A special dispensation has been agreed, I will be allowed to open my Christmas present today because as my wife says,

"This is something special"

Off to the barn now....

I just opened the present from my family.

Many years ago like most young men I wanted a motorcycle but with only limited funds available I was only able to afford a rather tired and long past its best 1967 T120 Triumph Bonneville. Two tone dark red and white.

. I loved that bike, it took me all over the UK as well as to holidays in France, Austria and Germany. It was easy to work on and I did nearly all the maintenance myself, despite its age and mileage it never let me down and I always said I would never sell it.

After I became a soldier I put it into storage in my father's garage in London. I have on many occasions promised myself I would bring it over to France and start the restoration it needed but always something came along first that needed my attention.

A night I hope I never forget. ✨
[Thread]

I knew going into a class where a single Qirā’ah is completed will usually be quite emotional (let alone one where all 10 will be complete).

I mean I’ve watched countless Ijazah videos...

I pretend I’m a tough cookie sometimes, but really I know for sure that (if Allah swt gives me life) I’ll definitely break down during my last lesson.

So I knew these students were going to be emotional. And they were, two broke down, one didn’t. She (perhaps wisely) didn’t say much.

What caught me by surprise was I was also feeling emotional??

I’ll never forget all their names.

I’ll never forget the weird and wonderful circumstances in which I joined the class.

#SSRWaiting4Justice
i am sushant

#SSRWaiting4Justice
i was murderd

#SSRWaiting4Justice
i m waiting for justice

#SSRWaiting4Justice
cbi plz asap break ur silence

#SSRWaiting4Justice
i know u r a very responsible agency of india

All spring and summer I was resentful of twitter "leftists" for their conduct during the primaries. There are many things, and they were all absurd, but the most absurd was when those lunatics turned on AOC for complimenting Liz Warren on a fucking SNL cameo.

Then I hated "leftists" for personal stuff. Long story short some nutjob leftists think I'm rich bc I'm a tv writer. They're stupid. Oh, and I'm evil, a trait apparently inherited from my mom whom "leftists" told me was evil for being a landlord of the 3 family house she lives in

Well, I do look like exactly my mom. And I'm evil because I told ppl not all landlords are rich slumlords, so if you can afford to, pay rent.

But it all really hit me when Kamala was announced as the VP pick. The first black woman San Francisco AG, California AG, AND VP pick. FIRST. HBCU grad and everything. And "leftists" acted like she aint shit. Like we werent supposed to be proud of her accomplishments.

I was so proud of her. And twitter had so warped my brain on what "progressivism" looked like, that in my attempts to pass purity tests, i muted my enthusiasm for her. I'm so disappointed in myself.

Christmas Trinity: Only the Son is incarnate, but the incarnation is the work of the whole Trinity. You can see why a distinction is helpful here: to recognize the undivided work of God toward us, but to specify the Son's incarnation exclusively.

Luther loved to use a homey image for this (one which he attributed to Bonaventure). The incarnation is like three girls putting a garment onto one of them: all three put it on, but only one has it put onto her.

Is it possible to be more precise? Well, although the work is undivided, the distinct persons are evident in the incarnation in a way that corresponds to their order of existence within the eternal relations: the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding.

Let's take the Father first: Just as he is the eternal origin of the Son, he is source of the Son's sending. The Father's sending of the Son is an extension of the Son's eternal begetting or generation. A real trinitarian mission makes known the eternal procession behind it.

This is why the Bible declares that the Father sends the Son: because this sending extends, or makes present among us, an eternal relation. Less specifically, we might say the Trinity sends the Son (or even that the Son sends himself!), but that's loose talk.

It's odd that 2020 is almost over and I've not seen one person the whole year go viral for using astrology to predict how shit a year it would be this time last year.

Not one post from november or december last year going "the stars say pandemic, lockdown, unemployment, your parents will die." Etc

It's been a whole year. One person would have gone viral for having a post this time last december saying their astrologer predicted basically *any* part of this year

At the same time: remember the sheer joy of thinking he was dying? Billions of people eagerly urging that to materialize? Wishing all the negative energy you could possibly want on one man?

