BC CULTURE
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

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
Day 6 stopped and took in and some beauty with @lantanapub 's A Story about Afiya – James Berry #BestiveBooks 6/28
Day 7’s slot was taken by My Shadow is Pink by Scott Stuart, published by @LarrikinH. #BestiveBooks 7/28
Day 8 got practical with the vibrant When Grandpa Gives You A Toolbox
By @jlbdeenihan & Lorraine Rocha, published by @sterlingbooks #BestiveBooks 8/28
Day 9 made way for the mighty The Girl who Stole an Elephant by @NizRite published by @NosyCrow @NosyCrowBooks. #BestiveBooks 9/28
We got well-informed on Day 10 thanks to The Britannica All New Children’s Encyclopaedia, edited by the marvellous @chrislloydwoep of @whatonearthbook #BestiveBooks 10/28
Day 11 celebrated a timeless great with The One That Got Away a ‘first retrospective’ of Jan Mark’s short stories, expertly curated by @appletonbooks #BestiveBooks 11/28
Day 12 was charmed and bewildered by @amytimberlake & @burstofbeaden ‘s Skunk and Badger #BestiveBooks 12/28
Day 13 unleashed the vivid joys of Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright: an Animal Poem for Every Day of the Year – expertly curated by Fiona Waters and illustrated by the super talented @Bteckentrup #BestiveBooks 13/28
Day 14 fell under the intoxicating influence of The Lost Spells by @RobGMacfarlane & @JackieMorrisArt #BestiveBooks 14/28
Day 15 brought the wonderful The Lost Homework by @therroneill & Kristi Beautyman #BestiveBooks 15/28
Day 16 gave us the gripping Orphans of the tide by @Struan_Murray #BestiveBooks 16/28
Day 17 provided two treats. the first choice got us outdoors with Wild Things: Over 100 Magical Outdoors Adventures by Jo Schofield & Fiona Danks #BestiveBooks 17/28
Day 17 kept us busy with two choices – there was also The Puffin Keeper by Michael Morpurgo, illustrated to perfection by @benji_davies #BestiveBooks 18/28
Day 18 also offered up two wonderful books – we shared Rise Up: Ordinary Kids with Extraordinary Stories by Amanda Li & Amy Blackwell #BestiveBooks 19/28…
And also, on day 18, we shared David Attenborough: Little People Big, Dreams Series by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara & Mikyo Noh, @QuartoKids @Frances_Lincoln #BestiveBooks 20/28
Next we shared Survival in Space: The Apollo 13 Mission, by Dan Long and Stefano Tambellini #BestiveBooks 21/28
And on day 20, we shared Can you See me? By Libby Scott & Rebecca Westcott @scholasticuk #BestiveBooks 22/28
Day 21 took a fresh view of the world through Holes by @JonathanLitton #BestiveBooks 23/28
Day 22 took a wander down Belonging Street - Poems by @MandyCoePoet @OtterBarryBooks #BestiveBooks 24/28
Christmas Eve Eve (apparently) or day 23 shared in the joys of Julian at the Wedding by Jessica Love, published by @WalkerBooksUK 25/28
Our poetry choice for the final day of our #BestiveBooks favourite reads advent brought two of our firm favourites together: The Book of Not Entirely Useful Advice
By @afharrold & @Bonzetta1 Utterly usefully brilliant! 26/28
Our Picturebook choice for the final day of our #BestiveBooks favourite reads advent is the lyrical, true beauty that is @jscottwrites & @Sydneydraws I Talk Like A River. 27/28
And we reached the end of our #BestiveBooks favourite-reads-of the-year advent with the important & timely The book of Hopes edited by Katherine Rundell @BloomsburyBooks. May we wish you all a happy and safe holiday - and plenty of good reading! 28/28 Happy Christmas. 📚🎄📚

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Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
Time once again for my occasional series "Women with great hair fleeing gothic houses!"

And today all the covers are by Walter Popp...


Crucible of Evil, by Lyda Belknap Long. Avon Gothic Original, 1974. Cover art by Walter Popp.


Hornet's Nest, by Evelyn Bond. Avon Gothic Original, 1972 Cover by Walter Popp.


