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"Never care for what they do
Never care for what they know
But I know
So close no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trust in who we are
And nothing else matters"
(Perchè alle volte, sembra l'unica soluzione.)
Agile Testing & BDD eXchange 10th-11th November 2016, Code Node, London. skillsmatter.com/conferences/7428-agile-testing-and-bdd-e.... Images copyright www.edtelling.com
Agile Testing & BDD eXchange 10th-11th November 2016, Code Node, London. skillsmatter.com/conferences/7428-agile-testing-and-bdd-e.... Images copyright www.edtelling.com
In a nationwide study, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of hundreds of participants in the National Institutes of Health’s Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT) and found that intensively controlling a person’s blood pressure was more effective at slowing the accumulation of white matter lesions than standard treatment of high blood pressure. The results complement a previous study published by the same research group which showed that intensive treatment significantly lowered the chances that participants developed mild cognitive impairment.
Read more: www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/intensive-blood-pre...
Credit: SPRINT MIND Investigators, NIH
The News Line: Feature Friday, 27 January 2017
Oakland longshoremen march against Trump!
ON the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, many Americans wrung their hands. Some took to social media to express their discontent while others protested. But, perhaps, the most dramatic and important action was taken by dockworkers in Oakland, California: They stopped working. Their strike demonstrated the potential power ordinary people have on the job, when organised.
Longshore workers, who load and unload cargo ships, chose not to report to their hiring hall. As a result, ‘Oakland International Container Terminal, the largest container facility at the Northern California port, was shut down Friday,’ according to the Journal of Commerce. It also reported that all other Oakland container terminals were essentially shut down, too.
Crucially, these workers did not first come together to protest Trump. They belong to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), one of the strongest and most militant unions left in the United States.
The ILWU, founded in the 1930s, represents logistics workers up and down the West Coast of the United States, in Alaska, Hawaii, British Columbia and Panama. For some 80 years, the union has fought for equal rights, democracy, economic equality and a vast array of other social justice causes. ILWU Local 10, which represents workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, often has been at the forefront of those fights.
ILWU members refused to load scrap metal intended for Japan because it had invaded China in the 1930s. The ILWU condemned the racist, apartheid regime in South Africa and Local 10 members periodically refused to unload South African cargo, including in the face of federal injunctions and employer pressure. They also refused, in 1978, to load US military aid for Augusto Pinochet, a Chilean military general who led a coup against a democratically-elected, socialist president, Salvador Allende. On May Day 2008, the ILWU shut down Pacific Coast ports to protest the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One key element of ILWU power is its job dispatch system. In the aftermath of its legendary Big Strike of 1934, which briefly became the San Francisco general strike, the union basically won control over job dispatch. Quickly, workers implemented a ‘low man out’ system, which enshrined the idea that the person with the fewest number of hours worked be the first one dispatched. Such socialism in action should not be surprising from a union whose founding members included socialists, communists and Wobblies, the name for members of perhaps America’s most radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World. The ILWU also inherited the Wobbly motto, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’
Today, though some workers are assigned to specific companies on a long-term basis, many still are dispatched via hiring halls. This system gives workers incredible power because they decide when to report for work, creating the possibility for workers to coordinate not showing up. The result, as seen on Friday, was to shut down the port of Oakland. Obviously, many workers, nationwide, do not operate under a dispatch system. But they can still organise something similar without technically calling a strike.
At the end of 2014, New York City police officers coordinated a ‘virtual work stoppage,’ nicknamed the ‘Blue Flu.’ And last year, Detroit public school teachers, enraged by the awful conditions students and teachers suffer from because of a lack of state funding, organised an effective ‘sickout.’ In other words, workers need not officially ‘strike,’ or even belong to a labour union, to engineer a shutdown.
Importantly, Friday’s action was not organised or endorsed by the ILWU leadership. Since its inception, the ILWU has stood on the left tip of the US labour movement, but even this union has become more conservative during the past few decades. Nowadays, rank-and-file activists in Local 10 often take the lead.
Like most unions and working people, the ILWU opposes much of Trump’s anti-labour agenda, which promotes ‘right-to-work’ (more accurately right-to-work-for-less) legislation, condemns public sector unions, seeks to privatise public schools and reverse the Obama administration’s actions on paying more workers overtime, reducing wage theft and ensuring worker safety. Trump’s proposed labour secretary, for one, has made his anti-worker positions clear. (That said, Trump’s opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership is welcome.)
