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Val Town is a neat service for hosting short server-side JavaScript programs online - reminiscent of a combination of Glitch and Observable Notebooks. Today I figured out how to use it to run an hourly task (a "Val") that fetches data from an Atom feed, parses it and then submits the resulting parsed data to a table running on Datasette Cloud via the Datasette JSON write API. Configuring secrets in …

Respected thesp tragically descends into a unique kind of dementia. (via actress Kika Markham's memoir of life with actor-husband and left-wing activist Corin Redgrave, here reviewed by ultra-thesp Simon Callow)"... When he was playing Pericles at the Globe, he had a major heart attack, while delivering a speech in Basildon on behalf of some evicted Travellers. He recovered physically, but never fully mentally... Though Redgrave could still speak, his memory …

Essay question Write a 2000 word essay on the following topic... Critically discuss the choices that you have made in relation to your communication techniques and style within the context of specific trauma-informed events or organisational change at work. You should draw on illustrative examples from practice to support or refute particular models and/or theoretical frameworks. Introduction Government has been working through Digital transformation for many years and as part …

I guess after luring women onto her pirate ship, X kills them one by one with her artificial hand-knife. Notes I sent to TB: – Call chinese orlando, stop. – “Ottinger” must mean “one-take” in German – I feel like Bertrand Mandico has watched this movie more than once. – This fits in nicely with the avant-garde traditions, in that some things (color, music, costumes, visual concept, counterculture vibes) are …

‘…It’s a quasar – the bright core of a galaxy that is powered by a gargantuan black hole some 17 billion times the mass of our Sun. Known as J0529-4351, the object’s power was confirmed in observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Scientists, reporting in the journal Nature Astronomy, say the black hole has a voracious appetite, consuming the mass equivalent to one Sun every day. J0529-4351 was …

By way of Peggy Holman, I was pointed to this video of an Open Space meeting recently held in Balama, Liberia. It’s a sweet thing, because Harrison Owen was deeply inspired by the village of Balama where he worked in the 1960s as part of the US Peace Corps. He attributes some of his inspiration for Open Space Technology to his experiences there, working with local folks as they organized …

"I feel like myself when I'm Morrissey"

Ever the force of nature, iconic musical Rent returns to rekindle the flame for a new generation. In the chance that a musical theatre newcomer has happened across Man in Chair, taking this chance to share the tragedy of composer Jonathan Larson’s all too short life. Having written the book, music, and lyrics for 1996 Broadway musical Rent, Larson succumbed to an aortic dissection on the day of the first …

There's two kinds of early electronic composition and musique concrete type that I really really love, and can't get enough of... First is the kind I associate with the late '50s and the 1960s, with this echoey, heavy-reverb sound, and a sense of sinister spaceThis is a later-than-that example, it's actually from the end of the 1970s, so consequently a bit cleaner sounding - less misty - but it does …

Nathan Rabin listened to Mickey Unrapped so you don't have to.

The big wave of spams is over? Thank you FediAdmins for doing what you do! Source here

Picat is a research language intended to combine logic programming, imperative programming, and constraint solving. I originally learned it to help with vacation scheduling but soon discovered its planner module, which is one of the most fascinating programming models I’ve ever seen. First, a brief explanation of logic programming (LP). In imperative and functional programming, we take inputs and write algorithms that produce outputs. In LP and constraint solving, we …

Stories of Rainbow and Lucky Handie by Jacob Abbott, 1859. I’ve been wanting to cover this series for some time. It’s an unusual series from the mid-19th century, written on the eve of the American Civil War, by a white author with a young black hero. Rainbow is a teenage black boy who, in this first installment of the series, is hired by a young carpenter, who is only a …

By David Tuller, DrPH A new study of an online group physical and psychological rehabilitation program for Long Covid confirms once again that people given an intervention purporting to help them are more likely to tell investigators that they feel better than those given nothing of the kind. People, this is not a surprising result! … Trial By Error: New Long Covid Exercise-and-Therapy Study Claims Success Despite Clinically Insignificant Findings …

Great news today: TCM has announced that the TCM Classic Film Festival will be returning to the Egyptian Theatre this April.Ben Mankiewicz made the announcement in a video shot at the theater.This was especially good news as a November article at The Wrap had cast considerable doubt about the festival's future at the Egyptian. Happily those concerns have now been put to rest.In a nice coincidence, I was just at …