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New insights into asteroid properties: A STEP Grant update

A Planetary Society-funded project to understand asteroids achieved its main goals and scientific objectives this year.




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Cloudy skies, smooth sailing

A Martian cloud atlas, LightSail wins big, and multiple missions coast toward launch.




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Twinsies!

Asteroids that come in pairs, matching volcanic features on Mars and Earth, and the potential space policies of two administrations.




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Barbour Ladies Pendle Beanie & Scarf Gift Set




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The Armies march to Partizan

The last Dwarf base done just in time for the big weekend. It's the Other Partizan show this weekend and I'll be there with my armies. So if you fancy seeing a massive Hobbit battle...pop along.

The battle will be fought using the new Midguard rules by James Morris. It proves to be a great Sunday especially if you're a Tolkien fan.

Today I have collect everything together and pack it as best I can to stop any travel casualties. I have always painted my figures to play at home so have never magnetised them onto metal sheets.

 I'm going to rely on nonslip matting and bubble wrap to get them there...I'm planned for a few accidents by hopefully, touch wood, all will be okay. It's been a lot of last minute painting but I'm looking forward to it.

Most of these Dwarves are old sculpts from Nick Lund.
That Reaper figure jumped the painting que and made the last company to leave the Iron Hills.

A couple of last minute Bolg bodyguard bases. I had planned to do more but time caught up with me. At least all the important stuff is done, like Beorn and the Eagles.
A coat of gloss on weapon edges and armour helps to catch the eye on the metal work. Dwarves are master smiths after all, their armour and weapons would be of high quality.

 Come along on Sunday it would be nice to see you.



Finally the two meet, Bolg and bigger Beorn.
My old Beorn figure is dwarfed by the new addition. The new bear has a lot more presence to him and should look the part on Sunday.



  • lord Of The Rings
  • lord Of The Rings.

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The Battle of the Five Armies at Partizan.

well...what a bloody marvellous couple of days I've just had. Taking all my figures to a show for the first time was a little nerve racking, but the effort really paid off. I had an excellent time and met some great new friends too in the process.
The board and mountain were excellent too, crafted by the talented James Morris. I had never deployed my whole army in one go before, so what better time to do it than on a set up like this. Everything seemed to come together perfectly.
I started my battle with the orcs at the bottom of the hill advancing across the mountain river. However, due to my terrible dice rolling and the luck of the Elves, I was cut and shot to pieces. It wasn't long before my tattered ranks were tumbling back through the freezing water. The Elves just had time to redress their lines before another dark wave of Goblin folk arrived.
I love the walled up gate that James made, the little gaps in the stonework were perfect. It really reminded me of one of Alan Lees illustrations. Also a very clever use of silver fabric for the river...very effective!

The Eagles arrived later in the game and swept the Goblins from the mountain sides. The game was masterfully run by David Hunter, who made sure the flo was just right.
My Eagles looked very realistic on the slopes of the mountain too, better than I had hoped for. The extra poses were well worth collecting over the last ten years. The flying ones on stands were a very recent purchase and they really stood out.
The game in full flo, it drew a big crowd and it was great to talk figures with people. A lot of people wanted to know where I got my Orcs from and of course the answer was...everywhere. Also the amount of plastic model kits used was very hard to calculate. Just about every Dark age and Fantasy box set all mashed up and mixed together.



I love my Wood elves after lovingly creating each one individually and got a huge buzz from seeing them in action. I didn't really care they were cutting my forces to ribbons, just seeing them used in anger was enough for me.
Hordes of Goblins still plagued the mountainside, their numbers were too much even for the Eagles.
Thorin was cut down by Bolg's bodyguard as he tried to cut through their great shields. Bard of Laketown too, fell to the hacking Goblin blades. Dain of the Iron hills was holding his own but was badly wounded. At last it seemed like the Free people's luck had run out. 
Then with a roar like a thunderclap Beorn burst onto the scene. He tore through the Goblin ranks and made his way to Bolg. Approaching the rear of Bolg's bodyguard he shattered their formation.

It was at this point the Orc's morale was lost and the game was called. The rules were James' new Midguard ones and were perfect for this Dark age epic clash of men and monsters.

I had a great couple of days and it was a real treat to get out and do something exciting like this. To my amazement I didn't suffer any spear snaps of breakages and everything survived intacted. I was expecting a few casualties and had even taken a little repair kit but didn't need it.

Dain's Iron hills Dwarves push the Goblins from the ridge, supported by a group of Lake men.
An earlier shot of the swirl of battle.
The nine Black riders with their Dark lord 
My beloved Silvan elves holding their own against ravaging wolf packs.