Nor have Bay Area longshore workers forgotten Trump’s insult of Oakland. The president once said, ‘There are places in America that are among the most dangerous in the world. You go to places like Oakland. Or Ferguson. The crime numbers are worse. Seriously.’
To resist Trump’s agenda, Oakland longshore workers shut down their workplace and reminded us of the potential of organised labour. As the old song, written by Joe Hill and sung by Utah Phillips, declares, ‘There is power, there is power in a band of working folks, when we stand hand-in-hand. That’s a power, that’s a power that must rule in every land.’
• President Donald Trump hosted a ‘listening session’ with American labour union leaders Monday, but some central players in the labour movement didn’t get the invite. In a sign of how Trump may seek to split organised labour as president, he limited the gathering to representatives of the construction and building trades unions, organisations that represent the type of blue-collar, manufacturing sector workers he championed in his campaign.
Left out were the public sector and service industry unions that have been some of the most powerful supporters of Democrats in recent elections. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – the nation’s second largest – was one of those excluded from Monday’s meeting. But even before that, the union was girding for war. ‘We are battening down the hatches,’ President Mary Kay Henry said in an interview.
Henry spoke to Newsweek shortly before Trump was inaugurated last week, and she acknowledged the challenges his election presents to her union, which represents 2 million health care workers, public sector employees, food and hotel workers and others.
But she insisted that the threats from a Trump White House are ‘not existential from our perspective.’ And the SEIU is preparing to fight for those same blue-collar voters Trump successfully wooed in 2016. It’s a brewing political battle that could define the midterm elections in 2018 and the president’s re-election effort in just under four years.
Henry tacitly acknowledged the union’s need to expand its reach, promising to broaden the ‘Fight for $15’ movement, one of its signature successes in recent years. The campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour has notched some major victories – 19 states and cities are now on track to have that as the minimum wage, more than double the $7.25 federal minimum wage, including California and New York. Many private companies have also raised their wages unilaterally as public pressure has increased.
Most of the activism, however, has focused on the fast-food industry, the health care sector and other service industry jobs, not the struggling manufacturing sector, whose decline was a central narrative in Trump’s campaign. And the labour campaign has had its biggest impact in the country’s urban centres, far removed from many of the small-town, predominantly white voters who fuelled Trump’s 2016 upset victory.
Henry said the SEIU and ‘Fight for $15’ organisers plan to target sectors that include autoworkers – a key Rust Belt constituency – and truck drivers in 2017. And we want to get into white urban and exurban and rural areas and figure out how to mount a fight to get good jobs back in their communities,’ she added.
At the same time, the SEIU plans to make clear to workers that Trump is not the populist ally he styled himself as on the campaign trail. ‘Our key job is to keep exposing the contradictions in his actions and words,’ Henry said, pointing to Trump’s nomination of Andy Puzder, an opponent of minimum wage increases, as secretary of labour, and his promises to revoke Obamacare.
Charcoal art I did. Photo used for reference.
At the top of rather a steep climb out of Alnwick and I wasn't the only one that had stopped to catch their breath.
Probably the hottest day of the year so far, in this area, and the pain and discomfort didn't matter to this MIND champion.
Scala eXchange 2016, Thursday, 8th - Friday, 9th December at Business Design Centre, London. skillsmatter.com/conferences/7432-scala-exchange-2016#pro.... Images copyright www.edtelling.com
The canal bridges are obviously popular stops for photographs, and no matter how much you tell yourself "no more canal photos" it just seems impossible to stop. We kept 5, including 2 taken at night that need a bit of tuning up before I post them.
Social activist Fatima Mann speaks at the Black Women Matter: Protest Against Police Brutality rally held at Austin City Hall on Aug. 4, 2016. The event, hosted by the Austin Justice Coalition, addressed the violent June 15, 2015, arrest of an African-American elementary school teacher, Breaion King, who was yanked from her car and twice thrown to the ground by a white police officer during a traffic stop for speeding. The arrest is under criminal investigation.
It's the Burning Matter texture created in the Filter Forge plugin. It can be seamless tiled and rendered in any resolution without loosing details.
You can see the presets and download this texture for free on the Filter Forge site here — www.filterforge.com/filters/8402.html (created by Skybase)
To use this texture download Filter Forge 30-day trial version for free here — www.filterforge.com/download/
I have decided to join in the fun and do the Everyday Matter challenges. I have done the first one but I am really struggling to get my pencil sketches to show up on the scan and this is the best I could do. You still can't see all the pencil lines! Think I will have to do the next sketches either in pen or colored pencils.
intense, wild, happy, passionate, irrational, fun love!
photo violeta minnick - szasza szoom
in the picture Andreas and me.
