel" explores Alexander Chee's life as a man, a writer, and an activist. Collectively, the essays form Chee's manifesto on how we form our identities in the creative world, mixing life, literature, and politics to reveal how the lessons he learned from reading and writing have shaped who he is. In these essays he morphs from a student to a teacher, reader to writer, and considers his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean-American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He recalls formative experiences of his life and the country's history, including his father's death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, writing his first novel, and the election of Donald Trump.
Alexander Chee is the author of the national best-seller "The Queen of the Night."
Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer with bylines at the Village Voice, Los Angeles Review of Books, author of "Capsid: A Love Song" and "INSIDE/OUT," and cohost of the Food 4 Thot podcast.


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(Reuters) - Boeing Co (BA.N) and the union that represents its 23,000 engineers tentatively agreed to resume labor talks on Tuesday, after their negotiations on a new contract ended abruptly on Thursday.
But tension rose as the two sides sparred over efforts to engage a federal mediator to help them reach a new labor contract.
Boeing said late on Friday that the union had declined its offer to attend meetings with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) said it had contacted the mediator before Boeing did, and was waiting for Boeing to confirm dates for meetings next week that it had arranged.
"We told SPEEA we'd like to start meeting with a federal mediator Tuesday in Seattle," Boeing spokesman Doug Alder said. "We are still working out the details with SPEEA and the mediator."
SPEEA's chief said the union was willing to meet, too, and with a different mediator if necessary.
"I've responded that we have a mediator assigned to us ... but if Boeing is dissatisfied with that mediator, they need to take that up with FMCS not us," Ray Goforth, SPEEA executive director, said.
"We also don't see the need to meet in a hotel. I offered to meet on Boeing property if that would make them comfortable."
The two sides have been negotiating since April to replace a labor contract that expired November 25.
The union has balked at a Boeing contract that it says would cut the growth rate of compensation of professional and technical employees. Boeing says its latest offer is much improved over its initial proposal and reflects a tough competitive environment.
Talks broke down Thursday after Boeing said it wanted a mediator.
The dispute comes as Boeing looks to speed up jet production from 52 a month to about 60 a month by the end of next year. A walkout by the union could stop production.
Peter Arment, an analyst with Sterne, Agee & Leach, expressed hope that the dispute would be resolved with mediation. He noted strikes by SPEEA were rare, with the last one occurring in 2000.
"There's still time for this to be resolved long before it would affect Boeing's commercial aircraft production," Arment said.
Shares of Boeing edged down 3 cents to $74.09 in Friday trading.
Reporting by Alwyn Scott in New York and Karen Jacobs in Atlanta; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Eric Walsh


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If we say "Recently I have been ill", I think "recently" is used to modify the whole sentence. If we say "I have been ill recently", I think "recently" is also used to modify the whole sentence. But if we say "I have been recently ill", it seems to me that "recently" is modifying the word "ill" only. So if we want to have "recently" to modify the whole sentence, apparently we do, we probably would use "recently" at the end of the sentence. I am not sure this is correct. But just for your reference. Hope others will provide more convincing answers.
English Teacher


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Extreme Measures
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Extreme Measures
Keep Your Enemies Close
Season 2 • Episode 3
A killer lurks nearby as a Texas woman and her two grown daughters try desperately to piece together what happened when her eldest daughter is found murdered.
42 min
Premiered 08/27/2019
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Order By Phone 1-877-777-2646
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Home > Bowling Alley Art Painting - Solar Moon Lanes
Price: $ 50.00 - $ 59.99 Remove This Filter
Beautifully created Bowling Alley Art painting and print of humorous and challenging bowling lane in an imaginative setting of solar moon.
The print depicts the bowling lane and includes a humorous tongue and cheek caption on how one might have to bowl under the extreme conditions.
Caption below the painting says:
Every solar year Galactic bowlers gather here for the annual interstellar Bowling tournament. With gravity at 25% less than Earths, the biggest problem here is touch and feel, a more aggressive pitch could send the ball over the pins possibly into orbit. The USA and International Earth team is at an advantage, being weak and fragile is an asset over the muscular aliens. The Monolith is still one of the galaxies greatest mysteries. It is a must for each bowler to touch it before his line, to insure a higher score.
18" x 24" printed Giclee on luxurious art paper.
Shipped as a roll in a tube. Frame not included.
This will make a great addition to your Alleys decor, or make great gifts for your bowling friends and family, or make great league prizes. Get yours today!.
Loyal H. "Bud" Chapman who is famous for his creation of the 18 Infamous Golf Hole paintings, has now used his imaginative mind to do the same with the popular sport of bowling, with the creation of The Infamous Bowling Alleys!. Lanes have been put into unusual places and then added humorous tongue and cheek descriptions on how to play them.
He is sure that these Bowling paintings will help promote the game for all to enjoy, and may even change how and where we play in future.


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Alans(redirected from Alani people)
Also found in: Dictionary.
Alani:see SarmatiaSarmatia
, ancient district between the Vistula River and the Caspian Sea, gradually conquered and occupied by the Sarmatians [Lat. Sarmatae] or Sauromatians (a term used by Herodotus and now used by archaeologists for early Sarmatians) from the 6th cent. B.C.
..... Click the link for more information. .


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Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.
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[no subject]
I get two lines, which one I use and how can I interpret it then? I mean how can I say that the distribution is more or less similar to student with 8 degrees?
Houda GUESSAB
-----Original Message-----
From: email@example.com [mailto:email@example.com] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: mardi 21 août 2012 11:27
To: firstname.lastname@example.com
Subject: Re: st: ksmirnov
When you say the qnormal function, I presume you mean the -qnorm- command.
There is no one way to do it. With the normal distribution, most
people regard matching means and SDs to be the way to do it, but there
is a good case for fitting a more robust line. In the case of t with 8
d.f. (henceforth t(8)) the case is even stronger. By my calculation
t(8) has SD = sqrt(8/6) = sqrt(4/3), but you could use the IQR or any
other pair of quantiles. Similarly, although t(8) has mean, median and
any other measure of level all 0, it is open for discussion how the
data should be summarized. It may even be that 0 is a natural
reference for whatever your data are.
The straight lines come from manipulating
(observed y - level for y) / (expected x - level for x) = (spread for
y) / (spread for x)
where in practice level for x is always 0.
Example code:
sysuse auto, clear
egen rank = rank(mpg), unique
su rank, meanonly
gen expected = -invttail(8, (rank - 0.5) / `r(max)')
su mpg, detail
local mean = r(mean)
local sd = r(sd)
local median = r(p50)
local iqr = r(p75) - r(p25)
scatter mpg expected ///
|| function t_8 = `mean' + x * `sd' / sqrt(4/3), ra(exp) ///
|| function t_8_2 = `median' + x * `iqr' / (2 * invttail(8, 0.25)), ra(exp)
On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Guessab Houda
<email@example.com> wrote:
> OK you are right. Then I will use the program you sent me.
> sysuse auto, clear
>>> egen rank = rank(mpg), unique
>>> su mpg, meanonly
>>> local N = r(N)
>>> gen tquantile = -invttail(8, (rank - 0.5) / `N')
>>> scatter mpg tquantile
> I just need to draw 45 degree reference line like the qnormal function does; can you help me with that?
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In a nutshell, I loved it. This is a great one to read yourself, especially if you like historical fiction. You can also give it to just about any high school student. You could give it to a middle school student as well but please know ahead of time that there are graphic war scenes and it does touch on the fact that some characters, well, lack character. That is to say some of the males are womanizers and some of the females have a past.
However, a book written with only perfect characters is worthless. How do we learn from their mistakes if they don't make them? How do we learn that we too can be heroes if the book's hero is too far beyond our grasp?
Belisarius does possess great humility and piety with just a few stumbles. However, he is not without trials. He rises up from a simple farm boy to a great general in the Roman army. He meets failure on the battle field but perseveres and learns from his mistakes. He is met with temptation, yet stands strong. He is a model for us and for our children that with tenacity, hard work and dedication combined with strong Catholic principles you can achieve greatness for the Kingdom.
In addition to being a good, uplifting story, Belisarius can be tied into your history studies. The story begins in 504 AD as the Roman Empire is struggling with the Barbarians on one front and the Persians attacking on another. We follow Belisarius from childhood to manhood and we see how he changes history through his skill and dedication. He is considered by historians to be one of "The Last of the Romans".
We're studying the Middle Ages this upcoming school year. We'll begin in September with the 6th Century. We plan to read a large variety of historical fiction to accompany our studies and Belisarius: The First Shall Be Last is, fittingly enough by it's title, first on the reading list.
I did have one quibble and it wasn't even about the story. The cover of the book is quite lovely but to me it says, "This is a book for younger children." In my opinion, this is a book for high school to adult. Other than that, and a few minor editing errors, I truly loved this book. It's a story worth reading. Now, if it was available on audio that would be really sweet!
Note that this is the first in a series of two books so you don't get a nice clean ending. I hope to get to Belisarius--Book II: Glory of the Romans soon. Very soon.


