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Advanced Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists/Scale Analysis
Scale Analysis Edit
In the chapter on nondimensionalization, variables (both independent and dependent) were nondimensionalized and at the same time scaled so that they ranged from something like to . "Something like to " is the mentality.
Scale analysis is a tool that uses nondimensionalization to:
- Understand what's important in an equation and, more importantly, what's not.
- Gain insight into the size of unknown variables, such as velocity or temperature, before (even without) actually solving.
- Simplify solution process (nondimensional variables ranging for to are very amiable).
- Reduce dependence of the solution on physical parameters.
- Allow higher quality numeric solution since variables that are of the same range maintain accuracy better on a computer.
Scale analysis is very common sense driven and not too systematic. For this reason, and since it is somewhat unnatural and hard to describe without endless example, it may be difficult to learn.
Before going into the concept, we must discuss orders of magnitude.
Orders of Magnitude and Big O Notation Edit
Suppose that there are two functions and . It is said (and notated) that:
It's worth understanding fully this possibly obscure definition. , short for limit superior, is similar to the "regular" limit, only it is the limit of the upper bound. This concept, alongside limit inferior, is illustrated at right. This intuitive analysis will have to suffice here, as the precise definition and details of these special limits are rather complicated.
As a further example, the limits of the cosine function as increases without bound are:
With this somewhat off topic technicality hopefully understood, the statement that:
Is saying that near , the order (or size, or magnitude) of is bounded by . It's saying that isn't crazily bigger then near , and this is precisely notated by saying that the limit superior is bounded (the "regular" limit wouldn't work since oscillations would ruin everything). The notation involving the big O is rather surprisingly called "big O notation", it's also known as Landau notation.
Take, for example, at different points:
In the first case, the term will easily dominate for large . Even if the coefficient on that term is very near zero, for large enough x that term will dominate. Hence, the function is of order for large .
In the second case, near the first two terms are limiting to zero while the constant term, , isn't changing at all. It is said to be of order , notated as order above. Why O(1) and not O(2)? Both are correct, but O(1) is preferred since it is simpler and more similar to .
This may put forth an interesting question: what would happen if the constant term was dropped? Both of the remaining terms would limit to zero. Since we are looking at x near zero and not at zero,
This is because as approaches zero, the quadratic term gets smaller much faster then the linear term. It would also be correct, though kind of useless, to call the quantity O(1). It would be incorrect to state that the quantity is of order zero since the limit would not exist, not under any circumstance.
As implied above, is by no means a unique function. All of the following statements are true, simply because the limit superior is bounded:
While technically correct, these are very misleading statements. Normally, the simplest, smallest magnitude function g(x) is selected.
Before ending the monotony, it should also be mentioned that it's not necessary for to be smaller then near , only the limit superior must exist. The following two statements are also true:
But again, these are misleading and it's most proper to state that:
A relatively simple concept has been beaten to death, to the point of being confusing. It'll be more clear in context, and it'll be used more in later chapters for different purposes.
Scale Analysis on a Two Term ODE Edit
Previously, the following BVP was considered:
Wipe away any memory of solving this simple problem, the concepts of this chapter do not look at the actual solution. The variables are nondimensionalized by defining new variables:
So that is scaled by , and is scaled by an unknown scale . Now note that, thanks to the scaling:
These are both true near zero. will be O(1) (this is read "of order one") when its scale is properly chosen. Using the chain rule, the ODE was turned into the following:
Now, if both and are of order one, then it is reasonable to assume that, at least at some point in the domain of interest:
This is by no means guaranteed to be true, however it is reasonable.
To identify the velocity scale, we can set the derivative equal to one and solve. There is nothing "illegal" about purposely setting the derivative equal to one since all we need is some equation to specify an unknown constant, . There is much freedom in defining this scale, because what this constant is and how it's found has no effect on the validity of the solution of the BVP (as long as it's not something stupid like ).
It follows that:
This velocity scale may be thought of as a characteristic velocity. It's a number that shows us what to expect the velocity to be like. The velocity could actually be larger or smaller, but this gives a general idea. Furthermore, this scale tells us how changing various physical parameters will affect the velocity; there are four of them summarized into one constant.
Compare this result to the coefficient (underlined) on the complete solution, with u dimensional and nondimensional:
They differ by a factor of , but they are of the same order of magnitude. So, indeed, characterizes the velocity.
Words like "reasonable" and "assume" were used a few times, words that would normally lead to the uglier word "approximate". Relax: the BVP itself hasn't been approximated or otherwise violated in any way. We just used scale analysis to pick a velocity scale that:
- Turned the ODE into something very easy to look at:
- Gained good insight into what kind of velocity the solution will produce without finding the actual solution.
Note that a zero pressure gradient can no longer show itself in the ODE. This is by no means a restriction, since a zero pressure gradient would result in a zero velocity scale which would unconditionally result in zero velocity.
Scale Analysis on a Three Term PDE Edit
The last section was still more of nondimensionalization then it was scale analysis. To just begin getting deeper into the subject, we'll consider the pressure driven transient parallel plate IBVP, identical to the above only with a time component:
See the change of variables chapter to recall the origins of this problem. Scales are defined as follows:
Again, the scale on is picked to make it an order one quantity (based on the BCs), and the scales on and are just letters representing unknown quantities.
The chain rule has been used to define derivatives in terms of the new variables. Instead of taking this path, recall that, given variables and (for the sake of example) and their respective scales and :
So that makes things much easier. Performing the change of variables:
In the previous section, there was one unknown scale and one equation, so the unknown scale could be easily and uniquely isolated. Now, there are two unknown scales but only one equation (no, the BCs/IC will not help). What to do?
The physical meaning of scales may be taken into consideration. Ask: "What should the scales represent?"
There is no unique answer, but good answers for this problem are:
- characterizes the steady state velocity.
- characterizes the response time: the time to establish steady state.
Once again, these are picked (however, for this problem there really aren't any other choices). In order to determine the scales, the physics of each situation is considered. There may not be unique choices, but there are best choices, and these are the "correct" choices. An understanding of what each term in the PDE represents is vital to identifying these "correct" choices, and this is notated below:
For the velocity scale, a steady state condition is required. In that case, the time derivate (acceleration) must small. We could obtain the characteristic velocity associated with a steady state condition by requiring that the acceleration be something small (read: zero), stating that the second derivative is , and solving:
This is the same as the velocity scale found in the previous section. This is expected since both situations are describing the same steady state condition. The neglect of acceleration equates to what's called a balance between driving force and viscosity since driving force and viscosity are all that remain.
Getting the time scale may be a little more elusive. The time associated with achieving steady state is dictated by the acceleration and the viscosity, so it follows that the time scale may be obtained by considering a balance between acceleration and viscosity. Note that this statement has nothing to do with pressure, so it should apply to a variety of disturbances. To balance the terms, pretend that the derivatives are quantities and disregard the pressure:
This is a statement that:
- The smaller the viscosity, the longer you wait for steady state to be achieved.
- The smaller the separation distance, the less you wait for steady state to be achieved.
Hence, the scale describes what will affect the transient time and how. The results may seem counterintuitive, but they are verified by experiment if the pressure is truly a constant capable of combating possibly huge viscosity forces for a high viscosity fluid.
Compare these scales to constants seen in the full, dimensional solution:
The velocity scales match in order of magnitude, nothing new there. But examine the time constant (extracted from the exponential factor) and compare to the time scale:
They are of the same order with respect to the physical parameters, though they'll differ by nearly a factor of 10 when . This result is more useful then it looks. Note that after determining the velocity scale, all three terms of the equation may have been considered to isolate a time scale. This would've been a poor choice that wouldn't have agreed with the time constant above since it wouldn't be describing the required settling between viscosity and acceleration.
Suppose that, for some problem, a time dependent PDE is too hard to solve, but the steady state version is easier and it is what you're interested in. A natural question would be: "How long do I wait until steady state is achieved?"
The time scale provided by a proper scale analysis will at least give an idea. In this case, assuming that the first term of the sum in the solution is dominant, the time scale will overestimate the response time by nearly a factor of 10, which is priceless information if you're otherwise clueless. This overestimate is actually a good (safe) overestimate, it's always better to wait longer and be certain of the steady state condition. Scales in general have a tendency to overestimate.
Before closing this section, consider the actual nondimensionalization of the PDE. During the scale analysis, the coefficients of the last two terms were equated and later the coefficients of the first two terms were equated. This implies that the nondimensionalized PDE will be:
And this may be verified by substituting the expressions found for the scales into the PDE. This dimensionless PDE, too, turned out to be completely independent of the physical parameters involved, which is very convenient.
Heat Flow Across a Thin Wall Edit
Now, an important utility of scale analysis will be introduced: determining what's important in an equation and, better yet, what's not.
