1. ICMR partners with Bharat Biotech International Limited for developing indigenous coronavirus COVID-19 vacc...  Zee News
2. Bharat Biotech to lead monoclonal antibodies project for Covid-19 therapy  The Financial Express
3. Bharat Biotech to lead project on monoclonal antibodies therapy for COVID-19  The New Indian Express
4. ICMR teams up with Bharat Biotech to develop Covid-19 vaccine  Times of India
5. CSIR approves project to develop human monoclonal antibodies that can neutralize COVID-19 in patients  Times Now
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Happy birthday Sai Pallavi: 4 times the actress redefined female superstar tag  Onmanorama
2. Birthday Special! Sai Pallavi is the epitome of elegance and grace in sarees. PHOTOS  Times of India
3. Happy Birthday Sai Pallavi: 5 Instagram Pictures Of The Actress You Can’t Miss  News18
4. Happy birthday Sai Pallavi: A powerhouse performer  Deccan Herald
5. Sai Pallavi birthday: Rana Daggubati, Naga Chaitanya and others send wishes  The Indian Express
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Trump admin working to temporarily ban work-based visas: Report  Top Live News
2. US lawmakers want H-1B visas and foreign students internship suspended to protect American jobs  Times of India
3. US likely to temporarily ban work-based visas like H-1B due to rise in unemployment  Zee News
4. US Mulls Temporary Ban on Work Visas Amid Unemployment: Reports  The Quint
5. 5 US lawmakers ask Trump to suspend new H-1B visas  The Tribune India
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Covid-19 Delhi latest figures- 224 new cases take capital’s total to 8,630, India tally at 59,662  Hindustan Times
2. Confusion over Delhi's Covid-19 toll as govt data, figures from hospitals don't match  Times of India
3. 3 More Private Hospitals To Treat COVID-19 Patients In Delhi  NDTV
4. Delhi Covid-19 tally tops 6,000 with 338 new cases in last 24 hours  Livemint
5. 100 rooms in Delhi's five-star hotels now hospitals  Times of India
6. View Full coverage on Google News

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

ICMR teams up with Bharat Biotech to develop COVID-19 vaccine  The Financial ExpressView Full coverage on Google News

Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory

2018 by Brendan Fong and David I. Spivak

Category theory is becoming a central hub for all of pure mathematics. It is unmatched in its ability to organize and layer abstractions, to find commonalities between structures of all sorts, and to facilitate communication between different mathematical communities. But it has also been branching out into science, informatics, and industry. We believe that it has the potential to be a major cohesive force in the world, building rigorous bridges between disparate worlds, both theoretical and practical. The motto at MIT is mens et manus, Latin for mind and hand. We believe that category theory—and pure math in general—has stayed in the realm of mind for too long; it is ripe to be brought to hand.

A very approachable but useful introduction to category theory. It avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of becoming incomprehensible after page 2 (as many academic texts do), and barely scratching the surface (as many popular texts do).

1. Viroloog Marion Koopmans: 'Als het misgaat, hebben we echt een megaprobleem'  AD.nl
2. Ook Nederlandse viroloog verwacht tweede coronagolf | Buitenland | Nieuws  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. Viroloog: “Nieuwe coronagolf verwacht, alles staat of valt met hoe we ons gedragen”  Oog TV
4. BLIJF BANG! Viroloog Marion Koopmans waarschuwt: 'Die tweede coronavirus-golf komt er'  De Dagelijkse Standaard
5. Viroloog: 'Er komt een tweede coronagolf die mogelijk nog krachtiger is dan de eerste'  ThePostOnline
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Turkse recepten tegen virus laten meer vrijheid toe  De Standaard

Man die fietspad bezaait met prikkeldraad, spijkers en glas praat zichzelf aan de galg tegen visser die stiekem filmt  Het Laatste Nieuws

Stranger Still Michaelbrent Collings Written Insomnia Press, 2020 Reviewed by Andrew Byers Stranger Still is a stand-alone sequel to Michaelbrent Collings’ horror thriller Strangers, which I reviewed way back in 2013. I enjoyed Strangers a lot, so was very pleasantly surprised to find that after this long hiatus, Collings had returned to that world. In […]

The Best of Both Worlds S.P. Miskowski Trepidatio Publishing May 1, 2020 Reviewed by Elaine Pascale  The Best of Both Worlds is a sequel to The Worst is Yet to Come in the sense that the plot runs parallel and the characters’ story arcs intersect in subtle yet important ways. The Best of Both Worlds […]

Marianne Porter's nanopress imprint, Dragonstiars Press,  has just announced its latest chapbook!