text:
|Taken at the new Baguio Technohub inside Camp John Hay... O.O.T.D. Giordano Denim Dress / Accessorize Butterfly Scarf/ FitFlop Dash Boots/ Longchamp Planètes Black Short Handle (my favorite, ever-reliable bag when I'm traveling because it's roomy, while still being lightweight)/ A la leggings-type-thick stockings from Metro Gaisano Marquee Mall department store for Php 350+.
|Trying out DIY O.O.T.D. ;-D...taken at our hotel room at Bloomfield Hotel. ;-D On a beauty/Korean fan mode, I'm trying out the LizK Color Veil BB Cream which I got from Wishtrend.
|This is such a funny pose... I think I'm naturally demure (haha!), that's us waiting for hubby to set the camera on time mode, and it captured way earlier, and tada! me...all prim and proper. ;-D
|Souvenir Shops at The Mines View Park...we got trinkets, and some bracelets for gifts (not in photos). A Php10 per piece can go 12 pcs. per Php 100.
|Bijoux Terner Belt Buckle Hinged Bracelets with Rhinestones for Php 550+ . Technically, this is not a native Baguio travel keepsake, but I got it at Mile Hi Camp John Hay. ;-D
|Saving for Sunny/Rainy Day...Esprit Folding Umbrella on sale at SM Baguio for Php 250. I bought two of these, one I gifted to my mom.
|With Chase. Enjoying the sights and some shopping at SM Baguio.


text:
Namco Bandai's devotion to bringing The [email protected] to everything it can get its hands on isn't just limited to fighter jets. Now its coming to race cars, specifically the ones in Ridge Racer Vita. In the grand tradition of real-life Itasha, fans can expect a raftload of downloadable content for the game throughout Spring, ranging from character-themed cars to music tracks. Check out a second trailer below.
The first batch, due this week and pictured in the gallery, consists of cars based on 765 Production's Haruka Amami, and Makoto Kikuchi. April will bring cars for Yayoi Takatsuki, Azusa Miura, and Chihaya Kisaragi. The rest of the girls follow in May, along with four music tracks.
In true "Scamco" fashion, it will all cost too much money. Getting all of it piecemeal will cost ¥6,500 (more than the cost of the game!), but thriftier otaku can pay for a ¥2,980 "[email protected] Pass", which unlocks everything.
Ridge Racer gets Idolmaster cars and songs [Andriasang]
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text:
Lacking Fair Use Rights, Argentina Tries To Increase Access To Copyright Works, With Mixed Results
from the you-win-some,-you-lose-some dept
If you think copyright is bad in regions like the US or Europe, this post from Intellectual Property Watch points out that things could be much worse:
In Argentina, there's no such thing as a "fair use" judicial doctrine. Moreover, Argentina is one of those few countries in the world where Domaine Public Payant is still in force -- which means to use or reuse works that have already fallen into the public domain one has to pay a "tax" that goes to a black hole known as then National Art's Fund (Fondo Nacional de las Artes).
Understandably, then, people are trying to fix this, with varying success. For example, Argentina's Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation (MINCYT) is hoping to move publicly-funded research centers and universities to an open access model:
The bill mandates publicly-funded research projects, papers, theses, etc. to be deposited in the to-be-created Digital Repositories within 6 months of creation or publication (in a private journal) and research data within 5 years of recollection. The Digital Repositories will be managed by the MINCYT and it will guarantee open, free and universal access to users from a single website.
That's almost certain to happen: the Chamber of Deputies has approved the bill, and only the Argentine Senate needs to do the same. But another bill has been less fortunate, even though its aims are extremely modest:
[to] allow public libraries, museums and archives to loan, copy and communicate to the public (within the premises) their lawfully acquired works freely and without requiring permission from the copyright owner, in accordance with and limited to their public interest goals.
Sadly, this looks less likely to come to fruition thanks to opposition from collecting societies, who seem to think they have a right to payments even from libraries trying to do their job by helping the public gain access to information. Argentina's archaic copyright system may be very different, but its collecting societies are clearly no different from those in other countries.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+


text:
Let's see what do I want to work on today... How about super cute Easter images! Just about all of the following are taken from antique postcards. Victorian and early 1900's all are pre 1923 so you can use them any way you want. Free. Well first up are these sweet little toddlers painting eggs.
Bunnies delivering their eggs in wheel barrows.
A mama bunny and her little boy bunny. Late Victorian era.
Hope you can use these in your projects. Celebrating sunny days and spring feels so good. Yesterday was warm and sunny so I wasn't bundled up in layers of clothing for a change!
See you next time and thank you for visiting, Louise


text:
Visual Persuasion in the LawCarret icon
(3 cr.) Students learn to make legal arguments using images as well as words. Students read and discuss interdisciplinary materials including rhetoric, visual perception, social psychology, narrative theory, art history, media studies, and advertising; perform hands-on visual exercises to gain practice in making and responding to images; and listen to guest lectures and see examples of work done by legal visual displays for use as demonstrative evidence and in closing argument in highly realistic hypothetical cases. No prior visual arts experience is required or expected.
This course is currently not being offered. Please try again next session.