Kinda disproves that whole thing, huh.

2020: the year woo failed, entirely.

Not even preppers got out of it. They were the first people to start proudly coughing in each other's mouths to own the libs upon their fantasized biological disaster finally occurring.

Christmas Eve does not feel to me like the ideal time to be trashing Ravi Zacharias. But neither should RZIM control the story line over the holiday. I offer these thoughts on their admission yesterday that Ravi “engaged in sexual misconduct over the course of many years.”

First, the worst of Ravi is yet to come. RZIM law firm said in a letter to their client “Some of that misconduct is consistent with and corroborative of that which is reported in the news recently, and some of the conduct we have uncovered is MORE SERIOUS.” (my CAPS). Stay tuned.

Second, I was wrong when I publicly stated that the RZIM investigation would be a whitewash. Clearly the ministry has committed to letting at least *some* of the ugly truth about Ravi Zacharias be known.
This is a dramatic and welcome change from the very recent past.

That said, I do not trust RZIM any more than I did the day before yesterday. $40,000,000 in annual donations is at stake, not to mention the personal reputations of Ravi’s loyal and long-term enablers, who remain in power at RZIM. Their game continues.

Yesterday RZIM said “Unfortunately, Ravi had died several months before we first learned of these allegations, so we were unable to explore them with him directly.” Are we to believe that nobody in RZIM leadership had any idea that Ravi was a serial sex abuser?

All in one place: our #BestiveBooks favourite-reads-of-the-year advent. Day 1 brought the joys of How to Read A Book by @kwamealexander & Melissa Sweet – a perfect starting point #BestiveBooks 1/28

Day 2 offered us a Lift created by @dsantat & @bottomshelfbks , published by @LittleBrownYR #BestiveBooks 2/28

Day 3 opened up new possibilities with How to be a Butterfly by @LauraMakesBook & @catellronca #BestiveBooks 3/28

Day 4 addressed the critical issue of coiffure-maintenance with The Hairdo that Got Away by @JosephACoelho & @fionalumbers #BestiveBooks 4/28

Day 5 got creative with How to Spot an Artist by Danielle Krysa #BestiveBooks 5/28

I've lately seen folks on here say they've felt guilty for getting books (mine and other authors) from the library, or people insinuating some authors might be against libraries. This is nonsense, and here's a thread on how using your local library supports authors.

It's easy to see why people would think, at first glance, that getting books from the library is depriving a writer of their dues. It's free, after all! You're not paying anything, so how would the author be getting paid anything for your reading? This is a misconception.

While it IS true that, in the US, authors are not directly paid each time someone checks out a book, they DO benefit, in multiple concrete ways.

The first, and most direct, being that libraries and library systems BUY the books for their collection. If a book looks to be popular, they buy in bulk! If a book *becomes* popular (i.e. lots of people checking it out), they will continue to buy more copies of that book.

If the library subscribes to a curation service (like the Junior Library Guild), a book is bought for a library system in large quantities before the book is even released. This is a big deal, especially for new and unknown authors (it's why we get excited when we're JLG picks)

1/The next major problem set in #DeFi is #NFTLiquidity.

It has become very clear that, like fungibles, nonfungibles are their own financial asset class.

One path to see this is to envision the future of NFTs as “liquid

2/Some say that NFTs “shouldn’t be” liquid, yet the innovation process continues.

Just like photography has become much easier to create in the last 100 years, liquid NFTs will surely bring down price points of tokenized digital content but will also open expansive new markets.

3/The key observation is this: #NFTLiquidity is merely a technical problem for #DeFi, and the entire set of economic mechanisms is its solution space.

👉🏻 In particular, because of tokenization, *the NFT liquidity problem reduces to the NFT price discovery problem.*

4/In other words, if we could reliably price a set of NFTs, we could issue a token backed by their reliably priced future resale value.

This is a core mechanism that today is underutilized in the market, and one that — we will soon see — applies to all illiquid assets.

5/Today, NFT price discovery proceeds via three main mechanisms: sales, auctions, and ERC20 fractionalization.

