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When I first searched for discard instruction, I've found experts saying using discard will result in performance drain. They said discarding pixels will break GPU's ability to use zBuffer properly because GPU have to first run Fragment shader for both objects to check if the one nearer to camera is discarded or not. For a 2D game I'm currently working on, I've disabled both depth-test and depth-write. I'm drawing all objects sorted by their depth and that's all, no need for GPU to do fancy things. now I'm wondering is it still bad if I discard pixels in my fragment shader?
Graphics hardware can perform early depth-based culling of fragments before computing their color value (in other words, before running your fragment shader). Consequently, if you utilize any features that would affect that, such as
Whether or not the use of any of those compromising features has a net observable performance impact depends on the situation, though. The early-z optimization can improve performance if you have very expensive fragment shaders, for example, but if the cost of your pipeline is in the vertex shader (or elsewhere) it won't benefit you as much, and consequently you may see little or no performance degradation by using
Disabling the depth test entirely via the API should prevent the optimization from running as well, since it could result in incorrectly-rendered scenes. In your case, then, it shouldn't matter that you use
Recent hardware can force the tests (including early stencil tests) using
As always for performance questions the most accurate answer is to try it out on your target hardware and measure what happens.
In your case it's probably not a bad thing to do. In fact there's a chance it will help performance by saving on memory bandwidth. It will also add shader instructions though, so it's not always a performance benefit.
Even when using the depth buffer the performance hit isn't always very significant, if you're careful with the order you draw things in.


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I've noticed that search suggestions (such as "marijuana", "The Pirate Bay", and various "swear words") are now being censored, i.e., not appearing in search suggestions despite being popular queries. Whenever I start typing the word "marijuana", the only search suggestion that I see is "marijuana's effects on the brain", which mainly leads to anti-marijuana sites, instead of sites that advocate the legalization of marijuana.
I haven't seen any option on Google Search that would allow users to turn off this word filter. Is there any way to work around this problem?

subset: commoncrawl


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Jet Set
The Party
The U.S.S. Midway was up in lights for the centennial soiree of Willis Allen.
The People
The Midway was chosen for this lavish party not just for location alone. The owners come from a long line of war veterans. In fact, the very plane that owner Andy Nelson flew in Vietnam, an F4 Phantom fighter jet, was parked on the flight deck, where guests mingled under the stars.
Best in Show
Willis Allen knows a thing or two about staging, throwing down a 40-foot white carpet to set the grand entrance (white is the new red). Because no party is complete without a photo booth, Willis Allen decked out theirs with old World War II posters and a simulated sky-dive in keeping with the evening's theme. For the grand finale, the SDSU drum line made some serious noise before fireworks played one-upmanship off the bow over the harbor. Talk about ending the night with a bang! Evening chatter circled around now-and-then real estate prices. In 1968, according to a vintage Willis Allen ad, a five-bedroom La Jolla home on three acres with five fireplaces, a tennis court and two servants' rooms, fetched $195,000. If we only knew then what we know now. Hindsight, baby. -Photography by Tim Hardy, shotbyhardy.com


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This pattern creation from Hope Chest Quilts is a dedication to the artist's grandmother whose love for flowers has been passed down to her granddaughter. This entire art project is made from pieces cut from felt which can be embellished with your own ideas. Finished size is 8 ½" x 11". Designed by Paula Jeffery
Item : HCQ09


text: A case now before the Supreme Court could lower the threat level created by bad patents in a meaningful way. The issue before the Court is whether to change the burden of proof on patent invalidity from clear-and-convincing evidence to the preponderance standard. This change would be good for... Read more


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The El Dorado 8th grade B team defeated Wellington in two games Thursday night with games going 25-23 and 25-9.
Ally Martinez scored six points on serves and Delaney Taylor scored five. Emily Domke led the team in kills with 2.
The EMS 8th grade A team won against Wellington needed the maximum amount of games to earn victory winning 21-25, 25-16, and 15-12.
Sydney Harper scored 11 points on serves and was followed by Braylon Daniels and Caedyn Reinhardt each with seven. Reinhardt also led with 2 kills.
The 7th grade A team was victorius over the Knights in two games going 25-21 and 25-19.
Sydney Scanlon led with 8 points.
The 7th grade B team needed only two games as well winning 25-16 and 25-10.
Rianne Showalter led scoring with 11 points.
The 7th grade Cats finished the regular season with a record of 4-3.
The league tournament is is today in Rose Hill.
Location, ST | website.com


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6 Famous People Who Eerily Predicted Their Own Deaths
It's always fun to speculate about how we'll die, like to break the ice during a party or while chatting in the subway with terrified strangers. We've all done that, right? Well, you should probably cut it out, you freaking weirdo, because sometimes those oddly specific death scenarios turn out to come true. We've told you about famous musicians who predicted their own deaths through songs, but this tragic superpower is (er, "was") shared by notable people in all fields ...
#6. Mark Twain Nailed His Death Date Within a Day
Getty Images
Mark Twain is arguably one of the greatest American writers that literature has ever seen, blessed with immense wit, a sharp sense of humor, and a killer mustache. He gave us classic children's characters like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and N-word Jim. What you might not know is that, apparently, he could also see the future -- specifically, the part where he died.
A.F. Bradley
He even left specific instructions for all his hair to be donated to Albert Einstein.
The Prediction:
In 1909, Twain joked that the next time Halley's Comet passed close to Earth, he would "go out" with it. He didn't mean romantically: The comet had last been visible from Earth in the year Twain was born, 1835, so he claimed it would be the "greatest disappointment of my life" if it didn't also pass at the time of his death. According to Twain, God must have said, "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."
Edward Emerson Barnard/Yerkes Observatory
"Preferably in one world-ending fireball."
True, Twain was advanced in years when he said that, had some heart troubles, and was depressed about losing some family members and close friends, but he was by no means on his deathbed or expecting to go to the big steamboat in the sky anytime soon. He was writing and active in his anti-imperialism league all the way to the end.
What Happened:
As you might know, Halley's Comet visits us once every 76 years and is only visible from Earth for a couple of months at a time. This means that at the moment of Twain's humorous prediction, the comet was due again in the following year; and what do you know, it showed up on April 20, 1910. The next day, Twain died of a heart attack.
Clearly, just dying in the same year the comet passed or at any time during its two-month window wasn't impressive enough for Twain -- he had to do it mere hours after the thing first showed up, didn't he?
It took a couple of hours for everyone to be convinced that it wasn't a setup for him to watch his own funeral.
#5. NBA Player Nails His Death to the Last Detail, 14 Years Earlier
Getty Images
"Pistol" Pete Maravich was one of the 50 greatest NBA players of all time, best known for his impressive showmanship, his still unsurpassed scoring average (achieved before someone decided that some shots should score three points), and his utterly ridiculous socks. Magic Johnson once called him the original "Showtime," and Hall of Famer John Havlicek said he was "the greatest ball-handler of all time."
James Drake/SI
He was pretty good at basketball, too.
What he wasn't known for was his good luck, though ...
The Prediction:
In 1974, Maravich was 26 and had been playing in the NBA for four years. He was at the height of his career, but didn't feel like basketball was all there was to life. In an interview with the Beaver County Times, Maravich said, "I don't want to play 10 years [in the NBA] and then die of a heart attack at the age of 40."
"The NBA is nice, but I'm hoping my Beatles tribute act takes off. I'm Ringo."
What Happened:
In an extreme case of you can't always get what you want, that's exactly what Maravich would go on to do. When Maravich gave that interview, he seemed perfectly healthy and had no reason to think that he wouldn't live to see the sports memorabilia shows and charity golf tournaments that accompany a former athlete in his twilight years. However, he ended up retiring six years later due to an injury ... completing exactly 10 years in the NBA, as predicted.
Eight years later, on January 5, 1988, Maravich was playing a pickup game of basketball when he stated "I feel great" -- seconds later, he collapsed and died of a heart attack. Turns out he had a previously undiscovered congenital heart defect called "being born without a freaking heart valve." He should have died at 20, but somehow stuck around for two more decades until his prophecy came true.
That mustache alone should have taken seven years off his life expectancy.
#4. Newspaper Mogul Predicts (and Dies on) the Titanic
Getty Images
William Thomas Stead was considered the father of the modern tabloid, back when the word "tabloid" meant more "meaningful reporting" and less "Kardashian butt." In fact, Stead was a pioneer of investigative journalism whose controversial expose on child prostitution got the age of consent in Britain raised from 13 to 16. It also got him arrested for pissing off the government.
Maritime Quest
He never once removed his suit and tie during the entire prison stay.
The Prediction:
Besides being an editor, Stead also dabbled in fiction and had an interest in the occult. In 1886, he wrote a piece for the Pall Mall Gazette called "The Sinking of a Modern Liner" about an ocean liner that leaves England for New York City and becomes involved in a collision. In the chaos that followed, many passengers drowned because there were too few lifeboats. Stead actually wrote, "This is exactly what will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats."
"Not to mention the future generations that'll have to suffer through tedious retellings."
A few years later, in 1892, Stead wrote another piece called "From the Old World to the New," in which a passenger on a ship called the Majestic has a future vision of an ocean liner running into an iceberg. The Majestic later runs into such a ship and helps rescue their passengers.
What Happened:
Twenty years later, in 1912, the Titanic crashed into an iceberg on a trip from England to New York City and about 1,500 people lost their lives because there weren't enough lifeboats. One of those people was W.T. Stead.
There's little record of what he did during his last hours, but presumably he went around telling everyone "I told you so!" and wishing he hadn't left his inflatable lifeboat home.
The Daily Mirror
The story later won the Pulitzer for outstanding achievement in the field of "I fucking warned you, you cheap-ass motherfuckers!"
There's more: The Majestic that Stead wrote about was a real ship, and like the Titanic, it belonged to the White Star Line. Also, the Majestic was captained by one Edward Smith, a name you might recognize if you tend to read the credits for James Cameron movies, because he was totally the captain of the Titanic, too. Stead himself wasn't included in the movie, possibly because his story was too unbelievable for a director who specializes in time traveling robots.