The Devil's Bestiary, a dark, brooding, and occasionally scabrous piece of fun composed by your truly, will be made available for purchase tomorrow, Thursday April 9, at noon Philadelphia Time (that's 4 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time) at the Dragonstairs Press website, www.dragonstairs.com.

But not a minute before then.

Here's the official announcement:

The Devil's Bestiary is Michael Swanwick's cynical,whimsical take on twenty nine creatures of myth and fables.  It is 5 ½ inch square format, with an outer wrapper of hand-dyed kozo paper, hand-stitched, numbered, and signed by the author.  It is published in a limited edition of 45, of which 40 are available for sale.   

The signed and very limited edition chapbook will go for $12 in the USA and $14 elsewhere, postage included. (When I tell Marianne she's not charging enough, she just glares at me.)  Which means that it will sell out pretty much immediately.

It's a lovely thing and I'm proud, as the content provider, to own a copy.


And rather than buy a pig in a poke with a blind horse . . .

Here are a couple of typical entries from The Devil's Bestiary:


Today he’s the picture of affluence. Respectable people pay extremely well for his services, for he returns the remains of their loved ones to the earth in the most environmentally responsible way imaginable.


Those, at the low-rez pic above, should tell you right away whether you need a copy or not.

Over on Facebook, Samuel R. Delany, answering a question in a post, offered the best and most succinct writing advice anyone has ever codified. Here, in its entirety, it is:

Writing advice: Read and reread. Think of a story you have never read but wish you had; then write it as carefully as you can. Finish it, and send it around till it's published.

The third sentence, as Chip noted at the time, was a condensation of advice that Robert A. Heinlein offered. So what you have above is the combined wisdom of two of the greatest careers science fiction has ever seen.

I could unpack that brief paragraph at enormous length. But, honestly, there's no need. You read it and you understood it. Now you only have to live it.


Above: The photo by James Hamilton was lifted from The Nation, where it illustrated a typically thoughtful and enlightened interview with Chip. You can find it here.

My Subterranean Press collection, The Postmodern Adventuers of Darger and Surplus,  has received quite a splendid review for Locus by Gary K. Wolfe, which has now been posted on Locus Online. Darger and Surplus are, as you probably know, gentlemen grifters in the future civilization that rises from the ashes of our own, after a failed revolution by the Artificial Intelligences we are currently hard at work creating. Humanity mostly won that war and the demons and mad gods were banished to a subterranean infrastructure too widespread and well-defended to be rooted out. But, as a result, the mechanical sciences have languished while the biological ones thrive.

All this is spelled out in the review more entertainingly than I have put it here. I encourage you to read it.

Meanwhile, here's the pull-quote I'd grab from the review if I were the sort of person who did that sort of thing:

As those Hugo voters apparently recognized nearly 20 years ago, Darger and Surplus not only join the small company of SF’s classic rogues, but the world they occupy is as complex, detailed, and morally chaotic as we’ve come to expect from the best of Swanwick’s fiction.

You can find the review in its glorious entirety here. Or you can just go to locusmag.com and poke around. Bot Locus and Locus Online make for informative, enjoyable reading


And as long as you're there . . .

Like everything else, Locus is feeling the financial stress of the lockdown. If you can afford it, and if you, like me, value the publication, consider contributing a little toward its survival.

The solution is not to scold drivers but to make structural solutions.

  I must confess: I was tempted to write a column along the lines of “Yes, it’s a war on the car, and it’s a just war!” But we don’t need a war on the car. What we need is an intervention. We need a serious conversation about our collective, structural addiction to this substance, […]

The post Our addiction to driving is costing lives, and more appeared first on Torontoist.

For those who care about data, the City’s new Open Data Master Plan is about to change everything.

One Saturday afternoon earlier this month, more than 100 people gathered at the Toronto Public Library for an annual gathering called CodeAcross, the city’s annual open data and civic tech event. This year, the theme was the Future of Work. One of the challenges centred on the City of Toronto’s freshly approved Open Data Master […]

The post Civic Tech: Hackers! To Your Stations! appeared first on Torontoist.

