text:
Analyze some Data
Budget $100 USD
Please read first before answering, NO automatic replies please.
Start the reply with telling me your experience level with Amazon scraping.
I will provide a list of 3 sets of upc codes and you in turn will provide an analysis of the data with a spreadsheet with the following columns: UPC (provided), Price, ASIN, Rank.
Please let me know if you have a tool to do this and if you have done it in the past or you can create one and compile the data.
33 freelancers are bidding on average $102 for this job
Hi, I can do this for you. Please send a massage in the PMB for details.......Best Regards flashsaiful
Dear Sir/Ma'am, I am a Web research, Data Entry & Webs Scrapping expert. I checked and understood your requirements. I can handle this job very well to your appreciation. I can find and extract the information More
Hi, Actually i have a team of people who work to rank products on Amazon. For that we have to use several tools to track the ranking as well. CyberMonkey is one of them. However, the goal of the job is to get back More
I have read your description and this is not automatic reply. I have my own Amazon scarping tool developed in C#.net. I can update this as per your requirements within [login to view URL] are very responsible towards our clients. W More
Hello Dear, How are you? If you will select me I could do it manually. I don't have any tool. Thanks. Best Regards, Masud
Dear client, I have already done a similar project for [login to view URL] scrapping. so i have a ready tool. you can test me. I have sound knowledge in Excel and I have previously carried out a number of projects in excel More
Greetings sir, i am an expert freelancer for this job and your 100% satisfaction is assured if you allow me to serve. I have created script earlier as well to scrape the product from amazon. Here is the reason. W More
I have been scraping amazon since last year. Hi, I'm a Web Scraper. I have been scraping website since last year. I scrape the website of tripadvisor, mobofree and [login to view URL], facebook, AMAZON, youtube and More


text:
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Share This Product
100.0% would recommend this item to a friend.
29 out of 32 people found the following review helpful:
What are the pros?
What are the cons?
These are great! I love true red flowers, with no hints of pink. These really bring the crimson color to my garden. They will bloom again if cut back right after the first flowers bloom, so put them in a vase and enjoy! Even the foliage has red in it.
Would you recommend this product to a friend?

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Search results for: Freshers Engineering
Freshers Engineering
EngineeringDaily.net - News and Notes for and by Engineering Professionals (Rating: 7) , Votes:Provides relevant and important information for those working in the engineering discipline. Usable content is generated every day by practicing professionals.http://www.engineeringdaily.net
Engineering Schools in U.S. (Rating: 5) , Votes:Profiles of top engineering schools in the U.S., including admissions requirements, tuition, fees, and rankings.http://www.engineeringschoolsinusa.com/
TRS Staffing Solutions (Rating: 3) , Votes:With 17 offices across the globe, we bring local expertise to international markets and have the industry knowledge to help match the right candidate to the right role.http://www.trsstaffing.com
Fugro GeoConsulting (Rating: 0) , Votes:Fugro GeoConsulting offer the following engineering services geotechnical engineering, geohazard assessment, offshore geotechnics and engineering geology.http://www.fugrogeoconsulting.comCategory: Directory/Science/Geology
Top Engineering Schools (Rating: 4) , Votes:Directory of Top Engineering Schools in the United States. Includes admissions statistics, application and tips.http://www.top-engineering-schools.org/Category: Directory/Education/Organizations
Geotechnical Engineering & Environmental Services (Rating: 2) , Votes:United Consulting geotechnical engineering consultants provide concrete testing methods, geotechnical reports, ground penatrating radar services, environmental site assessments, soil testing laboratorhttp://www.unitedconsulting.com/
Business Support Services from EEF (Rating: 0) , Votes:EEF is the industry body for engineering and manufacturing employers offering invaluable business advice, business resources & business support services.http://www.eef.org.uk/UK/Category: Directory/Business/Training
Engineering Innovation and Technology (Rating: 1) , Votes:Foster-Miller, Inc., is a technology and product development company with an international reputation for delivering and supporting innovative products and systems that perform under the most demanding conditions.http://www.foster-miller.comCategory: Directory/Business/B2B
Industrial Engineering - Hans Von Der Heyde (Rating: 3) , Votes:HvdH provide cutting-edge industrial engineering solutions in automation, machine design, tool making and machining. The company is based in Cape Town, South Africa.http://www.hvdh-sa.co.za/
CAD Software Programs for 3D Printing - CADD Edge (Rating: 0) , Votes:CADD Edge supplies engineering computer aided design software and services including training, 3D printing, and tech support.http://www.caddedge.com/
TriMet | 3D Scanning & Metrology Company (Rating: 0) , Votes:Metrology company offering Laser Scanning for 3D printing, 3D scanning and reverse engineering. Includes laser scanning, CAD modeling and more.http://www.trimetgroup.com/
Failure Analysis, Accident Investigations & Litigation Support (Rating: 3) , Votes:Kevin Kennedy Associates Inc can quickly assemble teams of world class consultants to address your specific needs with its top level experts in due diligence, failure analysis, accident investigations, litigation support and a host of other engineering and scientific services.http://www.rapid-response-consulting.com
Technical Recruitment Agency & Technical Jobs (Rating: 10) , Votes:AndersElite is a technical recruitment agency/consultancy for the built environment. Search for jobs in architecture, building services, construction, engineering, MoD, housing, IT, FM and rail.http://www.anderselite.com/
NEW Free Industrial Software, E-Books and Downloads (Rating: 71) , Votes:All free software and ebook downloads for the industrial sector Engineering, Maintenance, Management in manufacturing and other related industries. Free industrial related demos, software and E-Books.http://www.industrial-ebooks.com/
Top Colleges & Universities In India (Rating: 7) , Votes:An education portal for Study in India providing information on MBA, Engineering, Medical, Colleges, Courses, Institutes, Schools, Careers, Exams, Classes, Distance Education Universities & Jobs in India.http://www.infinitecourses.com
U.S. Top Schools (Rating: 32) , Votes:Directory of Top Schools in the United States.http://www.schoolaah.com/Category: Directory/North America
Advantage Engineering, Inc. (Rating: 1) , Votes:Advantage offers a full line of fluid circulating machinery to support all areas of your processing facility.http://www..advantageengineering.com
CompTIA Network+ Qualification (Rating: 0) , Votes:This course will benefit anyone and everyone seeking a professional level of competence and recognition within the PC industry.http://www.aplus.skillstrain.co.uk/
HMC, Inc. (Rating: 0) , Votes:Our services include Engineering, Large Component Fabrication, CNC Machining, Maag Gear Cutting/Hardcutting, Heat Treating, and Large Gear Box Rebuilding/Upgrading.http://www.hmcgears.com
Sheet Metal Stamping (Rating: 4) , Votes:Details about various methods and techniques used in metal forming engineering including details about metal machining.http://www.metalstampingdies.com
Elite Elastomers (Rating: 1) , Votes:A one stop solution for custom rubber compounds, Elite provides rapid turnaround on engineering, formulation, mixing, test and manufacturing polymer compounds.http://www.eliteelastomers.com/
Business Industrial Network (Rating: 4) , Votes:Offering CEUs and certificates for on-site industrial training and seminars. Answers distance learning with many maintenance and engineering related CBTs, training CDs and other training materials online.http://www.bin95.com
Jobs in India (Rating: 491) , Votes:Devseeker is an online job board site where you can find engineering and software jobs in India. Browse jobs by location or sector, upload your resume and apply online to hundreds of jobs in India.http://www.devseeker.inCategory: Directory/Asia/India
Online University Degrees (Rating: 7) , Votes:Resource for helping students in locating online courses and schools to suit their individual needs. Consists of forensic nursing, six sigma, and medical billing and coding degree listings.http://www.online-university-degrees.info/
Web Application Development & Consultancy (Rating: 5) , Votes:Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Banjax is a highly focused web engineering team specialising in advanced web application development and consultancy.http://www.banjax.com/Category: Directory/Europe/United Kingdom
Accredited Online Degree By Distance Learning (Rating: 6) , Votes:Lists the top online colleges and universities that offer the distance learning programs leading to online degrees.http://www.mbaers.com
California Environmental and Analytical Laboratory Services (Rating: 1) , Votes:California certified analytical chemistry and environmental testing lab provides soil and water testing for state and Federal agencies, industrial clients, engineering firms, and private industries.https://www.californialab.com/Category: Directory/Business/Environment & Energy
China Manufacturer: Made in China Manufacturing (Rating: 521) , Votes:China manufacturer provides made in China product lines, factory direct, specializing in China manufacturing from design concept, to engineering, to production, to final packaging.http://www.the-china-manufacturer.com/Category: Directory/Asia/China
Building Services Engineers & Low Carbon Consultants (Rating: 1) , Votes:Emlett Engineering Ltd is a professional Building Services Consultancy which offers high quality, client focussed solutions in the fields of consultancy and energy assessment.http://www.emlettengineering.co.ukCategory: Directory/Business/Environment & Energy
Top Online Colleges and Universities (Rating: 28) , Votes:Provides information on online degree programs from top online colleges and universities, including business, law, engineering, and nursing degrees. Covers online bachelor, graduate, master, andhttp://www.mbamonster.com/
MBA Resume (Rating: 6) , Votes:Offers information on resume, interview, and skills of MBA students.http://www.answerresume.com/Category: Directory/Business/Training
Eduers Higher Education (Rating: 20) , Votes:Higher educational programs, including college directory, exam preparation, letter writing, and information on loans and scholarships.http://www.eduers.com
Find Job Descriptions (Rating: 4) , Votes:Detailed descriptions of over 10,000 popular positions, including job example, requirement, tasks, responsbilities, and job duties.http://www.findjobdescriptions.com/
Sierra Pacific Engineering & Products (Rating: 0) , Votes:SPEP is a B2B supplier of engineered products including: latches, hinges, cam locks, handles & haspshttp://www.spep.com/
Sample Resume and Writing Tips (Rating: 23) , Votes:Offers free resume template, sample resumes and tips for how to create a resume for high school, college students, and job seekers.http://www.sample-resume-template.com/
Top Online College Degrees (Rating: 13) , Votes:Online degree programs and distance learning from accredited online colleges and universities, including business, law, engineering, and nursing degrees. Covers online bachelor, graduate, mba degrees.http://www.degreeers.com/
IT support, computer support, technical support: Sydney NSW Australia (Rating: 8) , Votes:Bruntech offers the best IT Services onsite and online at affordable prices. Computer consultancy, network consultants, managed services, computer engineering, computer repair and computer maintenance.http://www.bruntech.net.au
Advantage Home Schooling (Rating: 67) , Votes:Directory of more than 693,000 schools wordwide. Includes resume writing, letter of recommendation template, and MBA essay tips.http://www.advantageedu.com/Category: Directory/Education/Home Schooling
Dmsolar.com - Solar panels (Rating: 11) , Votes:An independent, American-owned company with headquarter in Florida, USA, is the world's leading supplier of high-efficiency solar panels, photovoltaic (PV) cells, solar modules and solar power systems with UL, TUV, CE and IEC 61215 approval certificates.http://www.dmsolar.comCategory: Directory/Shopping/Home & Garden
Related searches:
Webotopia provides a business directory designed to promote Freshers Engineering companies, products and services whilst helping it's users find the Freshers Engineering information they need. Webotopia business directory, with the help of it's dedicated support specialists and reviewers, enables delivery of Freshers Engineering quality content, excellent customer support as well as value added services such as content publishing and press releases for it's users.