I said it once, I'll say it again, what a bloody marvellous couple of days!

 I'm sure I'll have some more pictures soon to post on here of the day...
 




  • lord Of The Rings
  • lord Of The Rings.
  • War games

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The Battle of the Five Armies



 Here's a shot of James Morris' Lonely mountain with the only missing element...thousands of blood drinking bats. 



  • lord Of The Rings
  • lord Of The Rings.

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"Dragons of Paris" and the Role of Time in the Mongolian Wizard Series

 .

The kind people at Reactor Magazine have posted my two latest Mongolian Wizard stories, one yesterday and the other today. Thursday's "Halcyon Afternoon" took place during a rare moment of peace for Franz-Karl Ritter. But in today's "Dragons of Paris," it's warfare as usual. 

Time has always been a little tricky in this series. The first story was clearly set in the Nineteenth Century but, though only a few years have passed, the series has now reached what is recognizably World War I. Mostly this occurred for reasons explained in "The Phantom in the Maze" and "Murder in the Spook House." (And which I anticipate giving me increasing difficulties in writing the next ten stories.) But also, in a more literary background sense, I wanted to cover the transition from a way of life now alien to us to something more modern, if not contemporary. 

So time may get a bit more slippery in the future. That's if, of course, the stories go in the direction I intend. Sometimes the fiction has its own ideas where it wants to go and the author can only follow along meekly in its wake.

You can read the story here. Or just go to the ezine and poke around. It's a good place to poke around.


Above: The illustration is by Dave Palumbo. I'm grateful for that.


*





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Bev Priestman fired as Canada women's soccer coach after Olympic drone scandal

Canada women's soccer coach Bev Priestman has been fired after an independent review of a drone surveillance scandal at the Paris Olympics




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Joey Logano 1-on-1: Winning Cup Series championship is 'electric'

Joey Logano sat down with FOX Sports to discuss the wild pace-car wreck, the playoff format and the feeling of winning the title at Phoenix.




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Deion Sanders says he’ll intervene if ‘wrong' NFL team tries to draft son Shedeur

Coach Prime tells the "Speak" crew how he plans to handle the NFL draft process with quarterback son, Shedeur, and two-way star Travis Hunter.




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Champions Classic: Hunter Dickinson leads Kansas past MSU; Kentucky rallies past Duke

Hunter Dickson led No. 1 Kansas to an impressive win over Michigan State, while Mark Pope aced his first big test as Kentucky's head coach.




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You Could See Whole Other Galaxies




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This Bizarre Instagram Account Inserts Donald Trump Into Your Favorite Movies

Trump In Cinema is dedicated to displaying some of movie history's best moments with Donald Trump at the center of them. Some of these photoshops are too perfect. Others as just... troubling.




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The Funniest Protest Signs By People Who Think Trump's Presidency Is a Terrible Mistake

These people are not afraid to carry on hilarious protest signs and tell the world what they really think of Donald Trump's Presidency. Via: Sad and useless  




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Trump's 'TREASON?' Tweet Is Inspiring Some Pretty Clever Parodies

Recently Donald Trump tweeted the word "TREASON?" in light of the New York Times op ed that was published on Wednesday. The article was supposedly written by someone within the Trump Administration, calling themselves part of the "resistance." 

After Trump's "treason" tweet, people on Twitter began making their own amusing parodies, which you can read below!




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NFPA and ESFI work to reduce fatalities caused by electric shock drowning in pools and at marinas

With summer in full swing, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and Electrical Safety Foundation International (ESFI) are joining forces to remind people about the potential electrical hazards in swimming pools, hot tubs and spas, on board boats and in the waters surrounding boats, marinas and launch ramps.




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Fire chiefs share lessons learned from recent high profile emergencies including hurricanes, hi-rise fires and hostile shooting incidents at the Urban Fire Forum

Fire chiefs from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States gathered in Quincy, Massachusetts at the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Urban Fire Forum (UFF) to listen to first-hand accounts of some of the biggest emergency response incidents over the past 15 months, including hurricane response in Texas and Florida, the Grenfell Tower fire in London, and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando.




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CC strategic workshop reveals big opportunities for open access to cultural heritage

In May 2024, CC organized a strategic workshop in Lisbon to develop a roadmap for future action to advance our work towards a UNESCO instrument on open cultural heritage. In this blog post, we share the full report and some of its key highlights.

The post CC strategic workshop reveals big opportunities for open access to cultural heritage appeared first on Creative Commons.