As mentioned in the introduction to the Laplacian, steady state heat flow in a homogeneous solid may be described by, in three dimensions:
Now, suppose we're interested in the heat transfer inside a large, relatively thin wall, with differing temperatures (not necessarily uniform) on different sides of the wall. The word 'thin' is crucial, write it down on your palm right now. You should suspect that if the wall is indeed thin, the analysis could be simplified somehow, and that's what we'll do.
Not caring about what happens at the edges of the wall, a BVP may be written:
is the thickness of the wall (implication: is the coordinate across the wall). Suppose that the wall is a boxy object with dimensions . Using the box dimensions as scales,
Only the scale of is unknown. Substituting into the PDE,
Note that the scale on divided out — so a logical choice must be made for it's scale; in this case it'd be an extreme boundary value (ie, the maximum value of ), let's say it's chosen and taken care of. Thanks to this scaling and the rearrangement that followed, we may get a good idea of the magnitude of each term in the equation:
Each derivative is approximately . But what about the squared ratio of dimensions? This is called a dimensionless parameter. Look at your palm now (the one you don't write with), recall the word "thin". "Thin" in this case means exactly the same thing as:
And if the ratio above is much smaller then , then the square of this ratio is even smaller. Our dimensionless parameter is called a small parameter. When a parameter is small, there are many opportunities to simplify analysis; the simplest would be to state that it's too small to matter, so that:
What was just done couldn't have been justified without scaling variables so that their derivatives are (likely) , since you have no idea what order they are otherwise. We know that each derivative is hopefully , but some of these derivatives carry a very small factor. Only then can terms be righteously dropped. The dimensionless BVP becomes:
Note that it's still a partial differential equation (the and varialbes haven't been made irrelevant – look at the BCs). Also note that scaling on is undone since it cancels out anyway (the scale could've still been picked as, say, a maximum boundary value). This problem may be solved very simply by integrating the PDE twice with respect to , and then considering the BCs:
and are integration "constants". The first BC yields:
And the second:
The solution is:
It's just saying that the temperature varies linearly from one wall face to the other. It's worth noting that in practice, once scaling is complete, the hats on variables are "dropped" for neatness and to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.
Words of Caution Edit
"Extreme caution" is more fitting.
In the wall heat transfer problem, we took the partial derivatives in and to be , and this was justified by the scaling: , and are , so the derivatives must be so as well. Right?
Not necessarily. That they're is a linear approximation, however if the function is significantly nonlinear with respect to a variable of interest, then the derivatives may not be as as thought. In this problem, one way that this can happen is if the temperature at each wall face (the functions and ) have large and differing Laplacians. This will result in three dimensional heat conduction.
Examine carefully the image at right. Suppose that side length is ten times the wall thickness; and have zero Laplacians everywhere except along circles where temperatures suddenly change. At these locations, the Laplacian can be huge (unbounded if the sudden changes are discontinuities). This will suggest that the derivatives in question are not O(1) but much greater, so that these terms become important even though in this case:
Which is as required by the scale analysis: the wall is clearly thin. But apparently, the small thinness ratio multiplied by the large derivatives leads to significant quantities.
Both the exact solution and the solution to the problem approximated through scaling are shown at the location of a cutting plane. The exact solution shows at least two dimensional heat transfer, while the solution of the simplified solution shows only one dimensional heat transfer and is substantially different.
It's easy to see why the 1D approximation fails even without knowing what a Laplacian is: this is a heat transfer problem involving the diffusion of temperature, and the temperature will clearly need to diffuse along near the sudden changes within the wall (can't say the same about the BCs since they're fixed).
The caption of the figure starts with the word "failure". Is it really a failure? That depends on what you're looking for, it may or may not be. Note that if the wall were even thinner and the sudden jumps not discontinuities, the exact and 1D solutions could again eventually become indistinguishable.


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It seems oxymoronic that there is such a thing as fake vitamins. We take for granted that because it is a vitamin supplement, it has to be good for us. The fact is, there is such a thing as fake vitamins and it probably is in a store near you!
The market is flooded with many different variations of vitamin supplements to make your head spin. The way most people choose a vitamin is either, by asking their pharmacist, or picking one out that they think is what their bodies need. Unfortunately, all vitamins supplements are not created equal, especially synthetic vitamins.
If this were an open hall, we would see the real vitamins taking one giant step back and leaving the imposters exposed. The only health benefit synthetic vitamins have, is on the pockets of the manufacturers and distributors and marketers. Synthetic vitamins take a long time for your body to absorb it, if at all, it is bad for your kidneys, immune system and because it is "chemically made or synthesized" it has the potential for toxicity in the body.
We are conditioned to always read the label, but little good it does when we do not know what to look for. The next time you read the bottle label, search for the ingredient cyanocobalamin that is sometimes contained in B-12. This ingredient is found in nearly all multi-vitamins and ranks as one of the worst things to put in a vitamin supplement. Created in a laboratory, cyanocobalamin, is so frequently used in vitamins because it is the cheapest and easiest to produce. There is no nutritional benefit by using this synthetic vitamin, as it runs through the body without being absorbed.
The recommended vitamin to use would contain the ingredient in the B-12 vitamin, called methylcobalamin. This biologically active ingredient is agreeable to the body as it is almost immediately absorbed. Visit your local herbal shop to get good quality natural vitamins, which sells vitamin supplements in glass bottles, while most synthetic (if not all) vitamins are sold in plastic bottles. If you see "USP" on the bottle then it is a synthetic vitamin.
Only two vitamins were highlighted, which tells us as consumers how unwittingly we have been harming our bodies and throwing good money down the drain. Our health is our wealth, as well as our responsibility, to take care for as long as we live.

subset: commoncrawl


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In December, the research team of Antonio Giordano, a pathologist, Director and Founder of the Sbarro Health Research Organization in Philadelphia, PA, and Professor of Pathology and Oncology at the University of Siena, Italy, published two separate studies aiming to address the urgent need to identify possible new methods for mesothelioma treatment.
In the first study, published in the scientific journal Cell Cycle, Giordano's researchers tested on mesothelioma cells the effect of two drugs designed to reactivate the p53 protein, one of the most important 'tumor suppressors', which is turned off in most human cancers. "In mesothelioma, although p53 is rarely mutated, it is inactivated by alterations in its pathway," says Francesca Pentimalli of the National Cancer Institute of Naples, Italy, lead author of the study. Both of the drugs used in the study target p53, but with different mechanisms of action. One in particular, called RITA, proved to be very toxic. Specifically, RITA caused mesothelioma cells, and not 'healthy' cells, to undergo apoptosis — a type of programmed cell death that occurs through the activation of a specific 'cascade' of events.
"The ability of RITA to induce apoptosis is remarkable considering that mesothelioma is very refractory to this process. In fact the most aggressive and rare variant, sarcomatoid mesothelioma, did not respond to the treatment probably because of its intrinsically high levels of molecules acting as inhibitors of this process" says Alfredo Budillon, Head of the Experimental Pharmacology Unit of the National Cancer Institute of Naples and coauthor of the study. "It remains to be seen whether the combination of RITA with other activators of apoptosis can achieve efficacy also against the more aggressive cases."
Furthermore, challenging mesothelioma cells with RITA worked in synergy with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin, which is the mainstay of treatment for this disease, suggesting that its use in a clinical setting could possibly help to reduce the required doses and the side effects of chemotherapy, thereby improving patients' quality of life.
The second study, published online in Cancer Biology and Therapy and led by Paola Indovina of the University of Siena and the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, Temple University in Philadelphia, was designed along the same lines as the first study. In the second study, the authors tested, for the first time in mesothelioma, a new drug called MK-1775 in combination with cisplatin. MK-1775 is a selective inhibitor of WEE1, a protein that is crucial in activating a 'checkpoint' for the repair of damaged DNA before the cell starts its division process. The rationale for this strategy is based on the fact that many cancer cells, especially those with non-functional p53, rely on WEE1 to stall cell division and allow cells to repair the damage induced by genotoxic agents, such as many chemotherapeutic drugs, including cisplatin. WEE1 inhibition limits the time available for repair and, therefore, sensitizes cancer cells to DNA-damaging agents. Indeed, inhibiting WEE1 with MK-1775 selectively sensitized mesothelioma cells to the genotoxic action of cisplatin by preventing checkpoint activation and forcing the cells to divide despite the damage, thus triggering apoptosis.
"Overall our studies are aimed at identifying promising new molecular therapies against mesothelioma that hold the potential for clinical use in the near future. MK-1775, for example, is already being utilized in clinical trials for other types of tumors in the United States," Giordano concludes.