text:
22 May 2012 15:15
intro - milo-projectby p.fassier & 1 other
Street Art
ROADSWORTHby p.fassier & 1 other
Street Art
1 (3 marks)
Founded in late 2003 and heartquartered in France, we are non-profit and independant.
We believe in the open web, think internet services should be sustainable, build for the long term.
While we are re-launching the service, we only accept new members through invitation.
last mark : 22/05/2012 15:20


text:
Annual Energy Outlook 2018
presents yearly modeled projections
and analysis of energy topics
EIA's Annual Energy Outlook provides modeled projections of domestic energy markets through 2050, and it includes cases with different assumptions regarding macroeconomic growth, world oil prices, technological progress, and energy policies. Strong domestic production coupled with relatively flat energy demand allow the United States to become a net energy exporter over the projection period in most cases. In the Reference case, natural gas consumption grows the most on an absolute basis, and nonhydroelectric renewables grow the most on a percentage basis.
The Annual Energy Outlook provides long-term energy projections for the United States
- Projections in the Annual Energy Outlook 2018 (AEO2018) are not predictions of what will happen, but rather modeled projections of what may happen given certain assumptions and methodologies.
- The AEO is developed using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), an integrated model that captures interactions of economic changes and energy supply, demand, and prices.
- Energy market projections are subject to much uncertainty, as many of the events that shape energy markets and future developments in technologies, demographics, and resources cannot be foreseen with certainty.
- More information about the assumptions used in developing these projections will be available shortly after the release of the AEO.
- The AEO is published pursuant to the Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977, which requires the U.S. Energy Information Administration Administrator to prepare annual reports on trends and projections for energy use and supply.


text:
Friday October 25, 2013
Georgia May Jagger launched British Airways' brand new A380 plane which will fly the Hong Kong to London route, at the Gig on the Wing party.
Supermodel Georgia May said: "I'm so happy British Airways invited me to Hong Kong on their first A380 flight. The service, food and flat beds on the long haul flights are second to none and I always arrive feeling well rested."
To celebrate the new aircraft, the airline held an exclusive event inside Hong Kong International Airport's CASL hanger, which showcased the best of British fashion, music and culture.
The evening begun with a glamourous runway show by acclaimed British designer Alice Temperley. This was followed by a performance from X Factor sensation Leona Lewis who sang her number one selling track "Bleeding Love" amongst her set.


text:
There's no doubting the pinkness of Raspberry Weisse, though my camera seems to have spared the head its blushes: in real life it's very very pink. However, I think it's unlikely that this has ever had a real raspberry near it. Raspberries ferment, and generally leave quite a dry beer, whereas this gives off a powerfully sweet artificial aroma that immediately activated one of my nostalgia sensors: if you weren't raised in Northern Ireland or Scotland around the same time I was this isn't going to mean much to you, but it smells exactly like Creamola Foam, and that carries through on tasting in the powdery effervescent mouthfeel.
My assumption was that they'd just added the raspberry flavour into the house weissbier Friar Weisse, but I'm not 100% sure of that. Friar Weisse (which changes quite a bit from batch to batch) is going through one of its more Bavarian phases at the moment, whereas the base beer of Raspberry Weisse is rather dry with quite a nice wheaty cereal finish. And so tacked-on is the fruit flavouring it's actually possible to ignore it and enjoy the real beer underneath, with only the screamingly pink colour to assault your senses (as well as your dress sense, hairstyle and proficiency on the dancefloor).
I'd go as far as to say it's worth drinking. Though with craft beer fans of a girly persuasion a bit thin on the ground on North Mall, it remains to be seen who actually will.


text: Hi, My ISP gave me a new subnet and I think I changed everything IP and network wise (dns, hosts, web sites, mysql, apache, etc). Everything is working fine but sometimes emails being sent from my server are rejected due to no reverse DNS. I finally got a detailed error report and is shows that the sending address is that of the server, not of the website. In my case I have: My Server - inferno.cocoanet.us One of my customers website mail server is mail.dantesinfernophotography.com The rejection shows the IP of my server, inferno, not of mail..com! Is this configurable in the /etc/postfix files? Thanks, Danté


text:
March 21, 2008
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - No. 10 MIT completed a season-sweep of Mount Ida College as it recorded a 30-18, 30-21, 30-20, victory on Thursday. A balanced attack along with a team hitting percentage of .447 helped lift the Engineers' ledger to 23-10 on the year.
MIT raced out to a 7-0 advantage in the opening game, but the Mustangs battled back and narrowed the gap to two (10-8). The Engineers increased their lead by picking up seven of the next nine points and eventually cruised to the first-game victory. The second stanza was a back-and-forth affair as neither side would have a lead of more than one point. With the score tied at 15, MIT inched out to a three-point edge and then outscored Mount Ida, 12-6, down the stretch.
The final frame was tight early on as the Engineers established an 8-7 advantage. The Cardinal and Gray created some breathing courtesy of six straight hitting miscues by the Mustangs. The hosts were unable to overcome MIT's strong attack which recorded a hitting percentage of .571 (18 kills, two errors, 28 attempts) during the game.
Scott Pollom paced MIT with nine kills and five blocks as Michael Demyttenaere, Garrett Winther, and Troy Tamas each tallied six kills. Demyttenaere added three blocks while Steve Ray totaled four kills, three digs, and one ace in one game. Eric Reuland led the defense with seven digs as Matthew Ng collected six of his own. Ryan Dean posted 12 assists and two aces in one game while Tim Lee finished out the match with 23 assists, two aces, and five digs. Eugene Jang tacked on five digs as Malcolm Bean notched five kills.


text:
Cargo Airline of the Year 2014
The 31st anniversary of Air Cargo News awards evening, Cargo Airline of the Year, will take place at the Lancaster London Hotel on Saturday, 26th April 2014. If you need any further information about this Air Cargo News event, known throughout the airfreight world as the 'Oscars' of the air cargo industry, then please contact Patricia Cooper, General Manager of the Events Division on email@example.com or telephone +44 (0) 208 722 8380.
Voting for the awards will commence on Friday, 7th February and will close on 4th April 2014. In addition to our airline and airport awards – we have:
GSA of the Year
Charter Broker of the Year
Ground Handler of the Year
If you wish to be considered for any of these three then you need to prepare a submission of 300 words maximum explaining why your company should be considered for the award, to be received by Friday, 28th March 2014. When ready please send to Patricia Cooper firstname.lastname@example.com
You can book a table of maximum 12 covers and minimum 8 covers. If you wish to book individual places these are subject to availability. The sooner you book, the better the position of the table. The cost per place is GBP 130.00 plus 20% VAT. The event is being held in the UK therefore VAT is mandatory.


text:
Live Concert Broadcast and Webcast Fridays At Noon
From NPR Music and WXPN, hear a live mix of roots rock, folk, country and more.
Made possible by XPN Members, and Comcast.
Click the Artist name below to RSVP:
Todd Snider
at World Cafe Live
XPN Free at Noon at the World Cafe Live.
A co-production of WXPN and NPR Music.
This Friday at noon, join us as we welcome the southern based singer-songwriter Todd Snider for a free concert at the World Cafe.
Though Todd Snider's roots trace back to Portland, Oregon, his music branches across headstrong southern styles from Austin, Houston and Atlanta. After moving to Memphis in the 1980's, he became a local favorite at The Daily Planet club, where he was discovered by Keith Sykes (Buffet's Coral Reefer Band) and later signed to Margaritaville Records. Upon releasing his debut album "Songs for the Daily Planet" in 1994, Snider's sharp wit and satirical lyricism gained him sizeable recognition for the minor hit "Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues," a punchy alt-rock tune that earned comparisons to Lyle Lovett and Jerry Jeff Walker. By the time he released his third album "Viva Satellite," his blend of bluegrass, blues, folk-rock and country was instantly recognizeable. As he moved towards a more electronic based sound, he was endlessly compared to Tom Petty, demonstrating that somewhere along the lines of his defining style there was something particularly familiar and comforting about his new sound.
And with the over 10 albums under his name, Snider continues to impress his fans with an incredible sense of honesty, enchanting and witty narration, and relentless optimism. Pairing cheerful storytelling with political commentary and a bluesy rock style, his latest album "The Excitement Plan" intends to bring hope in time of struggle. As Snider retrospectively states "I know right now that times are hard for all of us... These 12 songs can be part of your solution. Just give them a chance. Take them in. Use 'em to help you appreciate your girl if you still got one, and/or your job if you still got one."


