All the latest Covid-19 updates from around the world.

Shopping for potatoes? Here’s how to know which kind to buy, and the best way to store them.

Continue reading "How to Buy and Store Potatoes" »

velocityconf: LAST DAY for #velocityconf EU call for speakers http://t.co/qShofQCDPl Share your best #WPO, #Ops, and #DevOps stories.

CTVNews.ca asked Canadians to share how they were using their CERB payments and got a flood of responses. Most said they were covering the basics -- housing, groceries, transportation and medicine.

Apple, dear reader, has been missing you — and it's banking on the fact that you've been missing the opportunity to touch its products before you buy them, too. 

In an effort to ease this assuredly mutual feeling of longing, the company confirmed on Friday plans to begin reopening some of its U.S. stores as early as MondayApple had been aiming for a May reopening for some time, but now it's official. 

So reports CNBC, which notes that the openings are, for now, limited to stores in four states: Idaho, South Carolina, Alabama, and Alaska.

"We've missed our customers and look forward to offering our support," an Apple spokesperson told CNN Business.  Read more...

The Gothamist is reporting the sad news that Gem Spa, the iconic NY corner store that has been a fixture at St. Marks Place and Second Avenue for around 100 years is being forced to shutter its doors and windows for the last time. The Spa has been struggling to keep up with increasing rent prices and COVID-19 has apparently proven to be the final nail in its coffin.

"It’s where Robert Mapplethorpe bought Patti Smith an egg cream on the day they met. It’s on the back cover of the New York Dolls’ 1973 debut (and where, according to lore, Johnny Thunders and others went for post-heroin sugar fixes between sets at CBGB). Before that, it was where Abbie Hoffman gathered Yippies to rain money on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s where Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and other neighborhood poets went to pick up the Sunday New York Times on Saturday nights (and which was inevitably commemorated in their poems)."

Read the rest.

Image: Alex Lozupone, CC BY-SA 4.0 Read the rest

Technology has come a long way, and cyber protection is the most crucial factor in advancing the future of digital defense. Interestingly enough, cybersecurity was not always an issue in backup and storage; but as technology advances, so do the methods of hackers. Saying this, let’s take a walk down memory lane. The 1900s: Where […]

The post How Backup And Storage Led To Cybercrime appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

I tell travel stories for a living. I do this because I can’t NOT tell travel stories — every experience I have is shaped in the moment and waits in anticipation to shoot out of my fingertips. And I live to share those stories with an audience. As humans, we’re hard-wired to be influenced by …

45 Funny, Heartfelt, Unforgettable Travel Stories Read More »

The post 45 Funny, Heartfelt, Unforgettable Travel Stories appeared first on Adventurous Kate.

When I started this blog more than 10 years ago, I had one goal: to entertain as many people as possible with my travel stories. I got away from that goal in recent years, focusing on guides for travelers instead, realizing that it’s hard to earn a living when you tell stories like these. But …

I’m Telling Stories I’ve Never Told Before — on Patreon! Read More »

The post I’m Telling Stories I’ve Never Told Before — on Patreon! appeared first on Adventurous Kate.

History of Machu Picchu

Archaeological evidence uncovered around the site suggests that the area was first used for agricultural purposes back in 760 B.C.

The war of Vilcambamba Pachacutec in 1440 established the first settlement at the site. It was called the Tahuantinsuyo Empire which was later followed by the formation of the government of Manco Capac.

It is thought that Machu Picchu was first inhabited by 300-1000 inhabitants, who were of the highest Class or "llactas".

The valleys around these areas were important for their agricultural contribution, however after death of the Emperor Pachacutec, it lost it's importance, with the establishment of new sites like Ollaytantambo and Vilcambamba. The building of these new sites by his successors, in more accessible terrain made Machu Picchu less appealing.

From 1527 to 1532, two brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa fought against each other in a civil war over the Inca Empire. Their father, Inca Huayna Capac had given each brother a section of the empire to manage, one in Huáscar in Cuzco and Atahualpa in Quito. When Huayna Capac and his heir, Ninan Cuyuchi, died somewhere between 1525 and 1527, the two brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar went to war over who should rule.  The population who had come to live in the Machu Picchu area from rural or remote locations left after the war ended to return to where they came from. Later another brother, Manco Inca was sent into exile in Vilcambamba, and Machu Picchu was deserted.