Thursday.
Start of the two day road trip.
I was awake before five with my allergies giving me hell. It was so bad I thought I had a cold, but it went off during the day, allergies is the best fit, but as I was feeling better later, it don't really matter. Anyway, we have breakfast, I load the car having packed the night before, and I drive Jools to the factory. And It's just me and the open road. Well, apart from all other drivers in south east England who were driving too. In fact I got caught in a train of cars heading to Folkestone behind a Dutch camper van travelling at 25mph.
However, onto the motorway and into the rush hour traffic of Ashford and then Maidstone before the fun that is the M25 heading into Dartford. It is odd that the most important part of the motorway is the corssing and we have to pay to use it, even if it has already been paid for and it causes god-almighty traffic jams. It's not that the money is reinvested back in the road system, as you will see later when I moan about the East Anglain road system with its myriad of bottlenecks and planning disasters.
I get through the queues, pay my two quid to find the southbound traffic the other side of the tunnel is at least three times as worse. And then there is the hjoy of the A12 through Essex. How can it be that a simple road causes so much pain? Is it the mad driving, the racing to get to the next junction, the pointless jams at Chelmsford. I mean who would want to go to Chelsmford? But once into the quiet county of Suffolk, I was able to turn off and head into the Dedham Vale. Or would have if the road signs would have made sense! Does it sound like I'm complaining all the time? I don't like traffic, queues or Essex. So, maybe driving through Essex in the rush hour was planning for trouble.
I switched on the sat nav, programmed the first port of call, Stoke by Nayland, and set off. I was lucky that my friend, Simon, had provided me with a list of fine churches to visit. All of the churches I would visit this morning would be splendid. I saw a sign for the village of Boxted, and realise that is on my list, so I head there, driving towards Church Hill, which my spidy senses tell me I might find the church. I park on the small high street through the village, with the church on my left. I leave the sat nav in the car switched on, I thought there would be no thieves in such a wonderful spot.
And I was right.
St Peter was quite spectacular, to me, inside, it was like a theatre, with a gallery containing seats and the organ, with the later being the centre of the stage. It was a delight, and is quite possibly my favourite church of all. Some doing, but I loved the church. But, I had to move on. But I tell the folks clearing bushes for the church wall how much I loved it. She had only been in once, at Christmas, but though the acoustics were good.
It was only a five minute drive to Soke by Nayland, I found the church and parked on the main street of the village and walked up to the churchyard noting the worker's vans parked near the porch. This could be trouble I thought.
It has fine glass, memorials and tiles, but I did have a run in with one of the workers. I wanted to photograph the windows, and asked if I could get by. NO. I was told. We're busy. But you're just talking. No, we're busy, and we might hot you on the head, said the stage erector. I siad I would be careful, and he retorted that he would not be held responsible if I had an accident. All in all it put a damper on the church, so I got my shots and left. I mean I can always go back.
I stopped at the small book shop at the cross roads and by a Sherlock Holmes novel to read if I got bored that evening, and head off for the next church.
It is a short drive to Polstead, the next on the list. Now, I did not plan this and I am getting the feeling that I am retracing my tracks already, in fact I was to pass through Stoke by Nayland some four times during the day. Oh well, its no real hardship.
Polstead lies in a shallow valley, with the village scattered up one side. I assume that the church will be on the highest point. As there are only four roads in and out of the village, it shouldn't be hard to find. I drive past the attractive cillage pond, more like a lake and head up through the village, past many wonderful looking ancient houses, but find no church. Back down into the centre of the village and out another road, and still no church. This just leaves the road I came in on, and so head back down through the village, past the pond onto the main road, or what counts as the main road, and a few yards further along is a small white sign pointing up the other side of the valley into some woods.
A new road has been laid, and there is a good sized car park, so I abandon the car, grab the cameras and walk into the church year. From outside St Mary looks something like a typical small Suffolk church, others might feel differently about that, but nothing too spectacular. But once inside on is met with brick-topped arches and it filled with the most wonderful light. I am awestruck, and glad that I do not research these churches beforehand so my breath can be taken away by the beauty of these churches.
