Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
My veg patch has turned into a chard jungle and now it’s chard for breakfast, lunch and supper
Chard. It’s hard with so much chard. As Jennifer Lopez might put it if she were in my gardening shoes, I used to have a little, now I have a lot. There was too little last year, for whatever reason. I probably did something wrong. This year, I sowed more. Come summer, the crop underwhelmed me again. So I sowed still more, throwing around seeds of as many varieties as I could get hold of. Then I went off to Croatia for most of August, where there is chard aplenty. That’s not why I go there, incidentally, but it suits me because I really like it, which is just as well because on the Adriatic coast it comes with every meal.
If you have not tried chard, I’d describe it as like spinach, but more substantial. In Croatian it’s called blitva, which oddly enough is the sound my belly starts making when I eat too much of it, as I do every summer there. It can get too much. In Split, I met a woman who was so sick of chard she got rather angry at the very mention of it. She was the cousin of the wife of a famous Serbian footballer I know. She wrote pop songs for a living, but she won’t be penning a love song to blitva any time soon, I can tell you that. As she started forking it off her plate on to mine, she spat out the word blitva as if it were a profanity rather than the sound of a stomach-gurgle. And now I, too, am taking its name in vain.
Continue reading...This week, we dive into the big questions surrounding the most surprising result of the Premier League weekend
Before this past weekend, Arsenal had not lost in the Premier League since April. Nine straight league wins had been enough to crown the Gunners as champions at the end of last season and firmly establish them as the team to beat early this season.
Against Brighton on Saturday, though, the team to beat were beaten. Thoroughly.
Continue reading...Conservatives long promoted a politics of sexual prohibition. Now such morals have been shed in favor of male domination
Under Kash Patel, the FBI will now hire you even if you have a history of hiring prostitutes, or of having sex with animals. The rightwing Maha influencer Alex Clark had a guest on to her talk show to discuss the idea that wives should provide sex for their husbands on demand. A new ad for a sports gambling website is being hailed as a victory for the political right, because it features a nude Sydney Sweeney clutching footballs to her breasts. The Tate brothers, who encourage their male followers to pursue compulsive sexual conquest and who have been accused of sex trafficking and violence in the operation of their online cam porn business, have reportedly been friendly with members of Trump’s circle. A dizzying array of elites on both sides of the aisle – conservatives very much included – seem to have been socializing with a pedophile financier, and were so unfazed by his constant coterie of underaged girl companions that one begins to wonder whether they were habituated to such scenes. A prominent conservative writer, best known for her opposition to gender transition care for children, has announced a new book claiming to tackle the problem of young women who are supposedly unwilling to have enough sex. And the women of the president’s members club, Mar-A-Lago, are so well known for their dramatic facelifts, and their lips so stuffed with filler that they cannot quite close their mouths, that their faces are now a shorthand in the world of plastic surgery.
Raunch, vulgarity, a boorish entitlement to women’s sexual service, and the aesthetics – and, indeed, the business – of pornography are being embraced by the right.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Continue reading...Theatrical rollout across 56 territories planned for documentary about Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza before film will stream on Guardian website
NAZA, the award-winning documentary from Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is set to be released in cinemas in more than 50 countries before a digital global release on theguardian.com.
The film, which the Guardian produced, premiered at the Venice film festival earlier this month, where it was met with a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. The documentary went on to win the special jury prize.
Continue reading...Duo had US hits with their cover of Always Something There to Remind Me as well as Promises, Promises and more
Pete Byrne, the frontman of British new wave group Naked Eyes who carried them to repeated chart successes in the US, has died aged 74.
The news was announced on the band’s website and social media on Wednesday, stating that Byrne died peacefully in Los Angeles on 14 September after a brief illness.
Continue reading...Known to many as JD in Scrubs, Zach Braff has forged a path as a successful writer and director since the release of his acclaimed 2004 indie film Garden State. Now’s your chance to ask him your burning questions
There’s much more to Zach Braff than hospital scrubs and hair that could keep the entire mousse industry afloat. His second career as a film-maker got off to quite the start with his 2004 directorial debut Garden State, which he also wrote and starred in. Shot for just $2.5m, it went on to make more than $35m worldwide, pick up over three dozen award nominations and earn Braff a Grammy for compiling its soundtrack, featuring the Shins, Coldplay and Nick Drake.
Then as a film actor he has also popped up in everything from 2000 gay ensemble comedy-drama The Broken Hearts Club, alongside Timothy Olyphant, and 2006 romantic drama The Last Kiss, opposite Jacinda Barrett, to 2006 workplace romcom The Ex, with Jason Bateman, and 2016 John Steinbeck adaptation In Dubious Battle, directed by James Franco.
