#ClariOnHEMA getting theoretical again, this time on armour.

—Is leather armour historical?—

CW // none apply //

Short answer: Yes, but not the way you might think.

1/16

There have absolutely been armour in which leather was used as material, but the RPG leather armour is mostly fictitious.

Leather armour is not flexible and supple. That's just leather clothing and protects about as well as an overcoat.

2/16

Leather that has been treated (boiled or baked, we don't really know the exact process) is hard and resembles ceramic plates or hard plastic more than the flexible leather we use in clothing.

But hard plate sounds good for an armour, right?

Well, yes and no.

3/16

Hardness is definitely a merit, but leather as a material poses some serious limitations.

1) You can't really repair leather armour

Cloth can be sown, metal can be welded and reforged, but apart from some very dubious glueing, there isn't much you can do for leather.

4/16

You'd have to replace entire sections of the armour in their entirety, so field repairs are out of the question. Not a great feature for any professional soldier at least.

This doesn't preclude ceremonial use, but that takes it out of the realm of real armour altogether.

5/16

norwak thread
#saneytwt

Many would believe that Wakko is insatiable. Nora was one of those people. she’s seen that little freak eat a whole table along with all the food on it. It was so disgusting she banned the Warner’s from going up to her office for a week.

A thread of #digitalart drafts, inspired by optical ring resonators:

It started with #Neff:

And then Neff ring matters:

And alas I digress:

And moreso

And even more

While I consider this to be little more than propaganda in places and making assumptions detached away from the evidence base. Also that some people do not have the expertise to be making such assumptions.

There is a comment that I find

"is an overriding compulsion to control situations and avoid demands made by other people, due to exceptionally high levels of anxiety."
@AhabInSpace

What the above quote is essentially saying, in the full context of the previous sentence is that PDA fundamentally is an OCD & Related Disorders.

The high anxiety would be the obsession and the demand avoidance would be the compulsion, which the essay admits the demand avoidance is.

@AhabInSpace

Proceedings resume
Mr Fitzgerald rises
#Assange

Says that Assange's experience in the Equadorian embassy was not one he would want to repeat, also says Mexican president was misquoted on asylum offer

Fitzgerald his client is aware: "He is safest and best in this country, with the protection of the rule of law and the cloak of this courts judgement."
#Assange

Defence end by formally asking for bail, ends.

Judge asking about costs, both sides agree this can wait

1/ Today is Winter Solstice. We
WAKE UP to the DARKEST DAY of the Year.

2/ but hey, it’s 2020! So?

3/ this year, for the first time in 800 years, we have the same SKY EVENT that WISE men traversed and followed in ~4 BCE.

The CHRISTMAS STAR illuminating our way....

4/ ... seeking, with COURAGE, to find WISDOM.

5/ Many of us have been AWAKE for several years, AWAITING the BIRTH of a NEW NATION...

an END to the Corruption, and a Govt once again By the People, For the People, Of the People.

HOW LONG do we WAIT for a BIRTH?

Ob/gyn's inform us it's
9 mo.
280 days.
hmmmm⤵️

https://t.co/ikhW5GmyFm

@OliviaMesser It will be a raging pandemic for at least six more months. I would explain why, but I’m not giving away free info any more. National politicians know who I am & continue to steal my arguments. Moreover, Twitter censors me bc I want expose corrupt Republicans. Til I have a (1)

sufficient follower base & can get the exposure & recognition I deserve I’m dumbing down my arguments. Difference with me is I don’t use the same recycled, bland arguments as is often the case with many people who don’t deserve the media attention they get. My arguments are (2)

Powerful, hard-hitting & on-point. Go back & read my Tweets over the last 3-4 mos. & you will see. Tho, I have much more proof of this than my tweets & will release this at the appropriate moment in time. With me pulling back. You will Democrats are going to get shredded by (3)

the Republicans in the next few weeks w/o me to prop them up. You steal & don’t give back. Then, that’s what will happen. Nothing is free in this world. The Democrats have things they need to learn about how to deal w/ the Republicans. Moreover, Twitter let Trump & Co. spread (4)

false, dangerous, blatantly-evil lies that divided the country the last 4 years. Now, I want to hit these Republicans back after 4 years & all of the sudden Twitter is worried about furthering to divide the country. Well, you should of thought about that 4 years ago. Now it’s (5)

Dear friends, most of you know about my brother Hakeem - (he's the older one, i'm the prettier one). But you don't know about my brother Dave. Dave was born a year after Hakeem and year before me - when my parents brought me home, I met both my brothers at the same time.

Dave's parents owned the home we all grew up in - 185 Rogers avenue in Brooklyn, a three story, multi-family house in the heart of Crown Heights. For the first 7 or so years of my life, Dave lived on the ground floor, Hakeem & I on the third floor. We played together night & day.