Antonio Raimondi was an Italian geographer and scientist from Milan who visited Machu Picchu in 1851. In 1867 Augusto Berns arrived to mine the site.

Hiram Bingham re-discovered the ruins in 1911. He documented and publicised his "discovery".

Hiram Bingham

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

—Albert Einstein, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics” (1934)

Context: Last week, I pinched off one of my typically woolly emails in response to an acquaintance whom I admire. He’s a swell guy who makes things I love, and he'd written, in part, to express concern that my recent Swift impersonation had been directed explicitly at something he'd made. Which, of course, it hadn’t—but which, as I'll try to discuss here, strikes me as irrelevant.

To paraphrase Bogie, I played it for him, so now I suppose I might as well play it for you.

(n.b.: Excerpted, redacted, munged, and heavily expanded from my original email)

There are at least a couple things that mean a lot to me that I'm still just not very good at.

• Make nuanced points in whatever way they need to be made; even if that ends up seeming “un-nuanced”
• Never explain yourself.

I want to break both these self-imposed rules privately with you here. [Editor’s Note: Um.] Because, I hope to nuance the shit out of some fairly un-nuanced points. And, to do that, I'll also (reluctantly) need to explain myself. But, here goes.

First [regarding my goofing on “distraction-free writing environments”] I think there are some GIANT distinctions at play here that a lot of folks may not find nearly as obvious as I do:

1. Tool Mastery vs. Productivity Pr0n – Finding and learning the right tools for your work vs solely dicking around with the options for those tools is just so important, but also so different. And, admittedly, it’s almost impossible to contrast those differences in terms of hard & fast rules that could be true for all people in all situations. But, that doesn’t make the difference any less qualitatively special or real.
   
   Similarly…

2. Self-Help Vs. “Self”–“Help” – Solving the problem that caused the problem that caused the problem that caused the symptom we eventually noticed. Huge. Arguably, peerless.

   • Viz.: How many of us ignore the actual cause of our problem in favor of just reading dozens of blog posts about how to “turbocharge” its most superficial symptoms? Sick.

3. Focus & Play – Yes, focusing on important work is, as Ford used to say, Job 1. But, that focus benefits when we maintain the durable and unapologetic sense of play that affords true creativity and fosters an emergence of context and connection that’s usually killed by stress. BUT.

   • Again, what conceivable “rule” could ever serve to immutably declare that “THIS goofing-off is critical for hippocampal plasticity” vs. “THAT goofing-off is just dumb, distracting bullshit?”

   • Impossible. Because drawing those kinds of distinctions is one of our most important day-to-day responsibilities. Decisions are hard, and there’s no app or alarm gadget that can change that.

     • Although, they certainly can help mask the depth of the underlying problem that made them seem so—what’s the parlance?—“indispensable”.
     • Think: Elmo Band-Aids for that unsightly pancreatic tumor.

4. Reducing Distraction through Care (Rather than braces, armatures, and puppet strings). Removing interruptions and external distractions that harm your work or life? Great. Counting on your distraction-removal tool to supplement your non-existent motivation to do work that will never get done anyway? Pathetic.

   • Frankly, this is a big reason I'm so galled when anyone touts their tool/product/service as being the poor, misunderstood artist’s new miracle medicine—rather than just admitting they've made a slightly different spoon.
   • Because, let’s be honest: although most of us have plenty of perfectly serviceable spoons, everybody knows collecting cutlery is way more fun than using it to swallow yucky medicine.

5. Using a System Vs. Becoming a System. Having a system or process for getting work done vs. making the iteration of that system or process a replacement for the work. This is just…wow…big.
   
   But, maybe most importantly to me…

6. Embracing the Impossibles. Getting past these or any other intellectual koans by simply accepting life’s innumerable and unresolvable paradoxes, hypocrisies, and impossibilities as God-given gifts of creative constraint. Rather than, say, a mimeographed page of long division problems that must be solved for a whole number, n.

   • I just can’t ever get away from this one. For me, it’s what everything inevitably comes back to.
   • The very definition of our jobs is to solve the right problem at the right level for the right reason—based on a combination of the best info we have for now and a clear-eyed dedication to never pushing an unnecessary rock up an avoidable hill.