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MLB: Five Lessons From 2013
With just four days left in baseball's regular season, we can draw a few obvious lessons from the year 2013.
If you give the Pittsburgh Pirates two decades, they can assemble a winner. If you give the Los Angeles Dodgers enough money, they will eventually spend some of it wisely. And if you give too many years and too many dollars to too many veterans, you will end up like the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies, dynasties in ruin.
But if you look beyond the standings, you'll find some other lessons about the game and the business of baseball from what we've seen this year:
1. The proliferation of data continues to change the game.
Baseball's statistical revolution is often described as a phenomenon of the 2000s, but the rethinking of traditional strategy based on statistical analysis has never been greater.
Emboldened by hitter-tendency data, teams used dramatically more "defensive shifts"—extreme realignments of fielders—in 2013. According to Baseball Info Solutions, there have been more than 7,800 shifts on balls in play, up from 4,500 in 2012.
Managers also seem to be giving more credence to long-held sabermetric beliefs about the foolishness of giving away outs and free bases. The frequency of sacrifice bunts and intentional walks fell to record lows this year. Stolen-base attempts sank to their lowest point since 1973.
2. Winning doesn't necessarily drive attendance.
One of the main incentives for winning is that, in theory, fans are more likely to pay to watch good teams than bad ones. But this year has been a case study in how little winning or losing can affect attendance in the short term.
The Tampa Bay Rays appear headed for the playoffs, yet they rank last in attendance, averaging just 18,645 fans per game, a 3% drop from 2012. The Cleveland Indians are close to reaching the playoffs for the first time since 2007, yet their attendance is worse than the miserly Houston Astros.
Meanwhile, some bad teams were box-office hits. The Colorado Rockies and Milwaukee Brewers, two of the worst teams in the National League, rank 10th and 14th of 30 teams in attendance, respectively.
The lesson? Winning isn't necessarily enough to overcome market and stadium issues. And losing isn't always enough to drive away a loyal fan base.
3. There is no such thing as a poststeroids era.
That term was thrown around often in recent years, as if performance-enhancing drug use were some sort of relic from the dead-ball era. But baseball's suspension of Alex Rodriguez and 13 others, including Ryan Braun, was a sobering reminder that increased testing has hardly eradicated doping.
Rodriguez, the 38-year-old Yankees star, is appealing the 211-game suspension MLB levied in August. But Braun accepted a 65-game suspension and 12 others accepted 50-game bans for their involvement in the Biogenesis scandal.
MLB proved it doesn't need to rely only on testing to punish PED users, but the fact that none of the suspensions were based on positive tests also suggests plenty of players are still trying to beat the testing system—and some are succeeding.
MLB continues to strengthen its testing program, but it would be naive to think the game will ever be 100% clean. It is more accurate to view this as just another chapter in a cat-and-mouse game that will continue as long as players have the means and incentive to cheat.
4. Committing lots of years and money to relievers: still a bad idea.
This isn't a new discovery, but some teams are still learning it the hard way. The Los Angeles Dodgers gave Brandon League a three-year, $22.5 million deal last winter only to watch him flunk out of the closer's role and end up with a 5.43 ERA. The Cincinnati Reds gave Jonathan Broxton a three-year, $21 million deal, only to see him struggle and then spend half the year on the disabled list.
All told, of the 13 relievers who signed multiyear contracts last winter, only one has been worth at least one win more than the average Triple-A call-up, according to FanGraphs' wins-above-replacement metric. Mind you, this is the first year of those deals—the one that is supposed to justify the added risk of another year or two.
5. Exceptional roster depth can compensate for a lack of star power.
The two best records in baseball entering Wednesday didn't belong to the star-studded Dodgers or Detroit Tigers. They belonged to the Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics, two teams that have thrived more on their depth than on anything else.
Boston assembled the game's best offense not with a fearsome heart of the order but with a lineup that lacks a glaring weak spot. Likewise, Oakland doesn't have a single hitter with 30 home runs, yet the A's rank second in the majors in homers. The Red Sox don't have one of the game's elite aces, but their rotation has the second-lowest ERA in the game.
It isn't the most compelling way to win, but so far this year, it has been the most effective way.
Write to Brian Costa at email@example.com


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Polk needs a professional LPD
If the Lakeland Police Dept. were a college fraternity, we suspect it would have been kicked off campus by now, and its charter revoked by its national office.
Results of investigations revealed in the past week make the LPD police station sound like a scene from Animal House, not a law enforcement headquarters.
Granted, this is Lakeland's problem, but every motorist who drives through the largest city in Polk County has reason to look at every passing patrol car and wonder, "Are you one of them?" We are not naive; we know that acts of sexual indiscretion occur in police departments, as they do in other venues.
But that is no excuse for the extended pattern of misconduct reported by State Atty. Jerry Hill, acts which involve at least 10 present officers, half of whom hold ranks of sergeant, lieutenant, or captain. Hill's investigation revealed similar allegations against 10 former officers, up to the rank of assistant chief.
This represents a pattern of misconduct, not an occasional indiscretion.
Hill's investigation revealed allegations of sexual misconduct ranging from consensual activity and sexual harassment to sexual battery. And it shows that in addition to the participants, other officers had knowledge of the conduct and did nothing.
One officer with a little less than five years with the department reportedly had a disciplinary file of 585 pages. Another garnered attention from Channel 8 in Tampa for allegedly requiring a young woman to lift her blouse and shake her bra as part of a supposed search for narcotics.
Three of five ranking officers (sergeant, lieutenant, and captain) are on paid leave and two are assigned to "modified duty." Their salaries, which range from nearly $70,000 to more than $101,000, apparently go on as if they were performing their duties.
In addition to the sexual misconduct alleged by Hill's investigation, the state attorney's office found "serious shortcomings of your (LPD) department in the areas of traffic stops, search and seizure, thoroughness of investigations, preparedness for trial and complying with the Florida Public Records Law," Hill wrote in a letter to Lakeland's police chief.
He also said his prosecutors will no longer present testimony from three sergeants.
While the city manager and police chief both expressed outrage over the revelations, Hill said the city manager seems committed to the concept that "we are going to defend what we've got."
Hill urged the city to go beyond "just circling the wagons."
These are strong words coming from the chief prosecutor in the Tenth Judicial Circuit.
Two Lakeland city commissioners quickly went on record calling for an outside investigation. To our way of thinking, that's a no-brainer.
When alleged misconduct reaches to the rank of captain, and involves 10 present officers and 10 former officers, not to mention those employees who failed to report their misconduct, an internal investigation by members of the department is bound to raise questions about its validity.
While misconduct by 20 present and former officers is indicative of a seriously flawed department, most of the remaining officers in a force of 250 presumably are competent and conscientious. They deserve to have the integrity of the department re-established as soon as possible.
We have long held that any city large enough to afford to have its own police department should do so, rather than contracting with the sheriff for law enforcement.
In fact, when a proposal to contract with the sheriff for city law enforcement was considered in Bartow, close examination revealed that the city would end up paying more to contract for the service than it was spending to operate its own department.
But in the case of the LPD, we see merit in the Lakeland city commission asking Sheriff Grady Judd to send in enough professional leadership to run the department, to clean house of officers who are unworthy of public trust, and to create a department in which Lakeland can take pride and all Polk Countians can have confidence.
Taxpayers and other law-abiding citizens deserve nothing less.


