1/ The past 48 hours may come to be known as The Great Cancellation of 2021, as Silicon Valley companies remove or limit Trump’s access to a host of services following the violent insurrection against democracy he incited on Capitol Hill.

1/ Jassa Singh Ahluwalia & his role in the history of Shri Harmandir Sahib (A Thread)

2/ Jassa Singh was born in 1720/21 at a village called Ahlu in the Lahore District of Punjab.

3/ Jassa Singh was educated in Delhi, in Persian, Arabic & more, under the care & supervision of Mata Sundari Ji.

Mata Sundari Gurdwara in Delhi.

4/ In 1733, Jassa Singh's mama, Thag Singh (ਤਾਗ ਸਿੰਘ), requested Mata Sundari Ji's permission to take Jassa Singh back to Punjab.

5/ At first Mata Ji refused but eventually gave permission for Jassa Singh to go with his mama, giving Jassa Singh a blessing and weapons, informing him, it was now the right time to take up arms.

SRI KUMARIAMMAN, KANYAKUMARI (TN)
#bharatmandir #navratri2021

Created by Maharshi Parasurama and also one among the 108 Shakthi Peethas in the world. The name Kanyakumari stands for Kanya(Virgin) and Kumari(girl).
Devi took this form to vanquish the demon Banasura
@GunduHuDuGa

Once, Banasura(grand son of Mahabali) obtained a boon from Shiva that he could be vanquished only by a virgin.
So, Devi took the form of a kumari and started meditating with the desire to marry Shiva at Suchindram.
Pleased Shiva fixed the midnight hour for marriage with Devi.

Devarshi Narada knew that the marriage would end the chance of killing Banasura. So, he assumed the form of a cock and crowed. Shiva returned back to Suchindram thinking that it was dawn.
Angered, Devi cursed that all food and articles meant for wedding turn into sand and shells

When Banasura heard about Devi’s beauty, he tried to take her by force. Devi, then, killed him and granted the wish of Devas to remain there always protecting them.
The murti of Devi stands with a rosary in hand. Her diamond nose-ring is said to be visible even from the sea.

Once an ancient mariner mistook it for a lighthouse and sailing towards it, his ship wrecked upon the Kanya Kumari rocks. In order to prevent such a tragedy from happening again, the eastern door of the shrine is opened only on five special occasions throughout the year.

Met a Brazilian-American Lyft driver from San Diego who passionately attacked the racism of Republicans, then switched to passionately defending Bolsonaro.

If I were Thomas Friedman, I could tell you what this means.

Met a Haitian-American in a restaurant who said he'd always vote for Democrats because of the immigration issue, but that he has conservative beliefs too. "I don't want to pay for someone's abortion!", he declared.

Met a Latino Lyft driver from San Jose who said that while he was liberal, California was getting too liberal for him and he was considering moving to San Antonio.

Again, not being Tom Friedman, I am unable to offer any commentary on the political and policy implications of these conversations.

I guess my only thought is that political opinions are pretty complex and multidimensional, out there in the real world.

(end)

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

Can we control the output of neural generation systems?
Can we build a better chatbot using this control?
And what makes a good conversation anyway?

Check out the blog post for our NAACL paper:

https://t.co/UAAUxSeA0L

#AI #NLProc #DeepLearning #ConversationalAI @facebookai

This post got a little delayed since the paper's publication, but the intervening time has given me an opportunity to reflect.

So this post has some extra thoughts regarding more recent NLG developments - e.g., pretrained models like GPT(2), and the suitability of beam search.