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Kiasmos – Blurred + Remixes

musicisart magazine Kiasmos – Blurred + Remixes

  Sometimes the best way to relax is to listen to calming, downtempo music. Kiasmos provide a modern twist to perfection. Duo producers Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen allow their own creative abilities to gracefully combine. Together their meditative sounds present an ethereal atmosphere mixed with sophisticated storylines told without words, felt within the simplistic beats […]

The post Kiasmos – Blurred + Remixes appeared first on musicisart magazine.




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New Robyn track, Missing U

musicisart magazine New Robyn track, Missing U

[Art: Yishu – Wang Tsuru] When I listen to Robyn some type of spark enters my body and I’m able to forget myself for a moment. I know many others will attest to this beauty of a feeling as when her voice comes over: the sound, the melody, the lyrics, the harmony is infectious. Robyn has has been […]

The post New Robyn track, Missing U appeared first on musicisart magazine.










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ICFP Programming Contest 2018

Yep, it on!




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Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK

Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK by Maroua Maalej, Tucker Taft, Yannick Moy:

Handling memory in a correct and efficient way is a step toward safer, less complex, and higher performing software-intensive systems. However, languages used for critical software development such as Ada, which supports formal verification with its SPARK subset, face challenges regarding any use of pointers due to potential pointer aliasing. In this work, we introduce an extension to the Ada language, and to its SPARK subset, to provide pointer types (“access types” in Ada) that provide provably safe, automatic storage management without any asynchronous garbage collection, and without explicit deallocation by the user. Because the mechanism for these safe pointers relies on strict control of aliasing, it can be used in the SPARK subset for formal verification, including both information flow analysis and proof of safety and correctness properties. In this paper, we present this proposal (which has been submitted for inclusion in the next version of Ada), and explain how we are able to incorporate these pointers into formal analyses

For the systems programmers among you, you might be interested in some new developments in Ada where they propose to add ownership types to Ada's pointer/access types, to improve the flexibility of the programs that can be written and whose safety can be automatically verified. The automated satisfiability of these safety properties is a key goal of the SPARK Ada subset.




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Applications of Blockchain to Programming Language Theory

Let's talk about Blockchain. Goal is to use this forum topic to highlight its usefulness to programming language theory and practice. If you're familiar with existing research efforts, please share them here. In addition, feel free to generate ideas for how Blockchain could improve languages and developer productivity.

As one tasty example: Blockchain helps to formalize thinking about mutual knowledge and common knowledge, and potentially think about sharing intergalactic computing power through vast distributed computing fabrics. If we can design contracts in such a way that maximizes the usage of mutual knowledge while minimizing common knowledge to situations where you have to "prove your collateral", third-party transactions could eliminate a lot of back office burden. But, there might be benefits in other areas of computer science from such research, as well.

Some language researchers, like Mark S. Miller, have always dreamed of Agoric and the Decades-Long Quest for Secure Smart Contracts.

Some may also be aware that verification of smart contracts is an important research area, because of the notorious theft of purse via logic bug in an Ethereum smart contract.




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I’m Coming Back To Lindsay Lohan

I’m Coming Back To Lindsay Lohan

Welcome back, Lindsay Lohan. And what better time than when we are all trapped in our homes desperate for something/anything to talk about. Linsday just dripped her first single, "Back To Me", since the year of the flood.

I Mean…What?!?




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Last Five Minutes of Fame

Last Five Minutes of Fame

To what lengths does one have to go in order to achieve fame? It wasn’t until years later that by simply sucking on someone’s cock (Monica Lewinsky and Kim Kardashian) that the distance one had to go to achieve fame was not that far at all. The only distance they had to go...was down.

I Mean…What?!?






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Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat" - VRT NWS

  1. Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat"  VRT NWS
  2. Het Corona Debat met Marc Van Ranst, Erika Vlieghe, Maggie De Block (Open Vld), Bart De Wever (N-VA) en anderen  De Morgen
  3. 'We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is'  De Standaard
  4. Het grote coronadebat: “We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is”  Het Belang van Limburg
  5. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws







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Defamiliarizing Faerie

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The Iron Dragon's Mother received a long, thoughtful, and positive review from Matt Hilliard in the March 30 issue of Strange Horizons. Rather than give you the usual pull-quote carefully excised from the corpus of the text, I thought I'd share with you one of Hilliard's observations:


That raises the question: what is Swanwick up to with this setting? If he wants to write fun faerie stories, why not just write about faeries the normal way? Or, since a valid way to describe this book is to say it’s “about a faerie fighter pilot, but it’s reallyabout living in a corrupt world and dealing with death,” why not just write about corruption and death in the real world where both can be found in abundance? To answer the second question, a common defense of genre fiction is that both fantasy and science fiction give us a different perspective on things that don’t change. They defamiliarize the world around us by situating us in the future or a past that never existed, and in doing so they can teach us things about humanity that we wouldn’t otherwise have known.