text:
Philosophy of politics (1)
First, let us consider the nature of this discipline and what it studies. If we look at the history of philosophy and political systems, we will see the following regularity. Philosophy and politics, from the very beginning, from the very birth of these two disciplines, developed not only in parallel, but inseparably from one another. Among the first of the Seven Wise Men, who are considered the founders of the philosophical tradition of the Greek Pre-Socratics, are many, including Solon, who are famous for writing political laws, constitutions, criminal codes, who were essentially political actors, representing their cities, their political units. So at the very beginning of the history of philosophy, we see an inseparable connection between philosophy and politics. Hence, politics as a separate phenomenon, disconnected from philosophy, studied for instance by philosophical methods, is a completely different approach.
In fact, the philosophy of politics is a deeper discipline than that. It is a discipline that considers the philosophers who engaged in politics, the philosophers who write about politics, and political actors who based their laws, the establishment of their political system, on philosophical principles. In fact, in the epoch of the birth of philosophy, and in the epoch of the birth of politics, these things were not at all separated from one another. Thus, the subject matter of philosophy and politics is that originary sphere that united philosophy and politics in a certain shared orientation. In other words, I want to say that there does not exist a separate phenomenon of politics and a separate phenomenon of philosophy, which we unite artificially. Nor do we study politics with the help of philosophy. We are speaking not only about the political philosophy of one or another school, period, culture, or civilization. When we speak of the philosophy of politics, we are talking to a significant degree about the essence of politics, of that which makes politics politics – on one hand. On the other hand, we are talking about the political essence of philosophy, which makes philosophy philosophy.
But there is a difference. Philosophy dominates here, because politics without philosophy is not possible at all. Politics is a form of applied philosophy, the application of philosophy to a certain sphere of human life. But philosophy without politics is possible, theoretically. That is, there is a philosophy that does not occupy itself with politics, but there is no politics that is not based on philosophy. So, there is an inequality here; philosophy dominates. Nevertheless, philosophy studies politics; not only the philosophical foundations of, but also the political aspects of philosophy itself; because politics is not a partial and accidental application of philosophy, but the most general, most fundamental, yet applied element of philosophy. As soon as philosophy appears, it necessarily, first of all, when it exists, turns to politics; and all politics emerges from philosophy. Between them there exists an unequal, but very deep, organic connection. There, where this original unification of the philosophical and the political occurs…there the birth of all possible political systems and at the same time the crystallization of philosophical knowledge happens.
Although there is a philosophy that free from politics occupies itself with non-political questions, in fact, in one way or another, even such a free, non-political philosophy is connected, in one way or another, with politics, inasmuch as philosophy and politics have a common root. For this reason, if philosophy considers aesthetic questions, historical questions, cultural questions, and says nothing about politics, this nevertheless does not mean that it is a completely separate phenomenon. Any philosophy at all, even the most abstract, has a political dimension, in some cases explicitly. In the case of Solon, as in the case of the ancient Greek Pre-Socratics and Wise Men, and as in the case of Plato and Aristotle, this is an explicit dimension of philosophy. But there is also an implicit political dimension of philosophy, when philosophy says nothing about politics, but the very fact of the presence of a philosophical paradigm of one or another already carries in itself the possibility of a political dimension. In one case it is only explicit, open, and manifest; in the other, it is implicit, contained.
Hence, between philosophy and politics there is a very, very deep connection, a connection at the level of their origin. And the study of philosophy without politics already in itself impoverishes and weakens the concept of philosophy. On the other hand, the study of politics without philosophy is not at all valid. In that case, we've already gone the way of programming and established rule by Word; that is, open file, close file. We are good programmers….we know two functions, save and save as. We can be excellent users of Word, we can write very good texts on Word, but we are not programmers. People who do not have the philosophy of politics, who do not have philosophy, they are as much politicians as computer programmers are, as are people who [inaudible]. In fact, a person who does not know philosophy cannot engage in politics; he's not a politician. He is a hired government worker who is simply in front of a wall. Someone has told him: go there, do that. What to do, where to go…he might be an excellent user, but in reality politicians who lack a philosophical dimension are merely on a construction-site, some foreign construction-site… In reality, without philosophy, there just is no politics, period. Politics is one of the dimensions contained within philosophy.
Politics without philosophy does not exist, but philosophy without politics does exist, because it is primary in relation to politics; but all philosophy has a political dimension – either, as I said, explicitly, or implicitly, in which case we are silent about it. But this silence of philosophy concerning its political dimension or expression is not a total silence; it is sooner reticence than silence. That is, philosophy which does not occupy itself with politics knows about politics and has it within itself, but openly does not speak about this. This is a peculiar silence. There is the silence of the wise man, and there is the silence of the dummy. This one stays silent in order not to say the wrong thing, because he senses that if he starts to talk, nothing good will come of it. The wise man stays silent for a completely different reason. The silence of philosophy concerning politics is the silence of the wise man. But, if we inquire of the wise man properly, he will tell us what he knows about politics and what he tells will be entirely sensible. But he's silent.
So, any philosophical system carries in itself a political dimension, but not every philosophical system develops this model explicitly. That's the most important thing in order to understand the sphere of the subject matter which we will be studying in the course of the philosophy of politics. In other words, we are studying the philosophical root, the base, the programming base, the matrix base, of all politics, which is entirely reducible to philosophy – there is nothing in politics, not a single element, which does not lead to, is not explained by, and does not emerge from philosophy. Simply, politics is a part of philosophy, on one hand. So we'll be studying that. We'll also be studying the political dimension of philosophy, which also [inaudible] because it is the servant of philosophy; on the other hand, the philosophy which carries politics within it is of course richer than politics, but nevertheless in any philosophical system we can discover, even there where nothing is said about it, a possible application to the political sphere, i.e. the possibility of deriving from philosophy political content. […] Politics is if you will the most important case of the application of philosophy. […] […].
Accordingly, the history of philosophy and the history of politics produce strictly one and the same pattern. This is extremely important. There exists a precise homology between them. If philosophy moves in one direction, politics cannot move in another direction. Politics moves together with philosophy. If something has changed in philosophy, something will change in politics. If something changed in politics, something changed in philosophy, which predetermined this change in politics. Politics has no autonomy from philosophy. Politics is often more visible, though sometimes less so. From the perspective of history…the changes of dynasties, of a certain leader, prince, imperator…to start a war…this is evident, this is a political decision, but it is never distinct from philosophy. It is what we see – the political decision – but we do not see the philosophical decision, which must be there. From the perspective of the philosophy of politics, political history is a section of the history of philosophy, depending on this philosophical history absolutely. No politician is free from philosophy, and no philosopher can fail to be viewed in the light of his implicit political dimension.
In other words, the historical picture, history, history as such, the rise and fall of princedoms, the construction and death of civilizations, conflicts between civilizations, political revolutions…decisions about tramways…all this has under it a philosophical dimension, not always evident and not always recognized, but the task of those who study the philosophy of politics is to elaborate the entirely of this total homology…this equal (homo) meaning (logos). The meaning of history is political-philosophical or philosophical-political. All history has these two sides. On one hand it is the history of princedoms, on the other it is the history of ideas. The history of princedoms and the history of ideas are not separate; it is one and the same history. Thus, if we fasten onto the philosophical dimension, for instance the transition from subjective idealism to objective idealism, this necessarily is connected with an identical political dimension…a transition from one political model to another…changes in the configurations of religions – and this is a philosophical problem in the first place, theology – change radically the content of the political processes occurring in the society where this philosophy is spreading. We can approach this homology between the philosophical and the political from all sides. We can say the political system changed, and depending on how it changed, in what direction, with what speed, and the content of the change, we can, even if we know nothing of the philosophy of that period, establish what was going on on the level of philosophical matters.
Or the opposite: we don't know what happened politically in some society, but the history of arguments of one philosopher with another was preserved; from this argument, if it is written down correctly, we can reconstruct the whole political picture of what was happening in that moment, in the agora where everything was decided democratically, in the ding or the veche, or on the contrary if there was a monarchy, theocracy, for instance, or an empire. In other words, to study the philosophy of politics, we begin with a certain axiom, the axiom of the absolute homology between the political and the philosophical. Of course we can make a certain distinction, between politics and the political. I want to draw attention to one of the most eminent philosophers of politics, Carl Schmitt; we will refer to him throughout the entire course. In the 21st century, it is commonly agreed that Carl Schmitt was the most outstanding political philosopher[s] of the 20th century. At some times this was doubted; it was said that there would be other philosophers…but today if you say "Carl Schmitt", everywhere you'll be told that he is our most outstanding political philosopher; maybe the most outstanding, alongside Hobbes and alongside Plato. That is, Carl Schmitt is the political philosopher par excellence. I want to draw your attention to his works, and recommend that everyone necessarily and without delay familiarize themselves with his work on the political, das Politische. This is very important. Carl Schmitt distinguishes politics and the Political. He considers the Political – written with a capital P – in this case it is an adjective considered as a noun…das is the article indicating that we are talking about a noun. In German this is very clear: das Politische, as opposed to mere politische. In order to convey Schmitt's meaning, we use the capital letter, the Political [henceforth, I will not capitalize; it is necessary in Russian, where there is no definite article.] This – the political – Schmitt distinguishes from politics. By politics, he understands the application of the political to a concrete social situation. The concretization of politics is the concretization of the political. But what, then, is the political? The political – das Politische – is precisely that point where the son (politics) is connected with the father (philosophy). That is, the political is precisely the sphere of philosophical politics, the sphere where philosophy connects directly with politics, what we called the homology of philosophy and politics. In other words, das Politische, according to Schmitt, is precisely the point of homology where we speak not of politics […] but not yet of philosophy as an ever broader level. It is the border, the horizon, the line between philosophy and politics. That is what das Politische means.
Another interesting aspect is that it is a certain sphere, a sphere that we define precisely as the philosophy of politics. The entire sphere of the philosophy of politics is contained in this concept of the political, das Politische.
Another very important concept Schmitt employs is what is called a "fore-concept" [Vorgriffe]. The fore-concept is not yet a political law, it is not yet a political institution, is a not a political party, nor is it a concrete political program. The fore-concept is a kind of element or singularity of the political in its pure guise – not purely philosophical, but where the philosophy of politics steps into its own right. Carl Schmitt calls this a fore-concept. The field of the political thus consists entirely of fore-concepts, political fore-concepts.
The political fore-concept is also a very interesting phenomenon in itself. It is precisely that moment of transition when philosophy becomes politics. But notice the tense: it becomes; it has not yet become, but only becomes. When philosophy becomes politics, when are dealing with a political concept. This is the political concept, for instance, of the separation of powers, the relation of Church and State, notions of borders, the subject, and political institutions. This is already a political concept, in the full sense of the word. When, then, is it a fore-concept? When the birth [I think] of this political concept is prepared on the basis of philosophical content. In this way, the sphere of the political is the sphere of the existence of fore-concepts. The political consists of fore-concepts; and studying fore-concepts, we study that homology about which we spoke earlier. The study of the homology of philosophy and politics, of what is common between these two asymmetrical spheres, is the study of fore-concepts and the task of the philosophy of politics. This is what we are talking about. We are talking about a kind of field that exists, where the multiplicity of the philosophical intersects with the multiplicity of politics. In here between them is precisely what is common…the political, which the philosophy of politics studies.
That was the introduction. Now we move to the question of how this occurs in practice. Plato is considered the founder of the first full-fledged philosophical system in history. He formulated most completely that philosophical agenda that not only predetermined the entire ancient history of philosophy, the entire Middle Ages, to a significant extent the philosophy of the Renaissance, which [inaudible] the philosophy of Modernity. But moreover, there is not today in the 21st century a philosopher more relevant and less understood than Plato. In other words, Plato is all of philosophy [the whole of philosophy; philosophy in toto]. The sharpest thinkers of the 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, 15th…and so on until Plato all study Plato. In fact, strictly speaking there is one philosopher: Plato, and this is philosophy. To this day we have not [inaudible] his agenda. Concerning each of Plato's words, of each of his phrases, there are heated arguments to this day, and no one can ascertain fully whether that is the way he was understood. Geniuses arise to take one position; geniuses arise and oppose it. Not simple people. Philosophical geniuses… All Christian dogma is based on Plato. In Christian theology there is not one thesis which does not have a Platonic dimension. In Islamic theology, everything is based exclusively on Platonism. And even where Platonism did not reach, in India, nevertheless the simplest way to study Hindu philosophy, Vedas, religion, is with Platonism, because the analogy is at once obvious. So, Plato is considered the prince of the philosophers, and his princedom in philosophy no one has yet been able to attack. Thousands of times it was announced that Plato's empire has fallen. These proved each time to be some kind of marginal hallucinations. We live in the philosophy of Plato, Plato is the prince of philosophy, and either we contest this, in which case we […] the rise of the slaves who try to break free from the might of Plato's princedom, or else we simply accept it as loyal citizens and follow our Emperor, Plato. Next, the idea that philosophy has brought something supplementary to Plato is an entirely unfounded, unscientific academic hypothesis. It is a kind of rumor which is not confirmed by the scientific community. Even those who are thought of as the embodiment of the philosophy of Modernity studied Plato [he talks about Bergson, who gave us, through the "primitive and very limited" Karl Popper, the open society, and about Whitehead, to show that both, though modern, were inspired by Plato]. Plato is everything. Hence, in fact if someone reads Plato, he comes up against not just one philosopher, not one author, not one school; he comes up against philosophy as such. Because all philosophy is nothing other than the movement between a few of Plato's theses. Plato founded all philosophy at once: at once, and all together. Thus, the study of philosophy is the study of the philosophy of Plato. Everything else, essentially – as Whitehead, an analytical philosopher, a logician, a mathematician, himself said – is a footnote to the philosophy of Plato. SO we must attend to the fact that philosophy is only Plato. And if we do not understand Plato, we do not understand the programming language of philosophy. […] The study of philosophy begins with the study of the works of Plato; the study of philosophy is thunder-struck [porazhaetsya, I think I heard] through the study of works of Plato; the study of philosophy ends with the study of the works of Plato; there's enough here for a lifetime. Accordingly, one can – I've been too general. This is a program for geniuses. For a simple, ordinary philosopher, it is possible to take one of Plato's dialogues. I take the Cratylus [for instance], and live my life with the Cratylus. By the end of my life, the clarity of the Cratylus will be total. For students, the matter narrows. Let us take a separate saying of Plato and try in the course of some extent of time to live it through. And even that will be enormous, because Plato is philosophy. Accordingly, if we talk of philosophy, we talk of Plato. [..] If we want to familiarize ourselves with that matrix on the basis of which das Politische and the sphere of that homology we spoke of is formed, or with those fore-concepts with which we deal, if we want to understand where politics comes from, what its structures are, and how it is crystallized and manifested through the political, we must study Plato. […] So the first things we must get to know are Plato's writings.
Translation of M.Millerman