Divestment is “more urgent” in Toronto than NYC

A growing list of large institutional investors around the world – state and provincial pension funds, university endowments, and most recently, New York City itself, have been aggressively divesting from fossil fuel investments so as to do their part in mitigating against climate change. Here in Toronto, it’s been a different story. Prominent institutional investors, […]

The post Habitat: Environmentalists eye city’s investment policies appeared first on Torontoist.

Why all the secrecy?

If you follow the news in Toronto or if you’re interested in technology, you’ve probably heard of Sidewalk Toronto by now. It’s a joint project of Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, and Waterfront Toronto. This is the tech giant’s first foray into urban development and infrastructure, with Toronto hosting the pilot project. In […]

The post Civic Tech: We tried to get a copy of the Sidewalk Toronto agreement appeared first on Torontoist.

From the submitter:

So I get up today and the kids are up before me watching TV. That's fine, it Sunday, got to sleep in, figured I go check my email and puts around online for a few. Later I go into the living room, to turn the TV so I can start watching Game highlights before the Super Bowl, but can not find the remote. I mean I searched everywhere. The usual places... In the couch cushions, under the couch, behind the couch and behind the TV.... nowhere to be found.

First off welcome to my site The Razors Edge. If you've been to this site before you were probably expecting to find my old website which delt with post apocalyptic survival. I've decided to do a complete overhaul including the content. Now this site deals with topics such as basic SEO tips ( Search Engine Optimization ) for those new to creating websites and blogs, movie reviews, general tips and advice, videos, and anything and everything in-between. Basically same name completly different taste

About a week ago I rented this movie, now if you’ve been watching any new movies over the last couple of months you’ve probably seen the trailer for this movie. If your like me you probably thought to yourself “Hey this looks pretty sweet, it looks like there’s going to be lots of hacking and slashing and all that fun stuff”

Finding work, it's something we all have to do at some point. Given the state of recent events with the economy, finding a job can be even more frustrating and time consuming. So when your resume is looked at by a potential employer, and they call you in for an interview you want to give them every reason to make them think you're the right person for the job. Below I've listed some things to consider for the next time you're going in for a job interview

Today I watched two movies The Last Exorcism and Case 39. Here are my thoughts and review of both movies.

YouTube and other video sharing sites like Vimeo for example are great places to get traffic to your website or blog. But there only as effective as the traffic those video receive, makes sense right. Obviously if your vides are getting next to no hits, your website will see little to no increase in traffic, which in a word sucks. So for this post I'm going to go over some simple steps you can use if your new to YouTube to help get your videos noticed. In the next post I'll cover some ways you can take those videos and use them to get traffic back to your site.

First off what is a favicon? If you look at the browser bar on this webpage just before the sites URL address is a small picture. When it comes to helping make your website or blog stand out there a huge benefit. They allow your readers to find your web pages easily if they have many browser windows and tabs open at once. If a visitor bookmarks your site in their favourites list the standard “e” icon is replaced by your picture helping your link stand out from the rest so they can return to visit. And they can also be used to help brand your site. Who would have thought a tiny 16x16 picture could help that much.

How to get your YouTube videos to auto play on your website Depending on your site having your videos auto play can help your site stand out. When it comes to embedding your videos from YouTube however there’s no feature to set up your video to auto play. It’s important to remember before you enable auto play on your videos that doing so can actually harm your site. Many people don’t like videos or music playing as soon as they open a page, especially if there’s no way to turn it off that’s easy to spot. Look at your site to see if this is something that you want to do.

When it comes to getting traffic to your website, one of the ways that is commonly talked about is writing and submitting articles to sites such as Ezine Articles, or Article Base. These types of sites provide one way back links related your topic with the objective of driving targeted traffic to your website.

For this video I chose the song So Cold by Breaking Benjamin which was inspired by the movie 28 Days Later. I thought this would be a good match since the Robocop movies take place in the not to distant future where cooperate greed and decay are running rampant.