text:
uTorrent v3.4 build 30428 RC 1
Vista / Win10 / Win7 / Win8 / WinXP
It was designed to use as little CPU resources, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.
Some of the features include: Multiple simultaneous downloads, Smart bandwidth usage, File level priorities, Configurable bandwidth scheduling, Global and per-torrent speed limiting, Quickly resumes interrupted transfers, UPnP support (WinXP and later only), Supports popular protocol extensions, Localized to different languages, typical memory usage is less than 4MB.
Other editions:
HTML code for linking to this page:
p2p utorrent µtorrent bittorrent client fast small
1License and operating system information is based on latest version of the software.
Ei ole kaatunut kertaakaan, jatkaa keskeytyneitä latauksia todella nopeasti, ainoa ongelma minulla ollut muutamia kertoja Suomenkielen kanssa...
Parempaa ette löydä, suosittelen, ladatkaa heti... ;)
Version: 1.6.1 Build 490
Utorrent 1.6 Standard, the last final build, was done before the company was purchased and the new code written. That version should be safe I believe and is still an excellent client.
The fact that Utorrent is now owned and being updated by people that have signed agreements with the RIAA and MPAA and NOT the original programmer, should give anybody pause.
If you wish to use Utorrent, I'd simply say stay with the 1.6 Standard final version and do not use anything after that release.
I for one do not wish to support ANY effort by someone so chummy with the RIAA and MPAA, period. I don't see why anybody would want to, especially with the original author no longer coding the program. He cashed out and he's done. Whatever happens from this point forward is no longer something he's involved in, I believe.
If the RIAA and MPAA can't kill 'em, they buy 'em and reprogram them. Bearshare, Utorrent, what's next? They are letting their money do the fighting for them and have ruined what was a fantastic product. Too bad it wasn't made Open Source so someone could continue on the work in the right way.
The backlash against Utorrent is not FUD. Simply looking at who bought the program and who is now updating the code should be enough to convince anybody that the Utorrent we knew is gone. 1.6 Standard is the last REAL version of Utorrent. Anything after that is suspect.
Keep up the great work.
If the file is an image file u would need programs like Nero or DVD Decrypter or imgburn to put it on a disc.
This is the ultimate small, powerfull BT program
uTorrent has a dangerous security flaw (3 posts)Latest post: 02/22/2018
Forum room: Announcements / News comments
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Forum room: Announcements / News comments
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Forum room: Announcements / News comments
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Forum room: Software, operating systems and more / Windows - Virus and spyware problems
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Forum room: Announcements / News comments
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Forum room: Consoles / Xbox 360 - Everything else
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Forum room: Announcements / News comments
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Forum room: Software, operating systems and more / Windows - P2P software


text:
Well saying as I havn't wrote anything major in here in a while I thought I would do a quick Flash tut - yes I know there is a tut forum but as it is for a web-development product I thought this forum was better suited for this thread
Right the tut is on a pretty old but still quite good effect - anyone who is new to flash might find it usefull but more advanced users will prolly know this already - it creates a sort of light effect which highlights txt as it passes over it - you can see it here
ok here goes -
- First of all create 2 layers name the top one text and the bottom light
- Write the txt in the txt layer u wish the light to pass over - don't worry about its color yet as we will sort that later
- Now in the bottom layer create a new fill box but with no line around the edges - go to the stroke color box and select the lil white rectangle with the red line through it.
- Make the box roughly twice the size of ur txt
- Now go to the fill properties menu and select linear gradient - set the middle color to the color that you want your light to be and the two on either side the same color as your movie background if you want the txt to only appear when the light is over it.
- Press F8 and to bring up the symbols menu - name your fill and check the graphic box and press ok
- Now create a keyframe at frame 10 in both the layers
- In the light layer move the light symbol in frame 10 until the light source is at the far end of the txt
- right click between frame 1 and 10 in the light layer and select inser motion tween - the fill should now move along the txt
- right click on the txt layer and select mask
that should be you
if you didn't understand this just look at the attached .fla
you can use this technique to create some really nice effects in flash - this was only just one simple example of hat u can do


text:
To compute a simple happiness index, the percentage of respondents in each category who self-describe as "not too happy" is subtracted from the percentage who say they are "very happy", with the "pretty happy" middling option ignored. Happiness scores among men by whether they make more, the same, or less than their wives:
|Men earning...
The differences are pretty modest. I suspected the gap between men keeping pace with their wives and those unable to do so would be larger than the one between men who earn more than their wives and those who make the same as their wives do, but that's not the case.
|Women earning...
This result is more surprising. More domineering manjaws and a corresponding increase in the number of manboobs today relative to the past? Some of the putative subjective benefits of female empowerment? A meaningless result based on an arbitrary self-description that might vary from day to day depending on the mood the participant was in when she completed the survey?
It is interesting that for both men and women, income on par with one's spouse is not an obvious positive psychological feature, as the lowest scores for both involve income parity among couples. It seems plausible that this sort of arrangement could cause tension at home, since the presumption on both sides is that since both are contributing equally economically, both should contribute equally on the home front, with any deviation from that arrangement making it seem as though the slacker is shirking his duty. I bring home the bacon, my wife keeps up the house and does the lioness' share of work raising our son. That's the societal ideal.
GSS variables used: EARNSHH(1-3)(4)(5-7), SEX(1)(2), HAPPY


text: Hi, after the upgrade of ispconfig to 184.108.40.206 we saw that the php.ini (with suphp) it pretty different than before. We mean, till 188.8.131.52 the user can add a php.ini in his web directory and overrire the system preference. But now looks that the panel set something like /var/www/conf/<userid>/php.ini. And this is the only php.ini used by the virtualhost. If this is all true, there is a way by the customer side, to modify by itself the php value? Thank you -peace


text:
I felt that learning French would be a daunting task as I had no background with the language, and I didn't understand a single word. Nevertheless, when my Rosetta Stone French Level 1 arrived, I was eager to dive in. A month and a half later, with about 20 minutes of practice three times a week, I've completed Unit 1. By my calculations, this is 5 percent of the way through the entire course (four units per level, five levels in total). Putting my progress in this perspective definitely helps because it tempers my expectations, and I just enjoy learning.
Reading French has proven to be the most difficult part so far, as each word seems to have numerous silent letters. The pronunciation, though challenging, has been my favorite part. The words just seem to roll off my tongue, and I love the sound of the language. Learning from native speakers—having each word sounded out, not just printed in a book—has been crucial to my learning process because I learn each word correctly the first time.
Having completed Unit 1, I gathered up the courage to schedule my first live Studio session. I was a bit nervous at first, but my nerves were quickly replaced with confidence, as I was actually conversing in a language that just one month ago, I hadn't known a word of.
A few days later, I found myself shopping in Zara in midtown Manhattan (which is packed with tourists this time of year), when I overheard a conversation in French. I was excited, even to just identify the language I was hearing. I was even more excited when I realized that I understood the gist of the conversation! Okay, I'll admit, it was a basic set of words I was picking up: "this coat . . . red or black? . . . too large." All were words that I happened to learn in Unit 1. Then I remembered that I'm only 5 percent through the course, and my confidence grew even more as I got ready to continue in my journey.
Find more posts about: French


text:
Contrary to the sluggish blogging action, cyclocross season in full swing in the Pacific Northwest. As is the Weeks 'N' Weeks of insanely nice weather we been experiencing. Cyclocross is supposed to be Wet 'N' Misery on two wheels and I'm sure that will hit eventually. For now, I'll take the perfect fall days instead. No boots required.
This edition of 'cross tomfoolery, stop number two for the MFG series, took place on September 23rd. See, told you the blog action has been sluggish - like me. Only son and Racer Boy Ian battled for glory, while I ran around like an idiot and took a few zillion pics. Narrowed 'em down to a few for yet another blog post.
See for yourself...
Low on the horizon fall sun makes for some cool shadows.
Risking camera and limb, I grab a shot of teammate Garth doing a little barrier dancing. Cool thing about shooting 'cross - you can get stupid close to the action.
Go ahead, admit it - that disk brake is kinda hypnotizing. You're getting very sleepy...
Garth, once again, this time blurring into the barrier section.
Some of Ian's fellow teammate junior racers. Some of these kids at 13 -14 years old are pretty fast and give adult racers a run for their money.
Beach run on the shores of Lake Sammamish included at no extra charge. Ian demonstrates.
More kid racers rockin' it.
Ian barrier sequence. Well, I cheated - pics not from the same lap - but you get the idea. Ian was doing fairly well this race, trying hard for sure, then derailed his chain while exiting the barriers. Wrestled a bit getting the chain back on, losing a glove in the process, and some time.
Finished 12th out of 22 kids in his class. Not bad at all in my book. He was mad about the chain incident, but hey, that's how racing goes sometimes. Still collects series points and I'm proud that he doesn't give up and keeps it rolling.
Ian enjoys post race burger at the team tent. Nice bunch of folks involved with the JL Velo crew. Most 'cross races involve social time with food and support included. Very cool.
Even the Michelin Man raced. And he's pretty damn fast. Who knew?
A few more shots to risk my Nikon and health at the same time. I'm actually not in the way at all, however, if someone stacked into the barriers - all bets are off - and I could become part of the action. But not in a good way...
High speed dismount. I wonder if all teammates gets a free Audi?...
Long pavement start that dumps into the grass. Dead flat, but fun course. My slow ass actually raced it last year.
Brian, nice dude and fast racer. He bought a Triumph Speed Triple I was selling back in 2001. A few years later, I recognized him at a 'cross race. Two wheel interest spills over from moto and pedal power.
Got a little sand kicked in my face for this one.
Teammate Harrison sporting some sun glare. Fast high school kid.
Hey kids, where's the beach? Let the stampede begin.
Teammate Andrew doing a little sand sampling.
Why run when you can roost?
Teammate Luke looking a little too happy.
Run Luke run...
Many colorful characters in 'cross. I dig it. Great scene.
Scientific fact - mutton chops make you faster.
Brandon blurs into the corner.
That's all for now sports fans. Another fun day shooting pics, chatting with like minded folks, watching 'cross, eating burgers, and quality father/son time. All with a spectacular fall day as the backdrop. We'll take it.
More pics and reports to follow. Until next time...