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How do you show the following? $$\sum \limits_{i=1}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{j=i}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{k=i}^{j}\ 1 = \sum \limits_{j=1}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{k=1}^{j}\ \sum \limits_{i=1}^{k}\ 1 $$ It's not obvious why this is true, but I have tested it with a program and it works.
Both count the cardinality of the set $\{ (i, j, k) \in \mathbb Z^3 \mid 1 \leq i \leq k \leq j \leq n \}$.
Explanation. We try to count the set $$ S := \{ (i, j, k) \in \mathbb Z^3 \mid 1 \leq i \leq k \leq j \leq n \} $$ in two ways.
Right hand side.
Can you see how the right hand side expression corresponds to the above explanation?
Left hand side. We adopt a similar strategy of fixing the values of variables one at a time. But this time, we fix them in the order $i, j, k$.
If you write this down in terms of the summation notation, do you see how you get the left hand side?
This looks like a pretty good excuse to switch to Iverson brackets. Letting $[p]$ be $1$ if $p$ is true, and $0$ if $p$ is false, we express the sum on the left as
$$\sum_i\sum_j\sum_k [1 \leq i \leq n][i \leq j \leq n][i \leq k \leq j]$$
where the sum is taken over all $i,j,k$. This can be rightly taken as an infinite triple series with nonnegative terms: the Iverson brackets ensure that terms that weren't present in the original series are nicely zeroed.
Using the fact that $[p][q]=[p\text{ and }q]$, we have the equivalent expression
$$\sum_i\sum_j\sum_k [1\leq i\leq k\leq j\leq n]=\sum_j\sum_k\sum_i [1\leq i\leq k\leq j\leq n]$$
where we were free to permute the order of summation.
We can slowly peel Iverson factors out like so:
$$\begin{align*}\sum_j\sum_k\sum_i [1\leq i\leq k\leq j\leq n]&=\sum_j\sum_k\sum_i [1\leq i\leq k][1\leq k\leq j\leq n]\\&=\sum_j\sum_k\sum_i [1\leq i\leq k][1\leq k\leq j][1\leq j\leq n]\\&=\sum_j[1\leq j\leq n]\sum_k[1\leq k\leq j]\sum_i [1\leq i\leq k]\end{align*}$$
and the last expression is precisely the sum on the right, rewritten in Iversonian form.
My answer is not mathematically rigorous, but it should help in visualizing the other solutions. First of all, without loss of generality, the indexing of the right hand side can be changed to match the left hand side as follows:
$$\sum \limits_{i=1}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{j=i}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{k=i}^{j}\ 1 = \sum \limits_{i=1}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{j=1}^{i}\ \sum \limits_{k=1}^{j}\ 1$$
Now the difference lies in two inner summations, which can be shown as red areas on the left and right respectively in the picture below. (Pardon my quick drawing.)
From $i = 1$ to $n$, the left hand side starts from the biggest triangle to the smallest, while the right hand side does the opposite. It is clear that both summations are the same.
If you are not satisfied with Srivatsan's proof (which I think is more elegant than mine), you can prove it by induction on $n$.
$$f(n) = \sum \limits_{i=1}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{j=i}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{k=i}^{j}\ 1,$$ $$g(n) = \sum \limits_{j=1}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{k=1}^{j}\ \sum \limits_{i=1}^{k}\ 1.$$
You want to prove $f(n) = g(n)$. This is easy to check for $n=1$.
For the induction step, note that $$f(n+1) = f(n) + \sum_{i=1}^{n+1} \sum_{k=i}^{n+1} 1$$ and $$g(n+1) = g(n) + \sum_{k=1}^{n+1} \sum_{i=1}^{k} 1$$
To prove $$\sum_{i=1}^{n+1} \sum_{k=i}^{n+1} 1 = \sum_{k=1}^{n+1} \sum_{i=1}^{k} 1$$, you can argue similarly with Srivatsan's earlier argument. Both count the number of lattice points on and above the diagonal of the square with vertices at $(0,0),(0,n+1),(n+1,n+1)$ and $(n+1,0)$ in the $i$-$k$ plane.
Otherwise, you prove it again by induction.
The idea of my answer is to unscramble the three summations on either the LHS or RHS into inequalities. Then, I use the unscrambled identity to rewrite the other side differently. WLOG, I'll start on the RHS.
$\Longrightarrow 1 \leq j \leq n \, \& \, 1 \leq \color{limegreen}{k \leq j} \, \& \, 1 \leq \color{red}{i \leq k} $
The key is just to rewrite the combined inequality above into three separate inequalities. To get different summation limits, I must ensure that at least one of the new inequalities must differ from those in (*).
The above gives $\sum \limits_{k=1}^{n} \sum \limits_{j=k}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{1=i}^{k} 1$, NOT the LHS, but another way to rewrite the summation limits.
Steps #4-6 yield the LHS = $\sum \limits_{i=1}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{j=i}^{n}\ \sum \limits_{k=i}^{j}\ 1$.


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[1] MSRP excluding tax, license, registration, $835.00 destination charge and options. Dealer prices may vary.
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[3] Subject to limited availability through September 2014 to residents of CA, OR, MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, and MD on approved credit through American Honda Finance Corp. Closed end lease for 2014 Honda Fit EV for well-qualified lessees. Not all applicants will qualify. No purchase option at lease end. MSRP $37,415 (includes destination). Excludes tax, title, license, fees, registration, options and insurance. Total monthly payments $9,324. Lessee responsible for non-routine maintenance and excessive wear/tear. Lease includes collision coverage, routine maintenance, roadside assistance, unlimited mileage, and navigation system updates. Total due at lease signing is $259 plus tax and title and includes first month's payment. Please see your authorized Fit EV dealer for complete details. For lessees who elect to install 240-volt charging equipment in their home, the charging equipment (hardware only) will be provided by Honda, the lessee remains responsible for installation and installation materials.
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Technically Speaking
The Insight doesn't just look futuristic, it has a host of technology.
Pushing the ECON button allows energy-consuming systems to operate more efficiently.
Bluetooth® HandsFreeLink®[3] for mobile phonesstandard on EXgives drivers the convenience of a hands-free phone system.
Learn more at handsfreelink.honda.com
The available Honda Satellite-Linked Navigation System™ with voice recognition[4] and FM Traffic provides information on 10 million points of interest[5].


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BMW R1200GS Water Cooled GPS Handlebar Mount Adapter - A brand new GPS unit for your motorcycle, and nowhere to mount it? This GPS bracket bar from Touratech gives you a solid attachment point on your Water Cooled BMW R1200GS. for any one of our locking GPS mounts. Gone are the days of trying to read shaky GPS screens or dealing with broken plastic pieces. Made of stainless steel and anodized aluminum, this handlebar mounting adapter is built to go the distance.
The GPS mount adapter provides a sturdy 12mm (1/2 inch) diameter mounting bar that is intended for mounting any of our locking GPS mounts. It can also be used for roadbook holders or any other device that uses a 1/2" clamp.
There are two different versions available depending if you have the Touratech 15mm bar risers installed. Please select from the drop-down menu above if you have our bar risers to make sure you get the proper mounting system.


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News and Events
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to speak at Columbia College
Columbia, Mo. - Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will deliver the 2008 Schiffman Ethics in Society Lecture. Huckabee's lecture, "Ethics Surrounding the Future of Medical and Health Care," will begin at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 13 in Launer Auditorium on the Columbia College campus. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the lecture is free and open to the public. A question-and-answer session for students, faculty and staff precedes the lecture at 3 p.m. in Dorsey Gym. A media briefing will be held immediately following the question-and-answer session at 4:30 p.m.
Huckabee is recognized nationally as a leader in health-care, education and energy issues. He served as governor of Arkansas from 1996-2007 and has held numerous other leadership positions over the course of his political career. He has been chairman of the National Governors Association, the Education Commission of the States and the Southern Governors Association. Huckabee also served as president of the Council of State Governments and state co-chairman of the Delta Regional Authority, and has been a member of many boards and commissions at the state and national levels.
In 2003, Huckabee's own 110-pound weight loss and completion of three marathons led to his recognition by the Road Runners Club of America as its Southern Region Runner of the Year. In 2005, Huckabee was named a Public Official of the Year by Governing magazine and one of the five best governors in America by Time magazine. That same year, he also received the AARP's Impact Award.
Over the past decade, Huckabee has authored five books, including "Character is the Issue," "Kids who Kill," "Living Beyond Your Lifetime," "Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and a Fork," and his latest, "From Hope to Higher Ground." Previous speakers who have given the Schiffman Lecture on Ethics in Society include David McCullough, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian; Arun Gandhi, grandson of the late Mahatma Gandhi and founder of the M.K. Institute for Non-Violence; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has devoted much of his career to environmental ethics; Soledad O'Brien, television journalist and CNN co-anchor; and John Kasich, a former U.S. congressman.
The Schiffman Lecture Series was established in 2000 through a gift by John A. Schiffman in honor of his late wife, Althea, a 1941 graduate of Christian College who served on the Columbia College Board of Trustees from 1983 to 1987.
Following his wife's death, John Schiffman served on the Columbia College Board of Trustees, retiring from the board 20 years later in 2007.
Columbia College, which was founded in Missouri in 1851 as Christian Female College, was the first women's college west of the Mississippi River to be chartered by a state legislature. The college changed its name to Columbia College in 1970 when it became coeducational.
Columbia College, a private institution, serves 25,000 working adults, including military service members, worldwide.
Read more details about the lecture.