After getting my shots I go back outside, taking a tray of quinces that are on offer and deposit a couple of quid in the box as a donation.
I program in Wissington into the sat nav and set off. Soon I see we are to go through Nayland, so I decide if I can find a parking space I will stop here first and snap the church. Nayland is a stunning looking large village, but, it knows it. I wanted to warm to the village, but seems to be more Aldborough that traditional working village, I could be wrong, but judging by the quantity of high powered sports cars parked in the village square, I get the feeling I am right.
I find a place to park, and see the church framed down Church Mews making a fine shot. So I snap that and enter the churchyard, walking round t the main entrance through the porch. Inside it is another fine church, built on a grand scale. I really warm to the church and am happy to snap it.
When I parked the car I saw some fashionably dressed ladies sipping coffees outside a shop, so I go in search of a cup for myself, to find it an arts shop which held classes for children to pain ceramics, with a coffee bar as a side line. Having just two tables, and a queue of several people, I assume I won't get a table and hope I can find a place somewhere else. I walk back to the car, load up and drive off towards Wissington.
Entering the village, I see a sign pointing to Wiston church, not the one I was looking for, but a church, so I drive down the narrow lane to the parking spot. The church is on a private estate, and they don't want cars parking near the church. Or something. But it is only a five minute walk, and it is a wonderful autumn day with lots of golden sunshine, its no chore to walk.
Wisset or Wissington? Is the question posed inside the church, so they are one and the same, more mangling of the mother tongue by East Anglians, then.
I am greeted with the sight of the wooden tower showing over a modern barn, it looks wonderful. First thing I notice is the bowed end, which reminds me of Loddon. Entry is my a grand glazed porch, but inside the walls are covered by the remains of ancient paintings, and right in front, over a door, is a dragon. Not what I was expecting. It is a delightful small church, made all the more special by the paintings, some more complete than others. And once again I have the church to myself. I am tempted to stay here longer, but it is already getting near lunchtime, and time is getting away from me.
jelltex.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/friday-26th-september-2014...
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Wissington, sometimes pronounced and even spelt Wiston, is in a gentle fold of Essex, above the Stour. It looks to Colchester rather than to Ipswich, and since the closure of the Jane Walker Hospital the village has returned to being a sleepy hamlet, not particularly on the way to anywhere.
Norman churches are not common in Suffolk; there was wealth to rebuild most of them on the eve of the Reformation. The best Norman churches are out on the margins of the county, as though some central authority had forgotten them. Apart from Nayland, the nearest other churches to Wissington are all in Essex.
Having said that St Mary is Norman, a qualification must be made, since the Victorians clearly thought that it wasn't quite Norman enough. They built the eastern apse, and filled the church with 'Norman' furnishings. There is a tasteless stone Norman pulpit, an absurd stone Norman reading desk, and even, I am afraid, Norman pews.
You approach the church by a narrow by-road from the Bures to Nayland road, which peters out into a private lane across the Wissington Hall estate.
You must leave your car on the hard standing area before entering the estate. The track is a public footpath, and takes you about 200m past a field that was full of the fluffiest, most comical sheep on my last visit. The church stands above the farmyard just to the west of the hall.
This is not a church you will come across by accident. The setting is superb - what it must be to wake up and see it every morning. You enter the churchyard from the eastern end, the apse for a moment making the building look round. The ancient exterior promises gloom, and you'll not be disappointed. You step into a darkness that seems ancient, and if you can ignore the pews and ridiculous pulpit, you can conjure up in your mind the candle flickering and incense-clouded early middle ages.
A building like this has a long memory, and, unusually for Suffolk, probably had as long a life before the Reformation as it has had since.
There is a smell of earth, a coolness that is unchanging, whatever the weather outside. And then, as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, you can look up to see the wonderful wall-paintings.
The paintings date from about 1280, and the complete range is still discernible. In common with many other survivals from this period, there are two levels.
The top level of paintings (the best preserved) shows the story of Christ from Annunciation to Ascension. The south wall is best of all. The sequence is shown below; hover to read the captions, click to see enlarged images. They starts at the far eastern end with the Annunciation; the angel holds a lily, and Mary's face is just visible on the right.This painting is wrongly identified as St Michael in some sources. The Visitation is lost, and we catch up on the story with one of two paintings here that are world famous. It apparently shows the Nativity (and must, to fit in with the sequence) but the imagery of it is more usually associated with the confinement of St Anne and the birth of the Blessed Virgin. It shows Mary in some pain, and her watching husband in distress, as a midwife nurses her. The problem is that, because of her immaculate conception, Mary was believed in medieval times to have given birth without pain. Although this doctrine was only formally received into the Church in the 19th century, it was widely held in medieval England.