   • YET, we keep force-feeding the monster that tells us to fiddle and fart and blame the Big Cruel World whenever we face work that might threaten our fragile personal mythology.

     • “Sigh. I wish I could finally start writing My Novel….Ooooooh, if only I had a slightly nicer pen…and Zeus loved me more….”

All that stuff? That there’s a complex set of ideas to talk about for many complex reasons—not least of which being how many people either despise or (try to) deny the unavoidable impact of ol' number six.

But, here’s the thing: as much as saying so pisses anybody off, I think the topics we're NOT talking about whenever we disappear into Talmudic scholarship about “full-screen mode” or “minimalist desks” or whatever constitutes a “zen habit”—those shunned topics are precisely the things that I believe are most mind-blowingly critical to our real-world happiness as humans.

In fact, I believe that to such a degree that helping provide a voice for those unpopular topics that can be heard over the din is now (what passes for) my career. I really believe these deeper ideas are worth socializing on any number of levels and in many media. Even when it’s inconvenient and slightly disrespectful of someone’s business model.

So, that’s what I try to do. I talk about these things. Seldom by careful design. Often poorly. But, always because they each mean an awful lot to me.

[…]

But, no matter how I end up saying whatever the hell I say, I believe in saying it not simply to be liked or followed or revered as a “nice guy” who pushes out shit-tons of whatever to “help people.”

Because, believe me, friend, a great many of those apparently “nice guys” swarming around the web “helping people” these days are ass-fucking their audience for nickels and calling it a complimentary colonoscopy. And, while I absolutely think that in itself is empirically wrong, I also think it’s just as important to say that it’s wrong. Sometimes, True Things need to be said.

Which in this instance amounts to saying, a) selling people a prettier way to kinda almost but not really write is not, in the canonical sense, “nice”—but, far worse, b) leaving your starry-eyed customers with the nauseatingly misguided impression that their “distraction” originates from anyplace but their own busted-ass brain is really not “helping.” Not on any level. It is, literally, harmful.

“Helping” a junkie become more efficient at keeping his syringe loaded is hardly “nice.”

It’s the opposite of nice. And, it’s the opposite of helpful. These are my True Things.

And, to me, saying your True Things also means not watering down the message you care about in order to render it incapable of even conceivably hurting someone’s feelings—or of even conceivably losing you even one teeny-tiny slice of that precious “market share.”

Well, that’s the price, and I'm fine paying it—best money I've ever spent.

But, it also means trusting your audience by letting each of them decide to add water only as they choose to—by never corrupting the actual concentrate in a way that might make it less useful to the smartest or most eager 5% of people who'd like to try using it undiluted. Because, at that point, you're not only abandoning the coolest people you have the honor of serving—you risk becoming a charlatan.

And, that’s precisely what you become when you start to iteratively inbreed the kind of fucktard audience for whom daily buffets of weak swill and beige assurance are life’s most gratifying reward.

Sure. Those poor bastards may never end up using any of that watery information to do anything more ambitious than turbocharging their most regrettable symptoms. But, who’s the last person in the universe who’s going to grab them by the ears and tell them to get back to work? Exactly—that same “nice guy” whose livelihood now depends on keeping infantalized strangers addicted to his “help.”

Holy shit—no way could I ever live with that. It’s so wrong, it’s not even right. ESC, ESC, ESC!

[…]

Okay. So anyhow, there’s a really long-winded, overly generous, and extremely pompous way of trying to say I don’t know how to do what I do except how I do it. But, I do genuinely feel awful when innocent people feel they have been publicly humiliated or berated simply because I'm some dick who hates people.

Which has to be my favorite irony of all.

When I was a kid, I thought my Mom was “mean” not to let me play in traffic on busy Galbraith Road. Today, I'm not simply grateful that she had the strength and resolve to be so “mean”—I actually can’t imagine how sad it would be to not have people in your life who care enough about your long-term welfare to tell you to stop fucking around in traffic. To where you eventually might start even seeking 12x-daily safety hacks from some of the very same drivers whose recklessness may eventually kill you. Wow.

[…]

Admitting when life is complicated or things aren’t shiny and happy all the time strikes me as a wonderfully sane and adult way to conduct one’s life. That there are so many folks offended by even the existence of this anarchic idea is not a problem I can solve.

No more than I can wish useless email away or pray hard enough that it never rains on anyone’s leaky roof. All out of scope.