It’s been sixty-five years since J. R. R. Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring and spawned a host of imitators, and for most of Swanwick’s readers, fantasy has become deeply familiar. If it’s too familiar, it no longer defamiliarizes. What to do? Some authors, such as those of the New Weird, responded by moving away from Tolkien’s folklore influences, pushing into stranger territory. Swanwick has done the opposite, hewing closely to the peoples and monsters of folklore traditions from around the world (albeit with the occasional references to Tolkien himself, as with Caitlin’s brother, named Fingolfinrhod). But by mixing together elves and Gucci handbags, dwarves and cigarettes, or dragons and jet fighters, Swanwick continually shifts the context his reader must use. Whenever you find yourself getting comfortable, the novel suddenly sounds like this: “With the easy, racist phrasing of his class, her brother said, ‘Well, the kobold is in the henhouse now, to be sure’” (p. 289).
Overall, the review is positive, the sort of thing that warms a writer's heart. Hilliard has some negative things to say along the way, but since they're based on a careful reading of the book I actually wrote, I don't see that I have any right to complain.

You can read the whole review here.  Or go to Strange Horizons here and wander around, maybe read a story or two while you're there.

Above: Cleaning office, I came across the above photo of myself at age 23, when I was new to Philadelphia and determined to be a science fiction writer. It captures my mood then pretty well.



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The Postutopian Adventures of Michael Swanwick

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Look what came in the mail! My contributor's copies of The Postmodern Adventures of Darger and Surplus. Which I can now honestly tell you are beautiful books. Marianne--owner, reditor, and sole entrepreneur of Dragonstairs Press, remember--especially admired the texture of the endpapers.

This is the first Darger and Surplus collection of short, and it collects everything except the two novels. But I should caution you that it is a slim book--five previously published stories, four related short-shorts, and "There Was an Old Woman..." a story written expressly for this collection.  Bloated this volume is not.

Subterranean Press has created, as I said, one lovely volume. It costs $40, because it's a high-quality collector's item, published in a limited edition of one thousand. But for a high quality collector's item, published in a limited edition of one thousand, that's pretty cheap.

Here's the table of contents:

Introduction:
  • Mother Goose’s Errant Sons
Stories:
  • The Dog Said Bow-Wow
  • The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport
  • Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play
  • Tawny Petticoats
  • There Was An Old Woman
  • Appendix:

  • Introduction to Appendix: A Little Smoke and a Mirror or Three
  • Smoke and Mirrors: Four Scenes from the Postutopian Future

If you're interested, you can buy a copy of the book here.

Or you can buy an e-book version for $5 here.

Oe you can simply go the the Subterranean website and poke around here.  Mine isn't the only book there you want. Far from it.


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A Last Minute Ten, Nine, Eight … Point Transit Plan

The mayor's list of ideas to alleviate crowding offers little relief in the short term.

Mayor John Tory announced a ten-point plan to fight congestion and delays on the TTC at a press conference just before Toronto Council began its final debates on the 2018 budget. Through the entire budget process, starting with Tory’s cohort on the TTC Board and continuing through the City Budget and Executive committees, transit has […]

The post A Last Minute Ten, Nine, Eight … Point Transit Plan appeared first on Torontoist.




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Mixed feelings around hockey about holding NHL draft early

Mixed feelings around hockey about holding NHL draft early




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Should college football players have draft flexibility? Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh thinks so

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




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Analysis: Tennis pros' US return amid pandemic no true model

Analysis: Tennis pros' US return amid pandemic no true model




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Family Reunion

 Digging through a box of figures yesterday I found an old Grenadier Orc that I had painted back in 1986 or so. Well, I thought time to draft you into the army my son!
It was only when I brought him down stairs to the painting table I realised I had bought some orcs from EBay that matched him exactly. In fact I think the sculpt had been cut up to create the other as from the head down to the belt were identical. Well not being one to break up a family, this lot will be based together on the same base. The range is an old Grenadier box set I think.

 I will rebase him, but I did have to stop and take a trip down memory lane as I studied his base. Back then rather than painting hordes of figures, I would spend hours on just one. This one is based on a piece of cardboard cut from an art pad. Polly filler was then used for the grass and pricked with a needle to create grass, then painted. Boy, now I just wash and go with new improved ground mix from Luke’s APS.
I used to spend hours and days on just one character at a time, glad to say those days are long behind me but it was quite moving looking at the way I used to work as a teenager.




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LOTR Armies

 After years of waiting, Dain finally gets to meet Thorin.
 The wolf packs meet up at last.
 A large black Warg snaps commands to his messengers.
 Iron Hills Dwarves battle Gundabad beserkers.
 Gundabad trolls lead the march of the Trolls, tickets now available.
 A throng of trolls. Two Dark Alliance 20mm plastic trolls flank a metal GW war troll.
 Drain and Thorin muster to protect a back gate.
 The great white wolf commands her forces. Her pack is made out of large black wargs, grey wolves and white wolves from the north.
 Two Snow trolls with their animal hide trappings.
These lightning fast wolves will be the terror of the battlefield, moving at incredible speeds to out flank and surround the enemy.




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Orc skirmishers

 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.