Continue reading...Council members also want Balogun affair included
Fifa president says review letter been well received
Fifa council members will demand that Gianni Infantino include the abandoned World Cup sell-off plan and the Folarin Balogun affair in his proposed external review of Fifa’s governance.
In a letter sent to all 211 of Fifa’s member associations on Monday Infantino said he would ask council to commission a review of “Fifa’s current governance framework for major strategic initiatives” at its next meeting, in Zurich on 15 October, but he faces an internal battle over its terms of reference.
Continue reading...
MariaDB has built vector search into its database. Its problem is persuading AI coding tools to tell anyone about it, says the executive chairman of the MariaDB Foundation. "We're so frustrated that the world doesn't understand that MariaDB has vectors," Kaj Arnö tells us. Arnö is speaking to The Register at Percona Live, where rival database vendors seem to be in an unusually collegiate mood. Not that Arnö is above throwing a little shade here and there: "I think we are in a period of calmness and sort of sailing smooth waters and seeing how AI impacts stuff, how extensibility impacts stuff… and I'm not as sure that MySQL is going through all that smooth times." MariaDB was forked from MySQL in 2009 as Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems loomed. It now supports vector search, which lets applications find items by similarity rather than exact matches – a common requirement in AI applications. The nonprofit MariaDB Foundation supports development of the open source server and its community, while MariaDB plc develops the commercial products and provides support. MariaDB is familiar to users of many Linux distributions. Arnö's concern is whether developers starting a new AI project will ever be pointed toward it. "People start using vector databases based on some framework or based on some default choices of the LLM," he explains. "So if you do vibecoding and just sort of press enter when Claude Code suggests something, you will not end up using MariaDB for your vector search, and that is what we need to change." Arnö attributes part of the problem to the information available to AI tools. Their training data may predate MariaDB's vector features, while the documentation and examples developers encounter elsewhere may still favor established alternatives. "There are a million places where we need to update stuff so that the frameworks, the training data for the LLMs, and all of those know about the existence of MariaDB vectors," he says. "Like, if you ask a random LLM, 'What database should I use for vectors?' And you do not mention MariaDB; today, based on the training that the LLM models have right now, nobody suggests MariaDB." In one decidedly unscientific check, we asked Claude which database to use for vector search. It suggested PostgreSQL first and did not mention MariaDB. When asked to compare MariaDB with PostgreSQL for the same task, however, it had plenty to say. The tool knew about MariaDB's capabilities; it just didn't volunteer them. "I compare this to the old days of how to improve your Google ranking. It was sort of a mystical science. You did not really know how Google prioritized results. "Now the world has moved on [from search engine optimization] to LLM optimization." Arnö acknowledges that vendors could try to game the recommendations, but says: "I think the only proper way of influencing it is by having it and by documenting it and by people using it." That leaves MariaDB with a chicken-and-egg problem: without users generating examples and discussions of its vector search, AI tools have less material from which to learn about it. "The early movers have an undue advantage, and it's like if the water starts flowing in a certain direction, it will continue to flow in that direction. And now we have to change that and make people aware of what we are doing." MariaDB's efforts to attract developers also raise a question about which capabilities will remain available in its community edition. Galera, the clustering technology used with MariaDB, has attracted controversy over its open source future and its place in the company's enterprise product line. "You can have different opinions on whether that is exactly part of MariaDB, the core server, or not, but it is a product that was not part of MariaDB's core engineering team to begin with. It was managed by an entity that was acquired by MariaDB plc, which is a commercial entity and which is not equal to MariaDB server, and they are allowed to do whatever they want with it," Arnö says. "It's their freedom. It's their prerogative to decide what they want to do. What we protect is MariaDB server, and if anybody is messing with that, we would be quite upset!" ®
Martijn van Eijzeren alias Snuifkabouter prakte in Frankrijk z'n auto in een vrachtwagen terwijl hij veel te hard reed én een paar nakkies kook in z'n mik had gebollejost. Regisseur Ilya Vierhout kwam daarbij om het leven. Stuntje mocht Frankrijk niet verlaten en het 'parket van Valence' heeft hem in staat van beschuldiging gesteld voor het veroorzaken van een dodelijk ongeval onder invloed van verdovende middelen. Bedankt voor het uitzoeken RealityFBI! Snuifkabouter is bij het grote publiek ook bekend van het Songfestival waar hij samen met Joost en die malle kraai naar huis werd getoept en weet u wat nou zo leuk is? We gaan komend jaar weer meedoen aan het Songfestival en daar mocht het geopolitieke fenomeen Loiza Lamers, de 7 oktober onder de topmodellen, dan weer wat over roepen. Dat hielden we niet lang vol helaas, misschien u wel.
wing of kaz has added a photo to the pool:
佐賀県藤津郡太良町、大漁神社の海中鳥居 / The underwater torii gate of Tairyo Shrine in Tara Town, Fujitsu District, Saga Prefecture.
