text:
How Sitter Works for Parents
Babysitting made easy for you and your friends
Use the Sitter app to share, book, manage, and pay your sitters in a tap!
An overview of Sitter
Watch the video and see how easy it is to book, pay, and connect with trusted babysitters.
How to book your babysitters
Add your babysitters.
Only you will see them. Their information is completely private. We won't share their info or spam them. And, they don't need the app!
Send them a booking.
Select the date and time. You're done! We'll send the details to your sitters.
(Psst – if you just want to send it to your favorites first, you can do that too.)
Your sitters respond.
Your sitters respond with a yes or no. We'll manage the communication and let you know when a sitter accepts.
How to pay your babysitters
Trouble with late-night math? Always forget the ATM? We'll take care it.
Sitters set their rates.
You can view their rate in their profile. If you and your sitter agree on a different rate, you can always change it before you pay them.
Pay the sitter with a credit card. The money is directly deposited into their bank account. (You can still pay cash if you want to.)
In-app timer keeps track.
We'll start and stop the timer at the times in your booking or you can open the app and start or stop it early.
Add a tip or reimbursement.
Before paying, you can add a tip or reimburse them for the pizza.
How to find a babysitter
The best babysitters are the ones referred by friends. The second-best babysitters are the ones in your neighborhood. With Sitter, you can find them both ways.
Find sitters in your network
Connect with friends and see the sitters they use. Check out your shared connections and their profile. See one you like? Introduce yourself! Then add them to your team of trusted sitters!
Find sitters in your neighborhood
Set your radius and see the sitters near you! Check out their profile. See one you like? Introduce yourself via chat. Ask some questions. Get to know them. Even set up a time to meet. Love 'em? Add them to your list! Then, book them and head on out for a night on the town.


text:
Elsevier has suspended UC's access to new articles. But the Library can help.
Calle Santa Fe: un amor revolucionario
A documentary about a leftist activist coming back to Chile from exile. Old harrowing memories come back to mind along with fears of finding a submissive Chile that doesn't fit in with the ideals they struggled for, so it triggers mixed feelings and the sensation of a lost battle. Presented at the International Latino Film Festival held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Directed by Carmen Castillo. 2007. 167 min.
Language or Country:
Call Number:

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Latest Health And Health News, Health News And Headlines At the moment
There are several health care issues that are in the news and within the minds of many people as of late. A life crammed with stress can actually wreak havoc in your physique inflicting plenty of diseases resembling hear attacks, strokes, asthma, gastric issues, menstrual problems, ulcerative colitis, angina, irritable colon, increased blood pressure, ulcers, complications, and so on.
And since they understand the basics of how protein, carbohydrates and fat affect metabolism and how metabolism determines your and your childrens health, they're never hypnotized by dancing lions or cute bears into shopping for packing containers of dietary junk trying to imitate healthy food.
As hundreds of scientists, doctors and researchers repeatedly attempt to find higher methods to enhance the well being of human beings, new strategies of preventing ailments and staying wholesome is being revealed almost on daily basis that should you look forward to a month to get … Read More


text:
Friendly URLs can be created for each individual page.
If for example you have a page which sits on the 3rd level of your site i.e.
You may want to create a shorter, more friendly URL for this page.
So you can have multiple URLs for one page all 301 redirecting to the primary URL
You cannot however create redirects from different domains withing the CMS.
For more information on URLs and Redirects, check out the articles below.
What more information can be given on friendly URLs
How to add a new URL to a page
What are friendly URLs ?
Does Envisage allow friendly URL creation from within the system ?
How to set page redirects through IIS
Sam is our resident video games expert. as well as being a dab hand (Or should
that be knee) at muay thai. He is the man on the end of the phone dealing with
your support requests.
Fixing the Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0 Error
How to import a segment list
Backups frequently asked questions
Content Blocks frequently asked questions
Banners/Jumbotron frequently asked questions
How To Get Your Twitter Feed Back On Your Website After The API 1.1 Update
How To Add A New URL To A Page
Creating A Dashboard Control
JavaScript frequently asked questions
About Envisage CMS
Envisage is a Content Management System that is extremely easy to use. It has a true "What You See Is What You Get" WYSIWYG editor that can be accessed via any browser or mobile device.
Websites are responsive so render perfectly on computers, tablets and mobiles.
It is developed using Microsoft technologies, so it will always be secure, stable and supported.
It has tons of features, including; video, Google Maps, dynamic image editing, create-your-own-templates, Google Analytics and events..
Get social with us


text:
Old 84
- Difficulty:
- Moderate
- Distance:
- Not Available
- Location:
- Damascus, VA
- Get directions
Additional Notes/Directions:
From the intersection with Route 58 & Route 91 east of Damascus: Turn left and follow Route 58 for 9.7 miles to Route 603 at Konnarock. Go straight on Route 603 (Route 58 makes a sharp right here) another 2.9 miles to Weavers Store and turn right on Route 603. Go 4.3 miles and turn left on FS 828 just before the Grindstone Campground. Proceed up FS 828 for 1.5 miles until you arrive at a level field that is a primitive camping area and is marked with red # 44 painted on several trees. There is plenty of space to park and you will start here. From Hurricane Campground, go straight on FS 84 4.3 miles to the intersection with FS 828. Go left 1.1 miles and park on the left at the pullover.