The House In Munich, by Dorothy Dowdell. Avon, 1974. Art by Walter Popp.


The Secret Of Chateau Laval, by Susan Marvin. Avon Gothic, 1973. Art by Walter Popp.
CULTURE
Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
As it's #AppreciateADragonDay let's do some classic covers from Dragon magazine!


Tony DiTerlizzi's cover art for Dragon magazine #242, December 1997.


Dragon magazine issue 106, February 1986. Cover by Keith Parkinson.


Dragon Magazine #71, March 1983. Cover by Clyde Caldwell.


Dragon magazine issue 65, September 1982. Cover by Clyde Caldwell.
CULTURE
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Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
Many readers have asked me "why do so many pulp covers feature women in ripped red blouses standing in swamps while a man fights off an unusual animal attack?"

The answer is artist Will Hulsey...


Will Hulsey was the undisputed king of the animal attack pulp cover. You name it, he'd paint it attacking you in a pool of stagnant water.


Very little is known about Will Hulsey, but he worked on a number of men's pulp magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s including Man's Life, True Men, Guilty, Trapped and Peril.


Their audience was ex-GIs: during WWII the US Council of Books in Wartime had given away over 122 million books to American servicemen to read; this led to a post-war surge in paperback and magazine sales amongst these newly enthusiastic readers.


As a result the 1950s saw a raft of men's pulp magazines being published to tap into this market - almost 200 different titles!
CULTURE
chika unigwe
chika unigwe
@chikaunigwe
So last week I wrote about the disinheritance of daughters in parts of Igbo land & to my disbelief, there were Ndi Igbo claiming that this customary law of inheritance that privileges sons doesn't exist, that I had somehow fabricated this out of thin air

(even as I and others on my TL gave concrete, real life examples and some Igbo daughters have successfully brought cases contesting the law before civil court).

One ill-informed young man stated that I had to “malign Igbo culture” so that “white people” would give me money. LOL. I understand that we don’t like to see the worst of ourselves reflected back to us but how do we progress if we refuse to confront it?

We can’t pretend that we are perfect, our traditions are perfect, our lives are perfect; we can’t create false narratives in the face of overwhelming evidence disputing those narratives;

we can’t go through life with our head perpetually buried in the sand because that isn’t a sustainable posture to hold. Sand go enter your nose and choke you, abi?
CULTURE
Julie Bindel
Julie Bindel
@bindelj
THREAD @ReadingsBooks now 'regret' the apology. This is from @TimesLucy in the Times today (can't find online link): Bookshop forced to apologise for feminist's visit in 2018
The Times (London)

February 11, 2021 Thursday

"A bookshop in Australia has apologised for "any hurt

caused" by an event it hosted three years ago with the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel.

Readings, an independent bookseller in Melbourne, is to host an event on Zoom with Juno Dawson, a transgender author, and Alison Evans, a nonbinary author, on February 25. Transrights

supporters have long accused Bindel of transphobia because she does not believe trans women are women.

Evans, an award-winning author from Melbourne who writes queer sci-fi for young adults, tweeted on Monday: "I agreed to do this event providing Readings publicly apologise for

hosting Julie Bindel. Where is this apology?"

The next day the bookshop said: "Readings prides itself on ensuring everyone in our community feels safe, respected and considered. We apologise for any hurt caused by highlighting the work of an author whose current stance is to

divide our community.

"To that end, Readings regrets programming Julie Bindel in 2018 and thanks our community for opening the dialogue with us. Readings is committed to considering the work of all authors to ensure our future programme of events, reviews and discussions remain
CULTURE

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\U0001d40d\U0001d41e\U0001d421\U0001d41a \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
𝐍𝐞𝐡𝐚 🇮🇳...
@Neh_hope_faith
THREAD: What is Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle and how it impacts India?

Golden Crescent region of South Asia - comprises of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan - which is a principal global site for opium production and distribution.


Golden Triangle is the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet at the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers. The Golden Triangle is called so because of the triangular shape formed by the locations of New Delhi, Agra and Rajasthan on a map.


