A brief thread on the life, religion, and language of Omar ibn Sa’id, author of the only known Arabic-language autobiography of an enslaved person in the United States.

Thread: History of Mogadishu and it’s conquest by Imaam Al Yaqubi

One of the First Imaams of the Hiraab Imamate was Mohamed Ibn Imaam Ahmed ibn Imam Ahmed Ibn Imaam Mohamoud Ibn Imaam Cumar Halol Al Yacquubi (Abgaal) during the year 1097 hijri.

After the collapse of the Ajuuran Abgaal nomads from the interior had started moving to take over the strategic port town of Mogadishu which was then under the muzzafar dynasty. By the 1600s Abgaal warriors had captured the city and set up their base in shingaani.

Mogadishu at the time was a large and well known port town. The Abgaal clan taking over control allowed them to obtain political power and world wide recognition.

Under Imaam Yaqubi’s time in power it’s reported that French merchants had arrived at the port in 1701
and stayed for 11 days. They had attempted to take the city but were successfully repulsed.

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix is a powerful tool for prioritizing your time and unlocking growth in your career, startup, business, relationships, or life.

A thread on how it works and how it can change your life...

Dwight D. Eisenhower was an American military officer and politician.

He was a five-star general in the United States Army and the first Supreme Commander of NATO.

After his military career, he was elected as the 34th President of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961.

In both his military and civilian careers, Eisenhower stood out for his prolific productivity.

His secret?

Eisenhower observed that people often confuse the urgent with the important. He did not.

"What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important."

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix is a visualization tool that forces you to differentiate between the urgent and the important.

It allows you to prioritize your time accordingly and unlock new productivity and growth.

Let's cover the basics of how it works...

First, we have to define "urgent" and "important."

An "urgent" task is one that requires immediate, focused attention.

An "important" task is one that promotes or furthers your long-term values, goals, or principles.

Remember: Tasks can be both urgent and important.

Rhino Barges

One of the dullest, coolest, more bizarre and fascinating pieces of kit used in Normandy.

Which NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT.

BUT I DO AND YOU SHOULD TOO.
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#WW2 #SWW #History

Planning for Overlord and Neptune had a serious snag, how to get troops from LSTs onto the beach as simply ramming them onto the beaches and dropping the ramp was known to damage the exceptionally vulnerable LSTs and felt to be unsustainable in the mid to long term. /2

LSTs were essential in sustaining Overlord's progress and were a subject of major headaches in the planning phase, and a real subject of friction when it came to launching additional amphibious operations such as Dragoon.

A single LSTs loss represented a capability nick. /3

So, logic dictated, we don't really want these remarkable but rare and highly valuable vessels constantly doing beach landings, we want something to act as a medium between ship to shore, and in came the (mostly) American designed Rhino. /4

I fucking love Rhinos.

Seriously.

Graceful lines of pure industrial pedigree.

Modular.

LOOK AT IT. /5

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

2/

Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

In this thread, I will argue that the conventional wisdom that Shannon's information theory is all about syntax and not about semantics stems from superficial reading. On the contrary, even his 1948 BSTJ paper is already concerned with syntax, semantics, *and* pragmatics. 1/14

Of course, it does not help matters that Shannon himself states that "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem" of communication on the first page of his paper. But you have to read the entire paper, not just the first page. 2/14

Let's first pin down the notions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the sense of Charles Morris: syntax is about relation of symbols to other symbols, semantics is about their relation to objects, and pragmatics is about their relation to subjects. 3/14

Let's start with pragmatics. The full formulation of Shannon's theory is concerned with the problem of reliable communication of some state of the world over a noisy medium, subject to a fidelity criterion. This is an operationalist, pragmatist concern. 4/14

We may envision the problem where we take an action U contingent on the state of the world X and incur the cost c(X,U). We cannot access the state of the world directly, but must mediate the act of selecting the action through transmission of symbols over a noisy channel. 5/14