And, then, I jizzed on at length about how much I admire the recipient’s work. Which I do.

Good work doesn’t need a cookie

I may admire your work, too. Especially if you care a lot about that work and don’t overly sweat peoples' opinions of it. Most definitely including my own.

For these purposes, it doesn’t really matter whether we're friends and, honestly, it doesn’t even matter whether I love, use, or agree with everything you do, say, or make in a given day.

It doesn’t matter because good work doesn’t need me to love it. Like tornadoes and cold sores, good work happens with total disregard to whether I'm “into it.”

But, conversely, let’s stipulate that the points-of-view undergirding our opinions—again, including mine—will and should survive either agreement or lack of agreement with equivalently effortless ease. Because, like really good work, a really good point-of-view doesn’t require another person’s benediction.

Guess we'll have to disagree to agree

Now, to be only vaguely clearer here, I'm not posting this circuitous ego dump in the service of altering your opinion of either me, my friend, his work, or practically anything else for that matter.

But, I would love it if we could all be more okay with the fact that real life means that we do each have a different, sometimes incongruous, and often totally incompatible point-of-view. Yes. Even you have a point-of-view that someone despises. Ready to change it now? Jesus, I sure hope not.

Then, to be only slightly more clear, I'm also not advocating for that fakey brand of web-based kum ba ya that gets trotted out alternately as “tolerance” or “inclusion” or some styrofoam miniature of “civility.”

I'm absolutely not against all of those things when authentically practiced, but I'm also really skeptical of the well-branded peacemakers who are forever appointing themselves the Internet’s “Now-Now-Let’s-All-Pretend-We're-Just-Saying-the-Same-Useless-Thing-Here” den mothers.

Because we're not all saying the same things. Not at all.

And, it infantalizes some important conversations when we tacitly demand that any instance of honest disagreement be immediately horseshat into a photo opp where some thought leader gets to hoist everyone’s hands in the air like he’s fucking Jimmy Carter.

Nope. Not saying that.

Who will you really rely on?

What I AM saying is that alllllll this seemingly unrelated stuff is absolutely related—that the pattern of not relying on other people for anything you really care about is arguably the great-grandaddy of every useful productivity, creativity, or self-help pattern.

Where’s this matter? Pretty much everywhere you have any sort of stake:

• Don’t rely on other people to remove your totally fake “distractions.”
• Don’t rely on other people to pat your beret, re-tie your cravat, and make you a nice cocoa whenever that mean man on the internet points out that your “distractions” are totally fake. (Which they are)
• Don’t rely on other people to tell you when or whether you have enough information.
• Don’t rely on other people to define your job.
• Don’t rely on other people to “design your lifestyle.”
• Don’t rely on other people to decide when your opinions are acceptable.
• Don’t rely on other people to tell you when you're allowed to be awesome.
• Don’t rely on other people to make you care.
• Don’t even rely on other people to tell you what you should or shouldn’t rely on.

Yes. I went there.

Because that’s the point. These hypocrisies, paradoxes, and ambiguities that people get so wound up about—that many of us are constantly (impotently) trying to resolve—cannot be resolved.

Because, yeah: all of these harrowingly unsolvable problems are immune to new notebooks and less-distracting applications and shinier systems and “nicer” self-“help” and pretty much anything else that is not, specifically, you walking straight into the angriest and least convenient shitstorm you can find and getting your ass kicked until the storm gets bored with kicking it.

Then, you find an even angrier storm. Then, another. And, so on.

“Get the fuck off of my obstacle, Private Pyle!”

Doing that annoying hard stuff is how you grow, get better, and learn what real help looks like. Even if that’s not the answer you wanted to hear. You get better by getting your ass out of your RSS reader and fucking making things until they suck less. Not by buying apps.

You don’t whine about distractions, or derail yourself over needing a nicer pencil sharpener, or aggravate your chronic creative diabetes by starting another desperate waddle to the self-help buffet. No. You work.

And, for what it’s worth, just like you can’t get to the moon by eating cheese, you'll also never leave boot camp with your original scrote intact by telling your drill sergeant to try using more honey than vinegar.

No. That sergeant’s job is to make you miserable. It’s his job to break down your callow conceits about what’s supposed to be easy and fair. It’s his job to emotionally pummel you into giving up and becoming a Marine.

