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I think I may just have earned my RYA Dinghy Sailing Level 2 badge. Can I call myself Captain now?

Update: I have in my hand a piece of paper.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/harry-potter-removed-from-tennessee-catholic-school-library-1.5268338

"The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text."

Hly shit...there are supposedly intelligent people who think this?
Watch some Buffy, why don't you...Witches...vampires...guys with erections...

Conversion therapy group founder comes out as gay, apologizes

The founder of one of the nation’s largest conversion therapy programs, who spent decades leading the organization, now says he is gay, apologizing for his role in the practice.

McKrae Game, who founded and led Hope for Wholeness in South Carolina, publicly announced he was gay in early June, more than two years after the organization’s board of directors abruptly fired him.

In a Facebook post last week, Game, 51, said he was “wrong,” adding: “Please forgive me.”

“I certainly regret where I caused harm,” he wrote. “Promoting the triadic model that blamed parents and conversion or prayer therapy, that made many people believe that their orientation was wrong, bad, sinful, evil, and worse that they could change was absolutely harmful."

Also at NBC.

We have an election coming in October.

The main choices are (I'm not going into Quebec's BQ party: it is just provincial to Quebec)
1. Conservatives: like the Republicans in the US
2. Liberals: like Democrats
3. NDP: historically a workers/union party (more liberal than the Liberals)
4. Greens: you know them (more or less the new kids on the block)

Current polls, with a month and a half-ish to go show Liberals winning, possible majority.
Conservatives a close second and NDP and Greens close third and fourth.

The NDP and conservatives are sliding down in support, the Liberals and Greens going up.

The Conservatives are sliding, the rumour is, because of the Doug Ford effect. Remember his brother Rob Ford who went down to the States and did the talk show route and entertained everyone with his goofiness/salesmanship, etc? He was then mayor of Toronto and coke user (if memory serves....errrr...it probably doesn't).
Doug is just as goofy: he has a way of pissing off his own party members with his silliness.... And he has pissed off enough people in Ontario (with his Conservative cuts and buffoonery) that it is making people across Canada wary of voting Conservative.

The NDP have a leader who seems oddly not really a leader: he doesn't seem to be making much of an impression and his party is declining in popularity.

The Greens have been on the rise for the last, say 15ish years?, slowly supplanting the NDP as the third party of choice. They seem to have great momentum, probably as the other parties have been ignoring the environment.

Both the conservatives and the liberals have been pandering to the oil industry (and I totally get the need for oil, but not while ignoring green alternatives) and the Liberals have tried to help Alberta get their oil to market but not successfully and at great cost.

I can't say that the Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, fills me with confidence, but the Conservatives....

Just to own up (can't think of the proper phrase): I will, unless something weird happens, be voting Green AGAIN. I'm voting for the future (and a chance to have political upheaval): I think my daughter is in a good relationship and we will probably be having grand kids. I'm voting for THEIR future...and HOPEFULLY a change in the electoral process.

Breaking news:
Pierre Nantel has just crossed the floor from the NDP to join the Green party.
Good news? Who knows,but could mean the momentum is with the Greens.

WOW!
The Greens just picked up ANOTHER 14 candidates from the NDP (all from New Brunswick). 14 people crossed the floor. Democracy in action!
They are now the #3 party for the number of candidates running for office.

The NDP now we only had the candidates they SHOULD be running.
A coup in the works?

by: LISA MARIE PANE, Associated Press

Posted: Sep 2, 2019 / 12:19 AM EDT / Updated: Sep 2, 2019 / 12:00 PM EDT

When law enforcement authorities gathered to discuss details of a mass shooting in West Texas that left seven people dead, there was one bit of information they refused to provide on live television: the name of the gunman.

Instead, they decided to release the name through a Facebook post. Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke made it plain why he wouldn’t mention the name at the news conference: “I’m not going to give him any notoriety for what he did.”

Even with such restraint, it remained a challenge to curb the spread of the gunman’s name. The Odessa Police Department has fewer than 25,000 followers of its Facebook page, but the social media platform easily reaches millions of Facebook’s members around the globe and the post was shared hundreds of times. Within minutes, Twitter lit up with posts mentioning his name. Journalists and advocates on both sides of the gun debate also began spreading the word, spewing a firehose of information about the suspect.

In this era of a saturation of social media and around-the-clock news, it’s next to impossible to keep a lid on such information.

“Ultimately, the police department can only directly control what they do, and that name, that information can be reposted and retweeted and republished hundreds of thousands of time,” said Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama who has studied the influence of media coverage on future shooters. He and others appeal to the media to limit the volume of information about these perpetrators, saying it does little to understand the reasons for the violence or stop it in the future.