text:
A question of hardware capability?
When can we expect the Singularity? What kind of hardware would be required for an artificial cortex? How far out into the future of Moore's Law is such technology?
The startling answer is that the artificial cortex, and thus the transition to a profoundly new historical era, is potentially much closer than most people realize. The problem is mainly one of asking the right questions. What is the computational power of the human brain? This is not quite the right question. With a few simple tools a human can perform generic computation – indeed computers were human long before they were digital (see the history of the word: computer). The computational speed of the human brain aided with simple tools is very very low, less than one operation per second. Most studies then of reverse engineering the human brain are really asking a different question: how much digital computation would it require to simulate the human brain? Estimates vary, but they are usually of order near 10^15 – quadrillions of operations per second or less for functional equivalence, up to around 10^18 for direct simulation, plus or minus a few orders of magnitude. The problem with this approach is its similar to asking how much digital computation would it require to simulate a typical desktop processor by physically simulating each transistor. The answer is surprising. A typical circa 2010 desktop processor has on the order of a billion transistors, which switch on the order of a few billion times per second. So simulating a current desktop processor using the same approach that we used to estimate brain capacity gives us a lower bound of a billion billion or 10^18 operations per second, realistically closer to 10^20 operations per second required to physically simulate a current desktop processor in real-time – beyond the upper ranges for typical estimates of simulating the human brain in real time. This is surprising given the conventional wisdom that the human brain is so much more complex than our current computers, so its worth restating:
If we define computational time complexity as the number of operations per second required to simulate a physical system on a generic computer, then current desktop processors circa 2010 have already exceeded the complexity of the human brain.
This space-time complexity analysis can be more accurately broken into two components: space complexity and speed. Space complexity is simply the information storage capacity of the system, measured in bits or bytes. Brains get their massive information capacity from their synapses, which can be conservatively estimated as the equivalent to a byte of digital storage each, thus giving an upper bound of around 10^15 bytes for directly storing all the brain's synapses – a petabyte of data storage, down to around a hundred terrabytes depending on the particular neuroscience estimate we use. Personal computers now have hard drives with terrabytes of storage, and supercomputers of 2010 are just now hitting a petabyte of memory capacity, which means they have the base storage capacity required to comfortably simulate the brain completely in RAM. Clearly brains have a big advantage in the space complexity department: their storage density is several orders of magnitude greater than our 2010 electronics (although this will change in about another 10-15 years of moore's law). However, along the speed dimension the advantage completely flips: current silicon electronics are about a million times faster than organic circuits. So your desktop processor may only have the intrinsic spatial complexity of a cockroach, but signals flow through its circuits about six orders of magnitude faster – like a hyper accelerated cockroach. Using one computational system to simulate another always implies a massive trade-off in speed. The simplest modern processor cores (much simpler than the intel CPU you are using) uses hundreds of thousands to millions of transistors, and thus even if we could simulate a synapse with just a single instruction per clock cycle, we may only just barely manage to simulate a cockroach brain in real-time. And note that the desktop processor would never be able to naively simulate something as complex as a human brain without vastly increasing its memory or storage capacity up to that of a super computer. And even then, running on supercomputers detailed brain simulations to date achieve only a small fraction of real-time performance: much less than 10%. It takes a human brain years to acquire language, so slow simulations are completely out of the question: we can't simulate for 20 years just to see if our brain model develops to the intelligence level of a two year old! Clearly, the speed issue is critical, and detailed simulation on a generic computer is not the right approach.
Capacity vs Speed
The memory capacity of a cortex is one principle quantitative measure underlying intelligence – a larger cortex with more synaptic connections can store and hold more memory patterns, and perform more total associative computations every cycle in direct proportion. Certainly after we can match the human brain's capacity, we will experiment with larger brains, but they will always have a proportionally higher cost in construction and power. Past some point of scaling a brain 2 or 4 or X times larger and more expensive is probably not an improvement over an equivalent number of separate brains (and the distinction further blurs if the separate brains are networked together through something like language). On this note, there are some reasons to believe that the human brain is already near a point of diminishing returns in the size department. Whales and elephants, both large advanced mammals with plenty of room for much more massive capacities, sport brains built with a similar order of neurons as humans. In numerous long separated branches of the mammalian line, brains grew to surface areas all within a narrow logarithmic factor: around 2,500 cm^2 in humans, 3,700 cm^2 in bottlenose dolphins, and around 6,000-8,000 cm^2 in elephant and whale lineages. They all compare similarly in terms of neuron and synapse counts even though the body sizes, and thus the marginal resource cost of a % increase in brain size vary vastly: a whale or elephant brain is small compared to its body size, and consumes a small portion of its total resources. The human brain definitely evolved rapidly from the hominid line, and is remarkably large given our body size, but our design's uniqueness is really a matter of packing a full-sized large mammal brain into a small, crammed space. The wiring problem poses a dimensional scaling constraint on brain size: total computation power scales with volume, but non-local communication scales with surface area, limiting a larger brain's ability to effectively coordinate itself. Similar dimensional scaling constraints govern body sizes, making insects insanely strong relative to their size and limiting the maximum plausible dimension of land animals to something dinosaur sized before they begin to fall apart. A larger brain developed in humans hand in hand with language and early technology, and is probably optimized to human's age: providing enough pattern-recognition prowess and capacity to learn complex concepts continuously for decades before running into capacity limits. The other large-brained mammals have similar natural ages. Approaching the capacity limit we can expect aging brains to becoming increasingly saturated, losing flexibility and the ability to learn new information, or retaining flexibility at the expense of forgetfulness and memory loss. Its thus reasonable to conclude that the storage capacity of a human brain would be the minimum, the starting point, but increasing capacity further probably has a only a sublinear increase in effective intelligence. Its probably more useful only in combination with speed, as a much faster thinking being swould be able to soak up knowledge proportionally faster.
The Great Shortcut: Fast Algorithmic Equivalence
We can do much, much better than simulating a brain synapse by synapse. As the brain's circuits are mapped, we can figure out what fundamental computations they are performing by recording mases of neuron data, simulating the circuits, and then fitting this data to matching functions. For much of the brain, this has already been done. The principle circuits of the cortex have been mapped fairly well, and all though there are still several competing implementation ideas at the circuit level, we have a pretty good idea of what these circuits can do at the more abstract level. More importantly, simulations built on these concepts can accurately recreate visual data processing in the associated circuits that is both close to biologically measured results and effective for the circuit's task – which is in this case is immediate fast object recognition (for more details, see papers such as: "Robust Object Recognition with Cortex-Like Mechanisms".) As the cortex – the great outer bulk of the brain – reuses this same circuit element throughout its surface, we can now see possible routes for performing equivalent computations but with dramatically faster algorithms. Why should this be possible in principle? Several reasons:
- Serial vs Parallel: For the brain and its extremely slow circuits, time is critical and circuits are cheap – it has so many billions of neurons (and hundreds of trillions of synapses) that it will prefer solutions that waste neuronal circuitry if they reduce the critical path length and thus are faster. From the brain's perspective, a circuit that takes 4 steps and uses a million synapses is much better than one which takes 30 steps and uses a thousand synapses. Running on a digital computer that is a million times faster and a million times less parallel, we can choose more appropriate and complex (but equivalent) algorithms.
- Redundancy: Not all – if any – synapses store unique data. For example, the some hundred million neurons in the V1 layer of each visual cortex all compute simple gabor-like edge filters from a library of a few dozen possible orientations and scales. The synapse weights for this layer could be reused and would take up memory in the kilobytes – a difference of at least 6 orders of magnitude vs the naive full simulation (where synapse = byte). This level of redundancy is probably on the far end of the scale, but redundancy is definitely a common cortical theme.
- Time Slicing: Only a fraction of the brain's neurons are active at any one point in time (if this fraction escalates too high the result is a seizure), and if we ignore random background firing, this fraction is quite low – in the range of 1% or possibly even as low as 0.1%. This is of course a net average and depends on the circuit – some are more active than others – but if you think of the vast accumulated knowledge in a human mind and what small fraction of it is available or relevant at any one point, its clear that only a fraction of the total cortical circuitry (and brain) is important during any one simulation step.
The Cortexture: The end result of these observations is that a smart algorithmic equivalent cortical simulation could be at least three orders of magnitude faster than a direct simulation which naively evaluates every synapse every timestep. The architecture I envision would organize cortical sheets into a spatial database that helps track data flow dependencies, storing most of the unique synaptic data (probably compressed) on a RAID disk array (possibly flash) which would feed one or more GPUs. With a few terrabytes of disk and some compression, you could store at least a primate level brain, if not a human-equivalent cortex. A couple of GPUs with a couple gigabytes of RAM each would store the active circuits (less than 1% of total synapses), which would be constantly changing and being streamed out as needed. Fast flash RAID systems can get over a gigabyte per second of bandwidth, so you could swap out the active cortical elements every second. I believe this is roughly fast enough to match human task or train of thought switching time. The actual cortical circuit evaluation would be handled by a small library of special optimized equivalent GPU programs. One would simulate the canonical circuit – and I believe I have an algorithm that is at least 10 times faster than naive evaluation for what the canonical circuit can do, but other algorithms could be even faster for some regions where the functionality is known and specialized. For example, the V1 layers which perform gabor-like filters use a very naive technique in the brain and the equivalent result could be computed perhaps 100x faster with a very smart algorithm. I'm currently exploring these techniques in more detail.
End Conclusion: If the brain was fully mapped (and that is the main task at hand – many mechanisms such as learning are still being teased out) and a sufficient group of smart engineers started working on optimizing its algorithms, we could probably implement a real-time artificial cortex in less than five years using today's hardware on a machine costing somewhere between $10,000-$1,000,000. (I know that is a wide error range, but I believe it is thus accurate.) This cost is of course falling exponentially year by year.
Neuromorphic Computing
A sober analysis of the current weight of neuroscience data – specifically the computational complexity of the mapped cortical circuits and their potential for dramatic algorithmic optimization on faster machines – leads to the startling, remarkable conclusion that we already have the hardware capability to implement the brain's algorithms in real-time today. In fact, it seems rather likely that by the time the brain is reverse engineered and we do figure out the software, the hardware will have already advanced enough that achieving faster than real-time performance will be quite easy. The takeoff will likely be very rapid.
The Cortexture approach I described earlier, or any AI architecture running on today's computers, will eventually run into a scalability problem due to disk and bus bandwidth speeds. To really accelerate into the singularity, and get to 100's or 1,000's of times acceleration vs human thoughtspeed will likely require a fundamental redesign of our hardware along cortical lines. Cortical neural circuitry is based on mixed analog and digital processing, and combines memory and analog computation in a single elemental structure – the synapse. The data storage and processing are both built into the synapses and the equivalent total raw information flow rate is roughly the total synapses multiplied by their signaling rate. The important question really is thus what is the minimal efficient equivalent of the synapse for CMOS technology? Remarkably, the answer may be the mysterious 4th element of basic computing, the memristor. Discovered mathematically decades ago, this circuit building block was only realized recently and is already being heralded as the 'future of artificial intelligence' – as it has electric properties very similar to the synapse – combining long term data storage and computation in a single element. For a more in depth design for a complete artificial cortex based on this new circuit element, take a look at "Cortical computing with memristive nanodevices". This is a fascinating approach, and could achieve cortical complexity parity fairly soon, if the required fabrication technology was ready and developed. However, even though the memristor is quite exciting and looks likely to play a major role in future neuromorphic systems, conventional plain old CMOS circuits certainly can emulate synapses. Existing mixed digital/analog technique can represent synapses in artificial neurons effectively using around or under 10 transistors. This hybrid method has the distinct advantage of avoiding costly digital multipliers that use tens of thousands of transistors – instead using just a handful of transistors per synapse. The idea is designs in this space can directly emulate cortical circuits in highly specialized hardware, performing the equivalent of a multiplication for every synaptic connection every clock cycle. There are a wide space of possible realizations of neuromorphic architectures, and this field looks to just be coming into its own. Google: "artificial cortex" or "neuromorphic" for papers and more info. DARPA, not to be undone, has launched its own neuromoprhic computing, called SyNAPSE – which has a blog here just so you can keep tabs on skynet.
The important quantitative dimensions for the cortex are synapse density, total capacity (which is just density * surface area), and clock rate. The cortex topology is actually 2d: that of a flat, relatively thin sheet (around 6 neurons thick) which is heavily folded into the volume of the brain, a space filling fractal. If you were to unfold it, it would occupy about one square foot or 2,500 square centimeters – the area of roughly a thousand typical processor dies. It has a density of about 100-4,000 million (10^8-10^9) synapses per mm^2. Current 40nm and 32nm CMOS technology circa 2010 can pack roughly 6-10 million (10^6-10^7) transistors onto a mm^2, so semiconductor density is within about a factor of 20-500 of the biological cortex in terms of feature density (more accurate synapse density figures await more detailed brain scans). This is a critical upcoming milestone – when our CMOS technology will match the information density and miniaturization level of the cortex. This represents another 4 to 8 density doublings (currently occurring every 2 years, but expected to slow down soon), which we can expect to hit around the 11nm node or shortly thereafter in the early to mid 2020's – the end of the semiconductor industry's current roadmap. This is also the projected end of the road for conventional CMOS technology and where the semiconductor roadmap wanders into the more hypothetical realm of nano-electronics. When that does happen, neuromorphic designs will have some distinct advantages in terms of fault tolerance and noise resistance which could allow them to scale forward more quickly. It is also expected that moving more into the 3rd dimension will be important, and leakage and other related quantum issues will limit further speed and power efficiency improvements – all pointing towards more brain-like computer designs.
Scaling up to the total memory/feature capacity of the brain (hundreds to a thousand trillion synapses), even when semiconductor technology reaches parity in density, will still take a large number of chips (having roughly equivalent total surface area). Today's highest density memory chips have a few billion transistors, and you would need hundreds of thousands to equal the total memory of the brain. High end servers are just starting to reach a terrabyte of memory (with hundreds of individual chips), and you would then need hundreds of these. A far more economical and cortically inspired idea is to forgo 'chips' completely and just turn the entire silicon wafer into a single large usable neuromorphic computing surface. The inherent fault tolerance of the cortex can be exploited by these architectures – there is no need to cut up the wafer into dies and identify defective components, they can be simply disabled or statistically ignored during learning. This fascinating contrarian approach to achieving large neuromorphic circuits is being explored by the FACETS research team in Europe. So, in the end analysis, it looks reasonable that in the near future (roughly a decade) a few hundred terrabytes of cortical equivalent neuromorphic circuitry could soon be produced on one to a couple dozen CMOS wafers (the equivalent of a few thousand cheap chips), even using conventional CMOS technology. More importantly this type of architecture can be relatively simple and highly repetitive and it can run efficiently at low clock rates and thus at low power, greatly simplifying manufacturing issues. Its hard to estimate the exact cost, but due to the combination of low voltage/clock, single uncut wafer design, perfect yield, and so on, the economics should be similar to memory – RAM chips, which arrive first at new manufacturing nodes, are cheaper to produce, and consume less power. Current 2010 RAM prices are at about $10 per GB, or very roughly 1 billion transistors per dollar.
Continuum of hardware efficiencies for cortical learning systems:
CPU,GPU Simulation: efficiency (die area, performance, power) 10^-8-10^6
FPGA, ASIC: efficiency 10^-5 to 10^-3
Neuromorphic (mixed analog/digital or memristors): 10^-2 to 1
CPU simulation is incredibly inefficient compared to the best solutions for a given problem, but CPU's versatility and general applicability across all problems ensures they dominate the market and thus they get the most research attention, the economy of scale advantage, and are first to benefit from new foundry process improvements. Dedicated ASIC's are certainly employed widely today in the markets that are big enough to support them, but always face competition from CPU's scaling up faster. At the far end are hypothetical cortical systems built from memristors, which could function as direct 1:1 synapse equivalents. We can expect that as moore's law slows down this balance will eventually break down and favor designs farther down the spectrum. Several forces will combine to bring about this shift: approaching quantum limitations which cortical designs are better adapted for, increased market potential of AI applications, and the end of the road for conventional lithography.
The Road Ahead
A human scale artificial cortex could be built today, if we had a complete connectome. In the beginning it would start out as only an infant brain – it would then take years to accumulate the pattern recognition knowledge base of a two year old and begin to speak, and then could take a few dozen additional years to achieve an education and any real economic value. This assumes, unrealistically, that the first design tested would work. It would almost certainly fail. Successive iterations would take even more time. This is of course is the real reason why we don't have human-replacement AI yet: humans are still many orders of magnitude more economically efficient.
Yet we should not be so complacently comfortable in our economic superiority, for moore's law ensures that the cost of such a cortical system will decrease exponentially.
Now consider another scenario, where instead of being constrained to current CPUs or GPUs, we invest billions in radical new chip technologies and even new foundries to move down the effeciency spectrum with a neuromorphic designs or at least a very powerful dedicated cortical ASIC. Armed with some form of specialized cortical chip ready for mass volume production today at the cheap end of chip prices (where a dollar buys about a billion transistors, instead of hundreds of dollars for a billion transistors as in the case of high end logic CPUs and GPUs), we would expect a full human brain sized system to cost dramatically less: closer to the cost of the equivalent number of RAM transistors – on the order of $10 million dollars for a petabyte (assuming 10 transistors = synapse, memristors are even better). Following the semiconductor industry roadmap (which factors in a slowing of moore's law this decade), we could expect the cost of a quadrillion synapse or petabyte system to fall below $1 million by the end of the decade, and reach $100,000 in volume by the mid 2020's – the economic tipping point of no return. But even at a million dollars a pop, a future neuromorphic computing system of human cortical capacity and complexity would be of immeasurable value, for it could possess a fundamental, simply mind-boggling advantage of speed. As you advance down the specialization spectrum from GPU's to dedicated cortical ASICs and eventually neuromorphic chips and memristors, speed and power efficiency increases by orders of magnitude – with dedicated ASICS offering 10x to 100x speedups, and direct neuromorphic systems offerings speedups of 1000x or more. If it takes 20-30 years to train a cortex from infant to educated adult mind, power and training time are the main cost. A system that could do that in 1/10th the time would be suddenly economical, and a system that could do that in 1/100th of the time of a human would rapidly bring about the end of the world as we know it.
Thinking at the Speed of Light
Our biological brains have high information densities and are extraordinarily power efficient, but this is mainly because they are extremely slow: with cycle times in the hundreds of hertz or approaching a kilohertz. This relatively slow speed is a fundamental limitation of computing with living cells and (primarily)chemical synapses with their organic fragility. Semiconductor circuits do not have this limitation. Operating at the low frequencies and clock rates of their biological inspirations, neuromorphic systems can easily simulate biological networks in real-time and with comparable energy efficiency. The most efficient neuromorphic computer generally can access all of its memory and synapses every clock cycle, so it can still perform immense calculations per second at very low speeds, just like biological neural nets. But you can also push up the clock rate, pump more power through the system, and run the circuit at megahertz rate or even gigahertz rate, equivalent to one thousand to one million times biological speed. Current systems with mixed digital/analog synaptic circuits can already achieve 1000-10000x biological 'real-time' on old CMOS manufacturing nodes and at low power and heat points. This is not an order of magnitude improvement over simulation on a similar sized and tech digital computer, its more like six orders of magnitude. That being said, the wiring problem will still be a fundamental obstacle. The brain optimizes against this constraint by taking the form of a 2D sheet excessively folded into a packed 3D space – a space filling curve. The entire outer surface is occupied by connectivity wiring – the white matter. Our computer chips are currently largely 2D, but are already starting to move into the 3rd dimension. A practical full electronic speed artificial cortex may require some novel solutions for high-speed connectivity, such as directly laser optical links, or perhaps a huge mass of fiber connections. Advanced artificial cortices may end up looking much like the brain: with the 2D circuity folded up into a 3D sphere, interspersed with something resembling a vascular system for liquid cooling, en-sheathed in a mass of dense optical interconnects. Whatever the final form, we can expect that the fundamental speed advantage inherit to electronics will be fully exploited.
By the time we can build a human complexity artificial cortex, we will necessarily already be able to run it many times faster than real time, eventually accelerating by factors of thousands and then even millions.
Speed is important because of the huge amount of time a human mind takes to develop. Building practical artificial cortex hardware is only the first step. To build a practical mind, we must also unlock the meta-algorithm responsible for the brain's emergent learning behavior. This is an active area of research, and there are some interesting emerging general theories, but testing any of them on a human sized cortex is still inordinately costly. A fresh new artificial brain will be like an infant: full of noisy, randomized synaptic connections. An infant brain does not have a mind so much as the potential space from which a mind will etch itself through the process of development. Running in real-time in a sufficiently rich virtual reality, it would take years of simulation just to test development to a childhood stage, and decades to educate a full adult mind. Thus accelerating the simulation many times beyond real-time has a huge practical advantage. Thus the need for speed.
The test of a human-level AI is rather simple and is the same qualitative intelligence tests we apply to humans: its mind develops sufficiently to learn human language, then it learns to read, and it progresses through education into a working adult. Learning human language is ultimately the fundamental aspect of becoming a modern human mind – far more than your exact brain architecture or even substrate. If the brain's cortical capacity is sufficient and the wiring organization is correctly mapped, it should then be able to self-educate and develop rapidly.
I highly doubt that other potential short cut routes to AGI (artificial general intelligence) will bear fruit – although narrow AIs will always have their uses as will simpler, animal-like AIs (non-language capable), but it seems inevitable that a human level intelligence will require something similar to a cortex (at least at the meta-algorithmic level of some form of self-organizing deep, hierarchical probabilistic networks – doesn't necessarily have to use 'neurons' ). Furthermore, even if the other routes being explored to AI do succeed, its even less likely that they will scale to the insane speeds that the cortex design should be capable of (remember, the cortex runs at < 1000hz, which means we can eventually take that same design and speed it up by a factor of at least a million.) From a systems view, its seems likely that the configuration space of our biological cortex meta-wiring is effectively close to optimal in some sense – evolution has already well explored that state space. From an engineering perspective, taking an existing, heavily optimized design for intelligence and then porting it to a substrate that can run many orders of magnitude faster is a clear winning strategy.
Clock rate control, just like on our current computers, should allow posthumans to alter their speed of thought as needed. In the shared virtual realities they will inhabit with their human teachers and observers, they will think at 'slow' real-time human rates, with kilohertz clock rates and low power usage. But they will also be able to venture into a vastly accelerated inner space, drawing more power and thinking many many times faster than us. Running on even today's CMOS technology, they could theoretically attain speeds up to about a million times faster than a biological brain, although at these extreme speeds the power and heat dissipation requirements would be large – like that of current supercomputers.
Most futurist visions of the Singularity consider AIs that are more intelligent, but not necessarily faster than human minds, but its clear that the speed is the fundemental difference between the two substrates. Imagine one of these mind children growing up in a virtual environment where it could dilate time by a factor of 1-1000x at will. Like real children, it will probably require both imitation and reinforcement learning with adults to kick start the early development phases (walking, basic environment interaction, language, learning to read). Assuming everything else was identical (the hardware cortex is a very close emulation), this child could develop very rapidly – the main bottleneck being the slow-time interaction with biological humans. Once a young posthuman learns to read, it can hop on the web, download texts, and progress at a truly staggering pace – assuming a blindingly fast internet connection to keep up (although perceived internet latency would be subjectively far worse in proportion to the acceleration – can't do much about that) . Going to college wouldn't really be a realistic option, but reading at 1000x real-time would have some pretty staggering advantages. It could read 30 years of material in just 10 days, potentially becoming a world class expert in a field of its choosing in just a week. The implications are truly profound. Entering this hypertime acceleration would make the most sense when reading, working, or doing some intellectual work. The effect for a human observer would be that anything the posthuman was intelligent enough to do it would be able to do near instantly, from our perspective. The presence of a posthuman would be unnerving. With a constant direct internet connection and a 1000x acceleration factor, a posthuman could read a book during the time it would take a human to utter a few sentences in conversation.
Clearly existing in a different phase space than us, its only true peers would be other equivalent posthumans; if built as a lone research model, it could be lonely in the extreme. Perhaps it could be selected or engineered for monastic or ascetic qualities, but it would probably be more sensible to create small societies of posthumans which can interact and evolve together – humans are social creatures, and our software descendants would presumably inherit this feature by default. The number of posthumans and their relative intelligence will be limited by our current computing process technology: the transitor density and cost per wafer – so their potential population growth will be more predictable and follow semiconductor trends (at least initially). Posthumans with more equivalent synapses and neurons than humans could presumably become super-intelligent in other quantitative dimension, that of mental capacity – able to keep track of more concepts, learn and recall more knowledge, and so on than humans – albeit with the slow linear scaling discussed previously. But even posthumans with mere human-capacity brains could be profoundly, unimaginably super-intelligent in their speed of thought, thanks to the dramatically higher clock rates possible on their substrate – and thus in a short matter of time they would become vastly more knowledgeable. The maximum size of an artificial cortex would be limited mainly by economics for the wafers and then by bandwidth and latency constraints. There are tradeoffs between size, speed, and power for a given fabrication technology, but in general, larger cortices would be more limited in their top speed. The initial generations will probably occupy a fair amount of server floor space and operate not much faster than real-time, but then each successive generation will be smaller and faster, eventually approaching a form factor similar to the human brain, and eventually pushing the potential clock rate to the technology limits (more than a million times real-time for current CMOS tech). But even with small populations at first, it seems likely that the first successful generation of posthumans to reach upper-percentile human intelligence will make an abrupt and disruptive impact on the world. But fortunately for us, physics does impose some costs to thinking at hyperspeed.
Fast Brains and Slow Computers
A neuromorphic artificial cortex will probably have data connections that allow its synaptic structures to be saved to external storage, but a study of current theory and designs in the field dispels some common myths: an artificial cortex will be a very separate specialized type of computer hardware, and will not automatically inherit a digital computer's supposed advantages such as perfect recall. It will probably not be able to automagically download new memories or skills as easily as downloading new software. The emerging general theories of the brain's intelligence, such as the heirchachial bayesian network models, all posit that learned knowledge is stored in a deeply non-local, distributed and connected fashion, very different than say a digital computer's random access memory (even if the said synapses are implemented in RAM). Reading (or accessing) memories and writing memories in a brain-like network intrinsically involves thinking about the associated concepts – as memories are distributed associations, and everywhere tangled up to existing memory patterns. An artificial cortex could be designed to connect to external computer systems more directly than through the senses, but this would have only marginal advantages. For example, we know from dreams that the brain can hallucinate visual input by bypassing the lowest layers of the visual cortex and directly stimulating regions responsible for recognizing moving objects, shapes, colors, etc, all without actually requiring input from the retina. But this is not much of a difference for a posthuman mind already living in a virtual reality – simulating sound waves and their conversion into neural audio signals and simulating the processing into neural patterns representing spoken dialog is not that much different than just directly sending the final dialog representing neural patterns into the appropriate regions. The small differences will probably show up as what philosophers call qualia – those subjective aspects of consciousness or feelings that operate well below the verbal threshold of explanation.
Thus a posthuman with a neuromorphic artificial cortex will still depend heavily on traditional computers to run all the kinds of software that we use today, and to simulate a virtual environment complete with a virtual body and all that entails. But the posthuman will essentially think at the computer's clock rate. The human brain has a base 'clock rate' of about a kilohertz, completing on the order of a thousand neural computing steps per second simultaneously for all the trillions of circuits. A neuromorphic computer works the same, but the clock rate can be dramatically sped up to CMOS levels. A strange and interesting consequence is that a posthuman thinking at hyperspeed would subjectively experience its computer systems and computer environment slow down by an equivalent rate. Its likely the neuromorphic hardware will have considerably lower clock rates than traditional CPUs for power reasons, but they have the same theoretical limit, and running at the same clock rate, a posthuman would experience a subjective second in just a thousand clock cycles, which is hardly enough time for a traditional CPU to do anything. Running at a less ambitious acceleration factor of just 1000x, and with gigahertz computer systems, the posthuman would still experience a massive slowdown in its computer environment, as if it had jumped back more than a decade in time to a vastly slower era of of megahertz computing. However, we can imagine that by this time traditional computers will be much further down the road of parallelization, so a posthuman's typical computer will consist of a very large number of cores and software will be much more heavily parallelized. Nevertheless, its generally true that a posthuman, no matter what level of acceleration, will still have to wait the same amount of time as anyone else, including a regular human, for its regular computations to complete.
Ironically, while posthumans will eventually be able to think thousands or even millions of times faster than biological humans, using this quickening ability will have the perceptual effect of slowing down the external universe in direct proportion – including their computer environment. Thus greatly accelerated posthumans will spend proportionally inordinate amounts of subjective time waiting on regular computing tasks.
The combination of these trends leads to the conclusion that a highly variable clock rate will be an important feature for future posthuman minds. Accelerating to full thought speed – quickening – will probably be associated with something like entering an isolated meditative state. We can reason that at least in the initial phases of posthuman development, their simulated realities will mainly run at real-time, in order to provide compatibility with human visitors and to provide full fidelity while conserving power. When quickening, a posthuman would experience its simulated reality slowing down in proportion, grinding to a near halt at higher levels of acceleration. This low-computational mode would still be very useful for much of human mental work: reading, writing, and old-fashioned thinking.
In the present, we are used to computers getting exponentially faster while the speed of human thought remains constant. All else being equal, we are now in a regime where the time required for fixed computational tasks is decreasingly exponentially (even if new software tends to eat much of this improvement.) The posthuman regime is radically different. In the early phases of ramp up the speed of thought will increase rapidly until it approaches the clock rate of the processor technology. During this phase the trend will actually reverse – posthuman thoughtspeed will increase faster than computer speed and from a posthumans perspective, computers will appear to get exponentially slower. This phase will peter out when posthuman thoughtspeed approaches the clock rate – somewhere around a million times human thoughtspeed for the fastest, most extremely optimized neuromorphic designs using today's process technology (gigahertz vs a kilohertz). At that point there is little room for further raw speed of thought improvements (remember, the brain can recognize objects and perform relatively complex judgements in just a few dozen 'clock cycles' – not much room to improve on that in terms of speed potential given its clock rate).
After the initial ramp up regime, Moore's law will continue of course, but at that point you enter a new plateau phase. In this second regime, once the algorithms of intelligence are well mapped to hardware designs, further increases in transistor density will enable more traditional computer cores per dollar and more 'cortical columns or equivalents' per dollar in direct proportion. Posthuman brains may get bigger, and or they may get cheaper, but the clock speed wouldn't change much (as any process improvement in clock rate would speed up both traditional computers and posthuman brains). So in the plateau phase, you have this weird effect where computer clock rate is more or less fixed at a far lower level than we are used to – about a million times less or so from the perspective of the fastest neuromorphic posthuman brain designs. This would correspond to computer clock rates measured in the kilohertz. The typical computer available to a posthuman by then would certainly have far more cores than today, thousands or perhaps even millions, but they would be extremely slow from the posthuman's perspective. Latency and bandwidth would be similarly constrained, which would effectively expand the size of the world in terms of communication barriers – and this single idea has wide ranging implications for understanding how posthuman civilizations will diverge and evolve. It suggests a strong diversity increasing counter–globalization effect which would further fragment and disperse localized sub-populations for better or worse.
What would posthumans do in the plateau phase, forever limited to extremely slow, roughly kilohertz-speed computers? This would limit the range of effective tasks they could do in quicktime. Much of hardware and software design, engineering, etc would be limited by slow computer speeds. Surprisingly, the obvious low-computational tasks that could still run at full speed would be the simpler, lower technology creative occupations such as writing. It's not that posthumans wouldn't be good at all computer intensive tasks as well – they certainly would be superhuman in all endeavors. The point is rather that they will be vastly, incomprehensibly more effective only in those occupations that are not dependent on the speed of general purpose computation. Thus we can expect that they will utterly dominate professions such as writing.
It seems likely that very soon into the posthuman era, the bestseller lists will be inundated by an exponentially expanding set of books, the best of which would be noticeably better than anything humans could write (and most probably written under pseduo-names and with fake biographies). When posthumans achieve 1000x human thoughtspeed, you might go on a short vacation and come back to find several years of new literature. When posthumans achieve 1 million X human thoughtspeed, you might go to sleep and wake up to find that the number of books in the world (as well as the number of languages), just doubled over night. Of course, by that point, you're already pretty close to the end.
We can expect that the initial posthuman hardware requirements will be expensive and thus they will be few in number and of limited speed, but once they achieve economic parity with human workers, we can expect the tipping point to crash like a tidal wave, with a rapid succession of hardware generations increasing maximum thoughtspeed while reducing size, cost, and power consumption and huge economies of scale leading to an exponential posthuman population expansion, and their virtual realities eventually accelerating well beyond human comprehension.