text:
- Name
- Description
- Proper Patch Guidelines
- Last Modified
- Author and Copyright Information
patching.pod - Appropriate format for patches to the perl source tree
Where to get this document
The latest version of this document is available from http://perrin.dimensional.com/perl/perlpatch.html
How to contribute to this document
You may mail corrections, additions, and suggestions to me at firstname.lastname@example.com but the preferred method would be to follow the instructions set forth in this document and submit a patch 8-).
Why this document exists
As an open source project Perl relies on patches and contributions from its users to continue functioning properly and to root out the inevitable bugs. But, some users are unsure as to the right way to prepare a patch and end up submitting seriously malformed patches. This makes it very difficult for the current maintainer to integrate said patches into their distribution. This document sets out usage guidelines for patches in an attempt to make everybody's life easier.
Common problems
The most common problems appear to be patches being mangled by certain mailers (I won't name names, but most of these seem to be originating on boxes running a certain popular commercial operating system). Other problems include patches not rooted in the appropriate place in the directory structure, and patches not produced using standard utilities (such as diff).
Proper Patch Guidelines
What to patch
Generally speaking you should patch the latest development release of perl. The maintainers of the individual branches will see to it that patches are picked up and applied as appropriate.
How to prepare your patch
- Creating your patch
First, back up the original files. This can't be stressed enough, back everything up _first_.
Also, please create patches against a clean distribution of the perl source. This insures that everyone else can apply your patch without clobbering their source tree.
- diff
While individual tastes vary (and are not the point here) patches should be created using either
-carguments to diff. These produce, respectively, unified diffs (where the changed line appears immediately next to the original) and context diffs (where several lines surrounding the changes are included). See the manpage for diff for more details.
Also, the preferred method for patching is -
diff [
-u] <old-file> <new-file>
Note the order of files.
Also, if your patch is to the core (rather than to a module) it is better to create it as a context diff as some machines have broken patch utilities that choke on unified diffs.
GNU diff has many desirable features not provided by most vendor-supplied diffs. Some examples using GNU diff:
# generate a patch for a newly added file % diff -u /dev/null new/file # generate a patch to remove a file (patch > v2.4 will remove it cleanly) % diff -u old/goner /dev/null # get additions, deletions along with everything else, recursively % diff -ruN olddir newdir # ignore whitespace % diff -bu a/file b/file # show function name in every hunk (safer, more informative) % diff -u -F '^[_a-zA-Z0-9]+ *(' old/file new/file
- Directories
Patches should be generated from the source root directory, not from the directory that the patched file resides in. This insures that the maintainer patches the proper file and avoids name collisions (especially common when trying to apply patches to files that appear in both $src_root/ext/* and $src_root/lib/*). It is better to diff the file in $src_root/ext than the file in $src_root/lib.
- Filenames
The most usual convention when submitting patches for a single file is to make your changes to a copy of the file with the same name as the original. Rename the original file in such a way that it is obvious what is being patched ($file~ or $file.old seem to be popular).
If you are submitting patches that affect multiple files then you should backup the entire directory tree (to $source_root.old/ for example). This will allow
diffto create all the patches at once.
-c<old-dir> <new-dir>
What to include in your patch
- Description of problem
The first thing you should include is a description of the problem that the patch corrects. If it is a code patch (rather than a documentation patch) you should also include a small test case that illustrates the bug.
- Direction for application
You should include instructions on how to properly apply your patch. These should include the files affected, any shell scripts or commands that need to be run before or after application of the patch, and the command line necessary for application.
- If you have a code patch
If you are submitting a code patch there are several other things that you need to do.
- Comments, Comments, Comments
Be sure to adequately comment your code. While commenting every line is unnecessary, anything that takes advantage of side effects of operators, that creates changes that will be felt outside of the function being patched, or that others may find confusing should be documented. If you are going to err, it is better to err on the side of adding too many comments than too few.
- Style
Please follow the indentation style and nesting style in use in the block of code that you are patching.
- Testsuite
When submitting a patch you should make every effort to also include an addition to perl's regression tests to properly exercise your patch. Your testsuite additions should generally follow these guidelines (courtesy of Gurusamy Sarathy (email@example.com))-
Know what you're testing. Read the docs, and the source. Tend to fail, not succeed. Interpret results strictly. Use unrelated features (this will flush out bizarre interactions). Use non-standard idioms (otherwise you are not testing TIMTOWTDI). Avoid using hardcoded test numbers whenever possible (the EXPECTED/GOT found in t/op/tie.t is much more maintainable, and gives better failure reports). Give meaningful error messages when a test fails. Avoid using qx// and system() unless you are testing for them. If you do use them, make sure that you cover _all_ perl platforms. Unlink any temporary files you create. Promote unforeseen warnings to errors with $SIG{__WARN__}. Be sure to use the libraries and modules shipped with version being tested, not those that were already installed. Add comments to the code explaining what you are testing for. Make updating the '1..42' string unnecessary. Or make sure that you update it. Test _all_ behaviors of a given operator, library, or function- All optional arguments Return values in various contexts (boolean, scalar, list, lvalue) Use both global and lexical variables Don't forget the exceptional, pathological cases.
- Test your patch
Apply your patch to a clean distribution, compile, and run the regression test suite (you did remember to add one for your patch, didn't you).
An example patch creation
This should work for most patches-
cp MANIFEST MANIFEST.old
emacs MANIFEST
(make changes)
cd ..
diff -c perl5.008_42/MANIFEST.old perl5.008_42/MANIFEST > mypatch
(testing the patch:)
mv perl5.008_42/MANIFEST perl5.008_42/MANIFEST.new
cp perl5.008_42/MANIFEST.old perl5.008_42/MANIFEST
patch -p < mypatch
(should succeed)
diff perl5.008_42/MANIFEST perl5.008_42/MANIFEST.new
(should produce no output)
Submitting your patch
- Mailers
Please, please, please (get the point? 8-) don't use a mailer that word wraps your patch or that MIME encodes it. Both of these leave the patch essentially worthless to the maintainer.
If you have no choice in mailers and no way to get your hands on a better one there is, of course, a perl solution. Just do this-
perl -ne 'print pack("u*",$_)' patch > patch.uue
and post patch.uue with a note saying to unpack it using
perl -ne 'print unpack("u*",$_)' patch.uue > patch
- Subject lines for patches
The subject line on your patch should read
[PATCH]5.xxx_xx (Area) Description
where the x's are replaced by the appropriate version number, area is a short keyword identifying what area of perl you are patching, and description is a very brief summary of the problem (don't forget this is an email header).
[PATCH]5.004_04 (DOC) fix minor typos
[PATCH]5.004_99 (CORE) New warning for foo() when frobbing
[PATCH]5.005_42 (CONFIG) Added support for fribnatz 1.5
- Where to send your patch
If your patch is for the perl core it should be sent firstname.lastname@example.com. If it is a patch to a module that you downloaded from CPAN you should submit your patch to that module's author.
Applying a patch
- General notes on applying patches
The following are some general notes on applying a patch to your perl distribution.
- patch
It is generally easier to apply patches with the
-pargument to patch. This helps reconcile differing paths between the machine the patch was created on and the machine on which it is being applied.
- Cut and paste
_Never_ cut and paste a patch into your editor. This usually clobbers the tabs and confuses patch.
- Hand editing patches
Avoid hand editing patches as this frequently screws up the whitespace in the patch and confuses the patch program.
- patch
Final notes
If you follow these guidelines it will make everybody's life a little easier. You'll have the satisfaction of having contributed to perl, others will have an easy time using your work, and it should be easier for the maintainers to coordinate the occasionally large numbers of patches received.
Also, just because you're not a brilliant coder doesn't mean that you can't contribute. As valuable as code patches are there is always a need for better documentation (especially considering the general level of joy that most programmers feel when forced to sit down and write docs). If all you do is patch the documentation you have still contributed more than the person who sent in an amazing new feature that no one can use because no one understands the code (what I'm getting at is that documentation is both the hardest part to do (because everyone hates doing it) and the most valuable).
Mostly, when contributing patches, imagine that it is you receiving hundreds of patches and that it is your responsibility to integrate them into the source. Obviously you'd want the patches to be as easy to apply as possible. Keep that in mind. 8-)
Last Modified
Last modified 21 January 1999 Daniel Grisinger <email@example.com>
Author and Copyright Information
Copyright (c) 1998 Daniel Grisinger
Adapted from a posting to perl5-porters by Tim Bunce (email@example.com).
I'd like to thank the perl5-porters for their suggestions.