The Associated Press names suspects identified by law enforcement in major crimes. However, in cases in which the crime is carried out seeking publicity, the AP strives to restrict the mention of the name to the minimum needed to inform the public, while avoiding descriptions that might serve a criminal’s desire for publicity or self-glorification.

The “No Notoriety” movement was partly inspired by the 1999 Columbine school shooting outside Denver. The gunmen became household names and even in death appeared to motivate a whole new crop of mass shooters.

In in recent years, it has gained momentum amid a seemingly steady stream of mass shootings. The idea is to urge news organizations to refrain from naming the shooters in mass slayings and to curb the volume of biographical information about them. In New Zealand, after a mass shooter there killed 51 people at two mosques, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern refused to mention the perpetrator’s name at all.

FBI leaders, leery of inspiring copycat killers and hesitant to give them what they see as undue attention, have occasionally been reluctant in recent years to refer to them by name.

Former FBI Director James Comey expressed that concern in a briefing with reporters the day after a 2016 rampage at an Orlando nightclub, repeatedly referring to the gunman not by his name but simply as “the killer.”

“You will notice that I am not using the killer’s name, and I will try not to do that,” Comey said. “Part of what motivates sick people to do this kind of thing is some twisted notion of fame or glory, and I don’t want to be part of that for the sake of the victims and their families.”

FBI special agent Christopher Combs, who previously worked at FBI headquarters leading the bureau’s efforts to respond to mass shootings, has held to that view. As the top FBI official in San Antonio, he has overseen the bureau’s response to multiple mass shootings in Texas, including a 2017 massacre at a church in Sutherland Springs that killed more than two dozen people.

At a news conference after the shooting where officials refrained from naming the gunman, Combs said, “We don’t talk about the shooter.”

And in a television interview after the shooting, Combs said he understood that the media had to name a shooter “once,” but “after that, we certainly don’t want to draw any type of positive attention to the shooter. And we have found through studies that there are people out there that are troubled, and when they see that, they believe this is how I can show the wrongdoings that have been done to me.”

All these years later, the Columbine attack continues to motivate mass shooters, including two men who this year stormed their former school in Brazil, killing seven people. The gunman in New Zealand was said to have been inspired by the man who in 2015 killed nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The University of Alabama’s Lankford urges journalists to refrain from using shooters’ names or go into exhaustive detail about their crimes. These attackers are trying to outdo previous shooters with higher death tolls, he said, and media coverage serves only to encourage copycats. Experts call it the “contagion” effect.

Lankford lauded the approach in Texas to avoid mentioning the name on live television. That medium is especially problematic, he said.

“There’s the issue of B-roll where the sound bite can be played over and over and over again,” he said. “They’re trying to set a moral position and a lead they hope the media will follow.”

Tom Manger, senior associate director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said there are a number of challenges. The name of the shooter is considered public information that must be disseminated, and there’s a general thirst for information about mass shooters. As Americans consider ways to prevent future shootings, knowing more about the gunman might help figure out effective solutions.

But there are practical issues at play, too: How can the information be contained?

“It goes out in a hundred different ways,” Manger said. “Once it goes out on social media, it goes everywhere.”

For Caren Teves, the issue is personal. Her son, Alex, was among those killed in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012. She and her husband, Tom, created the No Notoriety movement, encouraging media to stick to reporting relevant facts rather than the smallest of biographical details.

“It is a tough thing to navigate. But it’s a start,” Teves said. “We’ve never said it’s the only solution. It’s just one of them.”

It's an AP story, found on many sites - here's one - https://www.mywabashvalley.com/news/national/not-so-easy-to-prevent-the-spread-of-mass-shooters-names/

I think I understand now why some people are very keen on open water swimming (wild swimming). I've just been on holiday and spent a lot of time swimming in the sea (yes, in the UK, with a wetsuit) and doing a spot of body boarding. It's very relaxing. You can spend hours in the water. It's quite fun when the waves are breaking over you, but it's also good when they're smooth and you bob over the top.

There's a bit of a knack to body boarding, catching the wave at the right point, and adjusting the attitude of the board so it stays on the leading edge of the wave for longer. I don't think I'll ever get around to trying proper surfing. I think that would take some lessons and quite a bit of time. It's fun to watch though.

Evatec’s next-generation CLUSTERLINE supporting SkyWater’s 3DSoC and carbon nanotube custom foundry programs

Evatec AG of Trübbach, Switzerland (which makes thin-film production equipment for advanced packaging, power device, MEMS, optoelectronics, wireless communication and photonics applications) has delivered the latest generation of its CLUSTERLINE thin-film deposition tool (including evaporation capability) to SkyWater of Bloomington, MN, USA – a US-owned DMEA-accredited technology foundry that manufactures integrated circuits for markets including aerospace & defense, automotive, cloud & computing, consumer, industrial, the Internet of Things (IoT) and medical.

