text:
Friday, June 10, 2011
Rhubarb-Blueberry Compote
This was a "kitchen-sink" compote. To my immense gratification, I finally put an almost-full bag of frozen blueberries to use, as well as some dark sweet cherries that had been languishing in the freezer even longer. The rhubarb I had bought with purpose, but only needed a pound of it for my crisp. I had a whole pound left and was thinking either chutney or a jammy compote. I didn't know what I would eat with a savory chutney, so I opted for the latter.
A compote is defined as fruit stewed in a sugar syrup. That's sort of what I did. For me, this is what homemade jam looks like. I don't like it as sweet as traditional jam. Not even close. Since I am NOT preserving/canning or doing anything that requires exacting food safety standards, I'm free to use as much or as little sugar as I want. I put half the compote in the fridge and froze the rest. Since there is just over 1/3-cup of sugar in a batch that made over 2 cups of compote, I feel fine eating it with a spoon.
All you do is put everything in a pot and simmer until it reaches the consistency you want (this is also how I make chutney, by the way). Rhubarb breaks down quickly, and here it melded beautifully with the frozen blueberries and cherries, leaving plenty of bright, tart flavor. I added rose water (another ingredient hanging aimlessly around the fridge!), some fresh ginger that hadn't been earmarked for any special purpose, and cardamom for some intrigue, but you don't need to use any extra flavor elements if you don't want to.
P.S. Here's my quick fig jam from last summer using the same method. I cannot wait to make this again. So, are you a huge improviser like me, or do you have a more measured jam-making method? Share your thoughts or recipes in the comments!
Rhubarb-Blueberry Compote
You can always add more sugar for a sweeter compote.
Makes about 2 cups
1 lb rhubarb, trimmed and sliced 1/2-inch thick
8 oz frozen blueberries
6 oz frozen, pitted sweet cherries
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbs sugar
2 Tbs chopped fresh ginger
1/4 tsp ground cardamom, or to taste
1 to 2 Tbs rose water (optional)
1 Tbs fresh lemon juice
1/8 tsp salt
Combine all ingredients in a medium sauce pan and bring to a simmer. Simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently until fruit is broken down and compote thickens slightly (it should still be loose enough to easily run off a spoon), about 20 minutes (will continue to thicken slightly as it cools). Cool in sauce pan, then transfer to an airtight container. Keeps in refrigerator 1 to 2 weeks; freezes well.
3 comments:
This looks wonderful! A few weeks ago I made (and canned) blueberry-rhubarb jam made with only blueberries, rhubarb, sugar, and pectin. I'm planning on entering it into the local fair because it tastes so wonderful. I'd love to try your recipe with even more goodness added to it.
- Rivki Locker (Ordinary Blogger) said...
I discovered rhubarb for the first time this year (!) and have been obsessed with it since. Crisps, cakes, muffins. I think I will have to try compote too! Bookmarking this to try soon.
- table top fridge said...
This looks great....am gonna try this soon
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Aggregator of Data – Role of Web Developer and LibrarianPosted: April 12, 2009 Filed under: trends | Tags: trends, web services Leave a comment
In taking a survey of my info gathering and recent web dev activities, I noticed something. First, there is a lot of data in my daily channels of news and info. Raging river of data is probably a better description. Second, the trend in our local library development and app building has been to bring these data bits into manageable streams. Witness:
Journal Table of Contents (TOC) Service
And these are just local library apps at Montana State… There are open web services and desktop clients (FriendFeed and TweetDeck) that make similar attempts to aggregate data and add value. Wheat from the chaff… Signal from noise… By and large, this has been a role that libraries have played within the physical (our selection of books and relevant, vaild info). I'm wondering how well we can latch onto this trend of aggregation and extend ourselves into the virtual.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
LCC/CTE Teaching Online Certification (TOC)
This online course has been designed specifically for faculty who will be teaching online and/or hybrid courses.
The minimum requirements to participate in this training include:
- Currently teaching at the post-secondary level.
- Basic computer skills, including the ability to:
- Use email
- Add and open attachments in email
- Create new files
- Modify existing files
- Save files in commonly used word processing program formats
- Copy and paste text
- Download and install software
Course Outcomes
Upon completion, the successful participant will be able to:
- Apply basic skills and knowledge relevant to teaching in the online environment.
- Create a Desire2Learn course site which uses prescribed navigation.
- Create a comprehensive syllabus and use strategies for creating a community in the online classroom.
- Compare and contrast the potential uses of web-based applications and educational technologies to enhance student engagement and promote active learning (e.g., discussion forums, PowerPoint, chats, blogs, social networking, etc.).
- Distinguish among and employ a wide range of assessment strategies.
- Identify resources and strategies available to LCC students to help them be successful in online courses.
- Identify strategies and resources available to help faculty manage their time and workload when teaching online.
- Describe how Master Courses, Learning Object Repositories, etc., work together to more efficiently manage content.
- Locate and utilize resources available for requesting support and for using Desire2Learn (i.e., the Help Desk, eLearning's Web site, Request Forms, the Faculty Community Group, Center for Teaching Excellence workshops, etc.).
- Apply LCC's Course Management System Standards and Policies.
- Select a specific technology tool (e.g., Jing, Respondus, Kaltura, etc.) or best practice and demonstrate how to apply it to one's online course.
- Demonstrate proficiency utilizing the current Course Management System, Desire2Learn.
- Create a completed gradebook in D2L matching their course syllabus grading scenario.
Please note: Participants can expect to spend a minimum of 12-15 hours per week during the Fall and Spring semesters and a minimum of 15-20 hours per week during the Summer semester engaged in the twelve week online course during the Fall and Spring Semesters. While this is an online training, it is not self-paced. There are things to do, learn, reflect on, and submit nearly every day. There are specific deadlines for each assignment, discussion forums, etc.
For additional information contact Annescia Dillard at (517) 483-1407.
Teaching Online Certification Registration Form
This form is currently closed.
Center for Teaching Excellence
TLC Building
400 N. Capitol, Suite 324
Lansing, MI 48933
Phone: (517) 483-1680
Email: email@example.com
Additional contact information »
Open Hours
Monday - Thursday: 8:00 am - 6:00 pm
Friday: 8:00 am - 4:00 pm
To send an APPLEGRAM online,
fill-out the Applegram form.


text:
Fortune cast me a favourable glance this afternoon. Trudging back along a muddy path towards the railway crossing, I stumbled across a patch of sweet violets huddled underneath two old chestnut trees. The small purple flowers were in abundance, so I felt guilt-free in confiscating a handful. I've yet to decide what to make with the sugar, but I'll keep you posted. Kind of feels like I need a bit of zesty lime in the equation somewhere...
Sweet violet scented sugar
A handful of sweet violet petals
Granulated sugar
Scatter a layer of violet petals at the bottom of a jar. Cover with sugar and repeat the
process, building up petal/sugar layers until the jar is full. Leave for about a week,
then remove the violets.


text:
Kenneth Lund needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 55 designs submitted by 27 freelance designers.
WeddingTools.com is an online wedding planning website, that supports the DIY bride in planning her wedding.
We need a new logo for the site.
English "WeddingTools.com" / Danish "Bryllup.dk WeddingTools"
Our site has four main areas, all done by special developed software for making a wedding budget, a wedding checklist, wedding guest list and gift registry. Also, there's a forum / community and a LOT of articles and videos.
Main difference between our site and "all the other weddingsites" is that our WeddingTools software is INTELLIGENT. It learns from the users, so when a user inputs something in her budget, that noone else has, the system learns it and passes it on to all other users that might need it. It also takes care of alerting the user if they might be doing something wrong, late or perhaps too expensive.
Also, being a membership site, it relies heavily on being a COMMUNITY where brides help brides. It's almost "brides only" as grooms doesn't care about online planning and contrary to having a wedding planner (person) doing it all for you, the brides lean onto each other here for support, knowledge and help.
The logo must show these two things - "intelligent software" and "community feeling"
- Logo with graphics and text
- Logo / graphics should be simple, soft, romantic
- Text should be easily read (not too much caligraphic style) and to translate (as we have different names for our site in different countries). In english it's called "WeddingTools.com" and in danish it's called "Bryllup.dk WeddingTools"
- We like typical wedding'ish colours (purple, red, creme) but please do NOT make it too pink
- We need the logo in either at least 2000x2000 pixels 300 dpi OR as vectors, as we need to be able to scale the logo for website, posters, businesscards etc.
- We need to own the rights for the logo completely
- We need a rectangular logo - something in the area of 4:1 (4 wide, 1 tall)
- Colors that fit the red/green/graphite/green soft colors of this template: http://www.templatemonster.com/flas…18939.html
- We like typical wedding'ish colours (purple, red, creme) but please do NOT make it too pink
- Most other wedding sites use logos like rings or roses - we don't want that
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


text:
In the mood to infuse new life into your room or home in general? The simple and easy answer is accessories. Place a few homely and personal decorative pieces like vases, candlesticks and soft cushions and you've created a whole new ambience. So the real question is which ambience you want to create. Are you the luxurious hotel type, the bold colourful type or will the less-is-more look suit you best?
Here's a simple inspiration gallery that helps you mix and match and pick the perfect accessories. So let's go into detail.