Then Dave and his parents moved to Englewood Cliffs, NJ; a world away as far as we were concerned. But we stayed in touch, alternating calling each other on weekends, when it was cheaper to talk, but even then we could only talk for 30 minutes before we had to hangup.

But Dave's mom, Beulah Blaine, Aunt Bea to us, made sure "her boys" still spent time together. We never missed a birthday together. And during school breaks and summers, she'd drive back to Brooklyn to pick Hakeem and I up so we could spend weekends and weeks in Jersey.

Those were glorious days. We'd play video and role playing games inside the house (yep, that's how three Black boys from Brooklyn got down in the early 80s) and run around and ride bikes outside on their expansive, wooded corner lot.

Seeing lots of explainers about the reddit/hedge fund drama right now, and as someone who worked as a quant for a big fund for 7 years, figured I'd chime in. This whole situation is pretty much why I quit. Big thread.

First, what's happening? At the simplest level, hedge funds "short" stocks. That is, they borrow stock, sell it, and have to buy it again later to return it to the borrower. If the price falls during that time, they make a profit.

It's an effective way to make money from falling prices. But it also has enormous risk. Normally, if you put $100 in a stock, all you can lose is that $100. But if you short a stock and it goes to the moon, your losses are unlimited.

Consider $GME, Gamestop. Let's say a fund shorted it when it was $40. When the price spiked to $470 today, they'd be facing a LOSS of $430 on that $40 investment. If they shorted it for, say, $10M, they'd be facing a loss of >$100M.

But it gets worse. Let's say an institution BORROWED money and then used that loan to short the stock. That's called leverage. Before the GFC, banks were running at ~33x leverage ratios. For every $1 they owned, they'd invested $33.

A few paradoxes or philosophical ironies I have observed on this Bird Street:
1. Idiots have devised effective strategy to get under the skin of intelligent people:
E.g: Class A says he will unseat Tinubu in Lagos for N100m. Class B, gets riled up. Ought we not to just waka pass?

2. Second irony:
The illogical person makes illogic sound logical and incredibly many people retweet and like the illogic. The logical minded is now thrown into arguing that a clear illogic is illogic. Ought the logical minded person not to simply waka pass?

3. The third irony:
Tinubu owns Lagos. 2 businesses were burnt down (Nation and TVC). Those 2 media houses have not in the past 3-5 years done anything to support Tinubu's party, the APC-they have been largely opposition media. Who did the arsonists punish? Tinubu or Insurance?/

4. Tinubu and the ABC and the money laundering allegation: If people were rational, they would have done this:
1. Scrutinised the MEMART of the ABC company registered with CAC? Is Tinubu's name featured there?
2. Is the LASG operating an opaque contract with ABC company? /

5. The rationale mind would find that there just may be a substantive contract between the LASG & the said company. There may well be a LAW of the LASG supporting the ABC's operations in Lagos. So accusing Tinubu may not go anywhere in the face of the Law. Nut changes can happen?

THREAD

Nginx has a service mesh too. Is it any good?

Let's find out.

1/

Most service meshes use Envoy as a proxy and for good reasons:

1. It's fully open-source
2. It can be customised on-the-fly via an API
3. It can be extended

2/

Is there a service mesh without Envoy? Of course!

The best example is @Linkerd that uses a custom proxy written in Rust.

Linkerd is smaller and more focussed but it is also slower to add features.

And now there's a new entry: @nginx

3/

But isn't Nginx one of those products not fully open-source proxies?

Yes it is, but they made an exception.

When you run the Nginx Service Mesh you can use Nginx Plus (the paid product) as a proxy for free.

Great isn't it?

4/

How does the meshwork?

There are four main components:

- The API
- SPIRE (cert authority)
- NATS (message broker)
- Nginx Plus as a proxy

Grafana, Prometheus and Zipkin are automatically installed too.

Some thoughts: The great paradox of 1/6 is that so much of the planning happened out in the open (both in the immediate run-up and over the past 4+ years), which actually made it less effective. There were too many disparate and undisciplined groups, effectively tourists.

This part of Trumpism will continue. To the extent the Trump family is able to operate in the open, they will become the Grateful Dead of right-wing politics, which Trump rallies already embody, and followers will go on tour, chanting "Lock Her Up" for the coming decades.

The key question is whether the Far Right will break from this. Some indications show that Trump's efforts at self-preservation by weak denunciation will fuel a break and also further a pervasive "stabbed-in-the-back" narrative that the Far Right uses everywhere.

What made 1/6 more effective was the obvious underpreparation by the Capitol police, in coordination with DOJ and DOD. Some indiv officers assented but some did their job a little too effectively--incl. by shooting the woman in the bldg as much as not shooting entrants at first.