text:
Principal Investigator(s):
The most unique feature of earth is the existence of life, and the most unique feature of this life is its incredible diversity. Indeed, about 10 million species of plants, animal and microbes, all thought to be descended from a single ancestral species, now inhabit the earth. As life on earth diversified, new species tended to coexist with existing species. Ecological theory predicts that this coexistence must mean that there are tradeoffs among species. Such tradeoffs would mean, for example, that a plant species that was a better competitor for water would necessarily be a poorer competitor for a different limiting factor, such as soil nitrogen. My research will test this hypothesis by examining patterns of coexistence or displacement reported from the fossil record for plants, mammals, birds, mollusks and other types of organisms. This research is designed to help us better understand why the world has so many species.
Massive human-driven destruction of native ecosystems is now starting to threaten many species with extinction. The other aspect of my research will explore what may lie ahead during the upcoming 50 years. During that period global population is projected to increase by 50% and the consumption of various goods and services by a typical person is projected to increase by 140%. These two forces are projected to cause global energy and food demand to double within the next 40 to 50 years. Much of the demand for food may be met my clearing remaining lands for agriculture and for production of biofuels. I will compile and analyze a global data set to quantitatively project such impacts on land conversion and on biodiversity for the coming 50 years, and also seek alternative solutions that would meet our demand for food and energy with lower impacts on biodiversity.


text:
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автор The Film Archives дата 27.08.2012
- 102232
- 71
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A first-hand account from Gerald Anderson similarly offered descriptions that seemingly matched dummies: "thought they were plastic dolls," he said. More on Roswell: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&tag=tra0c7-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=dbaaac34266be24f47c702420fa10f5b&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=books&keywords=roswell He also described a "blimp," further suggesting a misidentified military recovery operation. A description of a "jeep-like truck that had a bunch of radios in it" sounds very much like a modified Dodge M-37 utility truck not used until 1953, further suggesting a confusion about dates. In 1997, the Air Force, in response to Congressional inquiries, issued the second of two reports which they asserted accounted for the reports of aliens recovered at Roswell in 1947. The report, entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed had a section which specifically dealt with the Dennis claims. While identifying a possible match to the nurse Dennis had said was a witness (see above), the report additionally linked descriptions of bodies and high security to several known and documented incidents, albeit ones which occurred years after 1947. As evidence that the event Dennis described contained elements from much later real events, the report cited the presence of a black sergeant paired with a white officer, a pairing it described as unlikely as the Army Air Force was racially segregated in 1947, and Dennis' use of the term "airman," a term not employed until 1952. A June 26, 1956 aircraft accident supplied many of the elements of Dennis' account, said the report. On that day, 11 crew members were killed when a propeller blade punctured the plane's fuel tank, creating an inferno. The charred and mangled remains of the crew were taken to Walker Air Force Base (the former Roswell base) and identification specialist George Schwader arrived from Wright-Patterson AFB. He said in an interview that he was frequently mistaken for a pathologist because of his working garb. The corpses had to be moved to a refrigerated part of the base, owing to the overpowering odor of the bodies. Three of the victims were autopsied by Dr. Alfred Blauw, a local physician, and the autopsies were performed at the Ballard Funeral Home, where Dennis was employed. A second incident accounts for the description of the "canoe-like" object Dennis said he saw in the back of a vehicle, and some of the high-handed treatment he received from officers at the base, including from a tall red-headed captain. A May 1959 accident of a low-altitude balloon, part of the Excelsior program, saw the three injured crewmen flown to Walker AFB. The mere fact of the accident caused consternation for the crewmen as the project was controversial and there was a very real prospect that word of the accident might lead to the program's cancellation. The controversy surrounded the wisdom of parachuting attempts from balloons some 100,000 feet in the atmosphere. Accordingly, much secrecy surrounded the project, as can be corroborated by a 1961 book written by a participant, Captain Joseph Kittinger, "The Long Lonely Leap." Kittinger, redheaded and six foot one, likely was the red-headed captain Dennis referred to who Dennis claimed said "You did not see anything. There was no crash here. You don't go into town making any rumors that you saw anything or that there was any crash." The report asserts that Dennis was in fact witnessing the arrival of the three injured crewman and was subsequently warned to be quiet, but so as to preserve the Excelsior program. Kittinger would go on to make those high-altitude leaps, one at 102,800 feet in 1960 still stands as the all-time record. The three-man Excelsior crew had been escorted by ambulances, and descriptions by Dennis closely match what would have been present that day. He reported what he thought was wreckage in the back of one ambulance which "was kinda like the bottom of a canoe... like stainless steel... with a kind-of bluish-purplish tinge to it." This description, the report notes, accurately describes two steel panels painted Air Force blue on a converted ambulance for this mission. Other descriptions such as wreckage all over the floor looking like "broken glass" corresponds to the clear plastic polyethylene balloon recovered from the mission. The heightened state of security Dennis described sounds very much like the extra security which occurred upon the arrival of the Excelsior team. The very presence of the balloon crew, who had arrived unannounced, likely led many base personnel to believe they may have posed a security threat or were a team from Strategic Air Command testing the nuclear-armed facility's alertness. Either way, the base's personnel would have been far more vigilant that day, and this may account for the heavy-handedness reported by Dennis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Dennis