text:
Israel News - Stay Informed, Pray Informed
One of the often forgotten aspects of the Middle East peace process is that that Palestinian state the international community is trying to create must be completely devoid of Jews. Nowhere else in the world would such a condition be viewed as anything less than racist and anti-Semitic. Israel's antagonists justify this stipulation by alleging that Jews are regularly stealing property from the Palestinian Arabs. But the truth is that Jews cannot even legally purchase property in areas claimed by the Palestinians without causing a global uproar.
Case in point, international newspapers and cable news networks were abuzz last week after a few Jewish families moved into a building they had purchased adjacent to the Cave of the Patriarchs in the Judean city of Hebron.
Never mind that the Cave of the Patriarchs (burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah) and Hebron itself constitute Judaism's second holiest location on earth. The area is today dominated by a Palestinian Arab population, and therefore is viewed as off-limits to Jews.
The original Arab owner of the property was arrested and brought in for questioning by the Palestinian Authority, which in the past has permitted the extra-judicial execution of Palestinians who sold property to Jews. The Israeli government also stopped additional Jewish families from moving into the building until its current ownership could be clarified, which it later was when lawyers for the buyers met with the Israeli army's Civil Administration.
Despite the fact that the purchase of the property was verified as legal, the local Jewish families still had to await special permission from the political leadership in order to settle in the house. It is a cynical twist of fate that only in the land of their forefathers do Jews today require special political authorization to purchase homes and actually dwell in them. Decades ago such restrictions were condemned when enforced by the nations of Europe. Today they are called "politically correct" in the Land of Israel.
Want more news from Israel?
Click Here to sign up for our FREE daily email updates
For Information & Reservations:
E-Mail: email@example.com
Israel Today
Free to Your Inbox


text:
Southbank Centre is committed to protecting your privacy. See our Privacy policy for more details.
diane arbus: in the beginning
Diane Arbus made most of her photographs in New York City, where she was born and died, and where she worked in locations such as Times Square, the Lower East Side and Coney Island. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and midtown shoppers, are among the most intimate, surprising and haunting works of art of the twentieth century.
Organised by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and adapted for Hayward Gallery, diane arbus: in the beginning takes an in-depth look at the formative first half of Arbus' career, during which the photographer developed the direct, psychologically acute style for which she later became so widely celebrated.
The exhibition features more than 100 photographs, the majority of which are vintage prints made by the artist, drawn from the Diane Arbus Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. More than two-thirds of these photographs have never been seen before in the UK.
Tracing the development of Arbus' early work with a 35mm camera to the distinctive square format she began using in 1962, the exhibition concludes with a presentation of A box of ten photographs, the portfolio Arbus produced in 1970 and 1971, comprising legendary portraits including Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967 and A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970.
This exhibition is organised by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Generously supported by Cockayne – Grants for the arts, The London Community Foundation and Alexander Graham with additional support from Michael G and C Jane Wilson.
Image credit:
Jack Dracula at a bar, New London, Conn. 1961 (detail)
9 3/4 × 6 5/8 in. (24.8 × 16.9 cm)
Promised Gift of Doon Arbus and Amy Arbus, 2007
Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/ Copyright © The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC.
All Rights Reserved.
11am – 7pm every day except Tuesdays when the gallery is closed. Late night opening on Thursdays until 9pm.
Each ticket allows entry to this exhibition and Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion.
about the Kader Attia exhibition
These exhibitions contain some content that visitors may find upsetting, including nudity and footage of sexual violence and mutilated corpses.
Get free entry to all exhibitions at Hayward Gallery and enjoy Members' private views.
Visit the exhibition in the company of special guests and Hayward Gallery's curatorial team. Tours take place on Thursdays at 6.30pm and Saturdays at 2pm, and take approximately 45 minutes.
Free with same-day exhibition ticket.
Saturday 16 February
Karan Rinaldo, Collections Specialist, Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thursday 28 February
Katie Guggenheim, Assistant Curator, Hayward Gallery
Thursday 14 March
Sarah Jones, Reader in Photography, Royal College of Art
Thursday 21 March
Carlotta Pierleoni, Curatorial Intern, Hayward Gallery
Thursday 11 April
Cliff Lauson, Senior Curator, Hayward Gallery
Saturday 27 April
Isabel Stevens, writer and production editor for Sight & Sound
Thursday 2 May
Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator of diane arbus: in the beginning and Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Please note that this tour takes place at 12 noon in addition to the usual 6.30pm tour.
Teachers can book free or discounted tickets (call our group ticket line for prices) for a group of up to 30 pupils to visit Hayward Gallery and experience the exhibition on weekdays during exhibition hours (closed Tuesdays).
Looking for a VIP exhibition experience for your group? Private guided tours are available with our experienced Hayward Gallery tour guides. These one-hour tours are available for groups of up to 20 people anytime the gallery is open to the public, and are £100 per group in addition to group exhibition entry.
Groups of ten people or more can get discounted entry prices for weekday visits when tickets are booked and paid for in advance.
Group Ticket Prices
Adult groups: £12.00
Secondary School, College and University Groups: £5.00 per student (Free tutor tickets when bringing a group of 10+ students)
Primary schools ages 4 –11: Free (Free tutor tickets when bringing a group)
Lambeth & Southwark Schools ages 4 –16: Free
To book a private tour or to make a group booking, call our group ticket line on 020 7960 4225 (Monday – Friday, 9.30am – 5.30pm) or email firstname.lastname@example.com for more information.


text:
This Is The Height Of Desperation: Goldie (On Big Brother Africa) Throws Up After Prezzo Says They Are Just Friends!
"Goldie is not happy with the way Prezzo has just described their relationship. " - Big Brother Africa
Please click the "Report" button below if the video on this page is not working properly.
Comments will only be displayed by verified emails. No Spamming or Racism.


text:
With able accelerated weight accident tips, you do not accept to decay too abundant of your time and accomplishment just to get rid of a brace of pounds. Since all of these tips are accurate safe and effective, you could readily absorb them to your exercise affairs and get rid of your baggy stomach, thighs and arms.
This commodity would altercate 5 important tips for accident weight. Once you accept apprehend this article, you would achieve all the aplomb you absent and feel contented with how your physique looks.
Use weights if alive out
One of the best means to access the bulk of fat you are afire is to absorb the use of weights in your circadian workout. Weight training would force your physique to apply added accomplishment during a accurate exercise routine; hence, acceptance you to use up added of your stored physique fat as energy.
Using weights is in fact one of the a lot of able accelerated weight accident tips that a lot of bloom buffs value. Weight training would accommodate you with the adventitious to accent your anatomy and to strengthen all your physique functions. With approved weight training, you could aswell advance your all-embracing physique bloom and addition your body's allowed system.
Cut down on calories
Cutting down on calories is simple. However, if you wish a certain exercise program, you should gradually cut down your calorie assimilation instead of acutely abbreviation the bulk of calories you consume. It is not appropriate to acutely cut down your calorie assimilation because this would alone apathetic down your metabolism and accomplish it harder for your physique to bake fat.
Create your alone conditioning plan
Another section of admonition from accelerated weight accident tips – appoint in a advanced array of contest instead of accomplishing the aforementioned accepted every day. This would accumulate your absorption on your weight accident affairs and accumulate you absorbed to your alone conditioning plan. Assuming a array of contest would aswell accent your physique faster.
Some of the routines that you should add in your circadian conditioning cover pond a few laps, biking, jogging, and assuming some aerobic exercises.
Reward yourself with treats
Instead of snacking on clutter foods and bistro candied treats every time you acquaintance cravings, you should just accolade yourself with these treats every now and then. Rewarding yourself would be so abundant bigger than cheating on your diet every time you feel any cravings for fast aliment and bathetic sweets.
Adopt a accomplished new lifestyle