text:
Tuesday calls for another Horse Expo interview. Today we are happy to present:
Sindrastadir is located on the farm Lækjamót in North West of Iceland, just midway between Reykjavík and Akureyri. Ísólfur is born and raised on the farm Lækjamót. After a few years away due to school and work Ísólfur moved back to Lækjamót in 2010 with this wife Vigdís and their two sons Ísak Þórir and Guðmar Hólm. In 2011 they finished building their house and in August 2014 they opened their beautiful stable Sindrastadir.
"Our own breeding is very young but Þórir Ísólfsson, my father, has been breeding horses for decades at Lækjamót with great success. The foundation of our breeding is the combination of two very good breeding farms, Lækjamót and Leysingjastaðir II. You can say we started breeding in 2010. Last year (2015) we had the first horses breed by us which got first prize. The three mares Iða (4 years old), Hafdís (5 years old) and Vala frá Lækjamóti (6 years old) all got evaluated in a breeding show for the first time and received first prize. It was a big thing for us as breeders and hopefully just the start of what more to come. In 2016 we have already had one 4-year-old mare receiving first prize, Ísey frá Lækjamóti.
We get 2-4 foals born each year but the plan is to increase that. We have high demands for the breeding mares so we will rather have fewer and better horses. Our dream is to breed top quality horses that everyone can enjoy. The horses should have the quality to be in high demanding competitions but also have the temperament so everyone can ride them and enjoy it. The tölt should be very good, soft with good movements and charm. Temperament needs to be excellent. When choosing the right stallion for a mare we need to see the stallion with our own eyes. He has to give us a good feeling when we watch him. Gates, temperament, balance, movements, and bloodline are always something you have to look at. We have similar expectations for the mares that we are breeding with. It's important that we own them well and really like to ride them. They need to have good temperament, clear and good gates and good movements.
We are looking forward to seeing our Horse Expo guests and hope they will enjoy their visit with us at Sindrastadir. Hopefully it will make them curious about what we are doing, interested in knowing more and maybe come for a visit again."
The pictures show two mares that we own and like very much. The first is a picture of Nútíð frá Leysingjastöðum (black mare) who received 10 for canter at Landsmót and will go to breeding. The other one is Ósvör frá Lækjamóti and will also go to breeding later. Ósvör combines Lækjamót and Leysingjastaði farms in her parents but both of these mares have the same father, Sindri frá Leysingjastöðum.
Learn more about Sindrastadir on www.sindrastadir.is.