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A majority black gang bang, the whites giving the head and the blacks cummin up the rear.
"Crikey I did'nt half enjoy that Guiness last night"
"Nothing like a nice Guiness, good for the heart"
"Nothing like a nice Guiness, good for the heart"
by Monkey08 March 13, 2008
Trending Now
Top Definition
Common misspelling of Guinness
dude, I can't even spell guiness
by Guinness2702 June 10, 2005
An Irish stout that is known as a household name. Very good drink and used in Irish recipies like coffee and cakes.
Guy: Y'know, Mick, I'll take a Guiness, it's my 5-month anniversery with my date.
Bartender: Take Two bottles, the two of you might drink it all up within the first hour.
Bartender: Take Two bottles, the two of you might drink it all up within the first hour.
by yahmoo23 February 14, 2010
The art of ejaculating on a females face then proclaiming "Brilliant!"
Tom blew a Guiness in Tina's Face!!
by ERM Enterprizes February 27, 2009
A person that is inexplicable. Guiness is quirky, lively, and unpredictable. You will often find yourself double taking a "Guiness" statement. Through all of this you will recognize an affectionate friend that is always there to talk and add a random narrative to brighten your day. When you first meet a Guiness you will realize instantly that he is your soul mate.
"That is so Guiness."
by lookkittens! September 10, 2010
A chocky brandishing a tightly permed or back combed blond Afro style hair cut.
is it just me or does that guiness smell funny
by Paddy Black from Ireland May 10, 2009
1. guiness is buff
2.guiness is fit
3. guiness is guiness
2.guiness is fit
3. guiness is guiness
I love guiness (robbie orr)


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Mental Health Center
Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder)
In this article
What Are the Symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder? continued...
Along with the dissociation and multiple or split personalities, people with dissociative disorders may experience a number of other psychiatric problems, including symptoms:
- Depression
- Mood swings
- Suicidal tendencies
- Sleep disorders (insomnia, night terrors, and sleep walking)
- Anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias (flashbacks, reactions to stimuli or "triggers")
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Compulsions and rituals
- Psychotic-like symptoms (including auditory and visual hallucinations)
- Eating disorders
Other symptoms of dissociative identity disorder may include headache, amnesia, time loss, trances, and "out of body experiences." Some people with dissociative disorders have a tendency toward self-persecution, self-sabotage, and even violence (both self-inflicted and outwardly directed). As an example, someone with dissociative identity disorder may find themselves doing things they wouldn't normally do, such as speeding, reckless driving, or stealing money from their employer or friend, yet they feel they are being compelled to do it. Some describe this feeling as being a passenger in their body rather than the driver. In other words, they truly believe they have no choice.
What's the Difference Between Dissociative Identity Disorder and Schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder are often confused, but they are very different.
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness involving chronic (or recurrent) psychosis, characterized mainly by hearing or seeing things that aren't real (hallucinations) and thinking or believing things with no basis in reality (delusions). Contrary to popular misconceptions, people with schizophrenia do not have multiple personalities. Delusions are the most common psychotic symptom in schizophrenia; hallucinations, particularly hearing voices, are apparent in about half to three quarters of people with the illness.
Suicide is a risk with both schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, although patients with multiple personalities have a history of suicide attempts more often than other psychiatric patients.


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Christmas boat parade is Dec. 22
Published: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 10:09 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 10:09 a.m.
You can watch boats show off their best Christmas lights at an annual parade later this month.
The Bayou Terrebonne Christmas boat parade is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Dec. 22.
Boats travel down Bayou Terrebonne near the Bourg Volunteer Fire Department, 4402 La. 24, and end in Montegut, three miles past Sacred Heart Catholic Church, 1111 La. 55.
The parade includes Santa and 15 to 20 boats decorated with Christmas lights.
For information, call Kevin Belanger at 594-2125 or 209-1771.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.


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I would like to know my options for good trekking tours in Thailand, especially in (but not limited to) the Chiang Mai area. Not longer than a week, not too much "intense", but also not too much "touristy". Language is not a problem, so English or Thai speaking guides will do.
Amazing Thailand has much to say on the subject.
Key points:
For locations to do elephant trekking:
Hope that gives you a good starting point!


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On average, we sleep 41 minutes more on the weekends than during the week.
Read on to learn if this treat is OK to eat.
Italian, Mexican and Chinese food ideas.
Could isotretinoin (Accutane) be the answer to your stubborn acne? Find out.
How do you keep things safer between the sheets? We explore your options.
Tips for preventing one of the most common types of knee injury.


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5 Creepy Medical Treatments That Actually Work
The whole point of modern society is separating humans from the unspeakably gross things that keep humans alive. No, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, and you don't want to see where your poop goes. This goes double for medical care, where you expect everything to be sterile and white and made by people in spotless laboratories. But if you're willing to keep an open mind about horrifying things, you'll be pleased to find out that ...
#5. You Can Use Decapitated Ants as Makeshift Stitches
Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images
If you're adventuring through the deepest jungles of Africa, it serves you well to take precautions, because it's safe to say you probably won't have access to the highest caliber of medical care. So what happens if you fall down and give yourself a nasty gash? If you're not carrying a needle and thread, the best thing you can do is shove your bleeding arm into an ant's nest and start collecting a few of the little bastards.
John Foxx/Stockbyte/Getty Images
We recommend feigning a picnic.
What? Why?
Driver ants are fearsome South American and African critters that hunt in swarms. They are so aggressive and their bite so powerful that when they raid, even elephants flee from them.
But industrious humans, unwilling to bow down to a master shorter than an eyelash, simply wondered what the bane of the jungle could do for them. And before the age of medical-grade sutures, early humans discovered that ants were remarkably good at stitching up wounds.
Via Animalshelpheal.blogspot.com
We can safely speculate that the first person to do this was wacked out fucking crazy.
Nicknamed "surgery ants," their pincers are so powerful that they can staple wounds together. This isn't a pleasant operation for the ants themselves -- you have to make them angry enough to bite you, and when they're good and pissed, you twist their bodies off to lock the pincers in place.
It's hardly an effective remedy for an ax wound, but it's so effective for minor injuries that ant stitches have been used for thousands of years, and in some remote parts of the world they're still used today. So if there are any doctors reading this, try it! And then send us video of the patient's reaction.
Jupiterimages/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images
Bonus points if you can do it while maintaining a creepy stalker smile.
#4. You Can Relieve Psoriasis by Letting Flesh-Eating Fish Chew on You
John Foxx/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Psoriasis probably won't kill you, but it still sucks -- it's a chronic skin condition where your skin cells replicate too fast and turn into red, itchy scales. It can seriously affect self-confidence, if nothing else, because the lizard-person look is rarely in fashion. Treatment options are wide and varied -- your doctor might prescribe a lotion, or a pill, or phototherapy ... or a mineral bath containing hundreds of tiny fish that eat the top layer of your skin off.
Via Wikimedia Commons
"We shall de-feet you!" (We are so sincerely sorry about that.)
What? Why?
It can be difficult to find a treatment for psoriasis that works well, so people who suffer from the condition may turn to some pretty unconventional solutions. That is, insofar as "climbing into a pool filled with creatures that will eat the flesh right off your body" can be considered unconventional. So for a mere $3,000, not including airfare, sufferers can travel to the hot springs of Kangal, Turkey, to pay a visit to the so-called "doctor fish," a minnow-like species that usually prefers to feed on plankton but is not averse to nibbling on dead human skin, which is something that psoriasis sufferers have in excess.
It sounds ridiculous, but up to 87 percent of people who try it report that they look and feel better afterward. The idea is that the pool is rich in selenium, which is an element with skin-healing properties. So after the fish nibble away at all the excess skin, the water can get in and help your dermis to help itself. And unlike drugs, fish don't usually carry side effects.
Via Ecplaza.net
Well, maybe a slight case of the willies and saying "BLUUGH!"
This leaves unanswered the most interesting question, which is, of course: Who was the first person to try this? Did they just fall in on accident and get pleasantly surprised by how good their skin felt afterward? Were they trying for a particularly slow and gruesome suicide, and profoundly disappointed? Unfortunately, the answer has been lost to history.
#3. Got Bowel Inflammation? Try Drinking Parasitic Worms*
Ulcerative colitis is an inflammatory bowel disease that feels exactly as unpleasant as you might expect from something with "ulcerative," "inflammatory," and "bowel" in the description. There aren't too many effective treatments, but science is looking into a new solution that has been showing positive results. It involves infecting yourself with intestinal parasites.
Polka Dot Images/Polka Dot/Getty Images
What? Why?
Studies have been done for some time that suggest that pigs with intestinal worms suffer fewer bowel conditions. Not willing to wait for human trials to give a verdict on his bloody diarrhea problem, one unnamed ulcerative colitis victim took it upon himself to swallow a bunch of whipworm eggs to see whether they offered any relief. We're not sure where he got them -- apparently there's a black market for that kind of thing?
Regardless, the results were a lot more favorable than what you could usually expect from deliberately ingesting parasites. The condition actually went into remission for four years and counting.
Visage/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Now that's the look of a man with a healthy poop shed.
As explained by Dr. Gerard Mullin, director of integrative nutrition services at Johns Hopkins, the effect is due to the fact that the body's immune response to whipworms is the opposite of the way it reacts to inflammatory bowel diseases. When infected with worms, the gut responds by producing extra mucus, which in this case is exactly what you want, as it protects against the ulcers that create the inflammatory response. And to think his friends probably called him crazy.
*Just because it worked on this occasion doesn't mean that you should try to cure your own chronic illness by eating random parasites. That's still usually a bad idea.
Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
"Ugh. Why'd I eat all that E. coli?"