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140117103923.htm


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Introducing Telerik® Data Access
Telerik Data Access is a tool that supports development of data-oriented software applications. Telerik Data Access tool is targeted at solving the object-relational impedance mismatch.
The object-relational impedance mismatch is a set of conceptual and technical difficulties which are often encountered when a relational database management system is being used by a program written in an object-oriented programming language. Relational and object-oriented models are so different that additional code and functionality is required to make them work together efficiently.
Using the Telerik Data Access tool means that architects and developers of data-oriented applications will have the ability to concentrate on the logic of the business problems they are solving, instead of solving problems with the data engines used to store and retrieve the data.
The handling of the data persistence is a huge task that may include multiple storage systems, each with its own protocols. Even applications that work with a single data storage must balance the requirements of the storage system against the requirements of writing efficient and maintainable code. These are exactly the problems that Telerik Data Access tool handles efficiently. It enables developers to work with data in the form of domain-specific objects and graphs of objects ( example: Orders and Order Details) without having to concern themselves with the underlying database tables and columns where the actual data is stored. This increases the level of abstraction at which developers can work when dealing with data and reduces the code that is required to create and maintain data-oriented applications.
Data-oriented applications development using Telerik Data Access
Nearly every application deals with data that needs to live longer than the actual execution of the program. This is also true for .NET applications. There are many ways to store this application data, many of which involve parsing the data to and from disk files. Although this is an easy way to make data persistent, realistically it can only be used for simple object graphs. Furthermore, essential features such as transactions, data protection and query capabilities are missing.
Telerik Data Access is a powerful object-relational mapper providing transparent persistence that fully conforms to the .NET standard. With Telerik Data Access, you can easily store your .NET application objects directly in the underlying database store. Telerik Data Access provides developers with a smart data access layer, which provides persistence services for effectively building well designed object-oriented applications.
Benefits from using Telerik Data Access
- Applications can work with the persisted data using object-oriented development practices, including types with inheritance, complex members, and relationships.
- Applications are freed from hard-coded data access layers and dependencies on a particular data store (database) or storage schema.
- Mappings between the data model and the storage-specific schema can change with minimal changes to user application code.
- Developers can work with data persistence object model that can be mapped to various data stores (different database management systems).
- The data persistence object model can be mapped directly to the data store (forward mapping), or can be extracted from the data source (reverse mapping).
- Multiple data persistence models can be mapped to a single storage schema. Also single domain model could be mapped to multiple data stores/schemes.
- Language-integrated query (LINQ) support provides compile-time syntax validation for queries against a data persistence model.
- All persistence classes are still normal CLR objects, and as such can be easily tested by state of the art unit tests.
- Advanced caching features are available out of the box, providing optimizations like: Connection Pool settings, Compiled Query Cache / Prepared Statement Cache, First Level Cache, Distributed Second Level Cache.
- Multi-tier application scenarios are supported through the ObjectContainer API.
- No reflection is used for data persistence and changes tracking. The product can be used even in Medium Trust environments. All the needed persistence code is post-build generated through byte code enhancement.
Transparent Persistence
Transparent refers to the way you work with the database in Telerik Data Access. In nearly all cases, objects are read from or written to the database without any explicit direction from you - transparently.
Transparent Persistence is therefore, the ability to directly manipulate data stored in a relational database using an object-oriented programming language, i.e., no SQL statements are needed to retrieve, insert, or update objects in the database and the tasks associated with conversion between your object model and your table model are done automatically. Telerik Data Access is intended to be used with all managed languages, such as Visual Basic.NET, C#, J# etc. and it has very few restrictions on the data model used.
While retrieving an object graph from the database only the objects that are really accessed are retrieved and objects that have not been accessed are not present in memory. As soon as an object is accessed it is retrieved from the database, and therefore, the retrieval is performed transparently from the users point of view. This is referred to as "lazy loading" (also known as delayed loading).
All database operations on persistent instances in the database are always performed in the context of a transaction. Database operations include addition, deletion or modification of objects in the database as well as reading objects from the database.
All this is done without the need of a persistent base class or reflection, since Telerik Data Access provide post-compilation bytecode enhancer technology. The enhancer, which is normally invisibly integrated into the Visual Studio IDE, 'injects' the necessary code to your assemblies.
If you have a lot of questions already, check out the FAQ section or take a look at the Getting Started folder.


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Veterans Memorial Ice Skating Rink offers summer time activities for children (ages 6 to 14) at its Buena Vista Summer Camps. All of the recreational amenities of the Buena Vista Recreation Complex is utilized to create a varied, fun and age-appropriate schedule of activities for campers ages 6-11 with children being places in groups by grade level. Activities will include, but are not limited to: ice skating, swimming, outdoor sports and games and arts & crafts. Indoor activities will be planned in the event of rain or excessive heat. A field trip will be scheduled for each week and each participant will receive a camp tee shirt. Our mission is to provide children with a safe and fun recreational experience that promotes positive social behavior and physical well-being. Our values: total camp experience, supervision and safety, fun, professionalism of staff and attention to detail.
Buena Vista Adventure Camp Age 6-11
The Buena Vista Adventure Camp is an action-packed program for middle school students (entering grades 6-8). This camp will include recreational game play utilizing all of the Buena Vista Recreation Complex. Popular activities include swimming, ice skating, basketball, soccer, gaga, flag football, and other various outdoor activities. Two weekly field trips will be scheduled. Field trips may include, but are not limited to: laser tag, batting cages, Rock Cats baseball, bowling, mini golf and amusement parks. Indoor activities will be planned in the event of rain or excessive heat. Each camper will receive a camp tee shirt.
Camp Field Trips
Buena Vista Afternoon Camp Age 6-14 12:00 – 4:30 p.m.
This program is designed to augment the Buena Vista Recreation Camp allowing children ages 6-14 to participate after other morning camps or summer school. The camp hours are 12:00 pm- 4:30 pm. Children may be dropped off anytime between noon and 12:30 pm. Activities included are ice skating, swimming, outdoor activities and arts & crafts. Indoor activities will be planned in the event of rain or excessive heat.
Buena Vista Summer Camps Early Bird/Extended Day Options
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Friday, December 21, 2007
Malt Mission 2007 #218
Macallan Elegancia 12 yo
Speyside Single Malt Whisky
40% abv
Elegancia. Hmm... what could it mean? Is it Scots? Gaelic? Nope; Spanish... naturally.
I can tell you that while the environment where I consumed this whisky provided fun and laughs, grace and dignity were almost nowhere to be found. Indeed, 'elegant' would be an ill-fitting descriptor for the DFDS boat from Copenhagen to Oslo, lovingly refered to as "Danskebåten" by Kristin and her friends, but it sure can be an arseload of fun.
With the sun rising over a frosty Norwegian fjord's shoreline we sat next to a starbord window in pleather chairs. Surrounded by bus-loads of blue-hairs, the cheesiest versions of jazz standards were squeezed from the bar speakers. Yes, we fell well below the average age, but this whisky made me feel at least 50% less out-of-place. I don't know what that means, but it did.
Launched in 2002, Macallan Elegancia is a Duty Free exclusive matured in ex-Fino and Oloroso sherry casks. My friend MC posted me some back in 2005 in plastic contact lens case. Gotta love him for the thought and creative method, but it did taste a bit like petroleum when it arrived.
For other Macallan's had on the mission click HERE
Lots of oak, apples and cinnamon, marmalade, breakfast cereal (corn flakes?). Malty, oaky sweetness. Almonds, oranges, chocolate ice cream.
Gentle impact, sweet before gripping with oak. Toasty sherry characteristics with dried fruits before crême brulée and leather glove flavours.
Elegant indeed. Lighter than the standard (as opposed to the Fine Oak) Macallan range, but it has a delicate richness... if that is possible. Great nose, soft, clean and tasty with a short-ish finish.
Malt Mission #216
Malt Mission #217
Malt Mission #219
Malt Mission #220
Malt Mission HOME
Posted by Dr. Whisky at 7:31 AM
Labels: macallan, malt mission, speyside, tasting notes, whisky tasting2
1 comment:
- Matthew said...
That's right, I might not have chosen the best vessel to ship you said whisky back then, but I have fond memories of the bottle from which the sample came! Nice to see a posting about this one. Definitely worth looking at when one passes through the airports of life...by which I mean, airports. No metaphor necessary there I guess.
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(This is perhaps pretty close to Question/answer ratio etiquette in Stack Overflow? and maybe a few others...but it seems at least a smidge different than an "exact duplicate" to me...)
It seems that "a lot" of "stupid" or "bad" questions (asked only for reputation points?) come from people with few answers. While I'm by no means any type of an expert on Stack Overflow (with a measly 1000+ reputation points), I answer a whole lot more questions than I ask--by a ratio of about 10-answered to 1-asked.