text:
THIS PRODUCT IS FOR THE LIGHT MOUNTS ONLY—Rigid Single Row 6 inch light NOT included
Our innovative billet Fork Light Mount attaches directly to the forks above the lower fender for the R1200GS/GSA and is designed to accommodate the Rigid Industries SR-Series 6-inch (single row) light. The Rigid Industries LED lights are available in Hybrid Spot, Flood or Combo patterns and put out 1,900 Lumens, while the Specter version in the driving beam puts out over 3,000 Lumens. The advantage of this versus typical crash bar-style mounts is that the light moves with the front wheel, giving you better light in the direction of travel. In addition, due to the location of the light, it is less prone to damage in a tip over.
More information on the Single Row 6-inch Lights from Rigid Industries:
These lights are compact, light-weight but incredibly durable, with the best optics in the business, and very low power draw. The Hybrid Spot optic is great for high-speed running, offering a small pattern that projects VERY far down the road. The Hybrid Flood optic offers a wider pattern better for tight off-road work or as an "early warning" of wildlife skulking in the ditches. The Specter Driving optic provides the best of both worlds—putting out a similar beam as the Dually D2 light—getting far down the road while providing an incredible wash of light that lights up the ditches as well.
- Any of these lights are too bright to run with oncoming traffic.
- Mount is sold per pair and includes necessary hardware.
- Rigid Industries lights sold separately.
- Not compatible with the Wunderlich steering stop or the Hyperpro Steering Damper.
- Works with the Touratech steering stop.
- Does not fit other models, only the 2005-2012 oil-cooled R1200GS/A.