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Apple’s AI notification summaries are unintentionally hilarious

What’s worse than getting broken up with over text? Getting broken up with over summarized text. Apple rolled out its Apple Intelligence suite of AI tools in October, and one feature has made headlines over and over again for its absurdity: Apple Intelligence notification summaries. What it is:…




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China's CATL pushes beyond batteries into power grids, EV platforms

Robin Zeng, the billionaire founder of CATL , aims to reinvent the world’s largest battery maker as a green-energy provider and to slash the cost of developing electric vehicles, upending the economics of the industry that has powered its growth.




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Exclusive-Chinese giant CATL pushes beyond batteries into power grids, EV platforms

Robin Zeng, the billionaire founder of CATL, aims to reinvent the world’s largest battery maker as a green-energy provider and to slash the cost of developing electric vehicles, upending the economics of the industry that has powered its growth. Zeng told Reuters in an interview that he expects…




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Should You Buy This Millionaire-Maker Stock Instead of Palantir Technologies?

There may not be a hotter stock on Wall Street right now than Palantir Technologies. The company's artificial intelligence (AI) software is revving its growth engine, and there is a wide-open market opportunity in both government and the private sector. The stock is up approximately 800% since the…




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A look at Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, which Alibaba claims to match GPT-4o's coding capabilities and is small enough to run on a MacBook Pro M2 with 64GB of RAM

Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is an LLM that can code well that runs on my Mac 12th November 2024 There’s a whole lot of buzz around the new Qwen2.5-Coder Series of open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) LLM releases from Alibaba’s Qwen research team. On first impression it looks like the buzz is well…




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Trump's return presents opportunities for China

Cao Xin is a senior researcher at The Charhar Institute, a Beijing-based think tank. I had the opportunity to observe the American presidential election on the morning of Nov. 6 (China time) at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. For China, the world's second-largest economy, Donald Trump's victory…




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Posting Fake Reviews For Companies on Services or Products

Driving more reviews to your profile for a local listing has always been a great way and still is a great way to increase your local listing visibility. The problem with this is when people started trying to game the system by posting fake reviews. Some companies were posting so many reviews that Google had […]




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Duplicated Web Content – Google Authorship and Article Directories

The Role of Google Authorship If you are the author of the article, can Google tell the difference when using article submission services? The facts point to no at this point, but there are more and more sites starting to follow the same authorship standard and business site verification standards. With authorship being more common […]




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NVIDIA Announces Indiana Jones and the Great Circle GeForce RTX 40 Series Bundle

Until December 29th, as part of our Indiana Jones and the Great Circle GeForce RTX 40 Series Bundle, get the Digital Premium Edition of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (a $99.99 value) with the purchase of a qualifying GeForce RTX 4090, 4080 SUPER, 4080, 4070 Ti SUPER, 4070 Ti, 4070 SUPER, or 4070 desktop or graphics card, or laptop with a GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, RTX 4080 Laptop GPU, RTX 4070 Laptop GPU.

The post NVIDIA Announces Indiana Jones and the Great Circle GeForce RTX 40 Series Bundle appeared first on ThinkComputers.org.




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How galaxies make their rotation curves flat and what about dark matter?

The rotation curves of disc galaxies are flat and dark matter is speculated as explanation. Alternatively, the gravity of material disk could explain the flat curves. Using the gravitational force that a disk exerts on a body in the disk, we have computed the the rotation curves of disc galaxies and the curve of their...




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The Easiest Hair Styling




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Diaries of Note

Dear all, On 1st January of this year, after what feels like centuries of preparation, I launched Diaries of Note, and though incredibly difficult to plan, the premise is simple: every single day, on the Diaries of Note website, I am featuring a single diary entry from history, published on the same day and month




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Monorail Kitties: The Proud Origin







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Don't Put Lies In The Newspaper

This was nonsense at the time (2022), but more importantly you can imagine what other nonsense Jeremy Peters - and his editors - believe.






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Introducing a New Species: My Namesake, a New Bone-Eating Worm

Osedax worms, or the ‘bone eating’ worms are little soft sacks resembling snotty little flowers. The “bone devourer” is not quite accurate as the worms…

The post Introducing a New Species: My Namesake, a New Bone-Eating Worm first appeared on Deep Sea News.




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What helps women who have learning disabilities get checked for cervical cancer?

This is a paper produced as part of the PROP2 (Practitioner Research: Outcomes and Partnership) programme, a partnership between the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) at the University of Edinburgh and IRISS that was about health and social care in Scotland. This paper was written by Elaine Monteith from ENABLE Scotland who participated in the PROP2 programme. What this research paper explores: All women are asked to go to the doctor every few years to get a check for cancer but women who have a learning disability don’t go for these checks as often as other women. The paper explore what barriers there are for women attending for checks and also looks at what could be done to encourage women them to attend.