You? You're not there to give the sergeant notes; you're there to sleep two hours a night, then not mind getting beaten for 20 hours until a decent Marine starts to fall out.

Who knows? He may even surprise you by introducing a surprisingly effective “distraction-free learning environment.”

“Tee ell dee ahr, Professor Brainiac.”

Like most humans, I like things I can understand. Like most readers, I love specificity. Like most thinkers, I love clarity. Like most students, I love relevance and practicality. And, like most busy people, believe it or not, I actually do really like it when someone gets straight to the point.

But, here’s the problem. If my 2-year-old daughter asks me about time travel, and I blithely announce, “E=mc²”, I will have said something that is entirely specific, clear, relevant, practical, and/or straight-to-the-point. For somebody.

But, not so much for my daughter. And, to be honest, not even to any useful degree for me.

She'd probably either laugh derisively at me (which she’s great at), or she'd pause and ask, “Whuh dat?” (which she’s even better at).

Thing is, her understanding that jumble of characters less than me—and my understanding it WAY less than Professor Al—has zero impact on the profundity, truth, beauty, or impact of the man’s theory.

Sure. You could quite accurately fault me for being a smartass and a poseur, and you could even berate my toddler for her unaccountably shallow understanding of Modern Physics. But, in any case, you can’t really blame either Albert or his theory.

You're turbocharging nothing

Specifically, Albert can’t begin to tell us what he really knows if we don’t understand math.

So, let’s say this theory you've been hearing about really interests you. And, let’s also pretend, just for the sake of the analogy, that you haven’t completed Calculus III (212) or Quantum Mechanics (403) or even something as elementary as, say, Advanced Astrophysics II (537). I know you have. Obviously. But, let’s pretend. Where do you start?

Well, you could read some tips about learning math. You could find a list of 500 indispensable resources for indispensable math resources. You could buy a new “distraction-free math environment.” Heck, there’s actually nothing to stop you from just declaring yourself a “math expert.” Congratulations, Professor.

Thing is: you still don’t know math.

Which means you still can’t really understand the theory—no more than a pathetic Liberal Arts refugee like me or a dullard Physics ignoramus like my kid can really grok relativity.

Difference is, you will have blown a lot of time hoping that actual expertise follows non-existent effort—while my daughter and I get to remain total novices without charge. Only, we don’t get all mad at the theory as a result; a staggering number of fake math experts do.

I mean, be honest—after all that recreational non-work and make-believe dedication almost trying to kinda learn math sorta—you might actually get frustrated at how brazenly Al defies your fondness for shortcuts by continuing to rely on so many terms and proofs and blah-blah-blah that you still just don’t understand. So annoying.

You may simply decide that Albert Einstein’s a huge dick for never saying things that can be completely understood solely by scanning a headline.

EPIC EINSTEIN FAIL, amirite?

You never really know what you didn’t know until you know it

But, Al just told the truth.

Problem is, Al’s truth not only requires fancy things in order to be truly understood—the more of those fancy things you take away from his truth, the less true it gets. And, by the time it’s been diluted to the point where you're comfortable that you understand it? You'd be understanding the wrong thing. Even I can understand that.

But, not one bit of any of this is Al’s fault. Al doesn’t get to control who uses, abuses, gets, or doesn’t get what he said or why it matters. Especially since he’s been dead for over fifty years.

All I know is, regardless of who has ears to hear it on a given day, it would be to Al’s credit never to mangle something important in order to get it into terms everybody’s ready to handle without actually trying.

And God bless him for never agreeing that your “distractions” to learning math are his problem.

So, yeah, if you only need to hand in a crappy 5-page paper, you could certainly Cliff’s Notes your way through Borges, Eliot, or Joyce in an afternoon, and feel like you haven’t missed a thing. Trouble is, if you did care even a little, it’s impossible to even say how much you're missing since you can’t be bothered to soldier through the source text. The text itself is the entire point.

Even the wonderfully cogent and readable layman’s explanations Einstein himself provided don’t really get to the nut, the application, and the implications of his real theory.

That all takes real math.