text:
Growing up, I was always so jealous of my friends who had older sisters. They always seemed to know things that I didn't and went places that I couldn't. I often felt as if I was one step behind them, feeling my way through things without an older sister there in front of me to lead the way.
But as much as I wished I had an older sister, I've loved being one that much more. When I lived at home, I loved going out on girl days. Driving around, shopping, going out to eat; just spending time together. I loved having live-in friends to hang out, swap advice and opinions with, confide in, or, in Cami's case, just go snuggle with.
So when I moved up here, nine hours away from my three little sisters, one of my biggest disappointments was that I was going to miss out on all the sister stuff. Megan had her license, so now she could bring them wherever they wanted to go. They'd have their own girl days and make their own memories without me. To say the least, I was not at all excited for that to happen.
So this past weekend, when my brother texted me that he was coming up and had room if I wanted the girls to hop in, I said absolutely. Megan had to stay downstate to babysit the boys, and while I wished she had been able to come too, I was ecstatic that Kaylin and Cami made the trip and spent the weekend with me. No parents or rules or bedtimes, just sisters and sleepovers and adventures. We had a picnic at Hungarian Falls and crossed "stand under a waterfall" off Kaylin's bucket list. We went out to Big Traverse and played in the sand. We went sauna swimming two nights. We made a campfire and ate way to many s'mores. We stopped at Dairy Queen and Chutes and Ladders, which were on Cami's list for the weekend, as well as Applebee's, which was on Kaylin's. We sat on the swing in the front yard and talked about random things, thought, and talked some more. I loved every minute of it.
Tomorrow the whole family heads up for a week and then in July, they're planning on a month. I'm beyond excited for a summer of adventures. After all, I have the last 9 months of living apart to make up for.


text: Factual Data fdcc shares are plunging $4.33, or 41.2 percent, to $6.17, after the company's merger with Fidelity National Information Solutions fnis fell apart. According to press releases from both companies, the decision was mutual. Fidelity National shares are up $1, or 4.4 percent, to $23.70, in the wake of the news. On July 24, the companies announced the merger, which called for Fidelity National to acquire Factual Data for roughly $13.75 per share in cash and stock.


text:
Your team could get thousands of survey responses when using AskNicely and it's important to be able to analyze the feedback you're getting at a high level without having to group similar comments manually.
Themes allow you to automatically categorize responses based on the keywords customers are using in the feedback they give, and overall themes that your team identifies as being important. This lets you quickly see what is making your customers most happy (or unhappy).
The theme buckets section is on your Dashboard page, just under the leaderboards section. To add a new Theme bucket click the Add button next to the title, or to edit just click on the pencil icon on the right hand side of existing theme.
You can add in any words that are related to that theme, and hit save! This will analyze all your comments (within the filtered date range), and you can see a breakdown of the NPS for each of these themes.
The AskNicely default Themes are "price", "service", and "speed", but these can be completely changed based on your company's needs. If you're struggling to get jump started on themes and what keywords to choose, then you can navigate to the Statistics page (using the gear icon in the bottom left of the window) and view common keywords across your customers responses.
You can add these popular keywords to existing Themes, or create new ones.
Isolating words
If you're using a word that is found in other words, example: "river". It can be found in driver, screwdriver, and strivers. You can isolate the word by putting brackets
{ } around the word, like {river}. That will pull in responses with only that isolated word and not other words that contain it.
*Please note* that Theme Buckets is only available for Professional Plans and above.


text:
Last of 17th Fires ends Afghan tour
Ann Mora and Misty Bauer carried a heavy weight when they awoke early Wednesday to attend a homecoming celebration for their husbands' artillery battalion.
The soldiers, just back from a year in Afghanistan, wanted to help them lift it.
The women's husbands – Staff Sgt. Conrad Mora and Spc. Joseph Bauer – were killed July 24 by a roadside bomb. The blast also killed two of their comrades, Sgt. Daniel Lim and Spc. Andrew Hand.
Ann Mora and Misty Bauer stood in for their husbands as the battalion came home Wednesday morning. They joined hundreds of other family members in a gym at Joint Base Lewis-McChord to welcome part of the 5th Battalion, 3rd Artillery Regiment of the 17th Fires Brigade.
The two widows held urns that contained their husbands' ashes. Some soldiers paused to kneel in front of them, quietly touching the urns and whispering to Ann Mora and Misty Bauer.
"He's still part of the unit," said Bauer, 25. "I'm very happy that they're returning, but it just breaks my heart that he's not."
Their tears contrasted with a buoyant mood at the homecoming – one of several such gatherings this year as a wave of returning soldiers has slowed to a trickle.
Soldiers grabbed their spouses for long kisses. They held the children they've missed and grinned as they looked ahead to a month of hard-earned downtime.
"She's huge," said Spc. Anthony Robertson, 22, taking in a full look at his 15-month-old daughter. "I know she's walking already, and that boggles my mind."
Elements of the 17th Fires went six different ways last year. Most of the brigade's artillerymen went to Basra, Iraq, and returned home in August.
One battalion, with 280 artillerymen, was sent to Afghanistan, where it protected airfields and cleared roads of deadly bombs. It was split into two batteries and further splintered into smaller missions around Afghanistan.
The last 130 soldiers from the Afghanistan contingent arrived home Wednesday morning.
"They sacrificed more than anybody," Col. Steven Bullimore, the brigade's commander, said in a brief speech to the soldiers. "They lived harder. They lived more dangerously. They risked more, and they left four of their brothers on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Their job every day was to go out and hunt the ones who were hunting them."
Just-returned soldiers described 20-hour days searching roads for improvised explosives. They said they felt good about their work but were relieved to be home.
"It's a very dangerous job, a game of cat and mouse. I'm just glad to be done," said Sgt. Mark Eddy, 27, holding his son, K.C. Stroop, 6. "It seems like a dream."
Some soldiers sought out the families of their four fallen comrades, who were the only fatalities in the battalion.
They also were the last of Lewis-McChord's 44 soldiers who have died in Afghanistan since August 2009.
"I'm glad the spouses are here. It gives us some closure as well," Sgt. 1st Class Cesar Zertuche said.
Misty Bauer was happy to talk about her husband, Joseph, 27. They're both from Cincinnati. She lives on the base and draws on support from the brigade.
"My husband's a hero, and I don't want people to forget the sacrifices he made," she said. "It makes me feel good that they appreciate his sacrifice."
Ann Mora, 23, lives in DuPont and remains close with soldiers from the 17th Fires. She wore a T-shirt that showed Conrad Mora, 24, superimposed over the San Diego skyline. They were married there in 2007.
"He's always really goofy. I love him. He brightens my day," she said.
She often carries his urn.
"I take him everywhere still. It helps me. I talk to him," she said.
Staff Sgt. Christopher Nelson, 39, of Puyallup, held Mora's 2-year-old son, Christopher, for most of the homecoming ceremony. He and Conrad Mora became friends quickly when the Moras moved to Lewis-McChord. Ann Mora asked him to escort her husband's body home from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
"When the news hit, I lost it," Nelson said. He helps out Ann Mora from time to time by taking care of her son.
"We are all tight," he said. "We know this is forever."
Adam Ashton: 253-597-8646 firstname.lastname@example.com blog.thenewstribune.com/military