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The Higgs Boson: Steaming Particle of Bull$#!%
Bruno Maddox visited the Large Hadron Collider, and all he got was one lousy God Particle, a whole bunch of Swiss coffee, and infinite questions about the universe
So it's been a month...wait, no, it's been two months, and from the silence roaring suddenly out of Geneva one has to assume that physicists are still—still—trying to figure out if the subatomic particle lately glimpsed by the Large Hadron Collider really is the elusive "Higgs Boson" they've been hunting for half a century. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the ABBA-looking dude who runs the Conseil Européene pour la Recherche Nucléaire, which built and maintains the LHC, was only comfortable saying in his July 4th press-conference that the new particle exhibits "Higgs-like" properties, but more research is needed—years of it, to be specific—before we'll know for certain that this is the submicroscopic speck that's famously not actually known as "The God Particle."
Given that no one so much as threw a shoe at Heuer during his maddening announcement, and that CERN's facilities remain untorched, even unvandalized, two months later, what it is not too soon to say, however, is that physics would appear to have gotten away with it: a decades-long campaign of hype, propaganda, and outright deception that saw a ragtag bunch of social misfits swindle the world out of billions of dollars, monies which as of this writing have not been returned. What follows is the story, if not of an outright hoax, then at least of the most audacious and effective PR campaign in the history of science. Our tale begins in the early 1990s. A young George Bush Sr. is in the White House. The music world has been turned on its head for only the eighty-third time by an angry young man singing songs about being angry and young. In tennis, a young...
Oh, actually, fuck it. Let's go all the way back.
In 1969, appearing before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a physicist named Robert Wilson was asked by one Senator John Pastore how exactly the fancy particle "accelerator" he wanted $250 million to build was going to enhance U.S. national security, it being the height of the Cold War and everything. Pastore's question was a little mean. You're not supposed to ask a physicist what the point of his work is, any more than you're supposed to inform a mime that it really isn't that windy. But Wilson rose to the occasion. Indeed, his reply probably ranks among the Top Five Most Boffo Comebacks in the whole history of congressional testimony, the kind of thing they show on looped rotation at the C-SPANZone in Times Square for tourists to stare at in silence over their nonpartisantinis.
"It has nothing to do directly with defending our country," Wilson admitted, hunching down into his gooseneck microphone the way you do. _"Except to help make it worth defending." _
Shpladow. With those seven perfect words, Wilson not only got his funding but solved a practical conundrum that had bedeviled subatomic physics since the field's inception at the start of the twentieth century: how to extract incredible shitloads of money out of people with no hope of ever understanding why you need it. Prior to Wilson, supplicant physicists had made the mistake of trying to explain themselves. In airless committee rooms, before panels of orange-skinned creationists hard up against their nap times, they had ventured into the mysteries of the wave-particle duality... tried to give some sense of just how exciting it would be to finally see the quarks inside a proton... and came away empty-handed. Others had made a practical pitch for why they needed the money. It was near impossible, they'd argue, to build a cutting-edge particle accelerator without at some point having to develop a new diode, or superconducting transistor, or a new method for threading lots of wires through a single tube, and so, you know... give me half a billion dollars and maybe that'll happen. Robert Wilson's stroke of genius, in that moment, was to say fuck all that. Rather than explaining particle physics or trying to sweep its inexplicability under the rug, Wilson seized all the weirdness, abstraction, and complexity of the field in his hands and balloon-animaled it into a patriotic virtue. This shit is so impractical and hard—ran the core of his argument—its payoffs so far away and uncertain, that there's not another nation on the planet that would dream of spending a dollar on it, let alone the nine blundred quintillion dollars I'm here to ask from you today.
It was an approach that worked brilliantly, right up until it didn't. In 1987, no less orange-skinned a creationist than President Ronald Reagan was persuaded to support something called the Superconducting Super Collider, a $4.4 billion, fifty-four-mile-long behemoth that would have seen physics comfortably into the twenty-first century. Construction duly began outside Waxahachie, Texas, but then in 1993, with the projected budget now swollen to $11 billion and amid reports that the SSC's design team had blown $56,000 on potted "tropical" plants and a further $24,000 on two massive Christmas parties, Congress pulled the plug, leaving fifteen miles of purpose-built accelerator tunnel to crumble and crack in the Texas sun like the rodeo dreams of an area farmhand or the freckle-dusted beauty of the waitress who loves him.
The SSC's scrapping really left a mark, emotionally, on the global physics community. Many had just spent a whole chapter of their working lives either building it or writing papers about what it might find, and now all of that work was for naught. Perhaps worst of all: The SSC's budget ended up going to fund something called the International Space Station, a sexy, crowd-pleasing bimbo of a project with only a fig leaf of scientific purpose. Whereas the SSC had been due to probe reality at its deepest level, tackling such nontrivial questions as "What is stuff made of?" and "Why does anything exist?," the basic mission of the ISS seemed to be to give U.S. taxpayers the thrill of living in science-fictiony Future Times—you know, like with space stations!—as well, presumably, as breaking down every now and again, requiring dramatic televised rescues by stubbled heroes of few words.
It was a kick in the face, was what it was, the scrapping of the SSC, but you don't make it through physics grad school without learning how to learn a lesson. Although what follows is pure speculation, it seems pretty clear that after a period of retrenchment and wound licking, the tight-knit global fraternity of particle physicists got back to its feet, dusted itself off, and either figuratively or actually swore a pact that one way or another, by hook or by crook, this was not going to happen again. Next time they had a shot at building a major-league accelerator—and by criminy, there was going to be a next time—the project would not be left hostage to the whims of politicians. Next time, somehow, the public would be brought on board. Cabdrivers, barbers, waitresses, people's mothers... literally everyone would be made to appreciate that the Great Machine under construction was every bit as glamorous and future-y as some chintzy two-toilet space station, and that riding on its success or failure were epic stakes rivaling those of the most summery and blockbusting of Hollywood summer blockbusters.
Oh, and they would be made to appreciate these things—and here was the great game-changing innovation—even it if none of them were true.
There's nothing wrong with the coffee machines at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. They don't look like much from the outside—well, they look like ordinary low-rent coffee-vending machines—but should you happen to sidle up to one of them and fumble into it any of the tiny lightweight foreign coins, a soft deposit of which has now accumulated along the seam of your right rear trouser pocket, then magical things will start to happen. Not immediately. Nothing at all will happen immediately. But then, just as you're starting to wonder if perhaps the machine would like another coin, there comes this noise... a great churning, aspirated sort of noise like something ancient clearing its throat... and from somewhere deep in its innards the machine will hawk up into its vending chamber a little brown plastic cup containing not only (a) a stout plastic swizzle stick, already in there magically somehow, but also (b) a hot portion of the oiliest, most flavorsome, and frankly strongest liquid rocket fuel you've ever tasted. Three or four of them little coffees, I was able to ascertain on a press trip to the Large Hadron Collier, and for a period of up to twenty minutes things are fine. The tedium lifts. The clouds of ennui part. The dingy corridors of CERN seem to glitter and seethe with all the whizzing subatomic doodads that all the people in all the offices are always talking about... . But then it wears off and things aren't fine again. Things aren't fine again at all.
See, like everyone else who reads the newspaper and watches the television, I had formed the impression over the preceding decade that there was something exciting happening there in the ground beneath the Swiss-French border. A giant machine was under construction, I had been led to believe—indeed, the largest, most complex, and most powerful machine that mankind would ever have built. Once the machine was finished and switched on, according to media reports, it would consume as much electricity as the entire neighboring metropolis of Geneva and use it to slam "protons" together with sufficient force to manufacture black holes, cause explosions hotter than core of the sun, and re-create the Big Bang so that this time scientists could watch and take notes. The risks of the projects were negligible, they assured us. Negligible but extremely cool. Among the various things that almost certainly wouldn't happen were the planet being eaten by a black hole, time itself starting to run backwards, the whole universe being canceled out by the sudden hernia-like intrusion of some kind of anti-universe... It was all very thrilling. These were the kinds of apocalyptic fates that previously only the lantern-jawed heroes of comic-book-based films had been able to save the world from, narrowly. Now here they were about to not quite happen in real life!
Oh, and it got better. The stated purpose of building this giant Doomsday Machine in the ground outside Geneva was to hunt an elusive and unimaginably tiny particle called "the Higgs." As with the Holy Grail or the Loch Ness Monster, people had been searching for the Higgs for a very long time, apparently, and as with the Ark of the Covenant, it was thought to contain the Answers to Everything. Finding the Higgs, they told us, would answer the question of why there is mass in the universe, why anything and everything has substance and exists, hence its controversial nickname, "the God Particle." The actual physics of it was laughably beyond the reach of anyone first learning about the Higgs in a newspaper or from the TV, but it didn't matter. Just as you don't need to know what's glowing inside Ving Rhames's briefcase to enjoy Pulp Fiction, you didn't need to know what the Higgs boson actually was to become invested in humanity's efforts to find it.
This reporter didn't, anyway. I'm a sucker for epic quests of any description, and as a consequence it was in a state of both childlike and childish excitement that I arrived to take the LHC's measure for myself.
The excitement didn't last very long. CERN's sprawling campus outside Geneva looks and smells like it hasn't been painted or even mopped since about 1979 and is generally not a very glamorous place. Physicists dress like shit, for one thing, as if they've galloped straight through a Walmart on a mighty steed, haphazardly spearing T-shirts and sweatpants from the racks with a heavy lance and spend their days performing dull, repetitive tasks that would chap the ass of a Foxconn worker to the bone. Entering any of the dozen or so control rooms dotting the LHC's vast, drab circumference, one can almost literally hear the layers of stratified boredom crunching beneath one's feet, and smell the stale yawns of 10,000 graveyard shifts, like a whiff of gangrene and gunpowder on an old Civil War battlefield.
And fair enough, I remember thinking, after one long morning in a control room watching the Large Hadron Collider slowly ramp itself up to collision velocity... then slowly ramp itself down again just to prove that it could. The wholesale absence of cheap thrills in physics only went to show that something important must be going on here. These were the smartest people in the world, after all. Each of them could, if he or she chose, be padding around a penthouse duplex in footie pajamas, running a hedge-fund empire from their iPhone while using the other hand to experiment with reverse-spherified squid-ink raviolini. But they weren't. Each of them was here instead, in the unlovely suburbs of Geneva, riding to work in a shitty Citroën1 and an "Abibas" T-shirt to spend the 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift staring at a screen and remaining mindful of the Post-it note's instruction to "Call Gary at home if there's a problem." Much as some subatomic particles are never glimpsed directly, but have their existence deduced from the spray of lesser particles into which they decay, so the importance and urgency of the LHC's mission, I decided, could be inferred from these depressingly low ceilings and that guy over there's "Planet Mollywood" sweatshirt.
I still think that's true, for the record. Witnessing the sheer drudgery of modern physics up close gave me a new respect for the field and the people who toil in it, and it's a respect that has endured.
It turns out not to be actually all that large, for one thing, the Large Hadron2 Collider. The circular tunnel that houses it does measure some seventeen miles in circumference, yes, and should you choose to walk from one side to the other, as I did, you should allow at least two hours for the journey. But it's not as if for all that time you're stepping over cogs and machete'ing your way through bushels of wiring. No, you're just walking through the outskirts of Geneva.
But... but you're being a dick, I hear you say. I've seen cross sections of the Large Hadron Collider, and it's both huge and very cool. It's like a... giant metal donut... the size of an apartment building... with all sorts of crazy... stuff all over it.
Yeah. No, it isn't. I know the photos you're talking about. For a good few years there, pretty much every magazine article about the LHC came illustrated with the same gorgeous splash-page photo of a humongous metal donut dripping with supercooled pipes and arrays of colored magnets, a few tiny human figures in white dust-suits taking readings from dials, and generally looking like the fucking Death Star at Christmas. Those donut-shaped contraptions do exist. I've seen them with my own eyes, but they are not the Large Hadron Collider. Those things are the particle detectors, a.k.a. "the experiments," and while they are indeed on the huge side (though this is simply so they can track the path of flying particles over a greater distance, not because they're applying or containing any of the terrifying cosmic forces you may have heard about), there are only four of them, taking up approximately zero percent of the Collider's vast circumference. For the remaining roughly 100 percent of those seventeen miles, the Large Hadron Collider is just a pipe, a boring-looking pipe, maybe two feet across, lying in a boring-looking tunnel. Ceci est une pipe, René Magritte would probably have remarked, hiding a yawn behind his fist, had you somehow convinced him to take a break from his exciting life making dorm-room art to come take a look at some science thing in a tunnel.
1._ Oh sweet Krishna the fucking cars these people drive. At one point just before dawn, during a break waiting for something dull to happen, I blundered my way outside...only to be startled awake by the blinding shittiness of the vehicles parked there. Even adjusting for this being Europe, it was a woeful scene. Row upon row of frail, rusting hulks formerly held together with thick lead paint in the depression pastels of Alpine lobotomy clinics, now duct-taped and bungee-corded to within spitting distance—most of it incoming, I rather fear—of being roadworthy. I'm no sheltered little violet, reader. I've been around the block and seen things. I am aware, for instance, that sometimes when a man is down on his luck, he will substitute a bent coat hanger for his broken radio antenna while he sources a low after-market spare. Not before the CERN parking lot, though, had I seen a bent coat-hanger filling in for a steering-wheel—though I could have been mistaken; the Saran Wrap of the windshield was doing strange things with the light._
2._ I've had it confirmed to me by Nobel laureates that even at the very highest levels of physics the only way anyone ever types the word "hadron" is with the ten-keystroke sequence: H; A; R; D; Backspace; Backspace; D; R; O; N. It seems that's just how we're wired, we people._
Now, do not mistake me. That tunnel itself really is quite something, and charges of dickitude might fairly be leveled if one didn't doff one's cap even slightly to the men who dug it. Five years it took them, which isn't bad at all when you factor in that the thing had to be seventeen miles long, buried 300 feet underground, and pass, in a millimetrically perfect circle, beneath the city of Geneva with all its plumbing and shit. Impressive stuff, no question about it, and one might even be tempted to argue that on the strength of its containing tunnel alone, the LHC deserves its frequent mentions as the glittering pinnacle to date of man's prowess in the art of making stuff... .
But that temptation is to be resisted, because it turns out they didn't dig the tunnel for the Large Hadron Collider. Mere hours after my arrival in Geneva, slurping my first of them little coffees from the machine while exploring the underlit CERN visitors center, I gleaned from a backlit Perspex info poster that the LHC's famous tunnel was excavated back between 1983 and 1988 to house a different particle accelerator, an identically huge machine known as the "Large Electron-Positron collider," a.k.a. the LEP.
What happened to the LEP? Why didn't it get built? That was my question, too, and the answer, I was shocked to learn, is that nothing happened to it. It did get built. Not only did it get built, but the goddamn thing fucking ran, perfectly happily, doing almost exactly what the LHC is doing now, for eleven productive years, from 1989 to 2000. If people like you and me and have never heard of the LEP, that's only because it was designed and built before the traumatic axing of the SSC and before physics, in a panic, decided to start selling particle-hunting to the general public like it was a goddamn monster-truck event.
As for the vaunted power of the LHC, that too turned out to be mainly hype. Yes, pound for pound the energy released by the collision of two protons can rival the intensity of the Big Bang or be hotter than the core of the sun, but that's because it's all squeezed down to a tiny point. What that energy also turns out to be equal to, however, in absolute terms, is the energy released by the head-on collision of a few mosquitoes flying into each other, nonfatally, at normal mosquito flying speed. "Wow," I said to the tour guide who told me this, and yeah, I think I probably did look a bit disappointed. "That's not very much."
"Yes, it is," she said, nodding at me in an encouraging way. "It really is."
Here's the thing, though: It actually isn't. It really isn't very much energy at all. And in regard to the dodgy proposition that the LHC running at full steam consumes as much electricity as the entire city of Geneva, which was almost certainly media hype rather than actual science to begin with, I would urge you first to spend a Friday evening in that desolate metropolis, feeling your way about its darkened streets in search of warm food and entertainment, before you decide how impressed you're going to be by that.
Which brings me, finally, to the fucking Higgs boson. Where to begin with this fucking thing.
It came as news to me, for starters, I have to say, there on the ground in Geneva, that the act of finding the Higgs, if it did occur, would be quite as drawn-out and tedious as it turned out to be. Early on in my visit, I happened to ask a CERN person what the odds were of them finding the Higgs, you know, while I was there, and after laughing literally in my face, the guy informed me that it didn't work like that. If they ever even did find the Higgs, he told me, there would be no exciting Moment of Discovery. No ponytailed hottie on the graveyard shift was going to glance at her screen mid-yawn and drop her Red Bull in recognition. No craggy Michael Caine-ish administrator would answer the phone at 4 a.m., then grapple for his spectacles and sit bolt upright as Susan Sarandon, here in the role of his wife, croaked, "Darling, what is it?" in her frilly camisole. No, if the Higgs were ever found, the man told me, it was going to happen with pulse-retarding slowness as data points steadily accrued upon a graph and a committee inched its way around to holding the kind of low-key gingerly press conference we saw last month. If in fact a film were ever made about the Finding of the Higgs, the man concluded—and I'm paraphrasing here—Michael Bay would not necessarily be one's first choice of director, despite all the explosions and mega-engineering involved. Indeed, that honor might fall more naturally into the lap of Michael motherfucking Leigh.
Dispirited by this news, I retreated to my hotel room with a bottle of bubble bath, one of Chivas Regal, and a sack of physics textbooks to try and get my head a little further around it. What I learned there would underwhelm me, underwhelm me to my very core, though explaining why is going to require some actual physics.
There is a common misconception that supercolliders like the LHC find particles by smashing things apart, the same way you might hurl a friend's watch at the wall to see what's inside it. This did use to be the case back in the early days, when we were still trying to see what, if anything, was inside an atom, but we are way beyond that now. A modern accelerator like the LHC makes particles out of thin air, which it can do because air—or even empty space—isn't as thin as it appears. See, the universe turns out to be filled with a number of invisible "fields," like vast three-dimensional bedsheets stretching from one end of space to the other, and just as you can make a wrinkle in a bedsheet by flicking it with your fingernail, you can make a field temporarily thicken into a particle by hitting it with a very intense explosion. Why would you bother doing that? For two reasons: one, to prove that the field exists; two, to find out what the field is like. Just as the depth and shake of the wrinkle you make by flicking a bedsheet can tell you whether the sheet is made of rubber, satin, or even sateen, so the shape and the size of a subatomic particle can tell you a lot about the field of which it is sort of a part.
Since about 1940 or so, this is what physicists have been doing, essentially: building ever larger mechanical fingers with which to flick harder and harder at the great tangle of invisible sheets that surrounds us, and since about 1960 or so a consensus has gradually formed as to how many different sheets there are, how they're wrapped, and what they're made of, etc. That theory is called "the Standard Model," and one part of it was supplied in 1964 by a guy called Peter Higgs. Prior to '64, it had been observed, as it were, that while several of the tangled bedsheets making up our reality behaved in some respects like a very thin lightweight fabric—gossamer, say—the wrinkles produced in them by our flicking were much shallower than they should have been, as if the sheets were actually made of something heavier. Higgs's suggestion—again, as it were—was that lying just beyond the sheets, there might be a blanket, causing the sheets not to dent so deeply when we flicked them. Oh yeah, said people in the physics community. That might be it, and a new era of even harder flicking began, in hopes of putting a dent in the blanket itself, thus proving it existed and that the Standard Model's theory of what the other sheets were made of and how they were tangled was correct.
Flash forward to 2009, however, and we find Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, playing a hot lady physicist in Ron Howard's appalling Angels Demons, trying to explain the Higgs to Tom Hanks and a roomful of skeptical Vatican officials. She and her colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider are "studying the origins of the universe, to try to isolate what some people call 'the God Particle.' "
"Gott... Particle?" sneers Stellan Skarsgård, visibly shaken at finding himself in a film even worse than Mamma Mia!
"What we call it isn't important," says Zurer with a dismissive swish of her hot hair. "It's what gives all matter mass. The thing without which we could not exist."
Films are generally pretty slapdash when it comes to science, but not in this case. Zurer's little speech could have lifted almost verbatim from the science pages of any reputable newspaper over the last decade or so, or from the Associated Press, which as recently as last month hailed the Higgs as "the key to understanding why matter has mass."
And the thing is this: It just isn't true. If I read those physics textbooks correctly, the Higgs field doesn't give every fundamental particle its mass, just some of them. Indeed, from the moment Peter Higgs first proposed the field in 1964, to the nonmoment they almost-confirmed its existence over the past year, it has never been thought to account for more than 1 percent of all the mass in the universe. That's right. One percent, which any mathematician can tell you is just not very much. Yes, it may be thought of as a blanket mid up in the tangle of sheets that surrounds us, but it's only mid up with some of the sheets. It isn't some ultimate Counterpane of Reality, as we'd rather been led to believe. Is it "the thing without which we could not exist"? No, it is a thing without which we could not exist, and down at the subatomic level there's literally a buttload of them.
No, the Higgs only became as famous as it did because physicists couldn't fucking find it. For half a century they were stymied by its nondiscovery, like a man attempting a crossword puzzle who, after some brisk early progress, finds himself hung up on a nine-letter word for a piece of cutlery beginning with F. The man becomes obsessed. The clue becomes his white whale. He racks his brain, ignores his wife, and in the evenings, drinking, tells sympathetic barmen that the fate of the entire puzzle hangs on his being able solve this one clue... which is sort of true, kinda... . But then, one day, he does solve it—fishknife—and readdressing the puzzle after a celebratory trip to the bathroom, he finds that fishknife has shed its mantle of grandeur and now it's the unsolved 80 percent of the puzzle that commands his attention, most urgently the five-letter word for a "tribal drum" descending from the central K of fishknife....
As for the term "God Particle," Ayelet Zurer's conflicted discomfort in Angels Demons was also very true to life. Some twenty minutes into the lo-fi churning of Prince's Black Album, a voice can be heard to mutter the words For someone who can't stand them TV dinners, you sure eat enough of them motherfuckers, and for some twenty years after the term's 1993 first appearance, as the title of a pop physics book by one Leon Ledermann, an eerily similar dynamic obtained between physicists and the term "the God Particle." In interviews and press conferences, they were adamant and unanimous that they hated the term... yet somehow they never missed a chance to bring it up, if only to state again for the record, just one more time, how much they hated it.
Which would have made a fiendish kind of sense, when you think about it, given the other efforts under way to amp up the sexiness of the quest for the Higgs by any means necessary. Scientists know what we think of them at this point, and they're smart enough, being scientists, to have figured out how to exploit that reputation for their own ends. They know as well as we do that when a scientist in a movie takes offense at someone's use of the term "time machine" and starts peeveishly adjusting his spectacles and explaining that it's not a time machine per se but actually blahbitty blahbitty quantum space dimensions blah, it means that not only has he invented a time machine, but it's a fucking good one. So it was with the so-called "so-called 'God Particle.' " The more we were told how loathed, how reviled, how detested the term was in the Corridors of Science, the more excited we shitheads in the lay community became. None of which is to suggest that physicists did like the term, I should stress. I think it's probably true, as Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample puts it in his book on the Higgs, that the particle's "grandiose" nickname is "one of the most, if not the most, derided in the history of physics, " and that "few things unite physicists more than their disdain for the name." All I'm suggesting is that maybe the term's value as a marketing tool did not go unnoticed by those in the know, and that maybe something of a double game was being played with it. I'm sorry, what's that? You want the title of Mr. Sample's book so you can check that I've rendered the preceding quotations accurately and not taken them out of context? Not a problemo. Published by Virgin Books at 320 pages, with an ISBN reference number of 0753522128, that would of course be Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle.3
Anyway, it's all behind us now, by which I mean it's all, or almost all of it, still in front of us. The Higgs may have been, as we were endlessly told, the "final piece" of the Standard Model's puzzle, but what we were told somewhat less endlessly was that the Standard Model itself is really just one small, early piece of a bigger puzzle of huge but still unknown dimensions. The most deflating moment of my generally grim trip to Geneva was listening to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the ABBA-looking dude who made the Higgs announcement last month, coolly discussing CERN'S plans for the next generation of gigantic particle accelerators. As Heuer spoke, I felt a tiny frown appear on my forehead, and glancing around the CERN media center, I observed the same tiny frown appearing on the foreheads of the other less-well-informed members of the global media. I'm guessing that they, like me, had thought that, you know, this was it: that once the world's largest machine had found the last undiscovered particle, we'd be getting out of the game, as it were, vis-à-vis particles. Sure, there would be other mysteries to solve, other voyages of understanding upon which humanity would boldly embark... but surely we didn't know what those were yet. Could it really be possible that in ten, twenty, and a hundred years we'd still be accelerating particles around circular tracks and smashing them together in search of yet more particles?
Yes, it seems. That's exactly what we're going to do. Now that the Higgs has been found, the next order of business is to study its properties and then, based on our findings, begin the search for what's always described as an exciting "new family" of particles, those predicted by the theory of "supersymmetry." Something like that anyway. Something involving finding more particles, and then even more particles after that.
The big question, of course, is whether we the public are going to feel like paying for it. We're not as rich as we used to be, and it's by no means clear we have the emotional energy left to work ourselves into a lather again over another supposedly crucial particle, let alone a whole family of them. We could have sworn we just spent many billions of dollars building a Doomsday Machine so scientists could find the God Particle. Unless they can also discover a whole new family of superlatives to dazzle us with, some time is probably going to have to pass before we open our wallet that wide again.
Then again, maybe not as much time as all that. The world has changed quite a lot, frankly, since 1969, when Robert Wilson shattered the backboard up on Capitol Hill. The world has changed quite a lot even since the early 1990s, when the mighty avalanche of hype and bullshit about the Large Hadron Collider first started to rumble. The world is faster now than it used to be, as well as weirder and more confusing, and while, yes, I know you can find that precise sentiment expressed on cave walls in the Great Rift Valley and slabs of cuneiform in the British Museum, as well as in every single novel written by a sensitive man between 1914 and the present day, it happens to be true, now, in a way that it didn't used to be. The once unpicturable abstractions of quantum physics, things entangling over distance, blinking in and out of existence for no apparent or even actual reason... they don't seem so abstract anymore. The news that we ourselves exist briefly in a boundaryless soup of invisible entities, ourselves gigantic specks of nothingness, flickering and excruciated between sickening infinities of scale... it no longer feels so much like news. Reality is a seething mess, we've come to appreciate, if not quite yet to accept, and what was formerly the banality of being alive, of drawing breath, of our effortless navigation from one moment to the next, has lately come to feel every bit as weird and wondrous and dizzying as physicists and the makers of trippy short animated films always insisted it was.
Indeed, if I can revive and extend an earlier analogy, I would submit that our general confusion has now deepened to the point that we really do feel, all of us collectively, like a man coming to after a blackout to find his head wrapped up in a welter of strange bedsheets. And if the physicists mean what they say? That with just a few more giant fingers built, just a few centuries more of diligent flicking, we might find out once and for all what's up with those sheets? What they're made of, what kind of thread count we're talking about, in what precise configuration they are tangled about us? Well, all of a sudden that project doesn't sound so much like a waste of money. Because as anyone who's ever woken up in that particular situation can tell you, it is only after one has solved the Mystery of the Sheets that one can properly address the bigger questions. Whose house is this. What happened last night. And how the fuck are we supposed to get home.
3._ As I fact-check this fine paragraph, I see that the 2nd edition of Mr. Sample's book has a new subtitle, "The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science," not to mention a new publisher, Basic Books. This could mean anything. One thing it could certainly mean is that Sample wasn't necessarily in love with the original subtitle, himself personally, perhaps even that it was thrust upon him in a long, fractious conference-call with Virgin Books, the kind of thing that begins with the tinny pop snap of bubblegum over a speakerphone and the words "Ian, baby, look I'm here with Jill from marketing ("Hi Ian!") and look here's the thing..." If so, that only proves my point. I could expand on that a bit, but this is already my third longish footnote, and if you think I'm ending up like poor David Foster Wallace, you can go fuck yourself. _