And the fundamental problem with each of these mechanisms is capital efficiency: in each mechanism, participants need to spend *at least* $N to value something at $N.

1. - Gator Comms Post Election
11/11/2020 Minnesota deer hunter bags 10-point buck — and an alligator
"odd chain of the events from Saturday’s firearm hunting opener"
https://t.co/aorxJ8hYib
Hunting Opener.

I'm slightly obsessed with this "#PenceCard" nonsense which is like the Platonic ideal of the current level of Trump election stealing conspiracy theory nonsense.

Here's a thing about the United States: the vice president famously *does nothing*. By design. The job is not like the vice president of marketing or whatever where the guy has a job. Mike Pence is the spare president. He's there in case anything happens to the first one.

In the original formulation under the constitution, the vice president was the runner-up of the presidential race. Nobody ran for it. There was no assumption that it would be an ally of the president; more likely they would be rivals.

They're officially "president of the senate" just to give them something to do to keep them around the capital but they're not a senator and only get to vote if there's a tie, so most of the time that ceremonial role is fobbed off an actual senator.

But this senate presidency that we give the vice president currently has attached to it some purely ceremonial duties in the very perfunctory part of the election process where votes are counted and reported to Congress.

Our inflated bios, our curated images, our growth addictions, our me-ministries, our carnal networking, our jealous hearts, our talent-idolatry, our unsubtle platform-building, our fear of going unnoticed, our internal scoffing at small things—what have we become?

Why don't we notice anymore? Why don't we care? Do we think Jesus isn't serious? Do we think he's not really coming back? Do we think we won't stand before him?

Do we even stop and think at all anymore, or do we just do what others seem to be doing?

"There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death" (Proverbs 14:12).

There are some things that Jesus says that are mysterious. These are not in that category: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 5:3). "Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted" (Matt 23:12).

It's Christmastime. We talk about the manger—dirty! Bethlehem—small! Shepherds—dingy! Mary—disrespected! "No crib for a bed," we sing. "Mild he lays his glory by," we sing. God the Son—blindingly humble! But do we realize this story is the "master story" of the Christian life?

Machine learning terms you must know about as a beginner.

🧵👇

These terms won't mean anything unless you know what Machine learning is all about.

> Machine learning is the process of making a program which allows a computer to learn from data.

The data could be anything, images, audio or even text.

(2 / 11)

In machine learning we use something called a neural network, this is essentially an imitation of the human brain.

> Neural Networks are a digital imitation of the neurons you see in the human brain.

(3 / 11)

In these neural networks, data flows through them and each neuron (the circle) has a numerical value which will change.

> The value of a neuron gets changes to something which is close to what we want each time the data passes through the neural network.

(4 / 11)

Think of the neurons as dials on a lock, you have to tune every dial to open the lock.

It is almost impossible for a human to tune thousands of dials like these, but a computer certainly can.

(5 / 11)

1/13 Doubt anyone who should read this will, but here goes-We had @FOXnews on 24/7 every day for years.
Recorded so many great shows to watch when we had time at night.
Then BOOM
-They fired Glenn Beck
-Then the Meghan Kelly fiasco
-Then Brett Baier's show died
-Then they fired

This nonspecific cation channel opens when illuminated with blue light, depolarizing the cell [4, 6] to trigger action potentials cells with high temporal precision [5]. Since the initial discovery of ChR2, many modifications have been made to refine the kinetic properties.

For example, ChETA, engineered to address limitations of spike fidelity with ChR2, has faster temporal kinetics and can maintain reliable spike precision up to 200 Hz [7].

Halorhodopsins (NpHR), light-gated chloride pumps activated by yellow light, allow for temporally specific hyperpolarization with single spike precision [8–10].

Archaerhodopsin-3 (Arch), a yellow light-activated outward proton pump, is an increasingly popular tool for light-induced hyperpolarization to inhibit cellular activity. Arch recovers spontaneously from inactivation with a much shorter recovery time than NpHRs [11].

Arch currents continue to increase with increasing light intensity, while NpHRs saturate [11]. The increased light sensitivity of the ArchT variant, along with better membrane targeting, allows for improved neural silencing both at cell bodies and terminals [12].