text: A recent study (2014) done in Southeast Florida clearly concluded that the density of calcium is indisputably higher than anywhere in the United States. Local minerologists confirmed that this density is clearly due to one thing: The exact locations of the local dairy farm. Regional dairy manager, Ron Ronson met up with the team of mineralists and weatherman, Philip Abucket. They realized on slightly cloudy days with a chance of wind (which is every day in Southeast Florida) the air molecules that naturally embed in milk were being carried throughout the town by, you guessed it, wind. These molecules naturally land on calcified tissue. The number one calcified tissue in the world is, you guessed it: Teeth.


text:
In a world dominated by extremely similar looking tablets, Japanese electronics giant, Sony have sent it a wave of fresh air. They've brought in two different form factors – the first one being the Tablet S – which wasn't a major overhaul, in terms of design, and the second one being the Tablet P – the world's first clamshell design tablet. Nintendo did it quite well in the gaming genre, but has Sony been able to pull off something similar with the Tablet P? Let's find out.
A clamshell design
Form Factor
The most interesting form factor that's ever existed on an Android tablet so far means two things – Sony isn't in the mood to create iPad lookalikes and it's treading a thin line between being outrageously creative or outrageously pointless. The second debate more or less carries forward throughout this review. We've seen this design on a portable gaming console, the Nintendo DS, but by terming it a tablet, you're throwing in a lot more variables into the picture.
On Video: Sony Tablet P
In terms of plain aesthetics, the Tablet P has got every bit of oomph and class you'd want in your device. Smooth curves, metallic finish, few plastics and brilliant colour tones – this one has stylish written all over it. However, the insides are glossy black and are quite prone to fingerprints. The dual screens feel immensely small when you compare them to the size of the tablet itself. The back (or the top, if you want to take it that way) consists of a 5 megapixel camera, while the headphone jack is located in the front. Moving on to the sides, we've got a power ON button, a charging port, the microUSB slot and volume keys. There's an almost invisible notification strip that's very neatly placed at the front. The microSD card slot is located underneath the bottom flap and is non swappable, whilst the SIM card slot is located under the top flap. Also, the Tablet P is one of the few tablets to have a removable battery.
With detachable covers
The biggest thing missing though is HDMI out. Imagine using a PlayStation certified tablet to play your PlayStation games on your TV and using your tablet's screen as a controller. Well, it would require some tweaking around, considering both the displays could get projected on to the big screen, but if they'd have managed to map it well and get the idea to work, then it would've been a brilliant addition. One that would have affected our overall score of the Tablet P, greatly.
Coming back to the design, the P (we're calling it that for the rest of the review) is quite chunky in its closed form. Plus, it's got a very small footprint, which makes it feel a lot more dense and heavier, than other tablets. But at 372 grams, it is just that slight bit heavier than the seven inched Galaxy Tab 620. When it's shut, it might just slip into your front pocket, but it's not really comfortable, so it's best suited for a jacket pocket. This one is definitely more portable, than most other tablets out there, but is it as ergonomic? Let's delve into that after the break.
From the sides
The P has a dual 5.5-inch screen with each one having a resolution of 1024 x 480 pixels. That's great, but there's a lot of bezel around the sides, so if you've got slightly smaller hands, you might have a problem reaching the far end of either of the screens, with the opposite hand. The hinges are strong and there's absolutely no wobbling when you flip it open, so it will surely survive a few falls.
The design is quite catchy, no doubt, but we would have loved a slimmer and a smaller version. In terms of build as well, you're pretty much getting the best from Sony.
Features and Performance
The P is powered by a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor and has 1GB of RAM with Android Honeycomb 3.2 onboard. It's super slick and fast and though the boot up time isn't that quick, you won't find the device lagging, even when you've loaded up a bunch of memory heavy applications. But again, it's a dual-screen tablet and hence it needs some special treatment in this section as well. Let's see what's different.
Social networking well integrated
While dragging apps from one screen to the other isn't a problem, the same can't be said about playing games on a full screen mode. If your game requires you to swap across the two screens (for example, Fruit Ninja) the touches won't be registered a lot of times, which also means that it does require a dedicated set of games – something we'll talk about in the miscellaneous features section. The menu stretches across the whole screen and if a particular app lies right in between the two screens, it gets split up on both the screens. It doesn't force you to shift on to the upper or lower screen, so that's good. Sony have tried to keep the usability as simple as they would have on a normal slate.
We put the P through a few synthetic benchmarks as well. In Linpack, the tablet got a score of 27.926 MFLOPS in the single thread mode, while it got a score of 53.853 in the multithread mode. It falls short of the Galaxy Tab 620, which has a dual- core Exynos 4210 chipset. In our AnTuTu benchmark test it got a score of 4955 points, which places it below the LG Optimus 2X and the S II, but above the Amazon Kindle Fire.
The dual-screen functionality has been nicely put to use in this section. For music, all your controls shift to the upper screen, along with the album art. The bottom consists of a collage of all your album art, allowing you to segregate all your favourite music without having to scroll down to find each song. There's a 5 band equalizer with support for custom presets, along with a dynamic normalize and their xLOUD technology. So you can tweak your music to suit your needs. The loudspeaker, although isn't as loud as we'd want it to be, is okay enough for personal viewing. Music via headphones is much better, just what we'd expect from a Sony product. Next up is the video section.
The media interface
The videos come up on a single screen and you might have to make a big compromise in this section, because one screen is quite empty, and watching a movie on a 'five point five inch tablet' isn't a great deal. However, one good thing that comes out of here is that you can make the tablet 'sit' on any flat surface and have 'handsfree' viewing. 1080p videos play out of the box and though the stock player didn't support our FLAC file, there are plenty of third party apps for other codecs. DLNA has been included for your wireless streaming needs.
The P has quad-band 3G (and 4G in some models), Wi-Fi with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 and GPS. We would have loved dual-band Wi-Fi support, too, but that's been omitted from the P. Browsing is better when the tablet's completely flipped open, otherwise the viewing angles start playing an important role in deciding what's more clearly visible to you. If you're using it more for typing, then you're better off with it, while being seated, otherwise the extra bezel on the sides might make you want to 'reach out' to the middle letters. While sitting, you'll notice a slight improvement in typing with the 'mini laptop' feel the P gives you. You've got the screen on a vertical plane, so it's a lot easier to see what you're typing. To sum it up, if you're going to have a lot of browsing and writing, you'll be better off switching between the different positions to maximize productivity.
Viewing angles come into play
One big concern we had with our review unit was that it would just not lock onto our Wi-Fi connection. The other tablets in the same area wouldn't really have much of a problem, but this tablet was just too erratic with its connectivity. This particularly came to light while downloading large files.
Misc. features
The Tablet P is a PlayStation-certified device. Sadly, we couldn't find any content on its official app for the Indian sub-region. Secondly, the tablet comes with a My Apps application that basically connects you to an online store where you can download the latest apps optimized for the tablet. Here again, all we could see were three apps for the Indian region. We were automatically relocated to India, but we made a minor tweak in the URL and found a lot more content for U.S shores. The phone comes with Crash Bandicoot and Pinball pre-installed and they make effective use of the dual screens. The size of the controls can be adjusted as well, so you've got the game playing on the upper screen, while the controls reside on the lower one. Another problem out here is the display resolution – Crash Bandicoot doesn't occupy the whole screen (you can force it to, though, but in the process will warp it a bit), so you'll have like a minor part of a 5.5-inch screen occupied. Doesn't look like gaming on a tablet, but on a small screen with a lot of space being wasted behind the controls and the bezel. This is important because we'll remind you it's a PlayStation-certified tablet. Oh, and while we're at it, we just couldn't find any more games, besides these two pre-installed ones. Where's the bunch of PSone and PSP games you promised us, Sony?
Very few games in the App store
The default Skype app doesn't work too well and Sony have their own 'Video Chat plugged into Skype' application, which utilises both screens. Here again we were absolutely disappointed with the way in which the screen space has been wasted. Chat opens up in a new window and if new notifications pop up, it's extremely difficult to toggle between the two windows. Why didn't they just keep a chat window for the existing call on the lower screen? Puzzling and irritating. The reader application works in portrait mode and converts the tablet into a book of sorts and was the only decent application, which we liked on the Tablet P.
One of the strong points, the Reader app
We're stressing on the fact that the tablet P needs its own ecosystem of applications, optimized for dual screens. Just like how you can't play Nintendo Wii games on a DS, single screen games quite literally get screwed up when played on dual-screen. Currently, there's very limited support for this tablet with a bunch of apps and with only Sony in the dual-screen tablet market, we're not too sure if many developers would actually go that extra mile to port apps (not just games) to dual screens. A lot of the third party applications would simply crash, or appear warped or not work at all. Not something you'd want, especially, if you're investing in a tablet with that price tag.
The P comes with a 5 megapixel rear camera and a VGA front camera. It's also capable of recording videos at 720p at a frame rate of 30 fps. There's no touch focus, so you'll have to long press on the camera button to (try to) get the object into focus. The image, somehow gets displayed on the bottom screen, which is just puzzling. There's not too much detail in the snaps and unless you've got a lot of light falling on the object, your picture won't appear too great. Video capture has a lot of colour banding and noise. Again, not impressive. Overall, we weren't too impressed with the Tablet P's shooting capabilities.
Battery Life
The tablet has a 3080 mAh battery and Sony claims that it has a battery life of about 7 hours. In our video test, the P played a 720p video nonstop for 6 hours 20 minutes before shutting down, so they're holding true to their claims, which is quite nice. Under average usage, you'll easily crank up to a day's juice. P for Power, eh?
Worth a buy?
The Sony Tablet P is priced at Rs.36,990 (MRP). This makes it compete with the top notch Android tablets and the iPad 2, as well. The P makes for an interesting design, but whilst doing so, it limits your functionality greatly. In the real world, you're not going to be impressed with what it's capable of doing. At best, it's decent for gaming (if they get more apps that is) and as an e-reader. But, a tablet is much more than just that. If it would have been priced around 23-25K, then we'd have been a little more lenient with our score, but at 37K, it's just too absurd a price. With the P, it's back to the drawing board for Sony.
Find our entire collection of stories, in-depth analysis, live updates, videos & more on Chandrayaan 2 Moon Mission on our dedicated #Chandrayaan2TheMoon domain.