It's clear that some people entered the Capitol with the intent to kidnap/lynch specific members of Congress (you can figure out who), and some of those people basically fantasized about doing that for the likes while live-streaming (insert analogy to Zetas/ISIS/whatevs).

@Pady_oFurniture @TadeuszBorowski @AnnaPembroke @pritipatel @UKLabour Talk about hypocrisy!

THAT is some turning of the truth!!!

So he didn't have a visa for the *#USA*

And used someone else's real passport

Yet *#WE* prosecuted him

The point you are "rebutting" is how many illegal immigrants to *#THIS* country do "#WE" prosecute FOR THE SAME?!

@TadeuszBorowski @AnnaPembroke @pritipatel @UKLabour We don't prosecute people entering THIS country using a relatives passport "accidentally"

We don't prosecute people for ADMITTEDLY DELIBERATELY entering THIS country without the right passport to "test" the system

In fact #Channel4akeNews had a whole programme (series?) of it!

@TadeuszBorowski @AnnaPembroke @pritipatel @UKLabour Was anyone at or on the #Channel4 programme prosecuted for illegally entering the country

Attempting it

Or aiding & abetting it

And that's ON TOP of the THOUSANDS of illegal immigrants who illegally enter the country without the correct or even ANY legal travel documents

@TadeuszBorowski @AnnaPembroke @pritipatel @UKLabour Or through correct legal entry points

Illegal immigrants don't just enter country without correct or any travel documents

Many (most?) don't go through customs or passport control

And not only do they not get prosecuted for it

The "liberal" left insist it's not a crime either

@TadeuszBorowski @AnnaPembroke @pritipatel @UKLabour Similarly the "liberal" left in US insist if you enter US illegally it's not a crime

But also dispute authorities claim any illegal immigrant trying to get through immigration hasn't "entered" the USA yet & so not entitled to US constitutional rights

AIUI #TommyRobinson hadn't

Hearing coming up at the top of the hour on the USPS lawsuits over possible delayed delivery of mail-in ballots.

Yesterday, Judge Sullivan indicated Postmaster DeJoy was not "off the hook" for failing to follow an Election Day order to sweep facilities for misplaced ballots.

Note that court staff have set up two more public lines after hundreds of people dialed in yesterday:

We also got a dump of data from USPS in the last hour or so on:

Extra and late trips
On-time delivery percentages
Number of inbound/outbound ballots processed

(all stats the agency has been sharing/updating daily over the last week)

DOJ has brought with today several USPS processing facility managers, per Sullivan's request yesterday, including from Philly, Central Penn, Greensboro and the Mid Carolinas.

Vote Forward attorney says the data USPS filed this morning suggests that 150K ballots were delivered yesterday, including 604 ballots in Atlanta and 7K in Pennsylvania.

*rubber duck thread* Using the Sega CD subcpu in mode 1 is very doable but the larger problem is: what kind of tasks can we hand off to it, and are they asynchronous?

We can't run code directly off the cart from the subcpu. We can't simply make the faster cpu run the game. So it makes more sense that we'd have subroutines running on the subcpu to accelerate common operations that can be called from the MD main cpu.

But we run into a problem here. First is defining what "common operations" would really be. Since the subcpu is another 68k with a roughly 50% higher clock, it wouldn't make much sense to run very small or atomic operations on it. There is overhead in passing arguments...

... because it has to be done in shared memory. Overhead could kill the gains. We'd get more benefit from a larger, more complex function to really take advantage of that higher clock speed. This adds another layer to the problem, synchronicity.

If the MD cpu has to block (stop and wait for a result from the subcpu) we're losing a lot of potential throughput. The effect is similar the other way around in that we also waste resources on the subcpu waiting for a command from the MD.

@DonaldWelsh16 Oh hello.

I knew Dr Rorabeck. He was a wonderful guy. @SchulichMedDent does have much to be proud of. Like any institution, it has its warts.

@SchulichMedDent But to respond to your comment: I think you’re referencing the concept of balanced pathogenicity, which probably will will, over the longer term, favour less virulent strains.

@SchulichMedDent The difficulty we have with VOC is that they appear to bind better to ace2 (as a vascular biologist I bet you’ve heard of that!) and that may underlie their increased infectivity and increased

@SchulichMedDent propensity to cause outbreaks among kids, which has caused the UK to do a u-turn on schools.

You seem to fancy yourself a bit of a quant (math! So great!) so you can probably figure out what happens if you get an increase in R resulting in increased attack rates, while virulence

@SchulichMedDent Remains constant. Yes! You get more people dying that way!

You got it! Gold star ⭐️!

And we have no evidence of diminished virulence for VOC as yet. What we do have is evidence for increased virulence.