1. Kareena Kapoor is missing her shopping sprees with Saif Ali Khan, shares throwback pic from Morocco  Hindustan Times
2. A Glimpse Of Kareena Kapoor's "Saturday Mood" With Saif Ali Khan  The Newsopedia
3. Bollywood actors share their secret workout moves amid lockdown  NEWS9 live
4. Sara Ali Khan says brother Ibrahim is ‘definitely interested’ in joining Bollywood: ‘It’s a dream right...  Hindustan Times
5. Sara Ali Khan on Ibrahim Ali Khan’s acting aspirations: It’s a dream right now, making it a reality is on him  PINKVILLA
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Shah slams Bengal govt for 'not allowing' migrant trains; Centre lying, says TMC  Times of India
2. Not Allowing Migrants' Trains "Injustice": Amit Shah To Mamata Banerjee  NDTV
3. TMC releases 'proof' after Centre alleges blockade of migrant transport in West Bengal  TIMES NOW
4. News updates from Hindustan Times: Have 7-stage plan to bring back migrants, says TMC on Amit Shah’s...  Hindustan Times
5. Bengal Says 8 Trains to Bring Back Migrant Workers Scheduled as Amit Shah Writes to Mamata on 'Injustice'  News18
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Not anticipating worst situation in India: Harsh Vardhan on Covid-19 pandemic  Hindustan Times
2. Health ministry says learn to live with coronavirus as India's COVID-19 count crosses 56,000  India Gone Viral
3. Government Tweaks Rules For Testing As COVID-19 Cases Rise. Details Here  NDTV
4. 80 per cent of Telangana will be rid of coronavirus soon: Eatala  The New Indian Express
5. ‘We must learn to live with the coronavirus,’ says health ministry  Scroll.in
6. View Full coverage on Google News

The transcript of Three Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Languages, a talk given by Peter Alvaro somewhere or other, is up at Info Q.

Peter Alavaro's main research interest is in taming distributed systems. He starts his talk with the provocative thesis, "In the future, all radical new languages will be domain-specific languages." He talks of the evolution of his ideas about dealing with distributed systems:

1. Little interest by designers of programming-language designers in filling huge difficulty of debugging in context of distributed systems;
2. PLs often make handling of data somewhat implicit, even with functional programming, which he says is dangerous in distributed programming;
3. To talk about the flow of data properly, we need to talk about time;
4. Two things that influenced him as a grad student: Jeff Ullman's claim that encapsulation and declarativity are in tension, and Fagin's theorem (the existential fragment of second-order logic characterises NP);
5. Idea that distributed systems can be considered as protocols specified a bit like SQL or Datalog queries;
6. Triviality with query languages of characterising the idea of place in distributive systems: they are just another relation parameter;
7. Describing evolution of a system in time can be done with two other things: counters and negation, leading to Bertram Ludäscher's language Statelog. But this way of doing things leads to the kind of low-level overexpressive modelling he was trying to avoid;
8. "What is it about...protocols that they seem to require negation to express?” Turns out that if you drop negation, you characterise the protocols that deliver messages deterministically.

He summarises by saying the only good reason to design a programming language (I assume he means a radically novel language) is to shape your understanding of the problem. No regrets of being the only user of his first language, Datalist, because the point is that it shaped all his later thought in his research.

1. Werkloosheid VS op hoogste peil sinds Tweede Wereldoorlog  De Tijd
2. Meer dan 20 miljoen Amerikaanse jobs verloren in april, werkloosheid schiet omhoog naar hoogste niveau in ruim 80 jaar  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. 'Cijfers uit de Grote Depressie'  De Standaard
4. Werkloosheid VS op hoogste niveau sinds Grote Depressie van jaren dertig  NU.nl
5. Werkloosheid VS naar hoogste niveau sinds de Grote Depressie  RTL Z
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Minister Muylle wil tijdelijke werkloosheid verlengen tot 1 ...  Het NieuwsbladHele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Ariel Martin’s “The iMom” explores the future of A.I. and asks who is to blame when technology turns on us.

A psychopathic hairstylist collects scalps and wears them — in an attempt to escape herself.

Very few people in the science fiction community ever came face to face with Alice Sheldon, who wrote SF under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr, much less met her tarantulas. One of those very few was Gardner Dozois. When he sold his papers to UC Riverside (the proceeds went to keeping his wife, Susan Casper, alive for several years longer than would otherwise have happened), bookman Henry Wessells became aware of the correspondence between Sheldon and Dozois.

Now, Henry has created a chapbook, She Saved Us from World War Three, containing the two most significant letters from that correspondence. The first is from Sheldon, telling Gardner that the secret of her identity was about to go public and that she was not a man but a woman. The second is her relieved response to Gardner's assurance that they were still friends.

Which understates how Gardner felt about Sheldon/Tiptree. He was in awe of her as a writer and remained so after the murder-suicide that ended her life.

To go with the letters and give them some context, I interviewed Gardner about his friendship with Alice Sheldon and this introduction now forms the bulk of the chapbook.