Is there anything on Stack Overflow that is driven by this ratio? Should there be? If so, what would be a "good" question/answer ratio?
While we all want people to feel free to ask questions, there is a lot of benefit in both answering questions and taking the time to write a decent question.


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At least 11 people were killed and about 30 injured when twin car bombs hit a Protestant church in a major military establishment in northcentral Nigeria, officials said Sunday, a month after a deadly church bombing in the same state.
A bus laden with explosives first rammed into St. Andrew Military Protestant Church in the military barracks in Jaji in Kaduna state at about 12 noon, said the director of army public relations Brig. Gen. Bola Koleoso. Then a Toyota Camry car parked just outside the church exploded 10 minutes later, as people fled the first blast, he said.
Jaji is a symbolic target as it is home to the Armed Forces Command and Staff College, one of the country's most important military colleges, training Nigerian and foreign navy, air force and army officers.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday's attack, but a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram has previously targeted Nigerian military institutions in the past.
The attack comes two days after a special military taskforce announced that it would be giving a total of $1.8 million in rewards for information that could lead to the arrest of top Boko Haram members.
The twin blasts also came a month after another church was attacked in the city of Kaduna, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) away from Jaji.
In that attack, a suicide bomber rammed an SUV loaded with explosives into St. Rita's Catholic church holding Mass on Oct. 28 in Kaduna, killing at least seven people and wounding more than 100 others, authorities said.
The killings sparked instant reprisals in a city with a history of religious violence, leaving at least two more people dead.
Churches have been increasingly targeted by violence in Nigeria. In Kaduna state, there were church attacks on three weekends in a row in June. These attacks and the ensuing reprisals left at least 50 people dead.
Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the June attacks, but nobody has claimed responsibility for the latest attacks—last month and Sunday—which have again rocked the volatile state.
Kaduna state sits on Nigeria's dividing line between its largely Christian south and Muslim north.
Associated Press writer Yinka Ibukun contributed to this report from Lagos, Nigeria.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
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Home Page Chess Life Online 2010 January Instant Replay: USA-3, Brazil-1
|Instant Replay: USA-3, Brazil-1
|January 10, 2010
Today at the World Team Championship in Bursa, Turkey, the USA defeated Brazil 3-1, with wins from GMs Varuzhan Akobian and Hikaru Nakamura. Tomorrow the US team will face Greece.
Watch the games live on the official website at 8 AM EST. For daily game analysis, see Ben's Blog on the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis website. Also see previous CLO reports on the Opening Ceremony, Round 1 and Robson's Annotations of Round two.


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We probably seem painfully ordinary or even invisible. We are middle-class-looking people (or "better") who drive unremarkable but reliable cars, usually conjugate verbs correctly and probably went to college. We might even have jobs and successes that make us seem like we sailed through the flaming hoops of the privilege circus to land there. We look and talk and act like people who have all the hallmarks of a middle-class upbringing, so we are treated that way.
But underneath our passable exteriors, we know that every step forged ahead, every job secured, every bit of debt reduced, every entree into "better society" is another million light years away from what we lived like before, when were grateful for SPAM, food stamps, and a dental program. But what the outside can recast, the inside may never fully erase — what surprises me most about achieving so-called middle-class status is that you never forget the mentality of what lies just beneath. And you most realize this when any number of conversations, assumptions, questions, or comments about money, class, upbringing and etiquette trigger your class rage like some kind of recurring rash, and remind you all too well that you were once and in some ways forever from the wrong side of the tracks.
Poor, is, of course, a relative thing. There's a popular saying about work in exceptionally impoverished countries: the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. If that doesn't make sense to you, you've probably never gone without for long enough to have to think about it all that much. Consider yourself lucky.
But poverty isn't a "Yo mama's so poor" competition, although as a once-destitute person I find those jokes to be wonderfully cathartic, and have the added perspective of seeing how they are both hilarious and politically incorrect. Anyone who has suffered through the aching nothingness of having nothing, no matter the scale, can relate. But for me, it's these five topics that tend to stick in my class-rage craw the most.
Or rather, when people talk about it like everyone's gone to Europe, and everyone is going to Europe this year, because going to Europe annually is what people do. If you grew up poor, you likely missed the 9th grade trip to France, or the year abroad in Japan, or the post-college year of travel and wild times backpacking through India. So when you have to endure another conversation about how everyone is getting over to St. Maarten this year, your class rage might heat to a nice, sunny simmer.
Your Problem: Traveling regularly — even in the form of family vacations growing up — is about as familiar to you as a reliable car. It's extremely difficult to explain to people that the very concept of a luxury such as travel is, to some people — even in this day and age — so distant as to not even be a real goal. And even as an autonomous adult, whether you worked your way through college and spent your twenties paying down that debt or never went to college at all because you had to work, getting to another country is probably so far off your list of actual real things you might be able to do that you it still seems literally exotic to you.
What to Do: Take a deep breath. Realize they are merely talking about their own experience, and relish the free education. Ask about their trips, and listen. Curiosity always serves lack of experience well — it's part of what helped you out of the cycle of poverty in the first place. Find out what you can about the places they've gone, where the best deals are, what was a waste of time, what unique viewpoint travel has given them. This comes in handy if you ever find yourself in a position to drop everything and go one day, and if anyone bothers to ask you where you've been or whether you're going to St. Maarten, tell them they can stick St. Maarten up their bougie ass. Kidding, tell them the truth. If you have to listen to them droning on about luxury travel, tell them about how much you love Vienna — the sausages. The Billy Joel song. You get the idea.
They say where you went to school doesn't really matter, it's what you do with your education that counts. But "Where'd you go?" is still a question I'm asked more often than I would have ever guessed in my life. People who ask this question typically, I find, went to really fucking good schools, which is why they are so into talking about it. Hell, I would too if I, or someone I was related to, paid $50k a year for me to do it. But when this tired but totally useful (to people who went to good schools) social game comes up yet again at another party or meeting, you can find yourself silently boiling with your mixer-wine-infused class rage while backs are patted and shared jokes are made.
Your Problem: Either you didn't go at all and have to whip out your tired little "University of Life" joke, or you went to a shitty, thoroughly unremarkable state school that no one has ever heard of, which you also have a really good, tired, shitty little joke about. As a journalist, I often found myself as the only person in the room at work, or among the people I interviewed, who didn't go to a "good school." (P.S. It can feel like this.) Or who didn't have a master's. Or who didn't have a built-in network of contacts from those good schools I could call up to set me up with the most powerful person in town for that lunch of getting to know you. I also can't tell you how many times I watched people get hired through that network — no-good, better-schooled, thoroughly unremarkable people. I got hired by literally hanging around and doing the poor person tap dance of "PLEASE LOOK AT ME, I'M SMART! I'M PERSISTENT! I MATTER! I GOT NO CREDENTIALS, KID, BUT I GOT MOXIE!"
What to Do: It's cliché as fuck but please remind yourself that you've got loads of experience from living the way you have that no degree can ever replicate. You're resourceful, you're street smart, and boy do you have some fucking stories about bologna (question from real person who went to Ivy League school: What's bologna?). Do we all have to be Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting to prove that we are assets, too?
And so when people ask you what school you went to, tell them the truth, and mention that the best part of going there is that you don't even know what you don't know, so they could tell you literally anything about world civilization and you'd just have to take their word for it. Then outdrink them and outwit them, but don't join their trivia team. (Kidding. You know the answers. You just think you don't.)
Media/Political Portrayals
When the discussion isn't abstract and academic, it is pitying and sentimental. When it isn't demonizing, it's overly mythologizing. Poor people are lazy, they are dumb, they are the salt of the earth, they are heroes, they are noble. Or worse, they could totally just choose out of it but they won't. When you hear, read or see another safely distant, ignorant take on poverty or struggle, it can make your class rage agitate to a steamy rolling scald.
Your Problem: If you've lived in poverty you've met a lot of poor people, and they have all the same wonderful and abhorrent human qualities as any other label you want to slap on a demographic. What they lack are the resources and opportunities — and are usually from generations of people who lacked the resources, stuck in a cycle — to lift themselves out of poverty. They lack good models of what to mimic. They have to do three times the work to get to college, a notion that is automatic and inevitable for most people with means. They are exhausted. They are possibly depressed. They are not lazy or dumb or dishonest, except when they are just as lazy and dumb and dishonest as any other lazy, dumb, dishonest person you know — that, my friend, has got nothing to do with money.
What to Do: When people talk about poor people as a monolithic group of ne'erdowells, it is your job to educate them. Email journalists who get it wrong. Write to politicians who sound insensitive. Correct well-meaning friends who don't know how ignorant they sound. Draw attention to the misinformation as much as possible. The hard part is doing this without a SPAM-shaped chip on your shoulder. But if you can see that by automatically assuming that they — a "better-off" person — wouldn't "understand" your perspective, then you're doing the same blanket labeling to them that they are doing to you. Give them a fair chance to blow it at least.