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EU Court Disagrees With Pretty Much Every Other Court; Says Ebay May Be Liable For Third Party Trademark Infringement
from the not-this-again dept
In the US, the war has been waged by Tiffany, which resulted in a big fat loss at the appeal court level and no interest from the Supreme Court in hearing an appeal. The courts correctly and smartly pointed out that general knowledge that people infringe via the site is not enough to say that the site should have to police the products -- especially since it had no clue how to tell what was really infringing and what was legit. Furthermore, Ebay bends over backwards to take down counterfeit products when it becomes aware of them, and also has a whole program to make it easier for trademark holders to alert the company of counterfeit goods.
In Europe, the battle has been waged by L'Oreal. And, even though European governments and courts seem to have a more welcoming view towards third party liability than US courts, for the most part, L'Oreal has lost many, many times in Europe (it's filed similar lawsuits in a whole bunch of countries). However, it appears to have finally found a slightly sympathetic court.... and tragically, it's the European Court of Justice (the top European Court), which has ruled that Ebay can be liable in certain cases, if it's determined (a) that the goods for sale target the EU market, if the company is considered to have played "an active role" and if it "has enough information" to determine that the use is infringing. Now this isn't quite as bad as some of the press have made it out to be, as the Court still says there are protections... but it does outline key exceptions to those protections, and the key question is on which side of the line Ebay falls.
Ebay claims that it's in compliance and thus not guilty of such infringement, but I'm sure L'Oreal will be pushing the case back in the specific court (this is the UK case). Still, just opening the door like this to a rather subjective standard of "active role" and having "enough information" to know that something is infringing, seems wide open to abuse... and could lead to Ebay making its service a lot less useful, just because some luxury brand giants hate competing.