Today is the publication date for She Saved Us from World War Three and it is currently available for sale. It costs $20, which is not cheap for twenty pages of prose but is cheap for a beautifully made limited edition chapbook with fold-out facsimiles of the letters themselves.

Those of you who need it know who you are. Me, I already have my copy. I'm going to dig up the oversized paperclip which Sheldon gave to Gardner  as a souvenir of their meeting and Gardner gave to me because souvenirs meant nothing to him and keep the two of them together. This is a very meaningful publication for me.

You can find ordering information here.


Above: The chapbook's cover. Photo by John DeChancie and used with his permission. John is a Mensch. I esteem him highly.

Yet again, something astonishing has arrived in my mailbox. This time, it's a chapbook titled Paris ett poem, containing a Swedish translation (surely the first) of Hoope Mirrlees' modernist masterpiece, Paris, a Poem. Mirrlees, you'll recall, is best known in genre circles for her fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist, in academic circles for being on the fringes of Bloomsbury, and in poetic circles for this poem.

Ylva Gislén translated the poem, wrote an introduction, provided explanatory notes, and created two collages for inclusion in the chapbook. All of it, clearly, a labor of love.

Quite a lovely  book. Published by Ellerströms.


And Speaking of Good Things . . .

The Temporary Culture chapbook assembled by Henry Wessells, "She Saved Us from World War Three," was reviewed by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. Here's what he said:

Besides being one of the stars of “The Booksellers,” Henry Wessells is also the proprietor of the micro-publisher, Temporary Culture. His latest booklet, “She Saved Us From World War Three,” brings together an interview, essay and two letters highlighting the friendship between Gardner Dozois, the longtime editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Alice Sheldon, the former Washington intelligence agent whose intense, sometimes feminist sci-fi — no one ever forgets “The Women Men Don’t See” — was written using the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. In one letter Sheldon explains that she has pretty much stopped writing because “the stories were getting to hurt too much.”

Which is pretty good coverage for a micro-press.

WWE Money In The Bank Kickoff begins at 6 pm ET/3 pm PT on Sunday, May 10.

Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh penned a two-page open letter advocating flexibility for college athletes looking to enter the NFL Draft.

 Another command group for the orc forces. These armoured orcs caused quite a problem as to who was going to lead them. Originally, it was going to be the guy with the fur cloak, but he looked a little underwhelming. So a quick look into the spares box produced a much bigger, better suited leader for the task.
 This crazed, motley lot are in fact a skirmish line of small snaga (slave orcs). They are being whipped and yelled at by larger orcs. They don’t look like they will able to do much with all their squabbling going on, but then again skirmishers in Dragon Rampant are rather limited.
 I was lucky enough to find a few goblins in chains which worked well whip armed orc from Northstar. I think the goblins came from Alternative Armies.
 The serious orc leader with his impressive uniformed band, he obviously has higher standards than most.
The unruly mob scuffle across the battlefield, making a dreadful din as they go. Reminds me of a school trip from the Seventies.

Vi Hart, adept at mathematics, music, and explaining things, made this video that explains the point (and the lack of point, too) of 12-tone music:

I think they spent all their money on the fancy toilet paper. ~NSHA

One of my favorite bands from the 90's is Powerman 5000. My favorite song of theirs is Drop The Bombshell, a really fast paced song that I thought would be a perfit fit to the Terminator movies

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; it's an XML based content format for distributing things like news, headlines, content, etc. These are popular because instead of relying on them to bookmark your site and return later, their RSS reader keeps your site fresh by showing them your latest posts as a simple headline. So every time that you add content such as a blog post or article they get to see the update, plus a direct link to that post.

If you're brand new ot creating websites or blogs you may feel a little like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck when it comes to figuring out what things your site needs. There are thousands of things to choose from such as GIF files, videos, widgets, slide shows etc. But before you start getting carried away adding these things you need to add the basics, call them your core fundamentals if you will. Without these your site won't be as effective as what it could be, and won't attract the traffic that you want.

If you’re new to websites or blogs you might not have heard of “pinging your site”. Using ping is another free seo tool in your arsenal to help get your site indexed and more traffic. Basically it works like this, a ping is basically the equiviant of you shouting at the top of your lungs “Hey over here”. It sends a notice to the search engines and directories that you have content in need of indexing, or that content has been updated.

When it comes to making a bug out bag, or having an emergency bag for long road trips, or camping, and hiking trips. One of if not the most important items you need for your emergency gear is a first aid kit. And while they can be bought almost anywhere, there contents can vary depending on there size or price range. Regardless of your budget there are some items you should always have present in your first aid kit. Here is a list of 12 things I recommend everyone have that aren’t always included in an off the shelf first aid kit.