text:
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Potato and Leek Soup with Crumbled Blue Cheese
The inspiration for this soup came from a classic Vichyssoise, a potato and leek soup generally enjoyed chilled. During the unbearably hot days at culinary school in New York, my teammates and I had made a cold Vichyssoise as an amuse-bouche for the school's restaurant. It turned out that a shot of cold yet creamy soup was the perfect way to start off a copious meal. Chilled soup would, however, be difficult to want to make at this time of year, so I tweaked the recipe to make it desirable for much cooler days. And what better way to serve it than in little espresso cups?
Montreal is a cold and bitter city come winter, but also a city where people - who are used to the wintery temperatures - still go out, eat out and enjoy life. Any Montrealer's wardrobe includes an extra pair of legwarmers under your jeans, socks up to your knees and fleece wherever you can fit it. The upside is that once you beat the first couple of steps out of the door, your body, although oddly at first - think frozen eyelids, and steamy cold breath - gets used to the cold and resets what normal warmth is. All to say that a bowl of steamy soup is really a great way to welcome the cold months to come.
On a less formal note, I am off to Venice in a couple weeks. Oliver and I were thinking about a small getaway and since were are spending the holidays in France with my family, Venice seemed like the perfect place to go to. I am sure you food lovers and travel lovers can relate to this: when I start booking a vacation, sure I look at the great sights, museums, architecture I want to be sure not to miss, but let's face it, I want to know what kind of food I'm going to be able to sample. Traveling through food is one of the greatest way to really experience the culture of the place you are in, the customs, the traditions and the aura of a place. I've done quite a bit of research and it seems quite unanimous that Venice is not the Italian city where the food is the best. I hear that finding more remote restaurants is the way to go to avoid touristy places with touristy prices. Any advice from you food lovers out there would be more than welcome! I promise to bring back a myriad of photos, and hopefully at least a couple recipes too.
Recipe (for 6)
2 ounces of pancetta, roughly chopped
1/2 white onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
3 leeks, chopped (use white and light green parts only)
2 bay leaves
2 cups of chicken stock
1 pound of diced Yukon Gold potatoes (about 8 small potatoes)
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup of crumbled blue cheese of your choice
Chives, to garnish
In a stockpot, add the pancetta on medium heat and cook until some of fat renders (about 3 minutes). Add the onion and stir to coat the fat. Add a drizzle of oil if needed. Cook until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the garlic.
Chop the leeks and add to the stockpot. Saute for 2 minutes. Add the diced potatoes and cook for another minute. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Add the chicken stock. The liquid should just cover the potatoes and leeks. Add water to cover if there isn't enough stock to do so. Add the bay leaves. Bring to a boil. Cover and reduce to a simmer. Simmer for 30 minutes. Taste, and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. Remove the bay leaves and blend with an immersion blender until the soup is smooth. Add a touch of water if the soup is too thick for your taste. Strain the soup to remove any lumps and strands of leek. Serve warm with crumbled blue cheese and garnish with chives. Enjoy!
14 comments:
- Maria said...
I am sure the blue cheese brings this soup to a whole new level. Great presentation too!
- November 20, 2008 at 9:54 AM
- Katherine Aucoin said...
The combination of all three flavors sounds heavenly. Your photos are terrific too!
- November 20, 2008 at 2:06 PM
- Dana Treat said...
Beautiful soup, gorgeously garnished and perfectly presented. Bravo! I am so jealous you are going to Venice - I have never been. I know it's not the culinary capital, but it's still Italy, right? How bad can the food be? :)
- November 20, 2008 at 5:56 PM
- Darius T. Williams said...
GREAT soup! I love it!
- November 20, 2008 at 7:24 PM
- Peppercorn Press said...
I love potato and leek soup. My version doesn't include the pancetta nor blue cheese - but they are both wonderfully delicious ideas. We're definitely having soup weather here and I can't wait to try this.
- November 20, 2008 at 7:34 PM
- Shari@Whisk: a food blog said...
What a gorgeous soup!
- November 20, 2008 at 8:51 PM
- Joanna said...
Venice is a place with a few really hot spots visited by people who come for the day. So the touristy places are right by those hotspots. Walk away from them, just a few hundred metres, and you'll find good places to eat. Especially, you should go to the neighbourhood bars for lunch, you'll have interesting things. And if you go to the fish market by the Rialto, there are good places to eat there, too.
And, actually, Venetian cooking is under-regarded. Read Francesco da Mosto's book, Francesco's Kitchen, which is a love letter to the cuisine of his city. And Tessa Kiros has just published a new book about Venetian food, which I bought yesterday, but have not yet started to read.
Above all, enjoy ... it is the most fabulous place, especially once all the day-trippers have left
- November 21, 2008 at 6:20 AM
- Chocolate Shavings said...
Joanna: Thank you for the kind advice. I will be sure to check out those books before my trip, and let you know how it goes!
- November 21, 2008 at 12:39 PM
- Jennifer said...
I love bleu cheese, this looks delicious!
Your photos are always so lovely as well.
You've been Tagged
- November 21, 2008 at 1:59 PM
- Elra said...
Great new twist for the humble potato and leek soup.
- November 21, 2008 at 2:01 PM
- Deanna S. said...
Whoa, this looks deeeelicious and beautiful..love your food styling and photos!! Have fun in Italy, looking forward to pictures!
- November 21, 2008 at 10:47 PM
- matt wright said...
complete and utter awesomeness. I love potato and leek soup, and the addition of the blue cheese must give it a great kick.
- November 22, 2008 at 8:08 PM
- Pepy said...
Awesome presentation with lovely ingredients.
- December 28, 2008 at 9:51 PM
- Jeremy said...
I love soups in winter, warming nourishing and usually make my own. This one looks little thick and my kids like thick one too. I would give it a try.
- March 26, 2009 at 3:30 AM


text:
|2012-12-12, 09:51
|Link #21
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Canada
Of course, this also means Killer heard the news and by extension the other supernova alliance in the works. Oh the possibilities! (Of course, that's if the translation I'm following is actually correct)
Anyways, great chapter.
|2012-12-12, 10:08
|Link #22
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2005
Was there EVER a need to doubt that Dofla's crew would reach PH before the Straw-Hats left the island? Personally, I'm not the least bit surprised that the both of them arrived at the time they did.
Anyways, as expected, Baby-5 is the thread's hot topic at the moment, but I'm pretty much in the minority of those who's more interested in Buffalo (who is NOT the loli from earlier. Yes James, I still remember our previous chat about that ). Cuz hey, now we've got some weirdo who has the power of flight AND wind! Seems like a pretty powerful combination to me. And as a member of Dofla's crew, he should be no pushover in a fight either....
But going back to Baby-5 for a bit: As strange as this may sound, I think she would actually be a more suitable opponent for Franky than just about any of the other Straw-Hats. Mainly because the both of them are weapon users. Maybe the maid even has her own mecha transformation.....
|2012-12-12, 10:36
|Link #23
Okuyasu the Bird
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Alberta, Canada
Age: 27
A maid character that uses incredibly oversized firearms and has a proficiency in combat with them....hmmmmm, now where have I seen this before? Heck she's probably an expy of the robot maid archetype in general. That aside, her quirk of getting off on being relied on by men (or maybe anybody?) is kind of amusing.
Buffalo's power is something I wouldn't have expected enabling him to fly. Pretty unique. I guess this counts as one of the very few known devil fruit powers that allow that now.
And Franky finally appears after god knows how many chapters of mysterious absence. His Iron Shogun mech suit obviously protects him from Shinokuni, but one has to wonder why he's waiting out there. With Oda there has to be a reason.
And Kinemon is dead. That's surprising. I suspect it won't be forever but how the heck is he going to be "revived"?
Anyway, Dressrosa is definitely looking like the next destination. Finally after such a long time since his introduction Doflamingo's going to get an arc villain role.~
|2012-12-12, 11:56
|Link #24
Join Date: May 2004
|2012-12-12, 13:14
|Link #26
Join Date: Sep 2009
Either that or Franky will have no idea what is going on and just let them walk away.
|2012-12-12, 13:52
|Link #27
Cool as a Cucumber
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Holland
Am I the only one who's getting slightly annoyed with Luffy's behaviour? I mean, of course, Luffy will be Luffy etc. But even after promising Zoro to get serious, this being the NW and all, he still fucks up and acts like a child in regards to his pact with Law.
I dunno. It ticked me of. Would be great for once to see some form of planning from that idiot. Wouldn't hurt his character development if he does so from time to time. Not too often of course.
|2012-12-12, 14:03
|Link #28
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: 1431 Highland Drive
|2012-12-12, 14:26
|Link #30
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2007
That being said, Franky can probably take either one down by himself. He hasn't made much of an impact in this arc, so now is the perfect opportunity to rectify that.
|2012-12-12, 15:17
|Link #32
ANEGO Worshiper
Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: By the vending machine, drinking tea.
|2012-12-12, 15:29
|Link #33
ANEGO Worshiper
Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: By the vending machine, drinking tea.
All of Luffy's new Haki attacks are named after RL guns with animals in their names. What I wonder is why Oda chose to name Luffy's giant haki punch after an Elephant killing weapon but then named a much stronger attack after a smaller and weaker pistol.
|2012-12-12, 17:19
|Link #35
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2005
The funny thing is, the scene where Luffy made that promise to Zoro was kind of a gag setup in the first place.
I get your point, though. You basically want to see more maturity in Luffy. I remember lots of folks had similar expectations during the chapters leading up to the timeskip. I think I was one of the only few in the minority who believed he wouldn't undergo some big change, though. Being simple-minded is.... just his nature. Plus, it was already established much, MUCH earlier in the series that he wouldn't tolerate people who treat their crew like trash (the Kuro arc, to be more specific). And seeing as Caesar really WAS a huge scumbag anyway, can you really blame Luffy for getting as angry as he did.....?
And honestly, if it's about planning, that's kind of what his crew is there for. Going back to East Blue again, Luffy had already admitted back then that he wouldn't be able to survive without his crew's help. So pardon me if I don't really expect a guy who loudly confessed such flaws to suddenly start formulating his own strategies. Frankly, I'm surprised that he even agreed to Law's alliance proposal on his own!
Honestly, I think it's a little unfair to assume that both Baby-5 and Buffalo are THAT much weaker than Vergo. I mean, I also don't doubt that he's superior to the both of them, but that doesn't have to mean that there's such a huge gap between them (seeing as they're fellow members of Dofla's crew). Especially if the both of them are haki users.... again, I wouldn't doubt that Vergo has more advanced mastery of haki over them, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't use it in some rather unique ways.....
That being said, I'm actually a little surprised that there hasn't been much talk about the following:
-Oda once again making a gag out of something "serious". Last arc we had that whole Sanji nosebleed thing that literally led to a life-or-death situation. Now here we have this whole deal with Baby-5's quirk of being insecure, which results in her losing money AND lovers! And again, such misery is being treated as a gag! Personally, I don't have a problem with it, but considering how many people were griping about Sanji nearly dying from horniness last arc, I'm surprised nobody else has taken issue with Baby-5's plight so far.
-The top hat guy who may or may not be Lucci. Considering how popular he seems to be around these parts, I figured more people would be speculating about how he's potentially become a major force in the NW or something. Personally, I don't care much about the guy myself, but I actually am interested in seeing what became of him and the rest of the old CP9 since that ministory.....
Last edited by marvelB; 2012-12-12 at 17:35.
|2012-12-12, 17:51
|Link #36
ばか =)
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
Age: 33
I think a lot of people are over looking Mr Peakoms and his partner viewing the punk hazard's occurrences....maybe a clear sign of big mum using the zoan army?
I think Luffy being forever immature is 100% fine by me. Luffy will always be Luffy love him or hate him.
Go Franky Go. He will somehow manage to stop Ceasar from being taken..somehow.
I'd love to have BABY 5 as a new nakama....but I agree that her powers clash with frankies but still she's an immediate hit.
|2012-12-12, 18:10
|Link #38
Shougi Génération
Graphic Designer
|2012-12-12, 18:32
|Link #39
Mr. Prince
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
Age: 35
|Thread Tools