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Goal.com cartoonist Omar Momani gives us his unique take on the football news of the dayPep Guardiola brought a premature end to the likely summer saga regarding his next destination after he was announced as Bayern Munich's next manager.
The 41-year-old, who guided Barcelona to 13 trophies during his four-year stint at Camp Nou, will take over from Jupp Heynckes when he retires at the Bundesliga club at the end of the season.
The appointment will come as a blow for both Manchester City and Chelsea, who were heavily interested in hiring Guardiola this summer, while the Premier League has lost another intriguing addition for the time being.
|Bundesliga stock rises as Bayern claim a prize football asset


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I have 2 email accounts on my iPhone and iPad, a work and personal.
I have edited a signature for my work account but can only seem to have one signature.
I also use Mail.app on OSX which lets me change between accounts that automaticly reply/send with the correct signature.
The iOS app doesn't seem to match a signature to an account rather it looks as though it attaches the signature to the iPhone.
Is there a way to add another signature to Mail?


text:
Leather Leggings
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Please call 1.888.222.7639 to speak with a Customer Service Representative.
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If you prefer email, we can be reached anytime at email@example.com.
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So you can create your own graphics from scratch and either add them to the page being created in Web Designer or export them as JPEG, PNGs or GIFs.
MacMall offers next day delivery on select products when you choose them before the stated deadline and use FedEx Standard Overnight, Priority or Saturday delivery. If you don't need it overnight, we also offer great 2-5 day shipping options.
To make sure all the item(s) you're buying are all eligible for next day delivery look for the "Get it by . . ." message which displays a cut-off time and shipping method. This message lets you know that next day delivery is still available.
To take advantage of next day delivery:
Canceling items, combining orders, or changing your shipping address or shipping options after you place the order might affect your next day delivery.
Next Day Shipping Options:
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The overall water situation in Iowa continues to improve. Ninety percent of the state is free of drought. Stream flows are moving toward normal levels, although the majority of streams are still in the above normal stage. Rainfall has eased and, as of June 11, it looks like the foreseeable future will bring more typical summer weather.
For a more thorough review of Iowa's water resource trends May 30 through June 12, go to www.iowadnr.gov/watersummaryupdate. The next Water Summary Update will be published July 11, 2013.
The report is prepared by the technical staff from the Iowa DNR, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, and the US Geological Survey, in collaboration with the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division.
Location, ST | website.com


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I want to try my hand at writing a 3D game. However I don't want to start at such a low level of drawing individual triangles and writing my own 3D object loader and so on. I've heard of things like Irrlicht, Crystal Space 3D, and Cafu, but I don't have any experience with any of them. I'm looking for suggestions from people who have experience with these or other engines on which ones are well written, and are easy to get started using, without having to learn a ton of 3D math theory and how GPUs work internally.
closed as not constructive by Sean Middleditch, Byte56♦, Le Comte du Merde-fou, Tetrad♦ Mar 26 '13 at 23:17
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My Opinion (only for open source 3D engines):
The obvious initial suggestion is Ogre3D.
Open Scene Graph is a pretty good, very well designed cross-platform 3D engine. Contrary to Ogre3D, for example, it does not provide "game engine" features, and concentrates on being a very nice abstraction on top of OpenGL.
Have a look at the extensive list of samples.
In terms of game engines:
Since Ogre3D was suggested, there also exists a light-weight alternative Horde3D.
Irrlicht provides a bit more than Ogre3D, and at the same time is a bit more hands-on (e.g. it doesn't feel like you're just "starting an engine" and watching it run, it feels more like you're the one running commands, as it should be in my opinion).
I think it would be great to start with!
I know you asked for C++, but Panda3D also works with C++, even if it's at first targeted to work with python. It is a game engine, but whatever...
The obvious choice, if Ogre3D is too low level for you, would be NeoAxis: http://www.neoaxisgroup.com/
It's powered by Ogre, but is a complete game development platform.
It's targeting .NET so you can use C#, managed C++, VB.
So go for that. :)
Ogre3D is able to run on a range of mobile devices, like iPhone and Android. So it's not too big.
Don't mistake size for performance.
I am not sure if IrrLicht has an official iPhone support, but Ogre3D does.
Good answers so far, but I'll add Marmalade. It does mobile pretty well. A bunch of large studios have released console game with it, so it's got credentials. There is even a unity-like editor built on top of it, Shiva3D, which allows for cross-platform as well.


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Possible Duplicate:
Change \textwidth and \textheight in mid-document
is there a way to adjust the vertical margins, i.e. left and right, on a single page / a certain region (the table of contents in my case) of a TeX document?
The reason why I'm asking is, that I've got a simple TeX-Article with two columns, therefor I set the margins left and right to somewhat around 2cm. However, I did not apply multicols on the table of contents (as I do not want that). Now the toc stretches over the full page width, which I find very ugly. Ideally it would have an individual width of 2/3 of the page, somewhat around 12cm.