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I can not belive my little baby is two already.
His birthday party was scheduled for a couple of weekends ago but Irene decided to show up uninvited and we had to postpone for a week later. And let me tell you it was just the perfect day for the most important person of our lives.
I decided to have the party at our own backyard and to cook the food myself – note to self: Catering!!!- dear internet please remind me of this next year ;).
The theme, as I mentioned here, was airplanes and the color orange. I created the design for the party making paper airplanes out of polka-dotted paper.
I worked with my sister-in-law, owner of Tudo de Bom Arte e Festa and we created a logo that was used throughout the whole decor.
I also wanted to forgo the whole idea of a "dessert table" and went with a "cubed display" instead.
I sent kids home with their own suitcase, hand stitched and personalized with each kid's name on it. Inside we had Joshua's favorites:Playdough, markers, stickers, fruit snacks (Cars, of course), and a blank canvas.
We had a blast, Joshua loved every minute of his party. There was an appearance by his favorite characters, Elmo and Buzz. I have no words to describe his face when he saw Elmo coming down the stairs. It was priceless!!
We had ice cream cone, cotton candy, face painting, tattoos, glow sticks, airplane shaped sandwiches, popcorn…so much fun!!!
Hope you are in for a load of pictures…Pam Rodrigues Photography once again rocked my world!
Thank you so much to everyone that joined us as we celebrated our son's 2nd birthday! You are all very dear to our hearts!
Happy Wednesday!!


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COMMERCE, CA - A colorful collection of hand-made beaded glass shades from Nora Lighting lend a Far Eastern flair to interior designs for homes and hospitality venues. Featuring a versatile range of styles, sizes and lamp sources, the beaded shades can also be specified as matching wall sconces.
Exotique beaded shades have become increasingly popular in the hospitality market. The delicate but luminescent fixtures are typically placed over dining tables, nooks and bars. The Nora line offers models in cylinder, oval, flare, round, hourglass, tapered and bell shapes and the spectrum of colors include amber, aqua, blue green, clear, red or silver. Beaded pendants range in size from 3 ¼" to 7 ½" in length and from 4 ½" to 6 ½" in diameter.
All fixtures are available in 40W G9 line voltage and 50W bi-pin G5.3/6.35 low voltage. Most styles are also offered as: 13W to 26W GU24 CFL self-ballasted; 60W E12 candelabra base and 100W E26 medium base A19 line voltage.
For more details on Nora beaded shades, or other Nora glass pendants and sconces, see the new Website at: www.noralighting.com or call 800.686.6672.