text:
Arizona Republicans hold two-thirds of the seats in both chambers of the Legislature after padding their majorities in 2010 as the party's wave swept across the nation. But those "supermajorities" that allowed them to vigorously pursue conservative courses on gun rights and other social issues appear to be on the line Nov. 6.
Republicans outnumber Democrats statewide and hold leads in most legislative districts, but this is the first general election using the map of new districts drawn after the 2010 census.
Redistricting left many Republicans unhappy, complaining that the state redistricting commission favored Democrats and stressed creation of competitive districts — ones winnable by either major party — at the expense of other redistricting goals.
The redistricting changes, the growing percentage of registered independents and the higher turnout in a presidential election are creating expectations that more districts are in play and that the Republicans' 2010 gains were a high tide that will recede in November.
"We're going to see a shift. They will no longer have a supermajority," said Mike Gardner, a Republican lobbyist and former legislator. "It will have a major impact on the types of policies that this Legislature will pass."
In Arizona, a party must hold two-thirds of the seats in a chamber to have a supermajority. That's the threshold required for veto overrides, but more routinely it enables a chamber's majority to take an aggressive policy course even if a few of its own members balk.
In recent years, Republicans in the state Legislature used that power to pursue conservative legislation on social issues ranging from gun rights to school choice while championing a small-government philosophy on regulatory matters and social services and pushing for tax cuts for business.
Except when Democrat Janet Napolitano was governor, Democratic lawmakers have had little say on contentious issues— usually finding themselves on the winning side only when their positions lined up with those of moderate Republicans.
Governors from both parties have used their veto stamps and other powers to sometimes hold lawmakers in check, particularly during the six years before Napolitano departed in 2009 to become U.S. Homeland Security secretary. However, current Gov. Jan Brewer more often than not finds herself in ideological sync with her fellow Republicans.
While the GOP's 40-seat majority in the 60-member House is expected to shrink a bit, most attention is focused on the 30-member Senate. Republicans picked up four additional Senate seats in 2010 and now hold 21 seats, a record high.
But even if Republicans retain control of the Senate, the loss of four or five seats would give disproportionate clout to GOP moderates, said Sen. Steve Gallardo, a Phoenix Democrat.
"They definitely have to stick together to get anything out of the state Senate. If one or two decides to flee from the bloc on critical bills, that changes the whole ballgame," Gallardo said. "The day of this tea party agenda is over."
Republicans' talking points in this year's legislative races include boasting of the state's return to fiscal stability and efforts to stimulate the economy.
Meanwhile, Democrats point to budget cuts in education funding and accuse Republicans of waging "extremist" policies against women on contraception and abortion.
"The Democrats' goal in this election is to make the Republican Party look as extreme as possible because that tends to turn off registered independents," said Chris Herstam, a political analyst and former Republican legislator.
Republicans have controlled both chambers of the Legislature since the early 1990s, except for a 15-15 split in the Senate in the 2001-2002 session.
To produce another Senate split like that, Democrats would have to overcome sizable GOP registration margins in several districts and sweep virtually all the races considered up for grabs.
"That's what is going to tilt the Legislature — those competitive seats," Gallardo said.
As in 2010, national politics could again have an impact on legislative races, said Kristin Borns, a former Arizona State University policy analyst and registered independent who worked in Napolitano's administration.
Some candidates "are hooking onto the presidential election and some of our congressional races," while the higher voter turnout for a presidential election also is a factor, Borns said. "It's a national election year."


text:
HANOVER, N.H. — Things have only gotten messier at Dartmouth College in the weeks since a former fraternity brother went public with hazing allegations involving swimming in and swallowing vomit.
Senior Andrew Lohse brought the issue to the forefront in January, when he wrote a column in the school newspaper describing "dehumanizing" experiences he witnessed at Sigma Alpha Epsilon. According to Lohse, the fraternity pressured pledges to swim in a kiddie pool of rotten food, vomit and other bodily fluids; eat omelets made of vomit and chug cups of vinegar. He called those activities the norm rather than the exception on the Ivy League campus, and he criticized the administration for not doing enough when he made anonymous complaints last year.
The week after the column was published, more than 100 faculty members wrote to the administration, describing hazing as an "open secret" and calling on the administration to set up an independent commission to address it. The college has since formed a task force and brought hazing charges through its judicial affairs office against the fraternity and more than a quarter of its members, including Lohse.
Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson declined to comment on those charges, but the fraternity's president, Brendan Mahoney, said all 27 accused students face identical charges relating to new member recruitment in the fall of 2011. But by that time, the fraternity had gotten rid of any traditions that would be "deemed problematic" by the administration, Mahoney said, and no current members of SAE were members in 2009 when Lohse was a pledge.
As for Lohse's graphic allegations, "None of these practices, and nothing remotely close to hazing, occurred at our pledge events in 2011," he said in an email to The Associated Press.
Lohse did not specify in his column whether all alleged abuses occurred in 2009 or later, and he declined to comment Monday, citing an agreement with another publication.
Dartblog.com, a blog written by former students about the college, obtained a copy of the letter notifying Lohse of the charges against him. According to the letter, Lohse is accused of threatening physical harm to new fraternity members, putting other students in fear for their safety and/or engaging in hazing during the fall 2011 term. He also is accused providing alcohol to underage students, providing drugs and/or providing alcohol to obviously intoxicated individuals during the same time period.
The charges filed were identical for the other individuals, "even though Lohse's tale does not describe them as engaged in the same activities," said Mahoney, who said students have been charged "without a shred of real evidence." Administrators, he suggested, are panicking in the face of bad press.
"We do know that Dartmouth has come in for a lot of bad publicity because of Lohse's allegations. We hope Dartmouth's administration will focus on the evidence rather than on a public relations strategy," he said.
Johnson, the college administrator, strongly denied both Lohse's allegation that the college failed to act on his initial complaints and Mahoney's suggestion that the recent charges were brought to quell criticism.
"When we get detailed, specific information regarding hazing or any other violation of our code, we act," she said. "This isn't a witch hunt, nor are we sitting on our hands."
She said the administration already had been working hard to tackle the issue of hazing and was not simply responding to the recent allegations and faculty pressure.
For example, the college hired a new director of Greek organizations who had been credited with turning around the fraternity and sorority system at another college, has hired two sexual assault coordinators and is in the process of hiring another alcohol and drug abuse counselor. The college sees hazing as part of a larger problem, tied together with binge drinking and sexual assault, and has taken steps to address all three through the National College Health Improvement Project it launched last year.
"Clearly we put our resources where our mouth is," she said. "This idea that we have somehow thrown up our hands, said there's nothing we can do about hazing or other high risk behavior going on on college campuses is a complete mischaracterization."
Johnson also said college officials did everything they could when Lohse made his anonymous complaints, but the tips he provided didn't pan out.
Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone, who also investigated at the time, agreed. Based on information Lohse provided, police set up a stakeout in a wooded area in December 2010 but nothing they witnessed among pledges and SAE members amounted to hazing, he said. Police began investigating again after Lohse's column was published, but criminal charges are unlikely, Giaccone said, in large part because Lohse is not cooperating with police.
"We also realized that based on his past history with us, that he may be a witness that would have credibility issues, and it may hard to rehabilitate him in the eyes of judge or jury if we ended up going that route," Giaccone said.
Those credibility issues include Lohse's 2010 arrest and conviction for cocaine possession and witness tampering and a 2011 disorderly conduct conviction, following a confrontation with a security officer during Homecoming Weekend festivities.
"The opinion of most students is that he has a bone to pick with both the college and SAE," said Stephanie Pignatiello, a senior who said that while she believes hazing happens, she thinks Lohse's claims are greatly exaggerated. But she also agrees with him that the college hasn't done much to solve the problem.
"They seem to be largely absent," she said. "I don't think much will change at the administrative level."
Sophomore Stuart Ghafoor said reading Lohse's condensed description of hazing was "gross," but not a surprise. He thinks SAE is being scapegoated so the college can appear to be doing something to address hazing.
"But if the administration goes after it, it could make it even more underground, which would be more dangerous," he said.
Arts & Entertainment
Sheryl Crow records 'Redemption Day' with Johnny Cash vocals
Local & State
Caribou had snow on the ground for 163 consecutive days
Consumers hanging on to old cellphones in record numbers
Boston Red Sox
Sale strikes out 10, but Boston drops Game 1 to Tigers
U.S. expands probe into air bag failures to 12.3 million vehicles


text:
Who needs Venice when you have a gondola in your courtyard? This modern concrete home in Bangladesh has a serene lagoon in the atrium, making it the kind of place you'd never want to leave.
The tall, temple-like structure is an airy retreat from the outside world. Living there would be like having your own tropical escape in your home. And the pool in the middle isn't just eye candy — it also helps push hot air out, cooling things off on the inside. From the minds of Shatotto Architects, the multi-level, open ceiling opens up the place for air and natural light, and the boat makes it easy to get from the living room to the pantry as fast as possible. Now you just need someone to row it for you. [HiConsumption]


text:
Express. Home of the Daily and Sunday Express.
Pamela Anderson injured during skating training
Actress PAMELA ANDERSON has been left battered and bruised during training for DANCING ON ICE.
The former Baywatch star is learning to ice skate for the series, in which she is paired with professional Matt Evers.
The pair has been practising routines ahead of the show's first episode and Anderson is sporting a number of bruises across her body due to the tough training sessions.
She tells Closer magazine, "Ice skating is all new to me and the rehearsals have been really tough. My skating partner, Matt Evers, is great. Our chemistry is really good and he's been so patient. I love the choreography and the lifts, but everything is so difficult - I've got bruises everywhere."
Anderson admits her sons were sceptical about her involvement with the show when she first told them, adding, "When I told Brandon that I would be skating on Dancing On Ice, he just rolled his eyes. My sons like surfing and playing rugby. Typical boys!"
The series is set to debut on Sunday (06Jan13).