The tool is said to bring new levels of thin-film performance, key to the production of carbon nanotubes and other emerging technologies. CLUSTERLINE is an industry-proven, high-volume single-wafer processing production solution enabling integration of PVD (physical vapor deposition), highly ionized PVD, soft etch and PECVD (plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition) process technologies, along with extensive pre- and post-treatment steps. The open system architecture allows easy tool configuration.

The latest tool from Evatec provides SkyWater new capabilities in processing of metals and dielectrics, and is important in its 3DSoC (system-on-chip) work, providing unconventional processing capabilities for a CMOS-based foundry. This new tooling supports SkyWater’s business model as a technology foundry by giving innovators additional processing options to establish manufacturable process flows for emerging technologies. This capability supports on-going process development at SkyWater not only for carbon nanotubes but also for photonics and MEMS device types as well as where conventional PVD processes do not provide flexibility or the precision that these applications require.

Previously: DARPA's 3DSoC Becoming a Reality

I have a NodeMCU v3, an ESP8266-based Arduino work-alike board with Wi-Fi, and after getting a few cheap sensors and a display, I managed to wire up together a network sensor system that can give readings of temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure that I'm feeding into an RRD to make pretty graphs. This is what it looks like as of now. I know it's on a breadboard, but I kinda suck at soldering and after burning two perfboards trying to get the circuit built I decided screw it and made the breadboard a permanent fixture. I'll have to buy another one soon. Yeah, it's hot here where I come from. 29°C and 84% relative humidity is punishing.

That 0.96" I²C SSD1306-based OLED display is very nice and clear, but it was also the very devil to interface. It took a lot of fuzzing around to get the thing to work reliably. The specs say that it ought to be compatible with both 3.3v and 5v, but I've found that it is very unreliable at 3.3v, and that the 4.7kΩ pull-up resistors that are generally required to use I²C have to then be pulled up to 5v. The rest of the components, the DHT11 temperature sensor (blue box) and the BMP 180 pressure sensor are all wired to to 3.3v for Vcc.

If you'd want to build one like it yourself, more details and code here. If you try to build upon my work I'd like to hear about it!

We are knee-deep in wharrgarrrbling white-supremacist bullshit. I don't think this site's going to last much longer as anything but Stormfront 2.0 at the rate things are going. Nevertheless, I'm the kind of person who can't just walk past a giant gibbering clusterfuck of wrong without snarking on it, so here goes.

Have you ever noticed that none of these people can give you a straight answer about what it is precisely to be "white?" I'd like to know when micks, dagos, polacks, and krauts...oops, pardon me, Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans, and basically anyone not a WASP began to qualify as "white." What caused this sudden shift in the definition of whiteness, when did it happen, and why?

Also, scratch these cowardly little whiners a bit, and something interesting emerges. It's not white skin they seem to be after so much as "white culture." This, if anything, is even more ill-defined than simple "whiteness." Requests for clarification from, as a pertinent example, our very own XivLacuna, have proven to be...less than enlightening, shall we say. Apparently "white culture" is what raises property values and is more or less synonymous with being a good neighbor? But also apparently, very poor and extremely dysfunctional areas with majority or entirely white populations are *not* examples of "white culture" despite their demography, because something something hurrrarghl Jews and liberals and banning coal?

I don't even know what the fuck. This kind of incoherent blather is par for the course from white supremacists. Bunch of idiot historically-illiterate rebels without a clue, let alone without a cause. Sounds like a load of maladaptive, resentful little manchildren who think the world owes them a living and are looking for something, or someone, to break when it doesn't fall into their laps. Boo-stupid-hoo. How about you use that supposedly superior white-with-a-capital-W intellect and pull yourselves up by your bootstraps?

I'm not even going to touch on the complete avalanche of non-sequiturs, half-truths, whataboutisms, false dichotomies, or outright *lies* these people attempt to bury opposition under. I do notice, though, that when you counter them properly, they simply stop responding to you, as if that somehow means they won. And, holy god damn, I don't think I've ever seen goalposts move that fast; I'm pretty sure some of these boys are breaking the sound barrier here!

What it all boils down to is this: white supremacists are incoherent, ignorant, cowardly whiners, scared of their own shadows for being dark. I will never comprehend how empty, how gullible, how utterly suggestible, how completely in the grip of total moral and cognitive surrender someone would have to be to fall for a supremacy movement that can't even define itself internally!

In case any of this crowd of upstanding, rational, well-spoken pillars of society (ye gods...) would like to attempt to explain their agenda so that it makes something approaching coherent sense, I'm all ears :) I'm also prepared to be completely let down on that front, though will probably at least get some cheap laughs out of it.