The next part of the story fills two panels; in the first, an angel appears to the shepherds, one of whom is in the panel with him. His fellows gather in the next frame, while young sheep gambol without concern at their feet. In the next frame, they appear to be hurrying down to Bethlehem. In fact, the story switches at this point from St Luke's Gospel to St Matthew's, and these are the Magi travelling to greet the Christchild.
The journey of the Magi is followed by a two frame scene in which they offer their gifts to the infant Christ. He sits on his mother's lap, much as he does in the same scene at Thornham Parva across the county. There then follows the other world famous image; the angel appears to the Magi to tell them not to go back to Jerusalem but to return by a different route. As in the capital at Autun Cathedral, they are shown all asleep in the same bed.
The final two scenes in this row show the flight into Egypt and, just before the gallery intervenes and they are lost, the massacre of the innocents, with a fearsome soldier wielding a sword.
The painting is in ochre, with vine designs around the painted archways and alcoves that offset the subjects. The lower range is less well preserved, and is generally held to be scenes from the life of St Nicholas. I have to say that I do not find the evidence for this compelling. Certainly, the most well-preserved painting shows a man in a boat, and he appears to be holding a bishop's crozier as he blesses the sailors, as in the St Nicholas legend. However, if it wasn't a crozier, then this could just as easily be the story of Christ calming the waters of Lake Gallilee, in which case we must be open to the possibility that this is another range of scenes from the life of Christ. However, those to the east of this don't fit any obvious stories, and they are now so faint that it is easy to read almost anything into them. One figure appears to be female and holding a wheel, and so could be St Catherine. To her right, one figure pushes down the head of another - the expression on the face of the victim suggests another martyrdom.
There are fewer images survivng on the north wall, and they are generally in poorer condition, but several parts of the crucifixion story are clear. In one, Christ is nailed to the cross; He lies on the ground, and his executioners kneel beside him. I have seen this described as 'Christ washing the feet of his disciples, which is not impossible, but seems odd at this place in the sequence.
In the next, a figure holds a stick with a vinegar sponge up to the thirsting Christ, while a woman weeps at his nailed feet. The next image I take to be Christ being taken down from the cross, because the iconography is familiar; he lies with his head to the left resting in his mother's lap. However, an unusual feature is the large number of people gathered to watch; there are usually only three or four. The only other really clear image in the sequence is the risen Christ standing with his hands help open, surrounded by his friends I have seen this described as 'the last supper'.
There are two other major paintings on the north wall, and they are both really quite extraordinary. One is above the former north door, and shows a large and ferocious dragon. He is quite out of scale with the other images, and in quite a different style. Some sources suggest that it is part of a scene of St Margaret, but I could see no evidence for this. At the other end of the north wall, however, is the earliest known English image of St Francis. He is shown preaching to the birds in the tree. If 1280, the estimated date for this work, is broadly correct, then this could have been painted by people who were alive in the lifetime of their subject.
There are also the remains of a doom on the west wall above the gallery, hidden when I was last here by building work.
The rest of this building is as atmospheric, and the Victorian additions are obvious, so don't intrude too much. You step beyond the chancel arch into a square space that was obviously once the base of the tower, as at Ousden or Oulton. The sanctuary beyond is all Victorian. A brass inscription for a Laudian Rector has been reset in the tiles. Turning back west, you can make out the two parts of the gallery through the gloom, a royal arms of George III and two hatchments flanking it. Mortlock says that it has Fear God and Honour the King inscribed on the back. This end was undergoing repairs on my last visit.
Beneath the gallery, the font, later than the Norman period, is unique in Suffolk. There is one detail in particular on it that I like very much. The lions at its base are not sitting up, alert, as is common in East Anglia. They are lying down, as though the rural idyll of this place, and its ageless peace, have at last overcome them, and they have surrendered themselves to sleep.
St Mary, Wissington, is just south of the Sudbury to Colchester Road, where the road from Nayland to Bures cuts through. I have never found it locked.
Astronomers have designed a computer algorithm, inspired by slime mould behavior, and tested it against a computer simulation of the growth of dark matter filaments in the Universe.
More information: www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic2003a/
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Burchett and O. Elek (UC Santa Cruz)