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Resilience and wellbeing in people living with dementia in relation to perceived attitudes in their communities

This is a paper produced as part of the PROP2 (Practitioner Research: Outcomes and Partnership) programme, a partnership between the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) at the University of Edinburgh and Iriss that was about health and social care in Scotland. This paper was written by Geraldine Ditta from Alzheimer Scotland who participated in the PROP2 programme. People living with dementia are at risk of becoming socially isolated and disconnected from their local communities. Reactions from others on being told someone has dementia can have a significant impact on the person with dementia’s sense of self. This study sought to explore the perceptions of people with dementia in relation to attitudes within their communities and how they subsequently respond. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to examine how they feel about their lives with dementia.




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Scottish Consortium for Learning Disabilities (SCLD)

SCLD brings together some of the most respected practitioners and thinkers from across the learning disability sector who work alongside people who have learning disabilities and their families and carers.The team at SCLD is focused on delivering real change through influencing policy, identifying and sharing evidence and good practice and challenging public attitudes. SCLD aims to be a knowledge hub – offering support, information and new ideas about learning disability in Scotland.




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British Institute of Learning Disabilities

British Institute of Learning Disabilities services help develop the organisations who provide services, and the people who give support.




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Fox Business Tries In Vain To Defend Trump's Crazy Tariff Plans

Fox Business host Charles Payne and contributor Steve Moore did their best to soft-peddle the damage Trump's cringeworthy plan of tariffs would have to the US economy but still came up short.

Payne, subbing for Neil Cavuto, went back to a US history that is no longer relevant to us to prop up the idea of tariffs.

PAYNE: How does President Trump plan to convince his fellow Republicans that this is the right way to go?

MOORE: Well, there's two issues here, Charles.

One is how do we make his landmark 2017 tax bill permanent, because as you know, if no action is taken this year, a lot of that tax bill expires and the average family would pay about $2,500 more in taxes and it would hurt our businesses.

This is what the 2%ers and corporations want more than life itself. Letting these tax cuts expire won't hurt anybody. It makes it harder for the rich to fiddle with their tax returns.

Now comes the rub. This is where their clucking begins.

MOORE: And then, of course, there's the secondary issue about the tariffs that Trump has been talking about. Now, maybe, I'm just thinking out loud here, Charles, and I've talked to some of the top economic advisors that have worked with me in the Trump campaign, we could maybe mix these two and use tariffs as a way to pay for some of these tax cuts.

read more




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Mysteries Revealed

"People in the media are aware of how illegitimately they've done their jobs that they think they're on the verge of being locked up" —Scott Adams




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3 Heartwarming Stories



  • FTW! (For the Win!)

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Forced to Carry: The Reality of Rape-Related Pregnancies in a Post-Roe World

Photo by freestocks The issue of rape-related pregnancies is a crucial yet often-overlooked aspect of the broader debate surrounding abortion access. As more states implement strict abortion bans, the implications for survivors of sexual violence become increasingly severe and far-reaching. When Hadley Duvall was just 12 years old, she was raped and impregnated by her stepfather. […]

The post Forced to Carry: The Reality of Rape-Related Pregnancies in a Post-Roe World appeared first on Feminist Majority Foundation.




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CALL FOR NOMINATIONS: The 2020 Theszies (rec.sport.pro-wrestling awards)

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2020 Theszie Awards (the rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards). To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by January 3, 2021. Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2019, here for 2018, here for 2017, here for 2016, here for 2015, here […]



  • Interactive Fun Time Party
  • The RSPW Awards / The Theszies
  • Wrestling

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CALL FOR VOTES: the 2020 Theszies (rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards)

(Sorry for the delay: we had a record number of nominations to plow through – over 250 in most categories!) This is the Call for Votes for the 2020 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here. The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite […]



  • Interactive Fun Time Party
  • The RSPW Awards / The Theszies
  • THIS-IS-AWE-SOME (clapclapclapclapclap)
  • Wrestling

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CALL FOR NOMINATIONS: The 2021 rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards (the Theszies)

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2021 Theszie Awards (the rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards). (Look, I started a new job late last year and my December was slammed. Sorry for the delay.) To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by January 28, 2021. Finally, to see previous years’ […]



  • Interactive Fun Time Party
  • The RSPW Awards / The Theszies
  • Wrestling

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20 Overlooked Movies That Are Some of the Best Ever

By Amanda Mannen Published: November 10th, 2024