text: On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > >> "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen > >> or 1024 chickens?" > > > >I'd take the chickens any day, if each chicken could plow 1/1024th of > >the field faster than the two oxen could do the whole thing. > > > >And they only cost chickenfeed...;-) > > The fundamental problem is you need a $2 million network for your 1024 > chickens. > > All i need with the virtual 1 tflop processor is some of that XDR memory, > add a few memory banks at the mainboard which are each independantly > connected to one of the 4 sides of the chip. Ah, Vincent, I begin to see your point. We are (not surprisingly, I suppose) talking about two different things. I thought that your remarks were directed at the discussion on VECTOR PROCESSORS. Vector processors are speciality processors designed to do one thing only, but do it very well. Take in one or more vectors of data on the right, perform any one of several relatively simple/linear transformations on each element (generally the same transformation or set of transformations to every element) and spit out a vector of results on the left. Classic examples of vector processors are e.g. digital signal processors or graphics processing units -- both take a fairly predictable stream of vectorized data and wreak a fairly standard set of transformations upon it. See: ttp://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/HPCinfo/glossary.html Because they don't have to waste all that processors space on the implementation of general purpose instructions, they can stack up nice little floating point pipelines much deeper than a general purpose CPU, and run many M successive steps of a vector transformation at once, where it is applying instruction 1 to the Mth data object at the same time it is applying instruction M to the 1st data object in a stream of N objects. If N is much much bigger than M, and if the processor doesn't have to do annoying things like compare each result to something and maybe branch and flush and refill the entire pipeline, this can reduce the time required per instruction to something like 1/Mth of the clock (presuming that the logic can retire one instruction per clock cycle at each level). Note that general purpose CPUs often have pipelines these days and can manage "vector instructions" but the pipelines are not very deep -- typically what, 2-3 instructions? -- and often support only a few speciality floating point operations. This is enough to enable relatively fast simple transforms that involve e.g. multiply-adds (a very common instruction pair in linear algebra and one of the things studied by stream). Thus a perrennial question discussed on the list is whether or not beowulfs equipped with attached DSP or GPUs to do vector instructions is a "win" in terms of performance for people with the right code. This often appears in the context of a discussion of whether or not to build a cluster out of the latest round of game boxes (e.g. gamecubes, playstations, whatever). This is because these boxes, these days, have enough general purpose power to be able to run a simple operating system including a network, but have dedicated graphics processors so that they can do their game graphics transformations very quickly. There have been "clusters" with vector processors attached to scalar processors sold as (usually SIMD) supercomputers in years past, e.g. Thinking Machines CM series -- consensus among my friends who used them are that they were a godawful pain to program but sure, quite speedy for the right code. I think that the accuracy of this description persists to this very day for this sort of architecture. Now, I was pointing out the following simple fact. Memory speeds are MUCH MUCH SLOWER than CPU speeds, and for that matter, pretty much always have been. Furthermore, faster memory (for any given memory generation) costs MUCH more than slower memory. That is WHY there is a memory hierarchy on EVERY system ever built. It runs something like the following simplified picture with times that are best of my recollection and may not be current (they very definitely change as systems evolve, although more slowly than Moore's Law advances raw CPU speed, creating a widening gap): register memory: on CPU -- fastest, access in ~1 clock as part of execution cycle L1 cache: static RAM, on CPU -- very fast, access in a few clocks (<=1 ns?) L2 cache: static RAM, also "on" most modern CPUs but hierarchically lives between L1 and either L3 on the few systems that have a third cache layer or more commonly DRAM -- main memory. access in ~1-5 ns. DRAM: main dynamic memory on most computers. A typical modern design pays a relatively high latency hit for reading at a new address (say 40 ns) followed by much lower hits for streaming sequential reads beginning at the first location -- IIRC around 10 ns each, but this changes fast enough that I wouldn't be surprised if my numbers are obsolete. How much data gets clocked in per cycle depends on many things such as the width of the datapath. Virtual memory: swap, NUMA, non-NUMA network partitioned memory. Typically BOTH high latency AND relatively low bandwidth, although NUMA SMP designs can be RELATIVELY fast since that's the whole point. Numbers can range from about an order of magnitude slower than DRAM to many orders of magnitude slower, especially for latency-bounded access to disk-based swap where disk latencies are typically in the MILLIsecond range. If you are running code that "needs" VM to fit, you're either dead (it can be viewed as a code design "bug", as I think Mark pointed out) or you have to work very hard organizing your code to get "acceptable" speeds Note that with the exception of register memory all memory hits on a system SLOW the system relative to its theoretical instruction execution rate. Instructions are typically retired in 1/2-2 clock cycles (depending on pipelining and parallelism) which is a sub-ns time on modern CPUs. Accessing memory outside of L1 takes many clocks, although lots of things work to make those accesses run in parallel with execution so that the CPU has to wait a minimal amount of time to get data/code into its working memory. The whole point of having the memory hierarchy is that if your program, or data, have any significant degree of locality, having the cache hides the slowness of the DRAM subsystem, which is a factor of 30-100 slower than operational register memory on the CPU itself. If your code is 90% local at any given layer of cache, the average time required to run your code is something like 0.9 T_s + 0.1 T_l where T_s is the short time to get something out of (say) L_2 vs the long time T_l to get something out of DRAM. In ns, this could be something like 0.9 1 + 0.1 10 = 2 ns average access time instead of 10 ns average access time to get the same data straight out of DRAM without caching. The effect is especially great when looking at random access patterns, where one pays the 40 ns latency hit in DRAM. benchmaster has a "shuffled" mode that lets you look at random read, random write, random read/write rates to big blocks of memory, and memory performance really goes straight to hell compared to streaming for cache-defeating patterns. I do mean hell: rgb at lucifer|B:1115>./benchmaster -t 6 -s 1000000 -r avg full = 1.508151e+08 min = 1.502259e+08 max = 1.519108e+08 Content-Length: 1065 <?xml version="1.0"?> <benchml> <version>Benchmaster 1.1.2</version> <hostinfo> <hostname>lucifer</hostname> <vendor_id> GenuineIntel</vendor_id> <CPU name> Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz</CPU name> <CPU clock units="Mhz"> 1804.520</CPU clock> <l2cache units="KB"> 512 KB</l2cache> <memtotal units="KB">515840</memtotal> <memfree units="KB">104832</memfree> <nanotimer>cpu cycle counter nanotimer</nanotimer> <nanotimer_granularity units="nsec">99.144</nanotimer_granularity> </hostinfo> <benchmark> <name>memory read/write</name> <command>./benchmaster</command> <args>-t 6 -s 1000000 -r</args> <description>Reads, then writes 4 byte integer vector</description> <iterations>2</iterations> <size>1000000</size> <stride>shuffled</stride> <time units="nsec">1.48e+02</time> <time_stddev units="nsec">3.97e-02</time_stddev> <min_time units="nsec">1.48e+02</min_time> <max_time units="nsec">1.49e+02</max_time> <rate units="10e+6">6.74e+00</rate> </benchmark> </benchml> Note the >>148 nsec<< access time required to read, then write, a single integer into/out of a shuffled/random memory location in a vector much larger than cache. This is much LARGER than you'd naively expect just from the properties of DDR on a 500 FSB system. Compare it to doing the SAME TASK (complete to the indirected addressing, but with an unshuffled addressing vector): rgb at lucifer|B:1116>./benchmaster -t 6 -s 1000000 avg full = 8.291473e+06 min = 8.127370e+06 max = 8.964347e+06 Content-Length: 1055 <?xml version="1.0"?> <benchml> <version>Benchmaster 1.1.2</version> <hostinfo> <hostname>lucifer</hostname> <vendor_id> GenuineIntel</vendor_id> <CPU name> Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz</CPU name> <CPU clock units="Mhz"> 1804.520</CPU clock> <l2cache units="KB"> 512 KB</l2cache> <memtotal units="KB">515840</memtotal> <memfree units="KB">104832</memfree> <nanotimer>cpu cycle counter nanotimer</nanotimer> <nanotimer_granularity units="nsec">99.920</nanotimer_granularity> </hostinfo> <benchmark> <name>memory read/write</name> <command>./benchmaster</command> <args>-t 6 -s 1000000</args> <description>Reads, then writes 4 byte integer vector</description> <iterations>2</iterations> <size>1000000</size> <stride>1</stride> <time units="nsec">5.81e+00</time> <time_stddev units="nsec">2.66e-02</time_stddev> <min_time units="nsec">5.65e+00</min_time> <max_time units="nsec">6.48e+00</max_time> <rate units="10e+6">1.72e+02</rate> </benchmark> </benchml> Down to 5 nsec per integer -- a more efficient addressing loop would probably drop this a hair. The memory is no faster, but now cache "works" for a factor of 30 speedup. Go down still further in size: <?xml version="1.0"?> <benchml> <version>Benchmaster 1.1.2</version> <hostinfo> <hostname>lucifer</hostname> <vendor_id> GenuineIntel</vendor_id> <CPU name> Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz</CPU name> <CPU clock units="Mhz"> 1804.520</CPU clock> <l2cache units="KB"> 512 KB</l2cache> <memtotal units="KB">515840</memtotal> <memfree units="KB">104832</memfree> <nanotimer>cpu cycle counter nanotimer</nanotimer> <nanotimer_granularity units="nsec">99.900</nanotimer_granularity> </hostinfo> <benchmark> <name>memory read/write</name> <command>./benchmaster</command> <args>-t 6 -s 1000</args> <description>Reads, then writes 4 byte integer vector</description> <iterations>256</iterations> <size>1000</size> <stride>1</stride> <time units="nsec">3.47e+00</time> <time_stddev units="nsec">7.70e-03</time_stddev> <min_time units="nsec">3.41e+00</min_time> <max_time units="nsec">3.62e+00</max_time> <rate units="10e+6">2.88e+02</rate> </benchmark> </benchml> into RW into L1, and you see times approaching 50x faster, where again some of this is double-indexing overhead. Even here random access forces one to give back a factor of 10 in speed -- it is faster to access a streaming int vector out of DRAM than it is to access data out of L1 in random order. The CPU really "wants" data access to be sequential and local, and makes you pay for it in time and idle cycles when it is not. The net result of all of this is that a LOT of what you perceive of as "raw CPU speed" on any given computer is an illusion -- smoke and mirrors -- perpetrated by a very clever memory hierarchy and will vanish instantly for the wrong kind of cache defeating work. There are all sorts of lovely human metaphors -- some work you can do "in your head", some requires information in papers on your desk that you have to put into your head, some involves papers in filing cabinets in your office (and indeed all your tasks START by getting out some particular file or set of files), some of those files have to get shipped in from the main office across town and all your results ultimately have to be shipped back to the main office when you're done. Same thing. You can be a super-genius and do the "brain work" for each file in zero time and only be a little faster than the plodding Joe next door if it takes both of you longer to get the files from across town into your local file cabinets, get the files from there onto your desks, and get the data from the files and into your respective heads than it does for either one of you to solve the actual problem once it is there. This is not always the case, of course, for HPC and computer tasks in general any more than it is for humans. Humans might WELL take on a task and require days or weeks to solve it from their "desktop" compared to minutes to hours to obtain the task and file away results. Plenty of HPC tasks involve things like computing trancendental functions or doing division inside the primary loop, tasks that take a LONG time and give the memory subsystems plenty of time to keep up with the CPU. So one invents a term to differentiate task types: "memory bound" tasks are ones where memory I/O is the rate-determining bottleneck that limits performance. "CPU bound" tasks are ones whose completion time scales with the inverse of CPU clock, more or less independent of the particular memory hierarchy involved. On parallel architectures, "interprocessor communications (IPC) bound" is an extension of the memory bound idea to distributed tasks; the IPC bottleneck has profound effects on the parallel SCALING of tasks across a set of nodes. >From what you are saying (in this and previous communications) your particular application, computer chess, is in the relatively happy regime where the application is CPU bound, hence your somewhat cavalier attitude to the VERY DIFFICULT AND EXPENSIVE TASK of designing the CPU-memory interface on modern computers. I don't think you appreciate how serious a problem this is, or how much serious money e.g. Intel or AMD spend on solving it. Whether or not you are memory bound can be determined easily enough from the task scaling -- if it takes (say) 4 seconds to determine its next move from some given configuration on a 500 MHz P6-family CPU, 2 seconds on a 1 GHz P6-family CPU, and 1 second on a 2 GHz P6-family CPU (independent of the amount or kind of memory, and probably even independent of the amount of L2 cache) then yes, it is probably CPU bound. Or use minutes or hours if appropriate. Guessing that a chess program spends most of its time doing character or integer tasks and comparisons -- processing large integer-indexed outcome trees of integer-sized binary encoded information with boolean instructions and indexing arithmetic -- one would expect the ENTIRE discussion on vector processors to be pretty much irrelevant to your application, as the VPs in question only are useful for doing streaming floating point arithmetic, and generally only for a fairly specific subset of numerical instructions and fairly specific data sizes at that. It isn't clear that they would be at ALL useful, or even usable, for/by your program. If, OTOH, the program perhaps STARTS by scaling with clock for relatively simple board configurations but then grinds to a metaphorical halt and no longer scales with CPU clock for more complex ones; it is quite possible that it starts CPU bound (for configurations that fit into L2 or are sufficiently local in memory that the architecture's cache fill algorithms "work") and then crosses over as the program has to look further and further away in memory (and in more and more random ways) to work out the outcome trees. In this case you'd observe a very definite cache effect -- larger processors wouldn't necessarily run instructions faster at any given clock but they WOULD run out of cache more often and avoid that nasty random access latency hit and hence would finish complex trees faster. You'd likely also observe a fairly straightforward dependence on memory type and speed, given that you're running on systems as old as 500 MHz PIII's, with their relatively slow FSB and relatively inefficient MMUs. Faster memory would produce immediate improvement independent of CPU speed, or on top of it as I don't think you can get 500 MHz systems with faster memory but rather have to get faster systems with faster memory. It wouldn't be surprising for those faster systems to relatively UNDERPERFORM CPU clock speed increases if your task IS partly memory bound, because of the aforementioned memory speed gap. Bleeding edge CPU clock speeds are about a factor of 8 faster than a 500 MHz PIII, but DRAM memory speeds have not gone up this much. > Even if that XDR rambuss grossely expensive at say $1000 for 2 gigabyte, > > then i put in 4 dimms of it at each independant memory controller of the > chip, > delivering a total bandwidth of 100 gigabyte a second. > > Even a medium engineer can add on die memory controllers to a chip. > > The extreme expensive mainboard i buy for $2500 and i feel ripped off. > The extreme expensive cell processor i buy for $3000 and i feel ripped off, > > But even then at a total price of say $10k the system is eating your $3 > million 1024 chicken system alive. > > See my point? > > Whatever price the 1024 chickens have, your network costs several million. No, no, no. First, the "oxen" you are proposing as an alternative simply doesn't exist -- we'd ALL love to have cheap 1 THz processors, and in lessee (log_2(25) = 4.64)x 2 = 9.3 years we might have them, if Moore's law holds out that long. If they did exist, we'd yoke them together and call them chickens and build QHz cluster out of them so we could finally count the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin (the answer is doubtless 42, but we have to be sure:-). Second, many a 1024 chicken cluster is very productive indeed with a 100BT network that costs maybe $10/chic-- I mean node;-) Other clusters can get by with gigabit ethernet at perhaps $100/node. Then sure, there are high end clusters that spend as much or more on the network per node as they do on the nodes themselves, and intermediate RDMA and TCP/IP managing gigE NICs that come in somewhere in between. All of these options make SENSE and are COST-BENEFIT OPTIMAL for various classes of problems -- the 100 BT solution for all embarrassingly parallel problems and quite a few "coarse grained" parallel problems (e.g. rendering, computing nifty mandelbrot set pictures, maybe even chess), the successively faster network solutions for parallel problems with IPCs that are increasingly bandwith and/or latency bound. The idea is to pick a cluster architecture for which your problem is UNbound by IPCs out to some desireable degree of speedup, in the most affordable way, not to build the world's biggest cluster as a marketing ploy (however often the latter is what actually happens). It is worth pointing out NOW that it is well known that there are whole classes of problem that do NOT parallelize efficiently on any available hardware including even the most advanced networks. A cluster or supercomputer of ANY sort do not always make sense and there is a whole computer science of the scaling of the diminishing returns. Network I/O is still hovering around 1 microsecond latency and bandwidths in the range of billions of bits per second. The former is order(s) of magnitude slower than the slowest DRAM; the latter is order(s) of magnitude slower than the slowest DRAM. You cannot just refill registers on your CPU from a memory location on a remote system anywhere nearly as fast as you can refill it from your own DRAM, and in many cases you have to FIRST move memory from DRAM to DRAM and THEN let operations move it into L2, L1, registers and so on, so it is strictly an ADDITIONAL hit timewise. For single-threaded tasks performing serialized instructions, there is no advantage to using a cluster unless the task is so big that it won't fit into local memory, in which case a network-cluster-based VM extension may well be the fastest possible solution that lets you run at all (whether or not it is "fast enough" to do what you need to do). NOTE WELL! Speedup, slowdown, and what kind of network suffices to represent a "solution" to any given problem depends STRONGLY on task organization. You cannot just say "my task doesn't run any faster on a cluster". You may have to COMPLETELY REORGANIZE AND REWRITE your task so it WILL run faster on a cluster, and the reorganization and cluster design it will run on are INTEGRATED in the final solution so one of the former will by no means fit all of the latter. To make the discussion concrete, let's address two tasks. We just heard from somebody that discovered the simplest possible form of parallelism -- instead of trying to partition an entire computation and all of its linear algebra components to run efficiently on any kind of cluster (and most modern "real supercomputers" are just clusters with custom memory/cpu interconnects -- an internal "memory" if you like) he just ran multiple instances of the serialized job. Why not? He had lots of runs to make, and doing them at the same time on N nodes gets them done in 1/N of the time of a single node! This is the IDEAL! The more "like" this you can make your task, or any significant PART of your task, the better your parallel scaling will be and the greater the parallel speedup you will observe. Then lets think about YOUR task, parsing out chess moves. So far, it sounds like the code that does it is pretty much strictly serialized. Strictly parallelizing the serialized portions within any given tree may not be particularly efficient, as it may take longer to communicate state at each succeeding level than the task would take to run if it didn't pause to split off and communicate each tree node to a real node. What you'd like to do is find a task reorganization that makes the entire task partition, so "parts" of the computation can be advanced independently on completely different systems after being given relatively little starting information. In the case of chess, I'd guess that one trivial parallelization is to split up all the pieces that CAN move in any given configuration so that each node solves the tree of outcomes for just moving that one piece. Prune the results, and when any given piece dead-ends (and its node becomes free again) split off single-moove components of the productive trees recursively. Arrange it (if possible) so that communications are rare per node compared to node computation and you'll have a winner in terms of parallel speedup. This presumes that it is possible to make local decisions about the quality of positions that are sufficient to accept or reject them with relatively small IPCs (communicating the general range of "best position so far" across the cluster). I'm guessing that MOST possible initial moves at any given level lead to positions that are "obviously bad" and one only needs to pursue them far enough to overcome possible optimization humps that separate these "bad" positions from a really really good one accessible in only this way. Which tempts me to digress upon GA's, simulated annealing, and discrete or continuous optimization theory in general, but I will manfully resist...:-) Or something -- I haven't studied the problem and you have, but IF you can find a partitioning that REMAINS CPU bound or only weakly memory bound on a cluster and involves only relatively "small" IPCs in order to set up and manage the partitioning, then a cluster becomes a good way to get things to speed up a lot for only a little money. The more data you have to exchange in the partitioning, the more you have to spend (relatively speaking) on network compared to CPU, and the more "IPC bound" the parallel task scaling will be. > A 12288 chicken system from IBM costs to be precise 8 million euro, > delivering 27.5 tflop. Thanks to the network it is not a chicken system but > europese fastest supercomputer. Sure, sure, sure. But THIS list is as much about a 2.5 K$ 8-node cluster as it is about an 8 ME 12288-node cluster. "Europe's Fastest Supercomputer" with all those nodes and that really expensive network isn't worth a damn to somebody running a serialized program, and it may not be worth much to somebody running a fine grained synchronous parallel program whose parallel scaling peaks at 32 nodes. It will be MOST useful to people who run embarrassingly parallel programs, and the main point that I can see of having such an agressively large size is that it will let lots of people run much smaller programs at the same time, or let somebody with a 32-node task can run 384 instances of it at once, in an embarrassingly parallel way. And of course it will get a really high linpack score and hence end up near the top of the Top 500 list, which is good marketing and almost certainly the REAL point of the whole thing given the paucity of problems that might actually use the entire resource constructively all at once. > By the way, my chessprogram doesn't output 2 bytes, but it outputs 4 bytes > each few minutes. > > A chess move. > > If you have a processor that can run it, just outputting 4 bytes each few > minutes, at a speed equal to a 1 Thz opteron processor, then i can sell > 100000 machines of that hands down if its price is that of a normal PC. > > At a 1 thz machine it will output d2d4 anyway the first move. In > correspondence notation 'd2' is the field 42 and 'd4' is 44. > > So it's output is 42 anyway. Right, but what if you could partition the "next move" problem so that it ran on a $2500 8 processor cluster where each processor provided you with (say) 3 GHz of processing power today (instead of an entirely mythical 1 THz of single processor power). That gives you 24 GHz of processing power for about what a high end gaming system costs from Dell, and about 0.1 THz (100 GHz) for only $10K and 32 nodes. Even if you end up doubling the per-node cost and get better/faster nodes or a better network after you finish analyzing the problem decomposition, it is still pretty cheap FOR WHAT YOU WANT TO ACCOMPLISH which is a nontrivial computational task. My final advice is to think carefully about problem decomposition and recursion. AFAICT, chess in general has a natural decomposition and recursion structure, where although the space of possible moves grows superexponentially, it also prunes almost as fast so that slow old human brains reject most possible move sequences almost before they start to really work. If you can figure out any way at all to do "the same thing" on a cluster, to carry out the pruning based on local or almost-local information, you should be able to realize linear or near-linear speedup on very pedestrian cluster designs, ones with CHEAP networks and CHEAP nodes. It seems like a fun problem, even. rgb > > Vincent > > > rgb > > > >> Seymour Cray > >> > >> Vincent > >> _______________________________________________ > >> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org > >> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > >> > > > >-- > >Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ > >Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 > >Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 > >Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb at phy.duke.edu > > > > > > > > > -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb at phy.duke.edu