That “single datum of experience” matters

Sometimes, complex or difficult things stop being true when you try to make them too simple. Sometimes, you have to actually get laid to understand why people think sex is such a thing. Sometimes, you need to learn some Greek if you really want to understand The Gospel of John. And, yeah, sometimes, you're going to have to just work unbelievably hard at whatever you claim to care about before anyone can begin to help you get any better—or less “distracted”—at it.

The part I really know is what doesn’t work. Reading Penthouse Forum won’t help you CLEP out of Vaginal Intercourse 101. Watching a Rankin-Bass cartoon about the Easter Bunny will teach you very little about the intricacies of transubstantiation. And, if you can’t be troubled to care so much about your work that you reflexively force distractions away, dicking around with yet another writing application will merely aggravate the problem. Ironic, huh?

These quantum mechanics of personal productivity are rife with such frustrating “paradoxes.”

These are True Things.

Achieving expertise and doing creative work is all horribly complicated and difficult and paradoxical and frustrating and recursive and James Joyce-y—and any guide, blog, binary, guru, or “nice guy” that tries to suggest otherwise is probably giving you a complimentary colonoscopy. Do the math.

Want a new syllabus? Sure:

Run straight into your shitstorm, my friends. Reject the impulse to think about work, rather than finishing it. And, open your heart to the remote possibility that any mythology of personal failure that involves messiahs periodically arriving to make everything “easy” for you might not really be helping your work or your mental health or your long-standing addiction to using tools solely to ship new excuses.

Learn your real math, and any slide rule will suffice. Try, make, and do until you quit noticing the tools, and if you still think you need new tools, go try, make, and do more.

If you can pull off this deceptively simple and millennia-old pattern, you'll eventually find that—god by dying god—any partial truth that’s supported your treasured excuses for not working will be replaced by a no-faith-required knowledge that you're really, actually, finally getting better at something you care about.

Which is just sublimely un-distracting.

Dedication

This article is dedicated to my friend, Greg Knauss. No, he’s not the app guy–he’s just a good man who does good work, who accidentally/unintentionally helped me write this rant. He also happens to be a fella who could teach anyone a thing or two about writing with distractions. Thanks, Greg.

Landlords who are missing thousands of dollars in rent or who find their properties damaged or strewn with garbage are concerned some tenants are taking advantage of the eviction ban put in place during the pandemic.

The following article, BREAKING: 43-Yr-Old Father Of 9, Dollar Store Sec Guard, Shot DEAD While Allegedly Trying To Enforce MI Gov Whitmer’s Face Covering Exec Order, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Will the mainstream media report about the senseless death of a 43-year-old father of nine, who would have been alive today if it were not for VP wannabe, Gretchen Whitmer's executive order that forced him to respond to a customer not wearing a face mask? 

Continue reading: BREAKING: 43-Yr-Old Father Of 9, Dollar Store Sec Guard, Shot DEAD While Allegedly Trying To Enforce MI Gov Whitmer’s Face Covering Exec Order ...

In Lakeshore, it may be a little while longer before a retail cannabis store opens.

At a time when store front vacancies are growing thanks to COVID-19, a new retail cannabis store in Pillette Village is hoping to open soon.

Instead of May flowers, Manitobans in the southwest part of the province received a blanketing of snow for Mother's Day weekend.