text:
Crackers are one thing I have no desire to make on my own, there are enough Wheat-Free and Gluten-Free items to cook and bake, and I honestly don't see how anyone could do better. Below you'll find the nutritional information and ingredient lists, in text and photo, as well as a link and a picture of the box.
Looking back over the last decade of my life, it's obvious I have always had a problem with Wheat and Gluten. No one wants to live a life Wheat-Free or Gluten-Free if there is no benefit, but for many there is a huge health benefit to removing those items from your diet.


text:
Should you be interested in organising your own evening to die for, do not hesitate to contact us.
For all enquiries, please fill in the form or call (+852) 64696807.
Until then,
Your Shadow in the Night,
By filling in the contact form with their Data, the User authorises Harbour Secrets to use these details to reply to requests for information and permits Harbour Secrets to add the User's email address to a contact list of those who may receive email messages containing information of a commercial or promotional nature concerning this website.
We will promise never to spam you.


text:
Dream City
Dubai is really incredible city. Many tourists, coming here for the first time, expect to see incredible luxury and shine and … their expectations are fully justified. The metropolis is really exciting, what it can be seen in the pictures in Google – skyscrapers, shining lights of the motorway, smart ships sailing through the canals. Billions of Dirhams are invested annually in the city's infrastructure.
This city luxury attracts the rich guests while frightening to those people who wish to move to live in this place. However, the rapid pace of development of infrastructures, unforgettable evenings on beautiful beaches, extravagant lifestyle, and oriental flavor encourage many to "take root" in this wonderland. But many people do not know how to find suitable housing. But if you look, everything is possible.
Financial Center
At one time, the government of metropolis made a lot of efforts to create the Dubai International Financial Center – a free economic zone – a modern financial structure with a worldwide reputation. This financial center strategically located between East and West, a safe and efficient platform for businesses and financial institutions operating in emerging markets throughout the region.
The authorities of the Dubai have created a favorable economic environment for the activities of foreign entrepreneurs and investors, for business tourism and recreation. In such free economic zones as DIFC, 100% ownership of the business is possible with no restrictions on the movement of capital, profit-taking and currency exchange.
Now DIFC is a stock market, a field of activity that can be considered the following areas: banking, insurance, state management, the capital market, any financial activity related to global corporations. In the DIFC not only numerous financial companies are located but also there are many restaurants, shops, hotels of extra class.
Highly desirable district
This area is directly accessible to Downtown and Burj Khalifa, a true free financial zone, and therefore a marina of a huge number of businesses. Compared with other areas of the city, there are not so many apartments here, and there are plenty of people ready to rent them.
In addition to the impressive trading infrastructure, all conditions for life and communication are created in the DIFC area. Sports fans will appreciate the opportunities for playing tennis, squash, modern fitness centers and gymnasiums, and entertainment lovers will appreciate – nightclubs, cinemas and theaters.
Cozy apartments
Exclusive apartments in DIFC with one bedroom – this is perhaps the best place to immerse in the life of Dubai.
MyRent could offer you cozy fully furnished apartments in the financial zone of the metropolis. For example, 1 bedroom apartment in Sky Gardens or Park Tower will bring you maximum comfort.
The metro and the main sights of the city are nearby. This means that tenants of the apartments can almost always walk around the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall.
These apartments also enough convenient for businessmen. In DIFC there are many headquarters of different companies, the brain and the financial engine of Dubai. This is the place, where the issues are solved and deals are concluded for millions, and rented apartments in DIFC are in close proximity to the meeting and negotiation sites.


text:
Celebrating her 25th year with Jewish Senior Life, Michele Schirano has grown along with the organization.
"I've been here for 25 years because I love our residents and the meaningful time I get to spend with them," she says. "I have talented, motivated, fun co-workers. Jewish Senior Life always looks to enhance how care is delivered, as well as how we can make the quality of life even better for our residents and our community. It's very rewarding."
Schirano started as a licensed practice nurse, earned her registered nursing degree, and rose to the top of the organization. In 2015, the Churchville resident's vast expertise and experience led to her being named senior vice president and administrator overseeing operations of the Jewish Home.
In 2012, Schirano helped lead the implementation of electronic medical records at The Jewish Home. Nurses now use laptops for medication administration, recording physician orders and charting and recording the clinical care of residents electronically. At the time, it was one of only a few nursing homes in the country to have fully implemented electronic medical records.
Schirano, 46, also played a significant role in Jewish Senior Life being named a Rochester Top Workplace in 2017. Of the more than 1,000 employees, Schirano is responsible for the more than 700 working at the Jewish Home. Satisfaction among employees remains high.
Schirano has led other key initiatives for the organization, too. For example, Jewish Senior Life began a journey toward resident-centered care several years ago in an effort to move from the traditional medical model of care to a model based on elder choice.
"Michele has been a champion and leading voice for moving us down the path of culture change," says Michael King, president and chief executive officer of Jewish Senior Life. "Advocacy for residents has always been her passion."
In 2017, Jewish Senior Life opened new homes for long-term care residents in its Green House Cottages. These homes take person-centered care to the next level by updating the campus to provide even more choice, autonomy, and control for all residents to deliver an even more enriching, engaging environment. The legacy Jewish Home Tower also will incorporate the Green House concept, opening in Spring 2019.
"This has been a huge, complex, sensitive undertaking," King says. "It was the equivalent of creating nine new nursing homes, and the process was not written in a manual. Michele was on the ground from the start, involved in all aspects of creating the new homes – from the architectural design, to staffing and processes, to coordinating the logistics of the move of 108 of our residents to their new homes.
"As you can imagine, it took a herculean effort to relocate 108 nursing home residents to a totally new environment and staff," King says. "We would not have successfully accomplished this phasing without Michele's calm leadership and ability to lead our entire nursing home management team through a very complicated process."


text:
Nautical SS15
For my first collection, I wanted to look at Kids Interiors. I was aiming my designs to be suitable for a Childs bedroom or play room. So I started off by looking at what trends were going to be current for Spring Summer 2015. Nautical crept up quite a bit so I decided that this was the theme to start with.
I have a slight fascination with Nautical themed products anyway, so I thought that this was a good starting point.
First thing is first the mood board needed to be made, so I came up with this...
For mood boards, I like to take inspiration from other Illustrators as I can see what is currently being done, I decided to come up with a slightly different colour scheme for my theme to set my designs apart. So instead of having the traditional colour of red, I've used orange instead, I have also incorporated greys into this trend too, I feel it makes the theme a little more grown up and trendy.