text:
Surveillance Data and Maps
DISCLAIMER: This page was last updated on August 14, 2018
Select a county below to view surveillance information for that county.
Tabular view of PA county surveillance status for 2018
Pennsylvania Surveillance
(Most recent cases reported at top of table)
Mosquito Positives Collected
Mosquito samples may consist of 1 or more mosquito pools with 1 or more species. The samples below are ordered by County, then by Recent Date.
Veterinary Positives Collected
When a dead bird is sighted, the information about that bird is recorded. If the bird meets the criteria for testing, it is collected and sent for testing. Samples are from each bird are tested for WNV. This table records the surveillance effort in Pennsylvania by whole birds,rather than partial tissues from the birds.
All mosquitoes collected in one effort create a sample of mosquitoes. This sample is sent to the lab for identification. A sample can include either larval or adult mosquitoes. Only adult mosquitoes are tested for WNV. All mosquitoes are identified, and adults are divided into subsamples by species for testing. This table records the surveillance effort in Pennsylvania by samples, rather than subsamples of mosquitoes.
Diagnostic blood samples from equine and other animals submitted by veterinarians across the state will be tested for WNV. Please note that since it is impossible to differentiate between naturally infected horses and vaccinated horses, it is important that the vaccination history of any horse that is being tested be provided to the laboratory. A reporting form is available for submission with samples from the Pennsylvania Veterinary Laboratory.
A multi-agency cooperative effort between:


text:
The Office of Student Services will be holding an informational session for anyone who needs to complete the Illinois Bar Application (1st year or 3rd year update). The session will be held on Tuesday, January 25, 2000 at 3:00 pm and 5:00 pm. Please check back here for the room number. You can also check out the following web pages for more information.
Law House
The Law House, located on IIT's Main Campus, has three single rooms
available on its male floor. If interested, please contact the Rooms
Coordinator at the IIT Housing Department at (312)808-6505.
North Suburban Bar Association Seminars
The North Suburban Bar Association has invited all interested students to attend their monthly luncheon seminars. The seminars are as follows:
February 24, 2000
March 23, 2000
April 27, 2000
May 25, 2000
For more information on these seminars, please contact the North Suburban
Bar Association at the numbers listed below the seminar.
CTA Red-Line Closures
The CTA Red-Line will be closed for repairs from midnight to 9:00 am every Sunday morning from January 16, 2000 - until completion. Trains will run on the elevated lines and shuttle service will be provided for the state street corridor. Please contact the CTA with and questions.


text:
Update:Bangor Police Seek Suspect in Broadway Bank Robbery
Bangor police are asking for the public's help locating a suspect connected to a bank robbery this afternoon. The robbery happened at around 2:30 on Broadway.
Sergeant Cathy Rumsey said in a press release that a white male suspect entered the Maine Savings Federal Credit Union this afternoon and presented a note to the teller demanding money. The suspect then fled on foot with an undisclosed amount of cash. He did not display a weapon.
Police describe the suspect as a white male, approx 5'5" tall with a thin build. He was wearing a dark blue zip up hooded sweatshirt with the hood up and a ball cap on. He was wearing blue jeans and black sneakers. The suspect was also wearing aviator style sunglasses and had some sort of white cloth covering his face.
He was last seen fleeing on foot from the back side of the bank towards TJ Maxx. Maine State Police units responded with a K-9 and attempted a track of the suspect. Based on the K-9's track it's believed the suspect entered a vehicle in the parking lot of TJ Maxx and left the area.
Anyone with information that may be helpful is asked to call the police department at 947-7384. If you wish to remain anonymous you can reach their tip line at ext 6


text:
They have never been so cheap in the past. Imagine if you wanted to grab it two weeks ago it would've cost you 35 cents.
Analysts are saying that the company is about to soar again and that they recommend buying as much as possible in the 15 to 20cent range.
R:N:B:I is one of the few companies on the market that is involved in the legal canabis sector.
Grab shares now!
More Newsletters | Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
©2014 BestOTC Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
BestOTC never sends unsolicited email. You received this email because you requested a subscription to Breaking Alerts from BestOTCOTC.


text:
Singing away theological differences in Nazareth
(Photo: Pope Benedict with Galilee religious leaders, 14 May 2009/Osservatore Romano)
Talk about a picture being worth 1,000 words. There's more than that behind this picture of Pope Benedict holding hands and singing a song for peace with leaders of other religions in Nazareth's Basilica of the Annunciation on Thursday. This might seem like an innocent gesture to most people who see it. To some Vatican correspondents following the pope on his Holy Land tour, it was an unprecedented step that spoke volumes about the evolution of his theological thinking.This sing-along started at an interfaith meeting when a rabbi began singing a song with the lyrics "Shalom, Salaam, Lord grant us peace." At some point, the 11 clerics on the stage stood up and held hands to sing the simple tune together. Never very spontaneous, Benedict looked a little hesitant but then joined in. It was something of a "kumbaya session" — a "religious version of We Are The World," one colleague quipped — but it was good-natured and well meant. The pope has been preaching interfaith cooperation at every stop on his tour and it seemed appropriate that it culminate in a show of unity among the religions in Galilee.But wait a minute. This is the same Joseph Ratzinger who, when he was a cardinal heading the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, frowned on Pope John Paul's pray-in with other religions at Assisi in 1986. He even declined to attend what became one of the landmark events of his predecessor's papacy. Catholics cannot pray together with other religions, he argued, because only Catholicism was the true faith and all others were flawed to greater or lesser extents. Praying together carried the risk of syncretism, or mixing religions.Over the years, Cardinal Ratzinger made several critical comments about other religions, especially Buddhism and Islam (although he is changing there as well). He drew a sharp line between Catholics and other Christians in the 2000 document Dominus Iesus that called Protestant denominations deficient and not proper churches. They felt slighted and several said so openly. The only faiths Ratzinger seemed interested in were Orthodox Christianity and Judaism (ironically, given the cool welcome he got in Israel — but that's another story).Things change when a cardinal becomes a pope. Suddenly, he was no longer just the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, he was the head of the world's largest church and its smallest country. He was a spiritual leader, a temporal head of state, a major diplomatic figure and one of the most prominent — if not the most prominent — spokesman for religion on the planet. That's a lot to juggle at the same time.
We welcome comments that advance the story through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. If you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can flag it to our editors by using the report abuse links. Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of Reuters. For more information on our comment policy, see http://blogs.reuters.com/fulldisclosure/2010/09/27/toward-a-more-thoughtful-conversation-on-stories/
[…] of the Elijah Interfaith Institute wrote this song for the Pope's visit to Israel and performed it in Nazareth. The kumbaya moment is at […]


text:
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Signing Off. . . at least for now
However, I have found that various other priorities -- family, diocesan ministry, teaching, parish ministry, writing (I am currently working on four book projects, plus I'm a regular contributor to Priest and Deacon Digest) and traveling to direct retreats and to present at convocations of priests and deacons -- are just keeping me from being able to give the necessary attention to the poor blog. What I need is a good blog editor who would be willing to take that on for me! Comments from readers critical of my sporadic postings (as well as criticizing what I DO choose to post; seems like others had a view of what this blog -- my personal blog, no less -- should be!) have confirmed me in this decision.
So, at least for the foreseeable future, I'm signing off the blog. If you have any need to contact me, please find me on Facebook or e-mail me at email@example.com.
God bless all here, and be good servants to each other!
5 comments:
Just awful! Deacon Greg just decided he wouldn't be taking any more comments on his "Deacon's Bench" posts, and now you have abandoned blogging altogether. What are we left with? Father Z?????ReplyDelete
Oh how I understand, but how sad I am. This has been a place of wisdom, insight and hope. Which appears to be a mirror of just who you are!ReplyDelete
Peace and good to you! Thank you for everything you have done here!
P.S. - what Ron says! :-(
Romans 1:8ReplyDelete
I give thanks through the Risen Lord Jesus to the Living God for you . . .because the whole world has heard of your faith!
Only the very best of blessings!
Deacon Norb in Ohio
Thanks Dcn Bill for many wonderful posts and all the great work you have done for the Permanent Diaconate.ReplyDelete
May the Holy Spirit continue to guide, support, inspire, and sustain you.
God Bless
Sorry to see this end (at least for now) Bill...but we know where to find you.ReplyDelete
Peace be with you!