Previous studies have shown that sphingosine kinase interacting protein (SKIP) inhibits sphingosine kinase (SK) function in fibroblasts. SK phosphorylates sphingosine producing the potent signaling molecule sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P). SKIP gene (SPHKAP) expression is silenced by hypermethylation of its promoter in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). However, why SKIP activity is silenced in primary AML cells is unclear. Here, we investigated the consequences of SKIP down-regulation in AML primary cells and the effects of SKIP re-expression in leukemic cell lines. Using targeted ultra-HPLC-tandem MS (UPLC-MS/MS), we measured sphingolipids (including S1P and ceramides) in AML and control cells. Primary AML cells had significantly lower SK activity and intracellular S1P concentrations than control cells, and SKIP-transfected leukemia cell lines exhibited increased SK activity. These findings show that SKIP re-expression enhances SK activity in leukemia cells. Furthermore, other bioactive sphingolipids such as ceramide were also down-regulated in primary AML cells. Of note, SKIP re-expression in leukemia cells increased ceramide levels 2-fold, inactivated the key signaling protein extracellular signal-regulated kinase, and increased apoptosis following serum deprivation or chemotherapy. These results indicate that SKIP down-regulation in AML reduces SK activity and ceramide levels, an effect that ultimately inhibits apoptosis in leukemia cells. The findings of our study contrast with previous results indicating that SKIP inhibits SK function in fibroblasts and therefore challenge the notion that SKIP always inhibits SK activity.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is characterized by impaired glucose-stimulated insulin secretion and increased peripheral insulin resistance. Unremitting endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress can lead to beta-cell apoptosis and has been linked to type 2 diabetes. Although many studies have attempted to link ER stress and T2DM, the specific effects of ER stress on beta-cell function remain incompletely understood. To determine the interrelationship between ER stress and beta-cell function, here we treated insulin-secreting INS-1(832/13) cells or isolated mouse islets with the ER stress–inducer tunicamycin (TM). TM induced ER stress as expected, as evidenced by activation of the unfolded protein response. Beta cells treated with TM also exhibited concomitant alterations in their electrical activity and cytosolic free Ca2+ oscillations. As ER stress is known to reduce ER Ca2+ levels, we tested the hypothesis that the observed increase in Ca2+ oscillations occurred because of reduced ER Ca2+ levels and, in turn, increased store-operated Ca2+ entry. TM-induced cytosolic Ca2+ and membrane electrical oscillations were acutely inhibited by YM58483, which blocks store-operated Ca2+ channels. Significantly, TM-treated cells secreted increased insulin under conditions normally associated with only minimal release, e.g. 5 mm glucose, and YM58483 blocked this secretion. Taken together, these results support a critical role for ER Ca2+ depletion–activated Ca2+ current in mediating Ca2+-induced insulin secretion in response to ER stress.

The 2019 Chatham House Prize is awarded to Sir David Attenborough and Julian Hector, head of BBC Studios Natural History Unit, for the galvanizing impact of the Blue Planet II series on tackling ocean plastic pollution.

N. Leigh Anderson
Nov 1, 2002; 1:845-867
Reviews/Perspectives

7 November 2019

17 February 2020

This is the second part of a two-part article on how time was perceived and measured in ancient and medieval Europe.

In the last installment of History for Fantasy Writers I addressed years, months, weeks, and days. Now I turn to shorter lengths: days, hours and still shorter periods. I’ll close with a more general consideration of time and the awareness of time.

Hours

We carve the day into twenty-four hours, but in the past the hour was a malleable thing. There were twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night, regardless of the season. The day began with zero at sunrise. Then came the first hour, the second, and so on. The twelfth hour fell at sunset. A winter daylight hour was therefore shorter than a summer hour.

This feels a little nuts at first, but it’s actually pretty sensible. At least the word midnight makes sense in that system—it’s the mid-point of the night, regardless of how long is the night. All we have to do is abandon the notion that an hour is a unit of time, to consider it as marking portions of a day.

Continue reading History for Fantasy Writers: Do You Have a Moment? at Mythic Scribes.

Banks appear in a number of fantasy stories. George Martin’s Iron Bank is probably the best known, but banks and banking families can be found all around the fantasy landscape, especially in modern works. For writers considering including banks and bankers in their own stories, knowing something of the history can help add detail and color.

Money Changers

Europe in the High Middle Ages, say around 1100, had a bewildering variety of coinage (see my article on medieval money), a crazy cobweb of overlapping public authority, and an unreliable network of roads. Banking arose in response to the need of merchants to conduct large-scale business at a distance in that environment.

As you might guess, with so many different coins, knowing how to convert from one currency to another was a fairly technical business. That business was handled by a money changer. In Florence and other north Italian towns, the money changers set up shop at markets and near merchant establishments—any place where there was plenty of commercial traffic. The benches they sat on are called banca in Italian. That’s where we get the term bank.

Money changers knew more than just how to convert currencies.

Continue reading History for Fantasy Writers: Bank on It at Mythic Scribes.

DL Brasaemle
Nov 1, 1997; 38:2249-2263
Articles

6 May 2020

Invitation Only Research Event

Event participants

Richard King, Senior Research Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources Department, Chatham House
Chair: Duncan Brack, Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources Department, Chatham House

29 January 2020

Policymakers are in danger of sleepwalking into ineffective carbon dioxide removal solutions in the quest to tackle climate change. This paper warns against overreliance on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). 