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The Titanic, if one may believe the last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect, was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen berg, but the low edge of a floe--and sank. Leisurely enough, God knows--and here the advantage of bulkheads comes in--for time is a great friend, a good helper --though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to prolong the agony of the passengers who could not be saved. But she sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many lives, a sort of surprised consternation that such a thing should have happened at all. Why? You build a 45,000 tons hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people (for if it had been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been no such exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the style of the Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style--I don't know which--and to please the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than they know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents, you launch that mass with two thousand people on board at twenty-one knots across the sea--a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere material and appliances. And then this happens. General uproar. The blind trust in material and appliances has received a terrible shock.
These words by author and seaman Joseph Conrad on the sinking of the Titanic are ultimately less critical of the fact that the ship sunk that they are critical of the fact that people were surprised. Of course there are inherent dangers to oceanic travel, and the larger the ship the more potent the possibility of danger. A ship deemed unsinkable is the one you must best prepare to have sunk. However, in stating the obvious, Conrad was speaking contrary to the spirit of his age.
The Late Victorian and Edwardian Eras were periods of incredible progress in science, technology and society. The Titanic was the last in a chain of innovations in transportation technologies that included the mass production of the automobile, the creation of the bicycle, the invention of the diesel locomotive and the conquest of the air. The Wright Brothers launched their historic flight from Kittyhawk, North Carolina on December 17th, 1903. Ford's first automobile, the Model A, rolled off the assembly line the same year. It was Ford's Model T, however, that began a phenomenon. Observing a basic rule that has seemed to escape modern corporations, Henry Ford set the production costs and price point of his automobile low enough so that his employees wages could be high enough to purchase the product, in turn creating the culture of the car. For those that could not afford the horseless carriage, the bicycle craze initiated by the 1885 invention of the modern bicycle was still going strong, in all its wonderful and strange variety. Though not widespread until after the Second World War, the diesel locomotive originated in 1912.
Electric light became widespread, replacing gas lighting all over the Western world. Madame Curie discovered radium in 1898 and synthesized as a metal in 1910. Through the Late Victorian Era the hunt was also on for X-rays, on which Wilhelm Röntgen published in 1895. In 1905, a young German patent office clerk and student published a series of groundbreaking papers in physics, including the theory of special relativity. Einstein followed this up in 1911 with a theory of general relativity. Experiments by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909 led to Ernest Rutherford overturning established models of atomic structure. Humanity, it seemed, was finally probing the true scientific mysteries of the universe.
The arts and entertainment entered new phases of creative expression. In fact, this period saw the invention of an entirely new and heretofore impossible medium of artistic expression: motion pictures. The Lumière Brothers inaugurated cinema as a form of popular entertainment in 1895 and D.W. Griffith filmed Hollywood's first movie in 1910. With the advent of photography, traditional visual arts broke away from Victorian conventions of representation: Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Expressionism and Post-Impressionism built on a foundation of Impressionism. New materials allowed for the invention of whole new styles of design and architecture, such as Art Nouveau. Literature, drama and music began to express new ideas of social and democratic freedom.
New religious movements fermented and broke out in tent revivals and Spiritualist sessions across the Western world. Within them was found the infrastructure and impetus for new social movements. The Temperance movement entered a new phase of activity which, for good or excess, recognized that the social ills faced by women were solvable. Though criticized in modern, free societies as moral busybodies imposing their religious views on society, we forget that the cry of temperance was more so a rally against the predatory victimization of men that in turn resulted in men's violent victimization of women. It is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but opiates that are the opiate of the masses.
This activity empowered the movement towards women's suffrage. More so than moral arguments or legal sanctions, the full legal equality was seen as the fundamental necessity to solve the victimization of women. Not long after, hemlines went up and corsets went in the bin. The rigidity of classism came under fire from within as the British Empire came under threat from without. Imperial exhaustion set in after the death of Queen Victoria, providing avenues for substantive inroads by socialists and pacifists. The old European powers began to falter as news powers like the United States and Japan rose to ascendancy. In 1907, Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch published Christianity and the Social Crisis, outlining the tenets of the now-forgotten Social Gospel Movement that defined early twentieth century Christianity, proclaiming that any form of Christianity that has neglected the causes of poverty and oppression while ministering to the poor and oppressed has neglected the full message of Christ. The magazine Christian Century began publishing in 1900, articulating a new optimism in widespread moral, political and academic progress, and the belief that "genuine Christian faith could live in mutual harmony with the modern developments in science, technology, immigration, communication and culture that were already under way."
The whole idea of an unsinkable vessel was perfectly in step with the prevailing attitude of progress and a "Christian Century". It was for this very reason that the RMS Titanic took on its symbolic status. Proclamations about such a technological marvel were not so much an expression of humanity's hubris as they were an expression of its hopefulness. It is not so much what the ship itself was as what it represented, both to those who watched its journey and to those aboard her: the richest of the rich and the immigrants aspiring to a new and better life.
Then, as if struck by God's chief archangel in charge of irony, the Titanic hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank to the bottom of the ocean, carrying over 1500 people to their grave.
Only the wisest and most cynical could have foreseen it. As Conrad observed, there is no progress to which danger is not implicit. Another to have foreseen it was Morgan Robertson, whose 1898 novella Futility; or, The Wreck of the Titan chillingly predicted with some astonishing accuracy the marriage of technological advancement without wise precaution. John Jacob Astor wrote his own Scientific Romance in 1894 - A Journey in Other Worlds - which trumpeted the march of progress, but other contemporaneous writers turned their attention more presciently to the question of global mechanized warfare. With new technologies come new weapons, as in H.G. Wells' 1907 novel The War in the Air.
For while the Titanic sounded the cloister bell, it was The Great War that truly dashed the Edwardian Era on the rocks. The restructuring of European power exploded in gore and shrapnel, ending the hope of the inevitable marriage of technological and scientific progress with moral progress and a "Christian Century". This globally traumatic experience served the functional purpose of that which the sinking of the Titanic symbolized: the end of the Edwardian Era and the birth of the modern age.


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Just to be clear, the new M1 upper rotator can only be used at the 7.5 degree stops?
Last edited by bbc597; 02-22-2011 at 10:04 AM.
The NN5 had down to 2,5° marks on the upper rotator ring. Besides Vincen's set up I used it with 70-200mm as well without any problem in between the 15° stop mechanism. Even more torque to the upper rotator.
I did not try a NN5L. But I think it should be the same as NN5 upper rotator. I can not remember any question about the upper rotator of NN5L loosing its position since 2008.
I realized it. The answer was based on your questions. Right now there is no solution to set the upper rotator of the M1 to anything else but 7.5° x settings.
So if you need upper rotator settings besides this with 5° or 2.5° intervals, right now the only solution is the NN5/NN5L depending on your camera lens combination. So if you need this right now, try to get a NN5.
Nick knows about questions about longer focus lenses and their needs concerning rotator steps. He listens to customers questions. Right now, it is 7.5° on the upper rotator for M1.
Last edited by hindenhaag; 02-22-2011 at 10:54 AM.
How about the focal length questions from above with the upper rotator at 7.5 degrees?
"With the longest focal length being ~155mm on a full frame camera mounted in landscape orientation with 15% overlap? And with the longest focal length being ~230mm on a full frame camera mounted in portrait orientation with 15% overlap?"
Last edited by bbc597; 02-22-2011 at 11:04 AM.
You can sort out the answer with all responses I suppose.
Nick, can you help?
Quote Originally Posted by nick fan View Post
yes. you can only shoot at 7.5 deg intervals, 15 deg intervals, 22.5 deg intervals, 30 deg intervals etc
more than enough for spherical pano makers.
With the longest focal length being ~155mm on a full frame camera mounted in landscape orientation with 15% overlap?
And with the longest focal length being ~230mm on a full frame camera mounted in portrait orientation with 15% overlap?
But I would be more conservative in the % overlap. For about 25% overlap and a full frame camera, max focal length is 135mm in landscape orientation and 200mm in portrait orientation.
To support longer focal length, a bigger and more fancy rotator is needed. I reserve it for M2 which will also serve as a gimbal arm for tele lenses.
We listen. We try harder.
I have to say that after reading this thread and doing some measurements on the images I can only say one thing. Skip it and start again. Perhaps you will then be able to do a decent design which is usable for us who does not want to have 3 different panoheads in the bag for different lenses and cameras.
The number of design flaws on this is simply to much. I now need to find another panohead to recommend to people who asks me.
ok, there are 2 obvious ones.
1. upper rail (210mm in photo) is too long and it will get too much into the image.
I check the NPP database, a shorter rail (170mm) will be just fine. It will be the one which is shipped. Price is adjusted in the listing. Even with this rail, it can still be a problem for smaller fisheye like shaved Nikon 10.5mm. The QR clamp position at the end of upper rail can be adjusted slightly. It will be fine for most users who use similarly sized lenses.
well, if a user need to use very differently sized (wide angle) lenses, it will need another rail. I know this is unacceptable for you.
solution: one more clamp can be added under the upper rail QR clamp to slide it along the rail. Each rail has sockets for installing a stop plate at the middle. This will keep the function of integrated stop plate.
2. the vertical head room is not enough for +90 deg zenith shots for some lenses. Right! but a "zenith" shot with smaller tilt angle is just fine. Lots of people do not take +90 deg zenith shot. Well, you can insist taking a perfect +90 deg zenith shot.
Solution: we will have a nadir adapter very soon that will increase the head room by 30mm. I have checked my database. It should be fine for most lenses that one may want to use for spherical panos. If not enough, I can make a taller one. Nadir adapter proves to be a very helpful accessory. So it is designed to be part of the system. And it works much better than the one on NN3/5. The vertical rail is designed to work for super tele lenses >400mm fl, it is kept short to increase stability and reduce bulk.
Are there other flaws that worth my recall of M1? You will win a demo unit by naming any flaw that I fail to consider during the past few years. :-)
Any design has its pros and cons. The design I choose has greatest versatility and expandability.
Last edited by nick fan; 02-23-2011 at 05:47 AM.
We listen. We try harder.
I'll have to disagree. This is not the R1 series.Lots of people do not take +90 deg zenith shot.
This is the M1 with an upper arm that's suppose to be able to "shoot up"?