When it comes to getting people to your site one of the ways you can do this is through social bookmaking sites. And while these all give your site excellent one way back links, there is one site that you should sign up to first to get more traffic, and that site is Stumbleupon. Why you should use Stumbleupon to get more traffic If you’re not familiar with Stumbleupon this is how it works for your site to get more traffic. Instead of using keywords like how you would for a search engine, visitors select categories that interest them such as videos, music, or computers to name a couple examples. Once they pick their categories and click on the stumble button their randomly taken to a site, article, or video that fits that category. They can then decided if the like or dislike that site by giving it thumbs up or down. The more thumbs up your site gets the more hits it will get because it will show up more frequently when people stumble that category. Visitors to your site can also write reviews and share it with other users or add a sites link to their list of favourite sites giving you even more exposure, back links, and that oh so coveted traffic..........

It seems like every other day there’s some natural disaster being broadcast on the news. From tornados, to floods, and the recent earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. These are constant reminders that even though humanity can achieve a lot Mother Nature is still the boss. This also means that everyone should have a good grasp of disaster survival tips to prepare for when the SHTF. For most disaster preparedness means making a bug out bag and having some plan on how to prepare their home for a disasteror emergency.

Most of the popular social book marking or networking sites have some form of social media share button. A little button that with one click allows you to share an article, video or web page on there site, in the hopes that it goes viral and gets you a tonne of hits. And while these buttons are usually easy to install, most sites only have either a limited number of choices, or a one size fits all approach. This is fine if you like what they offer, but if you want something that fits better with the theme and look of your website you have to do a bit of digging around.

When it comes to bug out bags everyone who knows anything on the subject talks about the gear you need to have. And while having the right knife or backpack is essential, one element that’s often overlooked is what clothes to pack in a bug out bag. Here is a list of things to consider for your emergency survival clothing.

It seems everyone is on Facebook these days. But it also seems that a good majority of those on Facebook have some very annoying habits they might not even realize is. Here is a list of 10 annoying Facebook habits.

It’s normal to be nervous when being interviewed for a new job, especially if that job is one you really want. Because of that most prepare and rehearse what the interviewer is going to ask them, what your strengths are, do you have any weaknesses, can you work evenings and weekends that sort of thing................

It used to be that if you wanted to rank well you only had one search to target, which was the main search page. It didn’t matter if you were going to share content with Google or another search engine. If you wanted to rank for a specific keyword or phrase you cold only do this through SERP’s. Fortunately those days are long gone and site owners can promote their content through a number of different channels. The search engines are very hungry for this kind of content, especially Google which is…….well a total whore when it comes to vertical search content.

To bug in or to bug out that is the question. Nobody can argue that being prepared in case of an emergency or disaster is a bad thing. If your like myself and live in an area that’s prone to natural disasters (in my case earthquakes) you would be very stupid not to have some level of preparation. For many this means having a bug out bag packed with all the survival goodies one could ever want and ready to go at all times. Again I think it’s a very smart idea and I have one myself. But just because you have a bug out bag, doesn’t mean bugging out is your only option when the SHTF...............

1. Should You Get A Nintendo Switch Lite If You Can’t Find Switch Availability? It Depends  Forbes
2. Nintendo Switch Lite is in stock at Amazon and Best Buy: Latest inventory update  CNET
3. Best Switch Games So Far In 2020  Trusted Reviews
4. Nintendo Switch Capture Cards: How to Record Video of Your Gameplay  Screen Rant
5. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Dodging the flu shot doesn't make you an anti-vaxxer, says union  The Age
2. Shop owners in virus-free towns plead to reopen  The Age
3. UFC 249 preview - Ferguson v Gaethje, Cejudo v Cruz and…  BT Sport
4. Why the best team won't win in a year that will be mental as anything  Sydney Morning Herald
5. Wellbeing hit: modelling reveals huge cost of school closures  Sydney Morning Herald
6. View Full coverage on Google News

Guinness World Records has named a South African restaurant as the official titleholder for 'Most Varieties of Milkshakes Commercially Available'.

"Mad Mike" Hughes, a self-styled explorer and daredevil bent on proving that the earth is flat was killed over the weekend when his homemade rocket crashed in the California desert over the weekend.

Air travelers cannot receive cash compensation if their flight is delayed by a passenger biting others and assaulting crew members, an adviser at the Court of Justice of the European Union said on Thursday.

A British vicar got more than he expected from his first attempt at an online sermon when he leaned too close to a candle on a cross and his sweater caught fire.

A quick-thinking Helsinki bakery has saved itself from financial ruin due to the new coronavirus pandemic by creating a cake that looks like a toilet roll.

As Thailand's capital cautiously reopens many restaurants shuttered over coronavirus fears, the feline "employees" of the Caturday Cafe are back at work.

An idea has been bubbling around in my brain for a while. And since this past weekend was a perfect …

Oh golly. I really wanted to show off some serious stitching today. But in fact, I ran into one of …

I’m reading a book! This is a big deal! I’ve always been an avid reader, but lately, all my “reading” …

Well, someone outdid the previous version of Battleshots. Well played, sir or madam.

Check out all the partying over at After 12!