Aos primeiros sinais de visão embaçada, as hipóteses mais frequentes sempre são miopia, astigmatismo, hipermetropia. Mas esses sintomas podem indicar outra doença ocular chamada ceratocone - uma deformidade progressiva da córnea, que assume o formato...

The post Visão embaçada e distorcida nem sempre é miopia: fique atento aos sinais do ceratocone appeared first on Saúde Próspera.

Storm surge is often the most devastating part of a hurricane. Mathematical models used to predict surge must incorporate the effects of winds, atmospheric pressure, tides, waves and river flows, as well as the geometry and topography of the coastal ocean and the adjacent floodplain. Equations from fluid dynamics describe the movement of water, but most often such huge systems of equations need to be solved by numerical analysis in order to better forecast where potential flooding will occur. Much of the detailed geometry and topography on or near a coast require very fine precision to model, while other regions such as large open expanses of deep water can typically be solved with much coarser resolution. So using one scale throughout either has too much data to be feasible or is not very predictive in the area of greatest concern, the coastal floodplain. Researchers solve this problem by using an unstructured grid size that adapts to the relevant regions and allows for coupling of the information from the ocean to the coast and inland. The model was very accurate in tests of historical storms in southern Louisiana and is being used to design better and safer levees in the region and to evaluate the safety of all coastal regions. For More Information: A New Generation Hurricane Storm Surge Model for Southern Louisiana, by Joannes Westerink et al.

Archimedes was one of the most brilliant people ever, on a par with Einstein and Newton. Yet very little of what he wrote still exists because of the passage of time, and because many copies of his works were erased and the cleaned pages were used again. One of those written-over works (called a palimpsest) has resurfaced, and advanced digital imaging techniques using statistics and linear algebra have revealed his previously unknown discoveries in combinatorics and calculus. This leads to a question that would stump even Archimedes: How much further would mathematics and science have progressed had these discoveries not been erased? One of the most dramatic revelations of Archimedes. work was done using X-ray fluorescence. A painting, forged in the 1940s by one of the book.s former owners, obscured the original text, but X-rays penetrated the painting and highlighted the iron in the ancient ink, revealing a page of Archimedes. treatise The Method of Mechanical Theorems. The entire process of uncovering this and his other ideas is made possible by modern mathematics and physics, which are built on his discoveries and techniques. This completion of a circle of progress is entirely appropriate since one of Archimedes. accomplishments that wasn.t lost is his approximation of pi. For More Information: The Archimedes Codex, Reviel Netz and William Noel, 2007.

Archimedes was one of the most brilliant people ever, on a par with Einstein and Newton. Yet very little of what he wrote still exists because of the passage of time, and because many copies of his works were erased and the cleaned pages were used again. One of those written-over works (called a palimpsest) has resurfaced, and advanced digital imaging techniques using statistics and linear algebra have revealed his previously unknown discoveries in combinatorics and calculus. This leads to a question that would stump even Archimedes: How much further would mathematics and science have progressed had these discoveries not been erased? One of the most dramatic revelations of Archimedes. work was done using X-ray fluorescence. A painting, forged in the 1940s by one of the book.s former owners, obscured the original text, but X-rays penetrated the painting and highlighted the iron in the ancient ink, revealing a page of Archimedes. treatise The Method of Mechanical Theorems. The entire process of uncovering this and his other ideas is made possible by modern mathematics and physics, which are built on his discoveries and techniques. This completion of a circle of progress is entirely appropriate since one of Archimedes. accomplishments that wasn.t lost is his approximation of pi. For More Information: The Archimedes Codex, Reviel Netz and William Noel, 2007.

euromicron AG, a medium-sized technology group and specialist for networking business and production processes, has taken on Funkwerk AG, Kölleda, as a strategic anchor investor. Funkwerk AG is a leading provider of innovative communication, information and security systems and intends to acquire a total of up to around 28% of euromicron AG’s increased share capital following the implementation of the resolved capital measures.

Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve is one of China's most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than five million visitors per year to the sparsely populated mountains of north-western Sichuan. The reserve has been home to farmer-herders for thousands of years, but to conserve the biodiversity and scenic quality of the reserve, park policies prohibit residents from farming, herding and wood cutting.

Ordinary citizens felt like they had been sold a bill of goods. They were right to feel conned.

http://www.biodiversityislife.net/