When Middle Class People "Slum It"
Oh god, the thing where the people whose parents pay their cellphones, college tuition, health insurance and car payment love going to dive bars so they can feel authentically gritty. If you had to endure your entire twenties with zero safety net, surrounded by trustafarians with an affection for faux-poor minimalism or suburban kids who called themselves poor while they drank freely at the shittiest pool halls in town, the ones they drove up to in their parent's Saabm all in their quest to feel real danger without actually risking their safety — then you've likely felt your class rage bubble up like a cauldron of annoyance.
Your Problem: You go here because the booze is cheap and the faces look friendly. Maybe you're living out a destructive cycle you witnessed growing up. Maybe these are the bars of your home town, the bars of your neighborhood, and the stories of the men and women who frequent them can be totally mundane, or really sad, or perfectly OK, but always familiar. Newsflash, slummers: These dudes are not Charles Bukowski ready to bust out some working-class insight for you. Some of them have abandoned families, lost their way, relapsed, and they are here in the dark getting comfort in the only cheap way they know how. This is a place for compassionate communing, not a place to co-opt grit.
What to Do: Ah, fuck, it pains me to say it, but those middle class kids don't know any better. Maybe this is the closest thing they get to a dark spot. Is it better than showing no interest at all? And really, if we're being honest, it's truly ludicrous to suggest there is a meter for authentic rights to grit — to suggest that anyone else from a more financially stable life can't dive into the deep end and craft their own alcohol-numbed fog is unfair, not to mention just as limiting as the unfair assumptions about your capacity for nuanced thought or debt repayment merely because you grew up in a trailer. Let this one go, even though it might just be the most irksome of all. Your class is showing!
When you try to educate or merely share experiences about poverty or financial struggle with people who haven't experienced it, they can get pretty weird about it. Sometimes, if you're talking about money, people act like that's "low class" or rude. Or they get defensive, like you're attacking their stability by offering a counterpoint. Usually, though, the response is a pitying look followed by awkward silence. When you can't even have a conversation about the reality of poverty in this country without middle class or "above" folks getting all clammed-up about it, it makes you wonder how anyone can actually work on the issue for realz. It also makes your class rage swirl around like a mini-tornado.
Your Problem: Being poor sucks, but until you're old enough to really process it, it's all you know. You adjust to it, and learn some valuable lessons from it, like what a savings account is. Later, you're able to unpack some of the assumptions that come with having grown up this way, as beautifully illustrated in this list of things the writer on this Class Rage Tumblr thought were just "for rich people" growing up — like butter, umbrellas, and cable TV. You can laugh at this stuff later, and in many ways it makes you stronger. At the end of the day, your experience is a valuable one, and it should be listened to, not pitied. Also, fuck, it's your life. It's what you know. If you can't talk about it, what the hell are you supposed to do? Constantly trot out other stories so that everyone around you can feel better about themselves?
What to Do: Sometimes you have to just talk people through it and spell it out real-obvious like: "I see you are looking at me with the pity eyes like I just told you I watched my dog get murdered, but maybe you could ask questions about my upbringing or talk to me about it like it's a story I'm sharing, and not a case of shingles. I've had a lifetime to unpack the way this has affected me, and I tell you this as a point of biography, not to fish for pity. I will however, take any extra money you might have on you."
There's so much more it would be nice to help non-poors understand about the world the rest of us live and have lived in. I love this list of "Nine Things I Wish Economically Privileged People In My Life Knew." It's a humanizing, illuminating explanation of the experience of poverty, the shame and stigma you carry no matter how much you improve your lot. My favorite is number 9:
If you can't deal reasonably and respectfully with me being poor, I'm not going to be able to keep you in my life. I've said this before and I'll say it again: I can never forget that I'm poor, or behave like I'm not poor. It is with me every moment, in everything I do and every decision that I make. If you constantly lean on classist stereotypes, if you insult my background, if you patronize and pity me, if you yell at me for "making you feel bad," if you won't let me talk about my financial struggles or get too uncomfortable to let me continue, if you forget every time that I can't afford to do the things you want to do or don't share your experiences and perspective- well, I'm sorry, but you're not worth being around. I have no interest in spending time with someone who will not give me the space to be myself, or who cares more about their own zone of privileged comfort than respecting another human being.


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On Newness and History as Occupy and the World Celebrate May Day
This article is based on the pamphlet, May Day – The Secret Rendezvous with History and the Present, by the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series, and the forthcoming book, Occupying Language, also with the same series as well as Adelante Alliance. http://www.zuccottiparkpress.com/posts.html
The Walk of the New
Kefaya! (Enough!) Is declared in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt.
In Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece they hung banners declaring, in Spanish, Ya Basta! (Enough!)
Democracía Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now!) Is the framing in Spain.
We are the 99% is announced in the US.
New Social Relationships and a New Common Language
2011 has been a year of uprisings, movements and moments – all against an economic crisis and the politics of representation. Kefya! Ya Basta! and Enough! are shouted by millions against an untenable situation – and simultaneously they are met with Democracia Real Ya! and We are the 99%! - powerful affirmations. The use of the exclamation point reflects the passion – It is the shout of anger, the manifestation of collective power and the strength of people's voices in the songs of joy in finding one another.
There have been numerous historical epochs where something massive and "new" sweeps the globe – moments such as the Revolutions and revolts of the mid 1800s, the massive working class struggles of the early 1900s, and the massive political and cultural shifts and anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s, to name only three. We believe we are in another significant historic epoch. This one is marked by an ever increasing global rejection of representative democracy, and simultaneously a massive coming together of people, not previously organized, using directly democratic forms to begin to reinvent ways of being together. These global movements are connected in ways not possible in the past with the use of immediate technology, such as the internet, twitter and facebook. These new technological forms have helped for something that in Latin America is often referred to as "contagion", a spreading of an idea in a horizontal way, more like a virus than a political program. This should not be confused with a "social network revolution," a description many in the media have used. The communication tools helped, but the essence and the 'new' in the movements is the collective construction of new social relationships – creating new territory – and the similarities of this phenomenon globally.
Also new, with the directly democratic forms, are similar global ways of speaking about this new social creation. The word horizontal for example is used in English, Spanish, Arabic and Greek, all as a way of describing aspects of these new relationships. People organize in assemblies, calling them assemblies and gatherings over terms such as meetings - and use similar forms in these assemblies, as well as all share the experience of doing so in public space, often taking it over and occupying it – even if for only a period of time. Many of these occupied spaces then organize internal forms of conflict resolution, from the mediation group in OWS to the "security" teams in Egypt and Greece, and a group with a very similar intention called "Respect" in Spain. To look at the images from Tahrir Square in Cairo, Syntagma Square in Athens, Zuccotti/Liberty Plaza in New York, or Puerta del Sol in Madrid, to name only a few of the thousands, is to see a very similar occupation, including everything from libraries, child care, health services, food, legal, media and art. The forms of organization and relationships created in the space, all using direct democracy are massive, growing and globally consistent – not the same of course – but so similar as to be a new global phenomenon.
Also similar globally is a reterritorialization of the movements after a few months. Since the intention of the movements in not to only change a plaza or square, but society as a whole, the plaza is more of a starting point, and over time people begin to move more and more into spheres that relate more directly to beginning to retake and control their own lives. Thus, around the world there has been a shift into neighborhoods and workplaces, to focus on local needs, yet at the same time come together to coordinate. As, for example, in Athens, where there are now a few dozen neighborhood assemblies that then come together each Sunday to have an assembly of assemblies to coordinate the resistance and refusal to pay newly imposed taxes. Or the powerful eviction preventions that are coordinated throughout Spain, based in neighborhoods and then networked regionally. In the US there is also an increase in neighborhood based organizing as well as neighborhood and city wide eviction preventions. People continue to use the plazas and squares as a place to gather, have assemblies and sometimes occupy, but the form of territorial construction is shifting – and again doing so in a way that is consistent globally.
Recuperating Language and Voice
Many words and phrases have come into common global usage through common processes of rejection and creation. While many of the words and phrases that are used in the current global movements are new for movements, or at least in their current usages, they are often, if not always, with a history and context. And in this case, the history of the 'new' language also emerged from movements seeking to describe what they were creating and doing in ways not previously used – again – also often drawing on words and phrases with histories – but ones that then, as now, have taken on new meanings based on the new context. The retaking and rediscovering of words and language is a part of the same process of the people finding their own voices with the new usages of direct democracy. As people recuperate their voices, having not had them under representational forms of democracy, they find themselves as well. The movements recognize this new agency and protagonism and name it – as naming things is a powerful process in the retaking of history and life. The claim for voice and language is a claim for real democracy.