India is wedged bw world’s 2 largest areas of illicit opium production, Golden Crescent & Golden Triangle, that has made Indian borders vulnerable to drug trafficking. It flows from 2 fronts, NW & NE, that possesses dual concern - violation of border & threat to national security

- Golden Crescent is world’s leading opium and cannabis producing region since 1983.

- Its proximity to Indo-Pak border has worsened the trafficking of hashish and heroin into Indian soil

- Trafficking happens through the border states of J&K, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat.


- Golden Triangle is leading opium producing region of the South-east Asia, also an ancient narcotics supply route to North America & Europe.

- Myanmar-Northeast nexus is recognized by NCB as the root of heroin & chemical drugs

- Myanmar produces 80% of heroin produced in world
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Roger Grosse
Roger Grosse
@RogerGrosse
Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ


The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.
MACHINE LEARNING
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Justin Mikolay \U0001f4bb
Justin Mikolay 💻...
@jmikolay
A distillation of what @naval said on Clubhouse last night:

What you call chaos I call spontaneity.

A regimented life is like a heartbeat that's non-chaotic; it's a system that’s too ordered. It doesn't have any life to it. And real life has lots of ups and downs, some of them very extreme.

I over-plan, but planning is pretty useless. What tends to dominant life are a small number of Black Swan events in both directions, positive and negative.

Expose yourself to asymmetric upside and lots of good options: things that can become massively important for you.

And you want to avoid the asymmetric downside: anything that can end the game, whether it's through financial ruin, or reputational ruin, or physical ruin.

That requires a certain amount of chaos and spontaneity.

If nothing else, 2020 taught the power of optionality.

We think about planning as linear and controlled, but that's not how the world around us works anymore.

The world is dominated by nonlinearities, so understanding options value is far more important.
ALL , NAVAL , NAVAL HIGHLISHTS
Billy Bostickson \U0001f3f4\U0001f441&\U0001f441 \U0001f193
Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 ...
@BillyBostickson
Enough Jaw Jaw, this is War!
1. People's Justice Courts to be set up worldwide
2. Citizens' arrests of all Identified Suspects
3. Lab Inspections
3. Harsh interrogation using MKULTRA
4. Public Show Trials video streamed live
5. Cross Questioning of suspects via Twitter & Zoom
6.


A growing list of suspects to be interrogated


Foul Traitors, Charlatans, Frauds, Bat Molesters! Frankensteins, Well Poisoners, Plotters, Deceivers!
Dr. Shipmans, Saboteurs, Devils in White Coats!


Organisations to be Investigated
WIV
Wuhan University IMA
WIBP
WCDC
BEIJING IPB
Nanjing Military Lab
SinoPharm
BARDA
NIH
EMERGENT BIOSOLUTIONS
BIOPORT
GILEAD
SIAC
QTEL
USAMRIID
FORT DETRICK
DARPA
DTRA
Metbiota
ONE HEALTH
GVP
ECOHEALTH
MITRE
BATTELLE
TUNNELL
LAURIMA GOV SERVICES


Suspects (1)
China
Zhengli Shi
Peng Zhou
George Gao
Deyin Guo
Major General Chen Wei
United States
ALEX AZAR
JONNA MAZET
ALISON O’TOOLE
ANTHONY FAUCI
BOYD YOUNT
DAVID FRANZ
DAVID KARESH
DENNIS CARROLL
DYLAN GEORGE
GEORGE PAINTER
IAN LIPKIN
JENS KUHN
JEROME HAUER
JONATHAN EPSTEIN
WORLD , ALL
Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen
@andrewchen
👇Thread.

Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!


This was a deck that I created on my (longish) interview process with @a16z. It was a long path, starting with meeting folks at the firm 10 years ago. But the purpose of the deck was to explain how I would use my superpower in an investing context

Here's what I explain in the deck. As investors (whether angel or VC) we're often confronted with an up-and-to-the-right graph. Is it going to go up? Or down?


One solution to forecast these growth curves is the Growth Accounting Framework, where you add up New+Reactivated and subtract churned users. In each time period that gives you the difference in monthly actives.


The problem with this is that it's a lagging metric, not a leading one. We need to go one level deeper and look at the underlying loops that drive these numbers, to understand the quality.
STARTUPS