text:
I'm working my way through the Slimming World "FakeAway" Book
I tried the Lamb Dhansak recently and I don't know what I did to it, but it wasn't nice! I plan to try the Beef version Click Here next week
So, on Tuesday I wanted something yummy but curry like (the boys will eat curry and rice and not much else!)
I had chicken. I had no tomatoes, chopped or fresh or even passatta and I had no coconut milk. How was I going to make something that resembled a curry!
Fakeaway book to the rescue! Chicken Tikka Masala all I needed was fat free natural yoghurt and I had fat free Greek yoghurt so we were good to go! I also read the recipe at 2pm so had a good 3.5 hours marinade time!
I had no tikka powder I just used the hot madras curry powder I have so I did not add any extra chilli that is In the original recipe.
I served with onion and coriander cauliflower "rice" for us and basmati for the kids
This recipe is Syn Free on Extra Easy
Chicken Tikka Masala
Serves 4
Juice of 1 lime (I cheated and used 3 tbsp bottled lime juice)
150g fat free Greek yoghurt
4 tbsp hot madras curry powder (or 5tbsp tikka powder)
Salt and pepper
4 skinless chicken breasts chopped into chunks
1 onion finely chopped (recipe says grated, how exactly one is meant to grate an onion I do not know!)
4 garlic cloves crushed
2cm piece of ginger peels and grated
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cumin
6 tbsp tomato purée
5 tablespoons fat free Greek yoghurt (original recipe says fat free fromage frais)
Fresh coriander to garnish
Cauliflower rice:
1 head cauliflower
Fresh coriander bunch
1 onion finely chopped
1 clove garlic crushed
– in a large dish mix the lime juice, 5tbsp yoghurt, 2 tbsp of the curry powder (or 3 of tikka). Season well with salt and pepper then add the chicken and mix well. Marinade in fridge for 4 hours or overnight.
I like to attack the chicken pieces in the marinade with 2 forks to poke lots of little holes in the chicken and really get that marinade in. You can skip this part but it's quite fun.
– when ready to go, heat up the grill and spray a pan with lo cal spray. Add the onion, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, cumin and the rest of the curry powder and fry for 2-3 mins.
– stir in the tomato purée and 300ml of water. Bring to the boil then reduce and simmer for 15 mins, stirring often
– meanwhile, thread the marinaded chicken onto skewers (use metal if you have them, if you are using wooden skewers, cover the ends with tinfoil because even though I soaked mine one of them still went on fire under the grill, oops)
– spray with lo cal spray and grill for 15 mins turning now and then until nice and deep golden coloured
– remove the chicken from skewers and stir into the sauce. Take off the heat then stir in the rest of the yogurt and scatter fresh coriander leaves (optional)
Coriander and onion cauliflower "rice"
– break the cauliflower into florets and blitz in processor until it resembles rice. Do in batches otherwise tends to get too mushy and over crowded, you need to just pulse it a few times to get a good consistency of not too small and mushy
– finely chop the onion and add to a frying pan with spray oil and the garlic and fry until golden in colour.
– finely chop the stalks of a good bunch of coriander and add them in along with the cauliflower. Stir well and add 5 tablespoons water and put a lid on to let it steam and cook the cauliflower through, about 10 mins
– season when cooked and scatter fresh coriander leaves over when serving


text: ISA TanTec secures Oeko-Tex accreditation for leather labels business ISA TrimTec, a division of leather manufacturing group ISA TanTec, has achieved certification under the Oeko-Tex leather standard. ISA TrimTec specialises in making labels and patches from bovine leather for products such as denim jeans, other apparel, bags and shoes. ISA TanTec has TrimTec production lines set up both in its China and Vietnam facilities, Heshan TanTec and Saigon TanTec. Oeko-Tex, an independent research and testing organisation with a strong reputation in textiles and garments, launched its leather standard in 2016. Requirements for certification take into account legislation (including the demands of REACH in Europe and of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in the US) on restricted and prohibited substances such as azo dyes, chromium VI, formaldehyde, pentachlorophenol, cadmium, perfluorooctanesulphonic acid, and so on. Another factor for Oeko-Tex is that the greater the degree of skin contact a product is likely to have, the stricter the human-ecological requirements that these products have to comply with. ISA TanTec has confirmed that its leather labels meet the highest level of human-ecological requirements, those for products that have direct contact with skin. "This will make us an even more trusted supplier for our customers," said ISA TanTec's senior director for operational strategies, Carl Flach.


text:
Solidify Your Belief (Reclaiming Your Health Part 3)/
Congratulations! You have made it to Part 3 in the Reclaiming Your Health Series! (Part 1 and Part 2) I hope that you loving your food, eating mindfully, and connecting to your why and your vision of radiant health.
This week you will solidify your belief in that healthy future self. If you can believe it you can achieve it!
In the words of Buddha: "Our life is the creation of our mind."
First you are going to focus on all of the things you have already accomplished in your life. Do you own a home? Did you graduate from college? Did you teach yourself how to crochet? Have you completed a 5K? Did you give birth to children? Can you speak a foreign language? Do you have a special recipe about which everyone raves?
Open your journal or Google Doc from last week and make a new list. Write down every accomplishment you can think of, no matter how small. Add to it throughout the week. When you see all of the things you have done you will become more aware of how amazing you are right now. You are successful! Your health is just one more thing you are fully equipped to accomplish.
If you still struggle with visualizing the possibility of success, borrow belief from others. I love to read success stories and Mark's Daily Apple hosts my absolute favorite collection. Read success stories every day. Find stories that resonate with you and read them multiple times. You are just as capable of achieving radiant health as the people on the blog.
Now, let's go back to that future self. What does she/he feel like? What are the top three emotions your future self consistently experiences?
I will give you an example. My future self is free, creative, abundant. If I want to experience life as my future self right now, I can engage in activities that make me feel free, creative and abundant. To feel free I can go for a long hike or ski in the woods. To feel creative I can whip up delicious food in the kitchen. To feel abundant I can truly appreciate every penny I find and every gift that is given to me. I am free, creative and abundant!
If you haven't done so already, define the top three emotions you believe your radiant healthy self experiences. Then make a list of activities you can do right now to activate those feelings. Do at least one of those activities a day.
To recap, here are the steps for this week:
1. Make a list of all the accomplishments you have achieved and be proud of your successes.
2. Read success stories and borrow belief from others.
3. List the top three emotions your future healthy self experiences and activate those feelings on a daily basis.
I hope you are feeling pumped up and ready to start! Your radiant self is so excited for you to begin.
As always, I'd love to hear from you. How goes your journey to reclaim your health?


text:
Kevin Brophy is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. He has had nine books of poetry published, the latest being Look at the Lake (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018). He is also a fiction writer and essayist. He has been runner-up for the Vogel and Christina Stead fiction awards, recipient of the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry, and in 2015 he was poet in residence at the BR Whiting Library in Rome. He was founding co-editor of Going Down Swinging from 1980 to 1994, and was a co-editor of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses from 2008 to 2018. He lives in Melbourne.
Nathan Curnow is a lifeguard, poet and past editor of Going Down Swinging. His previous books include The Ghost Poetry Project, RADAR, The Right Wrong Notes and The Apocalypse Awards. His work has featured in leading journals and been shortlisted for major prizes for nearly twenty years, receiving the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize in 2010. As a peer assessor he has worked for the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Creative Victoria and Arts Queensland. He has recently taught creative writing at Federation University, and continues to conduct school workshops across the country. In 2018 he toured Europe with singer/songwriter, Geoffrey Williams, performing at festivals in Poland and Germany.


text:
Once again I was lost in Brooklyn in a state of panic late for a job. My work has been spotty to put it nicely, so I can't afford to piss anybody off by waltzing in like Kate Moss.
It was a section called Fort Green I had never been to before.
I'm always amazed how many people don't know their neighborhoods. You ask them where a street is and they look drunk at 8 o'clock in the morning.
"I dunno."
"But you live here…it's a main street."
"Yeah, I know…I dunno."
After asking my seventh person who starts saying I'm going in the wrong direction, I hear a crackly voice behind me.
"No she ain't…she's goin right…she just needs to make a left…just in a half hour is all."
A half hour.
I turn around and there's man in a ripped Yankees jacket and pajama bottoms with his private parts jangling out like car keys.
There was no time to be appalled…I WAS LATE.
He then points, like an Irish Setter, and says,"Yous goin right, but it's a laaaang, laaaang ways?"
How is it, a half naked man is the only one who knows where Queen of All Saints Church is, an apparent landmark?
"Tell me again, so I can write it down."
I started rummaging for a pen.
"I got one," he says, handing me a Bic that's been significantly bitten.
In a very competent way he tells me step by step, how to go.
I thank him praying he was right, and by golly, he was.
But what occurred to me later when I had calmed down enough to go over what had happened…how oblivious I truly was to his balls blowing in the breeze.
I was late, that's all I knew, and his porn-like ensemble made very little difference to me.
I'm a New Yorker alright.
Live and let live, act as if, and get me to the church on time.


text:
D has become a dear friend of mine over the last few years, and I've been taking her picture since the day we met. This is her second year in the creek for me, and for the second year she's also adding to The Book Club.
I've gotten a bit behind on posting stuff to the blog, but I promise I'm trying to get caught up. In the last few weeks, I've been to Philly, DC, Jacksonville and Wilmington in North Carolina, Columbia South Carolina, St. Augustine Florida, and I'm currently sitting in Augusta Georgia through the weekend. I'll be heading back up the coast for Thanksgiving with stops in Columbia, Jacksonville, and back to Silver Spring Maryland, so if you're along(ish) that route and want to get a shoot in, now's the time to touch base!
You can find all of my Naked-Sex-Geeks-In-Abram's-Creek goodness by clicking here, or finding the SGSC item in the Blog submenu to the left (or at the top, if you're on your phone).
Naked Nerds, Garmentless Geeks, and Bare-assed Bookworms. Grab your favorite book, drop your knickers, and join the most fun book club anywhere!


text:
...Your cabin in the woods awaits. Everything you need to get out of the hustle and bustle and get back to nature. 16.25 acres made up of 3 parcels to explore and enjoy including 2 year-round creeks, meadows, mountains and the serenity of the forest. Further exploration can be yours on the bordering USFS lands that border 3 sides. The 1/1 cabin is quaint and cozy with wood floors, vintage cook stove, claw foot tub, antique windows, and a spiral staircase that leads to a sleeping loft. Time on the deck listening to the creek will relax and rejuvenate. After working in the garden clean up in the outdoor shower. The extra large workshop gives ample space for working on projects and storing your toys. With Salt Creek and Cold Creek running through the property, a drilled well and multiple
Listing courtesy of .