One of the ways to get people to notice your site is to comment on other blogs and websites. The benefits of leaving good comments are that you not only get to add your two cents about a topic, you can also gain valuable links pointing to your site. Sounds easy right, and for the most part it is, but when selecting blogs or websites to comment on you need to consider some things. First try to find sites related to your niche, while you can comment on any site you want you stand a better chance of getting traffic from that site if it’s a related site. You also want these sites if possible to be on the number one page of Google for keywords you’re trying to rank for

Leaving comments on blogs and websites. It doesn’t matter if the site is a “do follow” or not, building links through comments can help get the word out about your site. Comments are also a good indicator if you’re doing something right and can give you great feedback. Of course in a perfect world every comment would be a good one, the reality is that at some point your going to get bad comments or comment vomit if you will. Self centered crap that’s there to only advertise their site, bash yours, and all other types of garbage that adds nothing of value.

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.

This is a Star Wars tribute video to the original movies using the song map of the problematique by Muse.

If you haven’t heard of this movie, don’t worry you’re not the only one, I only recently found out about it after going to Blockbuster and seeing it there a couple days ago.

Recently the powers that be at Google launched Google Advisor essentially rolling all of it’s financial tools (this includes their mortgage, credit card, and bank comparison tools) into one product. The goal according to Google’s official blog is to have a site designed to help you quickly find relevant financial products from many providers and compare them side by side.

Recently a friend of mine who creates fan videos like me had one of his videos copied and re uploaded onto YouTube. The copied version was almost 100 percent identical except for a 2 second picture of a movie poster at the beginning, and a short video about Christian persecution attached to the end. Apart from that it was the same video, music and everything. The reality is this is a very common problem amongst people who upload videos on or other video sharing sites and it’s extremely easy to do. There are countless numbers of sites where you can download videos and easily upload them onto your channel and claim them as your own. So how do you protect your YouTube videos from being copied?

Recently I stumbled across a Youtube channel that was filled with nothing but videos that had been taken from other YouTubers, uploaded onto his site and claimed for his own. There were no descriptions as to where these videos came from, no link pointing back to their original creators. And to top it off at the end of each video was a quick blurb about religion.

I was recently looking around online looking for a new site to transfer an old blog of mine when I came across a site called Circlepad. Circlepad if you never heard of this site is a website builder that lets you easily and quickly create a website in minutes. What I like about this particular site is that you don’t need any programming experience, everything is click and drag.

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

So you’ve decided you want to make a website, perhaps for a business or something more personal. If you’re new to building websites you might by scratching your head and wondering what’s the best option. for you. And while there are plenty of site builders to choose from such as Wix, or Weebly for example, one place you should check out is Webstarts website builder.........

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.

There’s an old saying “Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one” This couldn’t be more true of all the Battle Los Angeles reviews I’ve seen online. It’s seems to be a mix of positive acclaim, comparing it to Independence day, and comments like this one made by Robert Ebert on his website “Battle Los Angeles is noisy, violent, ugly and stupid, it’s manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of it’s makers” Well that’s nice Mr. Ebert, but then who really cares what you have to say since you think movies like the Assaination of Richard Nixon is a great movie. So with all that out there I thought I’d throw my own review into the mix.................. Now if you haven’t seen Battle Los Angeles it’s nothing like Independence Day, which in my opinion went way over the top with American pride. Hey nothing wrong with being American but the rest of the world doesn’t need it shoved in its face. This movie closer to Saving Private Ryan, but with aliens instead of Nazi’s.

Google is ramping out their new social network Google Plus and allowing more invites. This is an attempt at Google to dominate the social networking scene currently controlled by Facebook. If you don’t have an invite to Google Plus yet and would like one, you’re in luck and I can hook you up.

Back in February the powers that be at Google released an update to Google Panda. What is Google Panda? It’s an algorithm designed to combat spam sites, link farms, scraped, content, and all the other junk floating around on the internet these days. Think of it as a second flush to get rid of those nasty bits of poop left in the toilet bowl if you will. It uses a very sensitive set of guidelines to separate and filter websites and blogs and helps quality sites get the rankings and traffic they deserve. This is nothing new as all the big search engines have some type of filter system, what is new is how sensitive or depending on the site how vicious it can be....... Right now it appears that Google Panda is only in the U.S, plans are being made to launch it globally but when it happens nobody seems to know, my guess is probably very soon. This also has an effect on sites based outside the United States that have a large percentage of its traffic from that country. If your not sure if your website has been “panda slapped” there’s a post I found on Wordtracker that goes into detail about how to find out through Google Analytics which you can check out.

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.............

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......................

A little while ago I asked if anyone wanted to an invite to Google , the latest attempt by Google to get into the social network scene. Because Google is still in a beta stage invites can only be done through email by a current member inviting someone............