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My 4 year old little one is home and unwell today, so to cheer her up, we did some fun paper craft.
"Let's make a bat!", she said, "and make the house all scary".
We printed her little hands with black paint to craete the wings, and I drew a bat body for her to colour. We are now starting a spider, so I will load some pictures shortly.
Here is how it looks finished.
I could not resist quickly putting it together to form a printable file for you!
Click HERE to find it!
Click HERE to find it!


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Turn off your telly, shut down your PC and dim down those lights, because if you don't, by 2020, 45 per cent of the UK's electricity will be gobbled up to feed the nation's love of gadgets, according to a report from British NGO the Energy Saving Trust (EST).
EST's delightfully titled report, The Ampere Strikes Back, warns consumers that by 2010, consumer electronics will be the single biggest... well... consumer of domestic electricity, overtaking fridges and lighting.
The report also warns that our love of laptops, LCD TVs, iPods, mobile phones and gadgetry in general will require the equivalent of 14 average-sized power stations just to keep them powered and charged, with the finger of blame primarily pointed at our love of standby mode.
Way too many gadgets, dude, warns the Energy Saving Trust
With the UK currently living in an "ICE (Information Communication Entertainment) age" - groan - the report states that an average UK household is likely to contain between two and three TV and DVD players/recorders, three mobile phones, three cordless phones, up to two MP3 players and radios.
Divorced, widowed and unmarried singletons are largely to blame because they consume electricity differently from those shacked-up with partners. So romantic meals for two and sharing of iPod headphones makes for more efficent electricity use, it seems.
A rise in the sale of flat-screen TVs over CRTs is also, according to the EST, having an impact on electricity use. By 2020, the average UK household will have 2.6 flat-screen TVs, EST forecasts. The number of digital adaptors will also increase by 67m to 80m by 2020, increasing their total energy use by 400 per cent.
For example, the average technophile could clock up an annual electricity bill of £219 through use of "everyday" gadgets, including a 42in plasma TV, iPod, laptop and broadband router.
The EST's report does provide readers with some advice on how to change their gadget-hungry ways. Multi-function products, such as Apple's iPhone, which combines a phone with an MP3 player, internet and email, are one way to avoid the need for multiple devices to be run at the same time and all of which need charging up.
However, the EST warns that this will only be worthwhile if manufacturers invest in making such devices energy efficient when in use and being charged.
The Energy Saving Trust's report can be downloaded here (PDF)


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My suggestion:
A new button in VDS at page Temperatures:
Cool Battery Now
You can press this button 10km before arrival and the HVAC Compressor starts to cool down the battery.
With air-stream while driving, the cooling is more economical than afterwards when loading.
And even more if you have to load in a closed garage.
And battery lifetime is also increased.
Where should I post this idea, to get it read by developers?
Or is somewhere a official wishlist?
If You like this idea, then push it ;-)


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Six hearty Wallies rescued and repackaged over 1,000 pounds of food in Detroit at Forgotten Harvest, a food rescue operation in Detroit for Wabash Day.
Michigan has lost one million jobs over the past decade, and no area has been harder hit than the Metro Detroit area, where 1 in 5 children now live in poverty. As one of Detroit's largest food rescue operations, Forgotten Harvest accepts surplus food from grocery chains, food manufacturers, as well as hotels and casinos, refrigerating, repacking, and distributing to food distribution operations throughout Michigan.
Pasta and sauce, salmon, sausage, macaroni and cheese and the like were rescued from Joe Louis Arena, the Motor City Casino, and the Henry Ford.
Census: Terry Hamilton '89, Mark Gilbert '88, Roy Sexton '95, Kevin Hornick '94, Caleb Mast '09, Daniel Sweet '04