text:
Mural, a painting applied to and made integral with the surface of a wall or ceiling. The term may properly include painting on fired tiles but ordinarily does not refer to mosaic decoration unless the mosaic forms part of the overall scheme of the painting.
Nature and technique
Mural painting is inherently different from all other forms of pictorial art in that it is organically connected with architecture. The use of colour, design, and thematic treatment can radically alter the sensation of spatial proportions of the building. In this sense, mural is the only form of painting that is truly three-dimensional, since it modifies and partakes of a given space. Byzantine mosaic decoration evinced the greatest respect for organic architectural form. The great artists of the Renaissance, on the other hand, attempted to create an illusionistic feeling for space, and the masters of the subsequent Baroque period obtained such radical effects as to seem to dissolve almost entirely the walls or ceilings. Apart from its organic relation to architecture, a second characteristic of mural painting is its broad public significance. The mural artist must conceive pictorially a social, religious, or patriotic theme on the appropriate scale in reference both to the structural exigencies of the wall and to the idea expressed.
In the history of mural painting, many techniques have been used: encaustic painting, tempera painting, fresco painting, ceramics, oil paint on canvas, and, more recently, liquid silicate and fired porcelain enamel. In Classical Greco-Roman times, the most common medium was encaustic, in which colours are ground in a molten beeswax binder (or resin binder) and applied to the painting surface while hot. Tempera painting was also practiced from the earliest known times; the binder was an albuminous medium such as egg yolk or egg white diluted in water. In 16th-century Europe, oil paint on canvas came into general use for murals. The fact that it could be completed in the artist's studio and later transported to its destination and attached to the wall was of practical convenience. Yet oil paint is the least-satisfactory medium for murals: it lacks both brilliance of colour and surface texture, many pigments are yellowed by the binder or are affected by atmospheric conditions, and the canvas itself is subject to rapid deterioration.
Early manifestations and the Early Renaissance
The Romans used mural painting to an extraordinary extent. In Pompeii and Ostia the walls and ceilings of almost all buildings, public and private, were painted in unified, inventive decorative schemes that encompassed a wide range of pictures, including landscape, still life, and figured scenes. However, at no other time before or since has mural decoration received a higher degree of creative concentration by artist and patron than in Europe during the Renaissance. A continuously inventive spirit and inquiring mind, a wealth of support from patrons, and an ever-awakening attitude toward new creative possibilities are characteristics of this remarkable age. One speaks by and large of an Early Renaissance (15th century), a High Renaissance (1500–30), and a Late Renaissance, or Mannerist, style (second and third quarters of the 16th century). The centres of activity were the various cities and the rival personalities and families who dominated each area as political and cultural leaders.
In Florence, undoubtedly the most important centre, the development reveals an emphasis on specific problems of form almost to the point of obsession. It began with the concentration on the monumental figure by Masaccio, whereby the solidly built forms in a three-dimensional space are closely integrated by gesture and light and shade to produce a dramatic unity. The skill seems to have been recognized and developed by succeeding artists such as Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Melozzo da Forli. The grandiose frescoes of Luca Signorelli (chapel of San Brizio, Orvieto) reveal the concentration on anatomy and the well-modeled structure of many nude figures to achieve greater strength and articulation. This then becomes the point of departure for the great art of Michelangelo in the next century.
A second tradition is the more conservative and Gothic one exemplified by the pure and mystic expression of Fra Angelico (San Marco, Florence). A third tradition is a kind of romantic realism to be found in the frescoes by Fra Filippo Lippi (the cathedral at Prato) and Benozzo Gozzoli (Medici Palace chapel, Florence). Both Lippi's and Gozzoli's murals reveal an awareness of the artistic problems of Masaccio but also a new interest in nature and its recognizable and realistic representation. Finally, these heterogeneous elements are combined into a highly sensitive and decorative style during the last quarter of the 15th century, particularly in the frescoes of Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli.
The High Renaissance
The High Renaissance is dominated by great individuals whose spectacular projects were often left unfinished or were completed by others. Leonardo da Vinci's rich and universal genius is best demonstrated in the dramatic movement of figures and tensely psychological interpretation of content shown in his two most important mural projects: the Battle of Anghiari (1503–06) in the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence (destroyed but known through partial copies) and the famous Last Supper (1495–98) in the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
Michelangelo, more intense and deeply religious than the scientifically minded Leonardo, sought to channel his expression through the human figure alone. Thus, the dramatic movement of the figure carries the total design of his first mural, the Battle of Cascina (c. 1504) for the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence (lost but known through drawings and engravings). The stupendous project for the decoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Julius II followed the same method with increasing concentration on the figure, and the later Last Judgment (1534–41) on the end wall in the same room shows greater interest in the movement of larger figure masses in space with considerable dramatic freedom and intensity.
Raphael represents the most perfect balance and integration of all the problems of form, space, and decorative unity that had been experimented with through the preceding century. Perfection of form is identified with the juxtaposition of the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (1510–11; called Disputa) and the School of Athens (1509–11) in the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican. The later historical murals of the Stanzas reveal an increasing interest in movement.
Correggio is the last of the High Renaissance mural painters. His frescoes in the cathedral and the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma reflect the transition to the new concept of Mannerism.
Baroque and beyond
Two factors condition the development of mural decoration in the Baroque style of the 17th century. One is the enormous building enthusiasm engendered by the Counter-Reformation, particularly through the Jesuit order. The other is the importance given to palaces and homes of the ruling aristocracy throughout Europe as the centres of society's cultural life. The roots of the style are to be found again in the work of the Renaissance masters but as interpreted and taught by the new institution of the Academy (e.g., that of the Carracci at Bologna, Italy, and the French Academy, founded in 1648). Its development can be followed from the allegorical decoration of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome by Annibale Carracci to the increasingly elaborate wall and ceiling frescoes of Domenichino, Pietro da Cortona, and Andrea Pozzo whereby the dramatic movement of foreshortened figures and perspective blends with the architecture to achieve a total unified and endless illusion of space.
The most prolific and indeed most important single Baroque artist from the decorative point of view is Peter Paul Rubens, whose designs for tapestries, historical paintings (the Marie de Médicis series in the Luxembourg Palace, now in the Louvre), and decorations for the Jesuit churches in Antwerp and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, as well as his own home in Antwerp, reflect both the universality of his productive genius and his international acceptance.
In late 18th- and 19th-century Europe, there was hardly any further development in style or technique. In the 20th century, however, mural decoration reemerged strongly in three major phases. One is the more abstract and expressionistic form stemming from the experimental easel painting of the Cubist and Fauvist groups in Paris and developing into the large projects of Pablo Picasso (UNESCO, Paris), Henri Matisse (chapel at Vence, France), Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and Marc Chagall (decorations of the Paris Opéra and Lincoln Center, New York City). The second phase developed out of the revolutionary movement in Mexico with the remarkable series of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo. With the ensuing acceptance of 20th-century concepts of design and structure in architecture, the new large-scale use of mosaics became a distinctive feature (e.g., the National Autonomous University of Mexico). A third phase was the short-lived American mural movement of the 1930s developed under U.S. federal sponsorship, the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. The wide geographic distribution of the work in U.S. public buildings and the freedom given to both individual and experimental modes of expression as well as to the interpretation of social and political problems provided an artistic impetus to mural decoration. Examples are murals of Ben Shahn, Boardman Robinson, Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, and John Steuart Curry. The murals painted by numerous artists at Coit Memorial Tower in San Francisco were created under the auspices of the federal government during that period and have been preserved into the 21st century.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
painting: Mural paintingMural painting has its roots in the primeval instincts of people to decorate their surroundings and to use wall surfaces as a form for expressing ideas, emotions, and beliefs. In their universal manifestation in graffiti and in ancient murals, such as cave paintings…
Latin American art: Populist art and the Mexican mural renaissanceAfter the turn of the 20th century, Latin American art reacted against the conservative establishment of the academies by agitating for political change. In Mexico young artists admired the work of José Guadalupe Posada, a populist artist who engraved illustrations for newspaper broadsides…
art conservation and restoration: Wall paintingsWall paintings are the oldest known form of painting, dating back to the prehistoric paintings in the Altamira cave in Spain and the Lascaux Grotto in France. In the last decades of the 20th century, the conservation and restoration treatment of two Renaissance…
India: Society and culture…complex, the decorative arts of mural painting and sculpture flourished. Early examples of mural painting occur at Bagh and Sittanvasal (now in Tamil Nadu), and the tradition reached its apogee in the murals at the Ajanta Caves (Maharashtra) during the Vakataka and Calukya periods. The fashion for murals in Buddhist…
Western painting: Upper PaleolithicThese primitive hunters decorated the walls of their caves with large paintings of the animals that were so important for their physical well-being. Most surviving examples of such murals have been found in France and Spain (see Stone Age), but similar figures from caves in the Ural Mountains in the…
More About Mural40 references found in Britannica articles
Assorted References
- major reference
- Assyrian art
- Central Asian arts
- Chinese architecture and art
- comparison with mosaic
- Egyptian art
- Etruscan art
- graffiti
- In graffiti