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A reminder: How to stimulate the appetite of a medical leech

The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen, Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, “Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches.” Recently, Bradley Allff, writing in Atlas Obscura, looked at the role medical leeches sometimes play in medicine in the USA. […]




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Crazy-seeming research, now and then, turns up something true and beautiful

Crazy-seeming research, every now and then, leads to something really, really wonder-filled. In this case, the discovery of something long-predicted (by Einstein) but seemingly impossible to perceive: gravity waves. (HT Maggie Lettvin)




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Software that predicts whether you look like, and so will be, a criminal

Harrisburg University proudly announces, in a press release: HU facial recognition software predicts criminality A group of Harrisburg University professors and a Ph.D. student have developed automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal. With 80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias, the software can […]




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A new comic (in 2 languages) about Ig Nobel Prize winners

A new comic strip—in Russian and in English—about some of the curious characters who have won Ig Nobel Prizes. The series appears on Instagram.




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Valentine’s Day is coming!

I am so nervous about Valentine’s Day.  I haven’t ever done this before until I visited Earth and my friend Skeeter told me about it.  Should I give Spec a Valentine that is special and tells him how cute I think he is or should I give all my friends a Valentine that is the […]





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Pandemic Pals!




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Terminator Drop The Bombshell

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




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Terminator Samson And Delilah

This is the last video I created using Windows Movie Maker before switching over to Adobe Premier Pro CS3. It's the first Terminator fan video I created where I used all four Terminator movies




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Minecraft "Minecrack" Review

Minecraft or as I prefer to call it “Minecrack” is a game that was recently recommend to my by a friend. At first glance the game looks like a throwback to the original Atari or Nintendo game systems (think Mario Bros type graphics minus having to jump on walking mushrooms) The game essentially has the look of a giant Lego world consisting entirely of blocks, the animals, trees, even the water are all blocks. There’s also no set point system or objective you have to reach in order to beat the game. But despite this the game is exceptionally addictive. I personally found it very easy to spend a few hours on it before I realized how much time had gone by.




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How To Link To The Middle Of A YouTube Video (blog post)

Let say you found a video you want to share with some friends. Or perhaps you want to post it to your website. The problem is that it’s long and the stuff you want people to see is in the last half of it.




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Tulalip Microsoft's New Social Network ?

With all the talk about Google and their new social network Google Plus, (Or Google+) it looks like there could soon be a new player to what appears to be a rapidly growing social network feud. Recently either by accident or on purpose Microsoft unveiled a new site called Tulalip. Personally I don’t think this was by accident, rather a clever way at generating some buzz..............




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Falling Down Coming Undone (Fan Video

Falling down is the tale of Bill Foster (played by Michael Douglas) a.k.a D-FENS which is his license plate. A guy who isn’t having a very good time. He lost his wife, his home, his daughter, and his job at a defence plant.............




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Optimizing Your YouTube Channel And Videos For Traffic

YouTube is one of the most important marketing tools out there when it comes to getting the message out about your business or your website. It’s currently the second most used search engine behind Google (which owns YouTube by the way) and is the biggest video sharing site in the world. Like it or hate it having videos on YouTube is a good way to promote what you have. But just having videos isn’t enough to get a tonne of traffic; you need to know how to optimize your YouTube channel and videos to get more traffic......................




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Squeeze More Earnings Out Of Your Adsense Account In 5 Minutes Or Less (Blog Post)

Google Adsense it’s usually the first place people go who want to monetize their websites and blogs with the hope those Adsense earnings will net them some big cash. Normally these ads will be matched to your site based on the content and browsing history of the people visiting your site. The goal is to tailor make ads that will hopefully be appealing for people to click on......................




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50 Web Directories You Can Submit Your Website To

Back in the day if you wanted your website or blog to get indexed fast by the search engines, you would submit it to website directories. Are they still worth submitting to today? For the most part yes. Submitting your site to website directories can still be an effective way at building back links that’ll help you rank higher in search results and should be part of your overall SEO strategy. This is especially true for new websites and blogs were getting back links from other webmasters can be difficult..........................




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Dead Island "Feminist Whore" Skill?

The game Dead Island, a game set on a fictional tropical island where you get to kill zombies hasn’t had very much luck with its recent release. Those who’ve purchased the game on Steam downloaded an incorrect build of the game full of bugs and glitches. On top of that most couldn’t connect online to play multiplayer.............




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Minecraft 1.8 Review

For those eagerly waiting for the first half of the first half of the Mincraft adventure update, the wait is finally over. And no I’m not talking about some buggy pre release that is a pain in the ass to properly install that’s been out for just over a week prior. As of Sept 14 it’s available to the masses who are looking to feed their “minecrack” addiction........... Because of the recent changes I figured it was time for an updated Minecraft review covering some of the recent changes. This is not a complete review on the 1.8 adventure update, just what I’ve seen and experienced in the game so far to give you an idea what to expect..........




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Minecraft 1.9 Update

With November being scheduled as the “official” release of Minecraft the team at Mojang are hard at work putting together Minecraft’s 1.9 update. This is possibly the last update before the release and like the 1.8 adventure update will be packed full of new features, crafting recipes and other stuff. Details at this point are scarce, but from the information that’s out there here are some of the things that could be included in the new 1.9 update..........