The Secret Rendevous with History and the Present
Walter Benjamin wrote of memory and history as a "secret rendezvous between past generations and our own" (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1955). The secret is not something that is known and not told, but something a great deal more subtle and ambiguous. When we speak of things being "new" in the movements, it is a reflection of our experiences. And when we write various histories and groundings to these experiences, which we argue are often very similar and sometimes so remarkably so it seems as if one is just taken directly from the other, we are in no way expressing that this takes away from newness, or that the people in the movements don't know what they are talking about. The opposite really, we are trying to find a place where the new meets the old – and is not a museum – but a live and useful interactive conversation. We do not challenge newness, but offer places of encuentro, of meeting, of the new social relationships and our many hundreds if not thousands of years of experimenting with the various forms of relating.
We offer this meeting place so as to best learn from one another, and especially so as to learn from our various positive experiences as well as the negative ones. It is not about fearing a repetition of history, since history does not repeat, but so as to see more clearly some of the many places from which the movements come so as to walk along further together, from different parts of the world and our many generations. Caminar preguntando.
In our forthcoming book we offer only the slightest of glances, and only into the past 20 years of creation and resistance in Latin America. This could be a multi volume project – especially considering the radical and revolutionary history is not often available to us, and particularly the more autonomous movements and understandings of our collective history.
So let us retake our history and bring it with our present – so as to learn more – and find more places of encuentro and rendevous that can be less secret.
May Day
Openly Defined: May Day is International Workers' Day. It is celebrated every year by tens of millions of people in most countries around the world. It originated with the struggle for the eight-hour workday, and in particular with the experience of the police repression against workers in Chicago in 1886. In the 1980s more diverse movements began organizing around May Day, and since 2001 the concept has shifted to one not only celebrating workers, but also for immigrant rights, social justice and against capitalist globalization and war.
Over one hundred people fit into a room meant for 50 – it is a union hall and we are planning for May Day 2012 in New York. The air is stale, but the energy high. The room is filled with Occupy movement participants, immigrant rights groups and communities, progressive labor organized in unions, and those from labor not representing their unions, or without unions, but identifying as labor, and a few people from neighborhood workers centers and other community based groups. The form of organization the May Day planning has taken is a spokes council. (Inspired by the global justice movement, and rumor is also the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s.) It is a directly democratic form of organization that can be used so that decisions are made, or ideas shared, based on those people speaking who are already involved in some form of organizing, reflected in things such as working groups, affinity groups or organizations. No more than one person from each group has a formal "voice" though everyone has "ears" and contributes to the idea of what their voice, technically a spoke, says to the group. Often there are constant whispered conversations up and down the line of a spokes to figure out what the "voice" should say, based on what others in the group feel and think. Consensus or agreement is reached in each group before ideas are shared and proposed. (See spokes council drawing in this pamphlet.) It is only early March and the people in the room are confident there will be at least tens of thousands of people on the streets of New York for May Day. And we know from our very composition that it will be organized and unorganized workers, the precarious, immigrants and all sorts of radicals.
This is not a "typical" May Day, or better said, it is not being planned to be typical, but rather is a vision of May Day coming from the new movements, together with the changing concepts of May Day and work that are described below. This is just one of countless examples of a current form of organization and practice that has antecedents, though most of those organizing do not know of the various histories. Below we share a glance at some of it with regard to May Day.
While May Day began as a day of struggle that included the mobilization of all sorts of workers, immigrants, leftists, socialists, communists, anarco-syndicalists and anarchists, since WWII, particularly in Europe and the US, it became characterized more by reformist union marches. In 1958 in the US, the government even tried to hijack the date designating it as Loyalty Day and attempting to physically obstruct mobilizations. With the decline of the industrial labor force in the later 1970s in the global north, May Day seemed to be increasingly less a point of reference for movements, especially in the global North.
Instead of losing its importance in the past decades however, May Day has begun to be re-signified by the movements and has begun to move again into one of the centers of massive mobilization.
One thread of the re-appropriation of May Day can be found in the "Revolutionary May Day" demonstrations in Germany and parts of (mainly) Northern Europe. They trace back to May 1st 1987 when police stormed a peaceful street festival organized by revolutionary collectives and neighborhood organizations in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin, an area characterized by a strong immigrant and leftist population. Radical activists and inhabitants of Kreuzberg started to fight back against police attacks, setting up barricades and burning police cars. It was then that the battle turned into an urban uprising, which eventually forced the police out of the neighborhood for the night. That night the streets in the heart of Kreuzberg were filled with massive street parties, while simultaneously there was looting of shops and grocery stores. The Kreuzberg uprising became a symbol, and ever since "Revolutionary May Day" demonstrations are held in Kreuzberg, often with up to 20.000 participants. The police mobilize for every one, and there is almost always repression and skirmishes. Over the years "Revolutionary May Day" has spread to other cities in Germany and throughout northern Europe.
Another appropriation of May 1st by the more recent movements is with the EuroMayDay. EuroMayDay began in 2005 in dozens of European cities, including Milan, Naples, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Helsinki, Seville-Malaga, Lisbon, Vienna, Maribor, Zurich, Copenhagen, and Liège, and then spread to other cities around the world, such as Tokyo and Toronto, loosing its prefix "Euro". The MayDay Parade emerged from the global justice movement in October 2004 during an autonomous event organized parallel to the European Social Forum. The basic idea was to unify the struggles of precarious workers and migrants for social rights and the freedom of movement across borders, as well as to create a trans-European network for mobilizations beyond the, up until then, one day of mobilization focus. The first coordinated EuroMayDay was held in 2005. Its origins go back to 2001 in Milan, Italy, when an alliance of labor activists of precarious workers, Rank-and-File Union Committees (CUB) squatted social centers and migrant organizations unified efforts for a May Day of the "precarious". The term "precarious" refers to all people living with income and work insecurity, uneven or a total lack of access to social services and/or often being subjected to repressive migration laws.
One of the central characteristics of MayDay is to understand the diversity of the subjectivities engaged as an enrichment of the struggle – therefore the concept of unity is a different one than in traditional workers and leftist organizations, where the concept is based more on homogenization. This diversity is often expressed in the form of a parade - drawing upon the tactics of the global justice movement - where joy and celebration were core, as shown with groups such as Reclaim The Streets and The Pink Block, but also simultaneously mixing this joyous celebration with direct actions, such as temporary occupations of institutions, expropriation of food and other goods from chain food stores, and the use of public transport without paying. Some of the MayDay networks became places where precarious workers, migrants and other workers, came for support around particular issues, struggles and actions – not related to May 1st actions. The rubric and actual networks of MayDay became central places for organizing around issues such as the struggles and protests of precarious workers, such as those in call centers or short time contract workers in the service industries, as well as struggles against deportation and detention centers, against copyright and for general access to services understood as commons. The different MayDays around Europe met regularly for discussion and coordination and made transnational calls for demonstrations. As of 2010 this form of organization began to shift, and while they still exist they have also again begun to change form.
The practices that grew out of MayDay spread beyond the mobilizations for May 1st with, for example, satirical inventions, such as the popular icon of "Saint Precarious" or the "Precarious Superheroes" who would appear in other campaigns and movements. The "Precarious Superheroes" for example stand for the amount of "super hero capability" precarious workers have to have in their jobs and lives. Dressed in colorful fantasy clothing, like traditional super heroes, the "Precarious Superheroes" have been participating in demonstrations and direct actions. For example, in Hamburg in Germany "Precarious Superheroes" expropriated expensive food from a luxury store and distributed it for free to unemployed, homeless and poor workers in the days preceeding MayDay in 2006.
In 2006 in the US May Day was again placed on the national agenda as day of struggle. Migrant communities and organizations called for a May 1st national boycott and in some places a "Day Without an Immigrant", with many millions of immigrants and migrants participating across the US, from the major cities to small towns. In Los Angeles alone close to one million people were on the streets. Solidarity actions were organized in Mexico as well, with a "Nothing Gringo Boycott", intending to show the cross border solidarity with migrant communities. Since 2006, every May Day in the US is one where immigrant rights and power are a core part.
And then in 2008, in the US, the West Coast Dock Workers Union (International Longshore and Warehouse Union ILWU) called for a strike on May Day, demanding "an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East." 30,000 members and tens of thousands of other supporters, shut down the port that day. This resulted in bringing back the question of class, as a possible militant force, into May Day.