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By Daniel Pohl, Published: 02/21/2011, Last Updated: 02/21/2011
Download Experimental Cloud-based Ray Tracing Using Intel® MIC Architecture for Highly Parallel Visual Processing [PDF 1.85MB]
Download (high-resolution) Experimental Cloud-based Ray Tracking Using Intel® MIC Architecture for Highly Parallel Visual Processing [Hi-res PDF 12.0 MB]
Cloud-rendered Wolfenstein Ray Traced (as shown on a laptop): Video of Wolfenstein Ray Traced.
A game-changing factor in computing is the rise of the cloud. While the word sometimes seems to be overused, the concept offers interesting benefits for both companies and end-users. One example of taking advantage of the cloud is related to computer games. Companies like OnLive* and Gaikai* are making a business out of offering a service in which the game itself runs on servers in the cloud. It processes user interactions from the game client, and the server sends back a compressed, rendered image of the game to the user.
There are many advantages of a cloud-based rendering approach. For instance, the user doesn't need to wait for the installation of the game and doesn't need to worry about patching the game to the latest state. The amount of used hard disk space on the user's machine is much lower. As the game can't be copied from the client side, there is no need for anti-piracy checks like putting the game DVD into your machine. For developers it also enables an easy way to release a demo version of the game, such as by providing a limited access time window to the full game so people can get a first impression of it.
Another advantage is that a game client could run on many different operating systems and might therefore save the amount of work that is sometimes used to port a game across different platforms. More platforms, such as netbooks, tablets, and smartphones, could run high-end games since intensive calculations are done on the server. This also opens the door to running high-end, even professional graphical capabilities on lightweight consumer devices. Current games are usually limited to using the hardware rasterizer that is on common graphics cards in order to achieve the required performance that gamers expect. While this approach has advantages, it also limits the choices a game developer could use for their game. There might be other rendering algorithms, like point rendering, voxel rendering, or ray tracing, that could enable games to look much more realistic.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that uses the laws of physics to create more photorealistic graphics by accurately calculating effects like reflections, refractions, and shadows. However, the computational requirements of ray tracing limit its use for interactive consumer applications like games. The cloud gaming model provides one method to give more people access to the high-end hardware needed to perform the ray tracing in real-time.
In recent years, Intel Labs has shown steady progress towards developing real-time ray tracing engines running on multicore Intel® processor-based platforms. In 2008, we were able to show Quake Wars: Ray Traced running at 15-20 frames per second (fps) on an Intel® Xeon® processor-based server using four quad-core CPUs. After several months of making optimizations, we showed the demo using the same four socket server, but with the newly updated six-core Intel® Xeon® X7460 processors at 20-35 fps. The following year the next Intel processor allowed us to go down from a server to a workstation system with two sockets achieving the same frame. It is clear that we will see continued performance increases with higher core counts and new architectures like Intel® microarchitecture code name Sandy Bridge.
One specifically interesting platform for this algorithm is the upcoming Intel® Many Integrated Core Architecture (Intel® MIC Architecture) announced in May 2010. As ray tracing is a highly parallel algorithm, Intel MIC Architecture will help provide big gains in performance by increasing the number of available cores for highly parallel applications in the high performance computing (HPC) market and for datacenters. This leads us to the topic of this paper: bringing together the Intel MIC Architecture along with a cloud-based gaming model to enable more advanced and realistic image rendering with real-time ray tracing.
Ray tracing is a rendering algorithm that simulates light rays found in nature, with one slight difference. In nature, the rays originate from a light source (e.g. the sun) and eventually hit the human eye. The ray tracing algorithm traces this process in reverse: from the eye (as a virtual camera) into the scene. The points where these rays hit geometric objects are calculated. Then, a shader program is called for the surfaces that got hit.
A ray from the virtual camera hits the car and gets reflected toward the house. A shadow ray is shot from the hit position at the car toward the light source.
Through this process, material properties such as reflectivity and transparency are evaluated. Colors from textures can be added, and secondary rays that test for lighting, reflection, and refraction can be traced from here.
Ray tracing is already heavily used in the professional graphics market. This usually is done for offline (i.e., non-interactive) tasks where a significant amount of time is spent on a single image. In order to enable some degree of interactivity, there are often previews of the final image that get refined over time. In some cases, large clusters have been the solution to gain interactivity.
The automotive industry is an important example of the professional use of ray tracing. Before a car gets built, it is valuable to be able to preview it first in a photorealistic way. Through this process, the manufacturer is able to accurately model the car to the desired properties and is able to detect flaws in the design easily-for instance, if a certain object or shape in the car would cause reflections that might irritate the driver. For modeling an object like a headlight, complex global illumination calculations where multiple rays bounce inside the object have to be solved. Ray tracing has proven to be the best solution for getting those physically correct images.
Offline-rendered headlight model of a car
Another application of ray tracing is in the area of medical visualization. Scanning devices used for computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) create 3D data of an object like the human brain or a skull. That volumetric information has to be displayed on a computer screen. While there are many different methods to do this, ray tracing is the most accurate one.
Volumetric data of a skull visualized using rays (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:High_Definition_Volume_Rendering.JPG)
In the movie industry ray tracing is an elegant and commonly used algorithm for solving reflections and refractions in a robust and stable manner.
Image from the movie MEGAMIND* (©DreamWorks Animation) showing ray traced special effects.
The demonstration described below is an evaluation of the combination of a cloud-based gaming approach and utilizing ray tracing for rendering using Intel MIC Architecture.
For this project four "server" machines have been used to represent the cloud. The relevant components of each machine are:
Intel code name Knights Ferry is the first-generation development platform for the Intel MIC Architecture. It includes a PCIe card that has a 32-core chip on it that is clocked at 1.2 GHz. The development platform is programmable with the regular tools and programming languages that developers regularly use. A bit further out there are plans for an Intel MIC Architecture-based product, code named Knights Corner, that will use 22nm manufacturing technology and will therefore be able to even have more than 50 cores on the chip.
As a thin client (representing the gamer's machine), a small laptop was chosen. The properties are:
Game content was taken from the German version of the game Wolfenstein* (2009), provided by id Software* and Raven Software*.
The ray tracing was performed by an experimental engine developed by Intel Labs. It is programmable over a clearly defined API in order to pass in geometry, camera data, textures, changed states, etc. Additionally, an HLSL-like shading language is supported to write high-performance shading code in a convenient way.
The ray tracing engine has two parts. One runs completely on the CPU and is used to communicate with the Knights Ferry card in order to upload the content, manage states, and send rendering commands. The other part is executed on Intel MIC Architecture. It has been implemented in a very similar manner to a regular Intel® architecture CPU in C++, with special code to utilize the 16-wide SIMD units. The renderer uses 31 of 32 cores - the last one is left free so it can handle whatever workload the driver requires. Given that each core has four threads, this means there are 124 threads available. These are dynamically allocated on Knights Ferry to different tasks, the biggest one being the actual rendering task that traces rays and colors pixels. The second most intense one is used to update internal acceleration structures. Those are holding representations of the game's geometry (triangles) in a way that makes it faster for rays to find the potential intersecting geometry. Dynamic changes of the scene (movement of players, particle updates, etc.) require that those acceleration structures are updated as well with this new information.
The Intel® Core™ i7 processor on the server runs a game engine that processes and updates all states (e.g., position of the players, which weapon is currently chosen, etc.) and communicates those to the ray tracing engine that is running as described above with an interface on the CPU and for rendering on Knights Ferry. It also transfers rendered pixels over TCP/IP to the client.
The client processes the user interface (key presses, mouse movements) and evaluates their actions (for example, pressing the Up key will make the player move forward). Updated game states are sent to the servers. The client receives pixel data from the server and displays it on the screen.
In order to combine the calculation power of multiple hardware units, in this case the four servers, there are different methods that can be used. Here are two of them in more detail:
Given the amount of additional latency through the second method, it is recommended for a commercial implementation to use the tile-based approach. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this research study, our first implementation used alternate frame rendering with the option to improve using the tile-based method in a future revision.
In order to upload an image from memory to the graphical device that shows it on a screen, almost all modern devices require an image with red, green, blue, and alpha (RGBA) channels, each of them having 8 bits of information. At a target resolution of 1280x720, a single image with this information takes 3600 KB of memory. As the alpha channel doesn't contribute any useful information, this can be easily reduced to 2700 KB. At 60 Hz this transfer would require a data rate of around 158.2 MB (1264 Mbit) per second, and therefore exceeds even the bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet. Obviously some form of compression needs to be used to better handle the amount of data.
Using compression introduces additional calculations on the server side for encoding and on the client side for decoding. On the servers there are plenty of resources to do compression. In this setup, an otherwise almost idle 6-core Intel® Core™ i7 processor performs a multi-threaded encoding algorithm. Alternatively, the compression could have also been done directly on the Knights Ferry card. The client, on the other hand, might be a lightweight system and require quite some time to decode the image before being able to display it.
There are multiple possible coder-decoders (codecs) that can be used. OnLive* has indicated that they use a special encoding chip to create a propriety video stream using their own codec. Gaikai* is using the H.264 compression codec that can also be found in YouTube* and Blu-ray* videos. Using about 5 Mbit/s for a video stream at 1280x720 gives reasonable quality, but also leaves room for improvement. If more bandwidth should be available, most codecs can utilize them easily by just changing a few parameters in order to achieve higher image quality.
Screenshot from Dirt 2* using OnLive*.
For this initial experiment we chose to start with the best-case networking scenario, a high-bandwidth Gigabit Ethernet connection, to relax the compression requirements and achieve the best visual results. That allowed us to use a different form of compression that is based on each image separately (compared to a video stream where a later image is often a modification of an earlier image), which results in very high image quality that remains stable independent of the amount of motion. The algorithm used is DXT1. That algorithm has a fixed compression ratio of 1:8 for RGBA data and is often used in games through the .dds file container. There are fast implementations for compression and decompression that utilize Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel® SSE) and can use multi-threading in the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) 7.0 library. Also, some graphics chips are capable of displaying DXT1 compressed content without any manual decompression. The result of applying DXT1 is an image that has only minor noticeable loss from the original source for regular game scenes.
Image without compression.
Image has been compressed with DXT1.
Of course, there are certain special cases where artifacts can become very visible. One example is a debug view that shows triangles shaded with their red, green and blue vertex colors. The DXT1 algorithm is not very well suited for such an unnatural image.
Image without compression
Image has been compressed with DXT1
In order to show the benefits of using a ray tracer for games, several components of the original game have been changed for the Wolfenstein*: Ray Traced demo. Please note that some screenshots in this section have been rendered with supersampling. Measurements and images without this will be given in a later section.
Ray tracing engines typically use acceleration structures, a hierarchy placed over the geometry that organizes the scene to allow a ray's interactions with objects to be calculated more efficiently. This leads to the nice property that for static content, the amount of required calculations for a ray only increases logarithmically with the number of triangles. Therefore, higher geometric detail can be used with only a small impact on the performance.
The complete Wolfenstein* game level used for the demonstration consisted about around 300,000 triangles in the original form. To showcase the ability to have more geometry available, two objects were changed to use extreme high polygonal details. The first was the chandelier model, made out of around 1,000,000 triangles. The second was a detailed car model with roughly 300,000 triangles.
Old chandelier model.
New, highly detailed chandelier model
The performance impact of changing these models and rendering them with the triangle debug shader was only 15-20% percent. Looking at the content generation pipeline, this means that such high-resolution models can just be taken out of the 3D modeling software and can be used in the game directly without the need for artists to painfully reduce every possible triangle, and without the need to use tricks like normal maps to fake the detailed geometry.