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It's Monday, the 18th day of NaNloPoMo, and I am feeling a bit uninspired. I looked at today's writing prompt to get me going. The prompt is to blog about a post you didn't publish. I have a couple of those, but not many. Actually, I have many more unwritten posts that I probably won't be able to publish, for the same reasons I haven't written them. The subject is too raw, and the stories are personal not just to me, but to others in my family.
I looked through my blog posts marked "private" and I found this one. When I wrote it my heart ached for my step-daughter. I felt so helpless, like most parents feel when they see their child sick or sad. At the time, I wrote the post for myself and yet I knew that I would not be able to hit "publish" because like my other unwritten, unpublished blog posts, the subject matter was still too fresh.
Now, after reading this post, I feel enough time has passed that I can finally hit "publish."
|As parents, we've experienced many "firsts." We had a first in our house last night. Our first daughter, with her first love, experienced her first broken heart. As parents, it was one of those times watching your child hurt and realizing you can do little about it, except offer some comforting words and the comforting food of a cheeseburger, fries and chocolate shake.We've all been there. But, somehow seeing your child go through it makes it so much more painful. As we talked about her heartbreak, I found myself amazed at her level of maturity, insight and sensitivity. The tears rolled down her face and she sobbed, feeling bad for being the one to break the news and knowing that in doing so, she may have broken a heart and ended a friendship.I have been on both ends of the spectrum, and in my opinion it is worse to be the one hearing the message, than the one delivering the message. Maybe that's because when I was the messenger I wasn't as attached to the person, or maybe I just wasn't as sensitive as our 14 year old daughter. I was also amazed, stunned actually, that we were talking about it. She doesn't share her feelings easily, so perhaps it's a testament to the amount of pain she felt that she was able to share it with her dad and I. Or maybe she just has a more open relationship about these things than I ever did with my parents. It could also be when I was a teen, I under-estimated my parents and didn't think they would understand.
As much as it hurt to see her suffer, I also felt gratitude. I felt grateful that we have such an insightful, loving daughter. Grateful that I felt close to her in sharing such heartache. Grateful that she confided in me, her mom and her dad. Most of all I felt grateful in knowing that this too shall pass and as beautiful and wonderful as she is, she will experience love again. This is one thing I know to be true. I am grateful to her for reminding me of that too.


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Recipes from the September/October 2012 Issue of EatingWell (Slide 33)
(Slide 33 of 46) Start at the beginning | View recipes as list
Recipe: Champagne Raspberry Jello
View as: Thumbnails List
Roast Chicken & Sweet Potatoes
Caramelized sweet potatoes and red onion are the bed for chicken thighs that cook up fast in a very …View slide
Seared Salmon with Green Pe…
A simple sauce of piquant green peppercorns, lemon juice and butter top this seared salmon recipe. G…View slide
Broccoli, Ham & Cheese Quiche
This quiche recipe is full of broccoli, Cheddar cheese and smoky ham surrounded by a crispy hash bro…View slide
Chipotle-Orange Broccoli & …
Chipotle peppers add kick to this tofu and broccoli stir-fry recipe. If you're shy about spice, cu…View slide
Spaghetti Genovese
Traditionally, this Italian pasta recipe combines pasta and pesto with potatoes and green beans. In …View slide
Maple-Bacon Roasted Apples …
Roasted apples and celery root (celeriac) with a maple-bacon glaze make a perfect fall side dish. If…View slide
Apple & Fennel Salad with B…
Apples and blue cheese are a heavenly match in this fennel and apple salad recipe dressed with a tan…View slide
Apple Oatmeal
In this healthy oatmeal recipe, cook apples into your morning oatmeal and you'll start the day rig…View slide
Caramel Apples
This healthy caramel apple recipe has just enough caramel to give a nice hit of salty-sweet flavor i…View slide
Pork, Apple & Miso Noodle Soup
Apples and mild white miso lightly sweeten this easy noodle soup recipe. It's got plenty of flavor…View slide
Ginger Baked Apples with Oa…
Think of these baked apples as individual apple crisps. Use apples that get nice and soft when they�…View slide
Salami & Spinach Stromboli
Traditional stromboli recipes are stuffed with tons of mozzarella cheese and Italian cured meats. In…View slide
White Pizza with Clams
Here's an easy homemade pizza recipe that is a take on white clam pizza, which was first made famo…View slide
Grilled Thai Chicken Sandwich
Juicy grilled chicken, onions and peppers combine with a Thai-inspired sauce in this chicken sandwic…View slide
Jerk Chicken Pockets
These tasty sweet potato and jerk chicken "pockets" are spiced up with jerk seasoning, a Caribbe…View slide
Smothered Green Beans with …
This green bean recipe from chef Alex Patout of Landry's restaurant in New Iberia, Louisiana, gets…View slide
Gateau de Sirop
This easy cake recipe by Cajun food authority Marcelle Bienvenu is studded with pecans and is typica…View slide
Crawfish Etouffée
Literally translated as "smothered" and pronounced ay-TOO-fay, the crawfish recipe is typically …View slide
Grilled Redfish with Andoui…
New Orleans chef Chuck Subra turns couche couche, a Cajun breakfast food where a cornmeal batter is …View slide
Catfish Courtbouillon
Cajun courtbouillon (pronounced koo-bee-yon) is a vegetable-and-fish stew recipe. In this healthy ca…View slide
Seafood Gumbo
Gumbo, a hearty stew made with anything from sausage or duck to rabbit or seafood, starts with a rou…View slide
Chicken Potpie with Biscuits
In this lightened-up recipe for chicken potpie, creamy chicken stew is topped with flaky biscuits fo…View slide
Fish & Mushroom Casserole w…
This fish and mushroom casserole recipe features a crispy phyllo topping on a hearty stew full of mu…View slide
Vegetarian Quinoa & Squash …
An aromatic mixture of garlic, paprika, cumin, coriander, allspice and cayenne flavors this vegetari…View slide
Massaged Mustard Greens Salad
A few minutes of judicious massaging will transform bitter mustard greens into a mellow, well-balanc…View slide
Massaged Kale Salad
Here a pungent garlicky dressing is infused into kale by massaging the greens and the dressing toget…View slide
Massaged Broccoli Rabe Salad
In this broccoli rabe salad recipe, the dressing is massaged into the leaves and florets, virtually …View slide
Sauerkraut & Sausage Casserole
One bite of this hearty sausage casserole recipe—full of sauerkraut, apples and kielbasa—and you…View slide
Sparkling Raspberry Jello J…
The sparkling white grape juice in this raspberry jello jigglers recipe gives these a fun, bubbly ap…View slide
Lime & Orange Jello Jigglers
Pucker up and enjoy this sweet and sour after-school treat. For a sweeter snack or dessert, use fres…View slide
Mango-Strawberry Jello Jigg…
These sweet mango-strawberry jello jigglers are fun to make and even more fun to eat. Great for an a…View slide
Grape Jello Jigglers
Forget the artificial colors and flavors–our hand-held grape jello jiggler is made with fruit juic…View slide
Champagne Raspberry Jello
In this grown-up take on jello, we combine cran-raspberry juice with Champagne and fresh raspberries…View slide
Lime & Orange Jello
This lime-orange jello recipe gets its vibrant green hue from spirulina—a dark green edible plankt…View slide
Sangria Jello
We took the classic flavors of sangria and turned it into a grown-up jello recipe for dessert. Look …View slide
Grape Jello
The mix of white and purple grape juice lets you peek inside at all the fresh cut fruit layered insi…View slide
Mango-Strawberry Jello
Tropical mango and sweet strawberries are the perfect marriage in this pretty, crowd-pleasing jello …View slide
Mushroom & Cheddar Stuffed …
In this recipe for stuffed onions, mild onion layers are filled with a tasty mushroom and Cheddar ch…View slide
Lebanese Cabbage Rolls
These Lebanese cabbage rolls are stuffed with lamb and infused with the flavors of turmeric, ground …View slide
Curried Lentil Stuffed Squash
In this stuffed squash recipe, a spicy red lentil curry stew fills acorn squash. If you find them at…View slide
Pork & Shrimp Stuffed Eggplant
The Thai-inspired pork-and-shrimp filling for this stuffed eggplant recipe is generously seasoned wi…View slide
Paprika-Spiced Stuffed Peppers
Plenty of paprika lends a lightly pungent flavor and vibrant red color to the creamy sauce and the p…View slide
Oyster-Stuffed Artichokes
Packed with oysters, Parmesan and herbs, these stuffed artichokes make a spectacular meal along with…View slide
EatingWell Meat Pie
Traditionally meat pie recipes are made with mostly ground pork. This recipe for French-Canadian mea…View slide
Raspberry Jello
We combine cran-raspberry juice with sparkling white grape juice to make a dazzling raspberry jello …View slide


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I've done some research but I couldn't find any helpful answer. Is there a way to delete all Hotmail contacts at once?
The reason is that some spam emails are sent automatically to my contacts, and I don't use this address any more. So, if there isn't a way to remove all contacts, is there a way at least to stop these emails?