While in most of the global south May Day never lost its appeal as a significant day for struggle, both with militant resistance, as well as joyous celebrations, in the global north it is only in the past decade being increasingly reclaimed, from below, as the day of the struggle for dignity of the oppressed, the silenced and marginalized. May Day is also being recuperated as day of joy, of celebrating together the vast diversity of protagonists and participants, and of the changes to come – it is a moment where one catch a glimpse of tomorrow. What began as a recuperation of May Day's radical tradition by activists of political groups and precarious workers, has increasingly turned into a broader movement, with May Day as a central symbol.
Now, in 2012, the planning for May Day is a combination of all of the above. There are traditional workers' unions, especially the more progressive segments, there are immigrant rights organizations and communities, and many working groups from Occupy, such as: Mutual Aid, planning to make a prefigurative day with food, some directly from local farmers and producers, child care, tutoring, medical consultations and direct medical aid; Messaging, making sure our message is the one that gets out, interacting with mainstream media as well as creating our own media; Direct Action, planning to shut down major road arteries, but doing so theatrically and with joy; the Plus Brigades, also planning direct action as clown blocks; Art and Culture, organizing so anyone can create art that day, as well as making the action beautiful.
The conversations about strike, what it means to be a worker, and even the meaning of "stopping business as usual" is a changing one, and one that now encompasses work as precarious, using the language of precarity – including various migrations statuses and abilities to risk a work strike. The call for a General Strike takes all of this into consideration and is interpreted as many things, from a labor union shut down to a non consumer day, or one without housework. Already, as we write this in March, coming from Europe and the US we can see the influence of the global south and our own history on our current practices – not linearly perhaps, but nonetheless, there exists many aspects of the past 20 years of a shifting May Day in the New York and US planned May Day ... how did this happen ... this is part of our many questions ...
An Invitation to a Global Conversation
With our forthcoming book we hope to help ground what is new and beautiful in our social creation today in relationships and concepts that have been developing and evolving in Latin America over the past 20 years in particular. There are of course many similarities with preceding forms of organization, especially most recently with the globalization movement of the late 90s and early 2000s – however we are choosing to ground the discussion with movements that arose and are comprised of more "regular" people, rather than movements and groups that came about and were made up of more intentional "activists".
Explored are concepts such as Territory, Assembly, Rupture and Popular Power, and relationships such as Horizontalism, Autogestión (self-administration), and protagonism. These forms of organization and ways of relating are described based on more than two decades of practice and experience in Latin America, from the spreading of horizontalidad with the popular rebellion in Argentina, to the concept of Territory, grounded in Bolivia and Brazil, or the construction of Popular Power in the Consejo Comunales in Venezuela and the understanding of our many diversities, creating a world in which many worlds fit, of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico.
In this article, we used only one example, that of May Day.
Happy May Day!


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Windows PC makers slashed prices to historically low levels in the U.S. during the last three weeks of October, damaging the consumer business just as Microsoft tries to push Windows 10 as its salvation, a retail analyst said last week.
"The implications of a much more price aggressive PC market are enormous, and while many of them are positive, many are not," said Stephen Baker of the NPD Group in a good news-bad news post to his company's blog on Friday.
In the span from Oct. 5 to Oct. 25, the ASP (average selling price) of Windows-powered personal computers was $430, down 10% from the year before, according to NPD's data. During the week of Oct. 5, the Windows notebook ASP was even less: $415.
"In contrast, the ASP last year at this time was around $480, a monumental change in pricing for a category that had seen stable pricing for the last few years," Baker said of the "Black Friday"-like numbers.
Although the price cuts were good news to consumers shopping for a PC, Baker questioned what the business would look like in 2015. "I would say this is damaging rather than unsustainable," Baker said in an interview Friday. "Some can withstand these prices better than others. But from an overall perspective, clearly at the end of the cycle, there are going to be a lot of losers."
U.S. retailers like Best Buy and Walmart can withstand an extended stretch of aggressive price cuts, as can some OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) such as Hewlett-Packard. But not every retailer or OEM has the resources to stick with those prices.
Baker predicted further consolidation as those unable to play in the ultra-low price bands bickered over an evaporating pool of sales in the $450-and-up range.
More importantly, said Baker, was that the price cuts were changing the design and manufacturing of PCs. "The challenge isn't that the ASP last year was $500 and that next year it will be $300, but that these lower-priced PCs are being designed and marketed and intended to be sold at $199 to $249. In the past, those prices have been reserved for models at the end of their cycles. Now they're pervasive."
At those cut-rate prices, touch -- once a major part of Microsoft's Windows 8 strategy -- disappears.
"The Windows notebook PC segment above $300 has been decimated, with sales down 10% over the past three weeks," Baker said in the blog. "This has impacted the uptake of touch in the Windows market as well. Basic clamshell notebooks with touch only accounted for approximately 25% of the Windows market over the past few weeks, in contrast to points earlier in the year when it was above 30%."
Flooding the market with cheap products has also affected sales of Windows 2-in-1 devices, hybrids that boast traits of both tablets and notebooks. According to NPD's U.S. retail sales data, the 2-in-1 market remains stalled at 11% of sales.
The price cuts will benefit not only consumers, but also Apple, Baker argued.
Although Apple has cut prices in the last year, its Macs remain premium machines at premium prices. With Windows PCs, especially notebooks, being designed and marketed -- explicitly or not -- as disposable, buyers looking for a longer-lived, higher-quality system will increasingly turn to Apple's MacBook lines, Baker said.
Apple's job will be made all the easier by a decay in the higher-priced Windows PC market. "How do you maintain a premium product segment when most of the entry-level stuff is good enough?" Baker asked. "It's all about managing prices. And that's exactly what Apple is best at. It doesn't get enough credit for how smart it is on pricing."
Discounts have spurred sales -- no surprise -- and have been largely possible because Microsoft launched Windows 8.1 with Bing, a subsidized OS offered to OEMs so they could sell notebooks at prices competitive with Chromebooks. While that strategy has worked to some degree -- Chromebooks' share of the U.S. entry-level notebook market is now under 20%, said Baker, compared to the high 20s this time last year -- it may hurt the Redmond, Wash., company's Windows 10 effort next year.
"What does the Windows PC market look like when we come out of the holiday season, and what would a permanent decline in notebook ASPs do to the market ahead of the launch of Windows 10?" Baker asked. "I suspect the answer is a significantly weaker PC business, less able to support Windows 10."
Baker based his take on a belief that by heavily discounting prices, and so sacrificing features, performance and build quality, OEMs will have an even harder time convincing consumers that PCs have something to offer that tablets or even smartphones cannot provide. "[OEMs will be] less able to clearly differentiate what makes a PC a compelling choice against a tablet or a smartphone," Baker said.
But pervasively cheap PCs may cause other ripples, too.
Minus touch-enabled hardware in consumers' hands, Microsoft's continued -- albeit de-emphasized -- pitch for touch in Windows will be made increasingly irrelevant, perhaps putting an end to the company's experiment with building two input user interfaces (UI) in one desktop OS.
Low-priced PCs could also reduce spending for software and services to the detriment of the Windows application ecosystem and even Microsoft's attempt to shift revenue generation from the operating system to other avenues, such as Office 365 subscriptions. People who pay little for their hardware typically pay little for after-market software or services, as many Android smartphone makers have discovered
Likewise, a flood of inexpensive PCs running the free or nearly-free Windows 8.1 with Bing would affect Microsoft's ability to sell Windows licenses to OEMs for any consumer machine and perhaps quash plans to charge for a Windows 10 upgrade. After all, who would pay historic prices -- around $100 -- to upgrade from Windows 7 when a new machine can be had for just twice that?
Not all Windows PCs are racing toward the bottom of the price barrel, Baker pointed out. "There is still plenty of stuff going on in the corporate markets that deliver much higher ASPs," he said.
But on the consumer side, the plummeting prices of PCs -- which Microsoft is driving -- becomes yet another example of the company's radical new strategy of eschewing revenue there in the hope it translates into larger volume and more users who, perhaps in their workplace, can be forced to pay. Last week's shifting of the boundary between free and paid usage of Office on the iPad was a similar indicator.
"The implications and challenges around a new level of Windows notebook pricing will reverberate around the industry," Baker said.
And that industry includes Microsoft.


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She was literally his dream girl, conjured in his artwork.
When director Len Wiseman sat down to sketch the main character in his 2003 vampires-versus-werewolves film "Underworld," he drew the spitting image of Kate Beckinsale, the Brit actress whom he'd never met but would go on to play the part and eventually become his wife.
"The script called for a gorgeous vampire goddess, and the chances are that my idea of a goddess will look pretty close to the kind of person I fall in love with," Wiseman once told the London Evening Standard.
The couple has made two films together. On Friday, their third, "Total Recall," opens. The thriller is a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger original in which a blue-collar worker (Colin Farrell) agrees to have fake memories implanted in his brain. When the process goes wrong, he finds himself on the run, and the line between reality and fantasy begins to bleed.