Through the ability to trace arbitrary rays on demand, ray tracing allows interesting effects for shading.
One example for using reflections has been done on a car model. By making the material highly reflective (in fact even too reflective to be realistic, but good for the purpose of demonstrating the effect), it is possible to see the surrounding environment in it - all updated accurately and in real-time.
The way this is calculated in a ray tracer is very simple. Just like a ball bounces off at the border of the billiard pool table a reflection ray is also just getting reflected at the surface it hits.
This method applied to the car looks like this:
Another nice ray-traced effect is an accurate glass shader with physical properties like the correct refraction index. Compared to the previous car shader, this one spawns two rays at the hit point: a reflection ray like above, and a refraction ray.
This shader used on the chandelier model looks like this:
Distortions of the background by looking through a ray traced glass shader.
Showing the high geometric detail on the chandelier model.
Another example of reflections that could also impact the gameplay is shown on the lens of the sniper rifle weapon from the game. The material properties of it have been changed by only a few lines of code to be reflective. Players are now able to see what is behind them (sort of a rear-view mirror) and might be able to notice approaching enemies faster.
Reflective scope gives players information about what is happening behind them.
Another interesting effect added is the surveillance station. Games already do this sort of thing, but in a limited way. Sometimes there is a room with a screen in it that shows a different part of the scene. In some games, there is a button to change what areas the screen displays. New here is the possibility to have many different screens at the same time while still staying at a good performance level.
Surveillance station showing 12 different parts of the level.
Recursion effects are also easily done.
The way it works is simple. Each screen has exactly one offset and one viewing direction defined. If a ray hits that screen, the offset is added to that position. From that, another ray in the specific direction which was defined earlier will be traced. That will hit another surface which will return a color. This effect is related to the camera portal effects (previously demonstrated in the earlier Quake Wars*: Ray Traced project, but differs in that on the TV screens, the displayed picture remains the same independent of the player's view angle, while for portals, the player can get other information by looking from the side of a portal instead of looking into it from the front. That is because in portal effects, the incoming viewing direction of each ray is taken into account, compared to the fixed direction that the TV screen has.
Today's games make heavy use of particle systems in order to display effects like smoke, fire, sparks, debris, moving fog volumes, etc. In the early days particles were small, one-colored squares or sprites.
Particle trail of a flying lava piece in Quake (I)
Today, particle effects for games typically involve the use of "quads" that consist of two triangles. The shader used on these can mix multiple textures, use different blending methods, use vertex colors, and all the magic that programmable shaders deliver. Implementations of smoke and fire in games are usually made out of particle systems that layer many quads and therefore create the illusion of a volumetric effect.
Smoke and fire implementation using particles.
Shaded view. Right: Triangle debug view.
Usually those many layers of particles are aligned towards the eyes of the player. For debugging purposes this setup can be frozen, and a look at it from the side reveals more details about the amount of layering.
Shaded view.
Triangle debug view.
This approximation of using layers has been developed specifically for games using rasterization, as it can be calculated in a fast way with this algorithm. We implemented the same in this demo, but recommend that for ray-traced games, another algorithm to display volumes should be used.
In order for the ray tracer to display those layered effects correctly, the ray has to hit the first surface. The shader program returns a color value after a texture lookup and defines some amount of transparency. From here on, the ray has to continue until it hits the next surface to repeat this step. In our tests, we required in the hardest cases a recursion depth of 50 to guarantee the correct display. This can obviously become very performance-intensive, and in fact rendering those particles in the rasterization-optimized way using a ray tracer is the most expensive visual effect in the demo.
Debug view shows performance hot spots when rendering particles. Bright means more intensive than dark.
Given the restriction that all those surfaces are quads and face the same direction, there are some optimizations that could be applied when rendering this. Also, different and potentially faster rendering methods where such a particle effect is calculated could be used and afterwards blended into the image.
The way it is likely this technology will evolve in the future is to have real volumetric data instead of trying to simulate the effect of it through layering. For example, smoke would naturally distribute in the air and change according to obstacles. Using ray tracing, the brightness values inside the smoke cloud could be adapted to the environment.
Offline simulated smoke using FumeFX*. Author: Sam Khorshid
Here are some example scenes and how they perform in the cloud-based setup.
Two commonly used terms in networking are bandwidth and latency:
Bandwidth: The amount of data that can be transported over the network from a certain source to a certain destination in a given time. This can be, for example, 12 Mbits per second which is sometimes found in home Internet connections, or 1000 Mbits per second for Gigabit Ethernet. It is often compared with a highway and how many lanes there are: Even if there were a highway with 1000 lanes between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a single car could still not drive the distance 1000 times faster.
Network latency: Describes the delay from sending a network packet from a source to the destination. Latency has a high impact on the cloud-based gaming experience. The latency of a packet from one machine to another machine and back can be tested using the ping command.
Assuming the available bandwidth is not limiting, then the latency comes from the physical limitation of the speed of light, and also delays from various hops that a network packet goes through from one physical connection to another (through routers, switches, etc.), and through the layers it has to pass to get to the operating system and finally the application.
Bandwidth will influence the quality of the image that the player receives in a cloud-based setup. Internet connection bandwidth has been increasing over the last years and can be expected to continue increasing.
The (total) latency will impact how long it takes from, for example, moving the mouse locally to seeing that update on the screen. The first thought might be that this is only dependent on the network latency, but there are many other contributing factors that in some cases can be adjusted to deliver a better gaming experience. In the following steps, which describe the process from the input controller to the update on the screen, the assumption of a target frame rate of 60 Hz will be made. This means each frame takes 16. ms, though for simplicity this will be rounded to 17 ms. A network latency of 80 ms for a round trip (40 ms one way) will be assumed.
The process from the input controllers to the update it causes on the monitor
Step 1 (input controllers): In the latest operating systems from Microsoft*, devices that are connected over USB are in default mode polled at 125 Hz. Therefore, in the worst case, 8 ms latency could come from this. There are some techniques and some vendor-specific mouse drivers that can change this rate to, for example, 1000 Hz. Often wireless keyboards and mice have even higher latencies and should therefore be avoided to reduce lag.
Step 2: After the movement through the input controller has been processed, it might take a short time until the game client reaches the piece of code that evaluates those movements. For example, the client might be currently busy with other calculations (in a single threaded game client version, this could be due to receiving the last rendered frame or uploading it to the graphics card). The maximal latency would be almost one frame (17 ms). By using multiple threads in the game client, this lag could be reduced, but might require additional synchronization about when an update should be sent out to the servers.
Step 3: Having evaluated all movements, a network packet with data such as the updated player position will be sent to the server and requires 40 ms. Generally, to lower network latency, it helps to have the servers close enough to be reached with a small number of hops. Some routers have special optimizations to prioritize network packets for online gaming, which might help for the first hop from the client's device to the Internet-connected router.
Step 4: Now the server has received the updated information. Assuming it is done rendering the previous frame, the new data can be used. But games often use a method where multiple frames are rendered in flight. The benefit is that this leads to higher and smoother average performance, because the calculations for rendering and scene updates never run dry as there is always more work available. Common default settings in graphics drivers allow pre-rendering of up to 3 frames.
Unless this value is lowered, this potentially adds 50 ms of latency. In a setup with multiple machines that are each rendering individual frames, there is additional latency. As mentioned earlier, a tile-based approach should be used to avoid this overhead. Once a frame is rendered, it has to be brought into main memory. The image could have been either compressed directly on the device that rendered it, or it could be compressed later by the CPU. As the server usually is very powerful, the compression consumes only a small fraction of time (around 2 ms for DXT1 in 1280x720).
Step 5: The compressed frame is sent to the client, which consumes 40 ms.
Step 6: Back at the client, the compressed frame needs to be displayed. Either there could be a way to upload the compressed image directly onto the graphics card (e.g., through support for DXT1 textures), or it has to be decompressed manually. As the client does usually not have a lot of horsepower, this step could be delayed by one frame: while the client already receives the next frame over the network, it could finish off decompressing the old one. This adds another 17 ms of latency, but might be required as an optimization for small devices. Uploading the color data from the client's main memory to the graphics card that displays the image will also take some time. It might be required to do this asynchronously and live with another 17ms of latency. Also, in case the pictures should be uploaded into a texture and then displayed as a quad on the full screen over Microsoft DirectX*, for example, it should be made certain that the graphics card settings at the client for the maximal amount of pre-rendered frames don't add any extra delays.
Step 7: Lastly, the outgoing picture from the graphics card has to be displayed on a screen. Besides the limitation that currently most flat screen monitors can only display at 60 Hz and might therefore introduce some latency for the correct synchronization, there is another important factor called input lag: it describes the time difference between sending the signal to the monitor and seeing the actual content on the screen. That difference is caused by the signal processing that a flat screen monitor does. That could be, e.g., interpolation to display in non-native resolutions, the "overdrive" method which reads what is being sent to the display several frames ahead and processes the image to reduce blurring and streaks left by ghosting, changes to contrast and colors, etc. There has been a very detailed test about this at Prad.de that measured input lags between close to 0 up to 45 ms (even without the synchronization of 60 Hz). These values should not be confused with the ones for the pixel response time that monitor vendors often specify, e.g., 2 ms from gray-to-gray for a gaming monitor.
The total amount of latency therefore depends not only on the network latency, but also on the choices of input controllers and monitors, as well as on the possible software implementations regarding buffering. Scenarios are possible where a difference of over 100 ms latency can easily show up - independent of the network latency.
|Example Scenario 1
|Example Scenario 2
|Step 1 (input controllers)
|Step 2 (thin client)
|Step 3 (network)
|Step 4 (cloud)
|50 (triple buffered)
|17 (single buffered)
|Step 5 (network)
|Step 6 (thin client)
|17 + 17
|Step 7 (monitor)
Different hardware and software setups can significantly change the total latency.
Over the last sections it has been shown that ray tracing can offer a variety of new and interesting effects to games. Through this research using a cloud-based gaming setup with machines that utilize the Intel code name Knights Ferry development platform, ray-traced games with a high frame rate can already be achieved today.
Further progress could be made by optimizing the video codec used in order to be able to use it for even smaller devices such as netbooks and tablets. Instead of assuming a Gigabit Ethernet setup, optimizations for wireless networks could be investigated to bring the technology to handheld devices like smartphones. In order to cut down on the number of servers needed, it should be possible to develop support for using multiple Knights Ferry PCIe cards within a single machine. To increase image quality, several well-known post-processing techniques like HDR bloom and depth of field could be added. A smart solution on how to do anti-aliasing for ray tracing with high performance on the Knights Ferry platform could also be investigated.
While the commercial use of cloud-based gaming is just starting, a scenario could be imagined in which some gamers favor the advantages of such an approach and would use that way of gaming as their main model. It might also be reasonable to assume that another group of gamers would like to stay at the current model, where all games are stored and rendered locally on the gamer's machine.
No matter which group will be the larger one, the industry is changing at an amazingly fast speed, and it will be exciting to see how graphics in games, cloud-based gaming, and most importantly the gaming experience will evolve over the upcoming years.
The author wishes to thank the following contributors: id Software* and Raven Software* for the Wolfenstein* content; Alexander Reshetov, Benjamin Segovia, Alexey Soupikov, Ingo Wald, and Sven Woop for working on the internals of the ray-tracing engine; Ram Nalla for working on the demo and enabling the cloud-based gaming setup; Bill Mark, manager at Intel Labs; and Sean Koehl, Ram Nalla, and Manfred Ernst for reviewing this paper.
Daniel Pohl started researching real-time ray tracing for games in 2004 during his study of computer science at Erlangen-Nuremberg University in Germany. As his master's thesis, he developed a ray-traced version of Quake 4*. In 2007, he joined Intel's ray tracing group, where he continues to research game-related ray tracing.
Intel's compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.
Notice revision #20110804