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Sunday, April 12, 2009
Birth of a calf
[Pic: Poppy and Uncle Al check the cow and the new calf]
I had a call from our daughter Bec on Friday morning. A cow who had begun labour had bulging membranes, but nothing had happened for a while. Was it alright? Should anything be done?
My response was that I thought it was best to leave the cow to give birth in her own time. And keep the puppy away. I thought that if there was a problem something could be done later in the day, as we were heading to the farm to visit them for lunch. Noel, my husband, did his Veterinary post graduate studies with dairy cattle when I was busy bearing and nurturing our own babies.
An hour or so later, as we headed up the Calder Hwy, we received the news that a calf had been born and all was well. At the farm we saw the cow and calf, separate from the rest of the herd, and unstressed. Membranes still hung from the cow's vagina. Later we noticed that the afterbirth had been passed. All part of the normal daily occurrences on a farm. My son in law Al says his cows are not too posh to push.
Normal birth of a human baby at home is not very different from normal birth of a calf in the paddock. The oversight that a midwife provides includes keeping the space free of disturbance so that the mother is able to progress in her own time. The midwife does not try to hurry things up, or manage the birth, and would only consider interference if the natural process had in some way become unsafe.
When the labour starts the cow withdraws from the herd, and finds a safe place, such as near a big tree, or rocks. She is patient.
The labouring woman also needs to withdraw. She needs unstimulating space around her, and her own home is often the ideal place. If her children are there, she needs to know that they are being cared for well so that she can move away from them. She will not labour well until she can do this.
A cow does not need to be taught how to give birth. It happens, under instinctive hormonally mediated processes. The human mind also has strong instinct and our bodies secrete powerful hormones, but we often suppress our instinctive thinking, and take over, or interrupt, with 'higher' brain activity - the activity of the neocortex. Anything that is specifically human is neocortical activity. Artificial lighting; managing progress; calculation of times and measurements. How many women think their main job in labour is to record the frequency and length of contractions? How many women become overwhelmed by labour, as they try to intellectually integrate the information give to them by their doctor or midwife? What does 5 cm dilated really mean?
The preparation and learning that a human mother needs to do, and that a cow does not need to do, is to learn how to accept her body's work and not to interrupt it. The secret to this, in most instances, is to withdraw - emotionally and physically - from anything else that might stimulate intellectual (neocortical) thinking or in other ways cause stress.
3 comments:
- Stitch Sista said...
So true so true. With my third's birth last year at home I was labouring all day but it was going absolutely nowhere until my older two were fast asleep. As soon as that happened everything kicked into gear and bubs was born a couple of hours later.
This aspect of our body's innate knowing when it's safe/ok etc to labour/birth just doesn't mesh with the hospital environment to me. I'm actually amazed that women can find their groove to the point where they can have a natural birth at hospital. I know several who have - so I don't dispute it is possible, but I don't think I'd be able to manage it myself. Infact it's what caused me myriad problems with my first stalled labour I'm sure.
- 10:55 pm
- Rachael said...
so true Joy. A evolutionary process over millions of years just doesn't create women to be 'bad' at giving birth, just a society that is 'bad' to women where the environment just does not facilitate the process, and yes many of the staff!
- 8:23 pm
- Joy Johnston said...
That's an interesting thought Rachel, that an "evolutionary process over millions of years just doesn't create women to be 'bad' at giving birth".
I would like to suggest that since modern medical miracles of asepsis, antibiotics, and surgery have been available, the human race has been doing its best to counter the Darwinian theories of survival of the fittest, in protecting those who under 'natural' conditions would not have survived the reproductive process.
I don't know what human reproduction looked like millions of years ago, but throughout recorded history there have been accounts and evidence of both the good (impressive population growth) and the bad (maternal and perinatal mortality and morbidity).
Our bodies are created wonderfully, and some of the aspects of that amazing creature are our ability to produce our children, and the newborn's ability to transition from the womb to the outside world. Yet our bodies and the world we live in are imperfect, and there are times when the risks of medical management are outweighed by the potential benefit.
- 9:36 am