Beckinsale, 39, plays Farrell's wife, who (it's no spoiler to say) turns on him and ends up trying to kill him.
Since they got together in 2003, Beckinsale and Wiseman have been tabloid fixtures here and especially in her native UK, filling the pages alternately with rumors of splits and her gushing, TMI-ish nuggets about their personal life.
Here's the annotated version of the latter: They enjoy webcam sex. He likes her in leather. He also enjoyed it when she filled out for a role and had "a bigger bottom and boobs." To make up for the lack of sleeping around in her life, Beckinsale tries having "sex many, many, many times with one person."
The pair met working on "Underworld," which proved to be a breakout hit for them both. Previously, the California-born Wiseman, 39, had been a commercial and music-video director.
The only problem was, both were in long-term relationships. Beckinsale had been together with actor Michael Sheen (of "Frost/Nixon") for eight years, and the two had a daughter, Lily, in 1999. Wiseman was married to Dana Wiseman, a schoolteacher.
Both the actress and the director have denied that they got together while the movie was shooting, but in interviews, Dana has claimed otherwise.
Whenever the romance started, it quickly became serious. They married in 2004 at the Hotel Bel-Air and then honeymooned in Mexico, where Beckinsale donned a white bikini with the name "Mrs. Wiseman" stitched across her butt.
"I've never come across anybody as steady and calm as Len is," she told Self magazine. "I'm the one who's a bit more volatile, spontaneous, mercurial. And Len is like the glue. And he's incredibly handsome, which really helps."
She has also said that Wiseman made her feel sexy for the first time in her life and that she valued him for asking her to marry him — something, she pointed out, that did not happen in her time with Sheen.
Something else that also did not happen until Beckinsale met Wiseman was her transformation to action star. Before "Underworld" gave her the chance to put on tight spandex, grab a gun and wire-fight in slo-mo, she'd been known mostly for restrained costume dramas, including "Emma" and "The Golden Bowl."
But outside of the "Underworld" franchise and projects directed by her husband, Beckinsale has sometimes stumbled. "Whiteout," from 2009, gave her a headlining role but bombed. The same year, "Nothing But the Truth" went straight to DVD. That year's "Everybody's Fine," a family drama with Robert De Niro, was mostly panned.
Following 2009's troubles, she took a three-year hiatus from movies, returning earlier this year in "Contraband."
She has said she wanted to focus on her family. Perhaps not coincidentally, separation rumors have followed her and Wiseman for years. In 2006, she reportedly moved out and was looking for new digs with her daughter.
The couple apparently reconciled, although there have been rumors of fighting on set. During a recent appearance on "The Tonight Show," Beckinsale joked about keeping her arguments with Wiseman private while filming. Instead of yelling, they now text each other. "You'd be amazed how fast you can type 'douchebag,' " she said.
Careful there. A few harsh words, and the next thing you know, Wiseman could be taking up with Kristen Stewart. We hear she likes directors.


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Update: veterans of the 2008 World Mind Sports Games will have familiar territory to cover (in more ways than one!). Beijing, China will be the site of the first SportAccord World Mind Games (http://www.sportaccord.com), scheduled for September 2011. The event will feature the top players of six mind-sport games: chess, Chinese chess, bridge, go and draughts, joined by a new game, duplicate poker.
So all you World Mind Games aficionados, if you are into buying or selling vintage movie posters, photos, and movie memorabilia you might want to start collecting the posters of such well known chess films as "Searching for Bobby Fischer," "Brooklyn Castle," or " Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine." In another 30-40 years they might be worth some big money. It would be interesting to see what the movie poster of the 1925 classic silent film from the Soviet Union called " Chess Fever" would fetch on the market today. There are also loads of poker films to check out. The posters of some of them may be even worth money today. For instance, the original posters from the 1965 Steve McQueen film, "The Cincinnati Kid" or from the 1967 film with Paul Newman, "Cool Hand Luke," or the original "Ocean's Eleven" that was released in 1960 could be well worth investing in. Take your passion for the games of the World Mind Games and explore new avenues. Let me know if there are any movies in which "Chinese chess" or "go and draughts" are featured.
Thomas Hsiang, Secretary General of the International Mind Sport Association (http://www.imsaworld.com/), promises that "the new event will include top Western players, women players, and youth representation." We'll have more info as soon as it becomes available.
29 July 2010 Update – as you may already know, poker has been accepted as a "mind sport" (no doubt causing much controversy in some circles), but that's old news now. More or less controversially (depending on your point of view), the IOC has officially stated that mind sports have "no realistic chance of entering either the Summer or the Winter Olympics". That's it then. Sigh.
According to the International Go Federation website (RANKA), the 2012 WMSG will actually be held in Manchester, and have no connection to the Olympics at all (obviously, as it would be in the wrong place). The good news is that they're looking far enough ahead to speculate on a third WMSG in Rio in 2016.
The rumors are that Manchester's WMSG won't even be held in 2012, but 2013 — possibly to completely avoid any shred of Olympic connection, or possibly because it will take that long to work out all of the details. After all, without the fresh Olympic infrastructure that the 2008 WMSG enjoyed in Beijing, the WMSG organizers have much more to worry about!
IMSA doesn't seem to have anything more recent on the website than an announcement about SportAccord 2009 (held in March of 2009), which is rather troubling…perhaps they could use some home refinancing money? If they do go that route, if all their US supporters were to get payday loans of a $1000 each maybe, just maybe, the IMSA could get their act together and gather some steam. Of course their entire US supporter would then have to scramble and pay back those short-term payday loans when their next paycheck arrives. Hey, but it's all worth it as far as I'm concerned.
The World Mind Sports Games were a rare treat that brought together world-class competitors in Bridge, Chess, Go, Draughts, and Xiangqi.
Assembling in Beijing in the wake of the 2008 Summer Olympics (the event was held from 3 to 18 October), over 140 countries participated in this first World Mind sports Games. Please see our "Results" page for a quick wrap-up of the events, as well as some impressive statistics concerning media coverage, among other things!
Additionally, we're compiling information (and commenting on it, in our own factual but otherwise irreverent fashion) on the upcoming 2012 World Mind Sports Games to be held shortly after the 2012 Summer Olympics in sun-drenched London. This will be the 30th official Olympics (sorry, the "Games of the XXX Olympiad — hey, XXX Olympics? Sounds great! I'm mostly looking forward the women's events, of course).
Where was I? Oh yes…we endeavor to conscientiously provide updates whenever humanly possible (i.e., we try to keep the site current, but don't breathe down our necks). So a quick glance at the "2012" page should tell you as much as we know, and perhaps a bit more. Of course the biggest recent news is the inclusion of poker as a mind sport, which is certain to make some people happy, and others not so much…
We're also offering a brief overview of the Games. You probably know what Chess is…I hope…but fewer may immediately recognize Go and Bridge, and I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of you are less familiar with Xiangqui. And some of you may not know that Draughts is more or less a fancy-pants name for Checkers.
And we'd be remiss if we didn't give a shout-out (and by that I mean 'dedicate a page') to the International Mind Sports Association who made all of this possible (or at least a good chunk of it, anyway).


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Each Bioconductor package contains at least one vignette, a document that provides a task-oriented description of package functionality. Vignettes contain executable examples and are intended to be used interactively.
You can access the PDF version of a vignette for any installed package
from inside R using the
browseVignettes function. For example, to
view the vignettes in the Biostrings package enter the following at an
R prompt:
browseVignettes(package = "Biostrings")
This will open a web browser with links to the vignette PDF as well as a plain-text R file containing the code used in the vignette.
The vignette files, both the PDF and the Rnw sources document, are
located in the
doc directory of an installed package
(inst/doc for an uninstalled package tarball). You can discover the
location of an installed package as follows:
system.file(package = "Biostrings")
You can extract all of the R code from a vignette source file (these
files are in Sweave format) as shown below. The result will be a
file for each vignette source file written to your current working
directory. You can use these R files to cut and paste into an R
session so that you can work the examples in the vignette yourself.
vigSrc = list.files(pattern = "Rnw$",
system.file("doc", package = "Biostrings"),
full.names = TRUE)
for (v in vigSrc) Stangle(v)
You can also download the vignette for a package that isn't installed on your system by visiting the package's description page linked from the list of Bioconductor packages
Term of use for the vignettes: You are welcome to use these materials for instructional purposes. However, you may not include these in separately published works (articles, books, websites). When using all or parts of the Bioconductor course materials (slides, vignettes, scripts), we would appreciate it if you would cite the authors and refer your audience to the Bioconductor website.


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A humorous take on GDPR via Charli Mills: https://carrotranch.com/2018/05/23/raw-literature-cake-cookies/