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The code has been in use for several months without issue and has been working fine all this time in all the browsers I've tried it in. For some reason in this one particular scenario though, Safari was completely ignoring the attempts to set the innerHTML of the node. Setting the innerHTML and then on the following line attempting to read it was also giving an empty response. For example:
text = "foo";
node.innerHTML = text;
alert( "html="+node.innerHTML ); // Pops up message saying "html="
I tried numerous methods to fix this problem, including setting the property before and/or after adding the DOM node to the document. I also googled it which flagged up a number of related posts but these generally referred to pages that were served as XHTML (ie. pages with an .xhtml extension and MIME type application/xhtml+xml) and were not offering any solution.
The general consensus towards working around this problem is to set a timer to retry setting the innerHTML value again. (e.g. as mentioned in this page) Such a solution is highly inconvenient and is generally inapplicable, however, because it screws up your programming model - you essentially need to turn the simple operation of setting innerHTML into a callback-like asynchronous operation.
A Probable General Solution
element.appendChild(document.createTextNode("Baby you're a firework!"));
Then, as I'm using jQuery Mobile, I can patch it into jQuery's html function:


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With the economy as it is and with fuel prices consistently rising, the need for fuel assistance is more urgent than ever. Many senior residents that receive fuel assistance will run out long before the winter is over. Others are keeping their heat dangerously low in fear of running out.
If you would like to make a donation to help those Groton senior residents in need of additional fuel assistance, you can make a check payable to: The Friends of the Groton Elders, P.O. Box 289, Groton, MA 01472 (memo: fuel assistance).
The donations will go only to those residents that have already used and/or run out of their Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
If you, or if you know of a Groton senior resident that may need fuel assistance, please call the Groton Senior Center to set up an appointment with me to complete an application. If your fuel assistance is close to running out, please call me regarding additional assistance that may be available at 978-448-1170. Please be assured that all information remains completely confidential.
Outreach coordinator
Groton Council on Aging


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Brands at Coachella Welcome "Crazy Frenzy" and "Too Much of a Crowd" at Events
You've heard the expression "an offer you can't refuse." According to marketers, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which ran from April 16 through 18 at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, California, is kind of like that. Many brands consider the opportunities associated with the desert gathering too valuable to miss. Among those present, Levi's took to the Ace Hotel with three days of gift suites and parties as part of a continuing partnership between the brand and the hotel; Anthem magazine was back with its notoriously rowdy pool party; and Lacoste showed off its new brand, Red, with a weekend-long pool party and gift suite produced by MMA Group within walking distance of the festival grounds.
"We believe that Coachella is a very cool event and it's a good place to gain brand [recognition and loyalty] with all these tastemakers, the kinds of people it attracts," said Lacoste vice president of marketing Emily Coppock. "Red is aimed at a more fashion-forward, younger, maybe even urban consumer, so in that sense, it's a perfect audience. This is the first music festival in the U.S. that we've been a part of, and we just feel that it's one of the best-known and stylish festivals, and has a sense of elegance."
Andreas Herr, the publisher of Anthem, who also oversees its bash, said, "Through our lifestyle marketing firm, You Are Here, we receive inquiries throughout the year about our Coachella event due to the reputation that we have built for hosting the most authentic party. It's a tradition for us, our sponsors, and fans."
Levi's, which brought stylists to help musicians cut off and customize their own jeans, sees the festival as an efficient marketing opportunity. "Here, we're able to showcase a lot of looks at one time, in one place, and target a lot of the cool, hip people," said Levi's director of engagement marketing Sheri Timmons, who noted that the brand was among the first with such a setup at South by Southwest years ago. "No one was doing it, and the next year, people came knocking. [With crowds of attendees and brands] Coachella has become the Sundance of music. We had three times as many people approaching us this year [to attend]."
With so many brands taking over the environment, the event marketing landscape has become as crowded as ever. But rather than see the packed calendar as competition, many see it as an R.O.I. bonus. "During the year, everyone's always doing things all at the same time for fashion, so the industry and the consumer are used to it. People have been trained to bounce from place to place at Coachella," said Coppock. "It's the crazy frenzy that people like, so it helps that we're all there. A lot of the fashion brands have realized what a stylish festival it's become and welcome it."
Herr, whose party trimmed and retooled its guest list this year to make it a more exclusive ticket, added, "Our event is recognized as the most exclusive and most authentic event to be at during the weekend, so our biggest concern seems to be drawing too much of a crowd."
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