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7 Hacks That Turn Everyday Objects into Deadly Weapons
#3. Human Slingshot
Building your own amusement park ride seems like an impossible undertaking. Between the construction costs, the insurance issues and wrangling and vaccinating all the carnies, you're probably never going to get a roller coaster in your backyard. You can, however, stretch a big rubber band between a couple of poles like these guys.
The slingshot is made from two power line poles, a homemade bungee and some overeager kids on a four-wheeler who long ago abandoned their sense of self preservation in favor of a desire to watch a friend's ass get forced into their neck.
The potential for this contraption to go horribly awry is high. Nevermind a faulty bungee or poor launch trajectory, one loose harness strap and you'll be flying through the skies as gracefully as a drunken hobo scales the stairs into the subway, and towards the same result: broken bones and shitted pants.
#2. Sawdust Cannon
A sawdust cannon is supposedly a way to make explosions without the inherent danger of real explosives, which is like saying stabbing someone with a screwdriver is like stabbing without the inherent danger of knives.
When you force compressed air into 30-pounds of sawdust with a road flare jammed in the middle, you get a massive explosion. The flare ignites the air/sawdust mixture and creates a scale model hell on Earth.
The cannon was tested on the TV show Mythbusters and, after creating a fireball even bigger than the one in the video, claimed that the technology was too dangerous for even them, and should never be shared with anyone. This seems slightly disingenuous though, after explaining exactly how easy it was, then broadcasting it to millions of rabid, tech-junkie viewers. It's kind of like giving a kid a candy bar and telling them not to eat it. Then waiting until they start eating it to make it explode.
#1. Rocket Bike
These days, rocket bikes are as common as syphilis. A quick Google search will net you a few hundred thousand results. Most of them are loud, dangerous and don't do much except for sputter and smoke a lot, like grandma only less incontinent.
Then you have Tim Pickens, an actual rocket designer. His "not fucking around here" bike incorporates the same hybrid fuel design used in SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded spaceplane to take a human into space, which, oh by the way, Pickens helped create.
The bike is fairly simple, in a crazy fire-a-few-inches-from-your-ass sort of way. A battery pack ignites a model rocket engine which vaporizes roofing tar, fueling the engine and creating 200-pounds of thrust. The rocket bike can go from zero to 60 in five seconds, fast enough to beat a Porsche--though probably still unable to help you land the girl riding in the Porsche.
The major design flaw though is not Pickens's engineering, but the base model he chose for his bike. The bike is a Pacific, sold at Wal-Mart and put together by guys who likely enjoy Pabst and weed for breakfast. Demonstrating faith in his design, Pickens lets his 13-year-old daughter ride the bike, which does less to give us faith in the bargain-basement bike and more to lower our faith in his parenting skills.
Then again, at age 13 what would you have given to trade your dad for a Rocket Bike Dad? We're guessing a lot.
While we don't condone creating one, we'd be failing in our civic duties if we failed to inform you that flamethrower is totally legal. Find out what else is, in 7 Items You Won't Believe Are Actually Legal. And find out about some iconic weapons that are being developed, in 5 Famous Sci-Fi Weapons That They're Actually Building.
And check out the Top Picks to see how our modified pens are truly mightier than the sword (we're talking about our dongs).


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The 5 Worst Sources of Advice on Television
#2. Joey Greco from G4's Cheaters
Helping friends through a break-up is difficult. But helping complete strangers through a break-up is easy: you just film their loved ones cheating on them and show them the footage.
This simple formula has catapulted Joey Greco's Cheaters into godsend status among fraternity members and previously-scorned, single thirty-somethings. Each show ends with a (usually violent) confrontation between cheater and cheatee, during which Joey Greco takes the opportunity to brow-beat the accused into a frenzied, emotional meltdown.
And where advice is usually offered for the benefit of the recipient, in Joey Greco's case the advice - to have a cheating significant other followed and videotaped - is only given so that he can soak up the satisfaction of talking down to a red-handed cheater. On TV.
You can't tell, but that chair is on top of a giant pedestal, atop a high horse.
So instead of convincing the subjects of his show to talk through their issues with their significant others, Joey Greco organizes shock and awe breakups - confrontations so charged and emotional that they always end in either fist-fighting or sex.
The cheatee always walks away worse off, one more person to find that problem solving via basic cable reality show has left them sadly unfulfilled.
#1. TLC's Flip This House
In the year 2056, a sociological presentation on the greed and short-sightedness that drove the financial crisis of 2008 will probably open with an episode of Flip That House. The show follows modern-day gold prospectors buying, renovating and selling homes with turnarounds of as little as 30 days.
The show generally features houses that were successfully flipped and sold for tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Crack dens, run-down shanties, doghouses - they're all converted into McMansions in the span of 30 minutes and sold for half-a-million dollars by a sharply-dressed real estate agent who thinks it was a great idea to install granite countertops.
Each episode follows the same basic plot progression: house is bought, then house is fixed, then massive bags full of money are trucked to local bank branch. But the people flipping the houses fit one of three profiles: the young go-getter eager to get her feet wet in the "real world"; the father-son duo who rekindle their relationship over the project; and the chipper, sensible newlyweds who are renovating the house as their honeymoon.
The advice these people dispense on the show is to follow their lead to El Dorado, the city of gold. But advice is only as good as the results it achieves, and it's more profitable now to flip burgers than houses. The fact is that house flipping most likely created more divorcees than millionaires, and each episode of Flip That House is probably directly responsible for 10-20 mortgage defaults from people trying to play along at home.
House-flipping is actually slightly more complicated than this.
Holy crap, we think we owe Joey Greco up there an apology.
For more crap your television would like you to swallow whole, check out 5 Cheap Tricks TV Shows Use to Keep You Watching. Or check out As Seen on TV: The 10 Most Laughably Misleading Ads.
And stop by Cracked.com's Top Picks to receive some great online advice from total strangers!


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While taking thermodynamics our chemistry teacher told us that entropy is increasing in day by day (as per second law of thermodynamics), and when it reaches its maximum the end of the world will occur. I didn't see such an argument in any of the science books, is there any probablity for this to be true?
migrated from chemistry.stackexchange.com Jun 6 '12 at 13:02
This question came from our site for scientists, academics, teachers and students.
What your describing is the theory of the Heat death of the universe which is speculated about since 1850s. However, as explained here, object at astronomical scale are often self-gravitating and that gives them have unintuitive thermodynamical properties like a negative heat capacity. This usually gives more structured systems as entropy increases, and negates the idea of heat-death.
Furthermore, given the fact that the universe is currently thought to be forever expanding and that the majority of the entropy is/will be in black-holes, the estimated time-scale for such thermal equilibrium to occur is huge (of the order of 10100 years), which gives us vastly enough time to change our cosmological theories about the end of the universe...


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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (Matinee)Sun, December 23, 2012 - 3:00 PMNew York City Center - Stage 1 in New York, NY
We are sorry, the date for this event has already passed. This event took place on 12/23/2012. Click here to view upcoming events for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
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HABA Assorted Cookies
Product Description
The HABA Assorted Cookies look so realistic, that they look good enough to eat! But, of course, they are toy cookies are ready lots of tea parties and hours of pretend-play. Your little ones will love having these as center pieces to picnics, pretend-birthdays, and other celebrations all year long. Includes 6 sets of cookie layers (19 individual pieces) that can be reassorted again and again. Cookies come in a flower-shaped cookie box. Yum, yum! Third-party certified to be child-safe and non-toxic.
Pretend-play is an important part of child's early development. Such imaginative play allows children to freely explore roles, conversations, and social norms in a safe and fun setting. Research shows that children who are appropriately supported and encouraged to engage in pretend and imaginative play grow in self-confidence and are stimulated intellectually.
Made Of / Made In
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The HABA Made in Germany line of toys are manufactured in Bad Rodach, Germany where HABA's worldwide headquarters are located. The wealth of experience, coupled with the latest technologies guarantee consistently high-quality products.
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Letters, flyers, and papers from numerous civil rights campaigns in 1960s Seattle, spearheaded by CORE, the Urban League, the NAACP, the Central Area Civil Rights Committee, and other civil rights organizations, relating to police brutality, community programs, education, and particularly, the campaigns for open housing in 1963-1964. These documents from open housing and other civil rights campaigns are part of a special section of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Digitization of documents courtesy of the Special Collections Library, University of Washington (CORE, Seattle Chapter Records, 1961-1970, Manuscript Collection 1563). Copyright (c) reserved.
Report of Cross Burning, September 5, 1958
"The Housing Situation of Minority Groups in the State of Washington," April 30, 1961
"Operation Windowshop," c. 1962
Outline of 1963 Civil Rights Act, from the Washington State Democratic Committee
Voter Action Campaign, Central Area Civil Rights Committee
Call for Seattle Freedom March from the CACRC, August 28, 1963
Fair Housing Listing Service, Fall 1963
Democratic Committee Statement for Open Housing, June 25, 1963
Proposed Open Housing Ordinance, 1964
Letter on Defeat of Open Housing Ordinance, March 24, 1964
Letter on housing discrimination, September 10, 1964
"Why We Are Here" Housing flyer from CORE and the NAACP
Report of CORE's March 22, 1964 sit-in at discriminatory realtor Picture Floor Plans
CORE's Discrimination Log
Guidelines for 1965 "Freedom Patrols" to eliminate police brutality
The Urban League's Rental Project Progress Report, June 15, 1966
University of Washington Civil Rights Action Group (CRAG) pamphlet, c. 1964-1965
Seattle CORE's "Corelator" Newsletter, February 20, 1967
"Separate but Unequal: Is Black Control the Answer?" Urban League Forum, c. 1967-1968


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