Africa bigger, US smaller as UN votes to adopt a new world map.
The United Nations has voted to adopt a map that makes Africa and Australia bigger while shrinking North America and Europe.
Dankzij kunstmatige intelligentie wordt het voor criminelen gemakkelijker om cyberaanvallen uit te voeren, waarschuwen onder meer de AIVD en MIVD.
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BAKOE (ANP) - Max Verstappen heeft in zijn Red Bull bij de eerste vrije training op het stratencircuit van Bakoe de tweede tijd neergezet (1.45,787). De 28-jarige Limburger hield Charles Leclerc in zijn Ferrari kort achter zich (1.45,791) en zag alleen George Russell van Mercedes een snellere ronde noteren (1.45,387).
WK-leider Kimi Antonelli klokte de vijfde tijd. De Italiaan moest de trainingssessie na zo'n 25 minuten vroegtijdig staken, nadat er rook uit zijn auto kwam.
Voor de Formule 1-coureurs staat om 14.00 uur de tweede vrije training gepland. Vrijdagmiddag volgen de derde vrije training en de kwalificatie voor de hoofdrace die zaterdag om 13.00 uur begint in de Azerbeidzjaanse hoofdstad.
Je verjaardag vertelt precies hoeveel jaar je op aarde rondloopt. Maar hoe oud je lichaam werkelijk is, is een ander verhaal. Die biologische leeftijd geeft aan hoe snel slijtage toeslaat. En een scan van het netvlies kan daar verrassend veel over vertellen.
Een nieuwe studie van Seoul National University laat zien dat een foto van de achterkant van het oog kan worden gebruikt om biologische veroudering te schatten. De methode is snel, niet-invasief en voorspelt leeftijd nauwkeuriger dan eerdere modellen die het netvlies daarvoor gebruikten.
De techniek draait om de zogenoemde retinal age gap (RAG): het verschil tussen iemands werkelijke leeftijd en de leeftijd die een algoritme op basis van het oog schat. Het oog is daarbij interessant omdat het nauw verbonden is met hersenen en hart.
Voor het nieuwe model werden 29.530 netvliesscans van 7.535 deelnemers gebruikt. Anders dan bij veel eerdere studies zaten daar beelden tussen van gezonde ogen en ogen met aandoeningen aan het netvlies of de oogzenuw. Daarna werd het systeem getest met 14.832 andere scans van 7.416 mensen.
Diabetes en roken
Een hogere RAG bleek samen te hangen met verschillende gezondheids- en leefstijlfactoren. Bij diabetes ging het om 2,52 jaar extra veroudering, bij huidige rokers om 0,5 jaar en bij voormalige rokers om 0,46 jaar. Maculadegeneratie hing samen met 0,6 jaar extra en staar met 1,86 jaar. Bij staar kunnen troebelere beelden een deel van het verschil verklaren.
Er zijn nog belangrijke beperkingen. De methode is niet rechtstreeks vergeleken met bestaande manieren om biologische leeftijd te meten. Bovendien zijn veel gevonden effecten klein ten opzichte van de foutmarge van het model.
Op termijn zouden opeenvolgende oogscans mogelijk kunnen laten zien of behandelingen of andere veranderingen invloed hebben op de biologische veroudering. Mar daarvoor is eerst verder onderzoek nodig.
Bron: Science Alert
Peter Breedveld Sociologen en politicologen leven in een papieren werkelijkheid waarin iets pas waar is als je het kunt uitdrukken in percentages en statistieken. Daarom heb ik altijd gelijk en zij helemaal nooit. Peter Breedveld Illustratie: Tomoe Gozen door Chikanobu. Eén van de ergste dingen van oud worden is de media elke zeven jaar die oude meuk zien herkauwen waarmee we al drie, vier keer meenden te hebben afgerekend. Dat Hitler links was, dat intelligentie ras-gerelateerd is en dat we het daarover moeten kunnen hebben, dat Nederland islamiseert, dat Nederland wordt bedreigd door ‘massa-immigratie’. Net zag ik weer een interview in de Volkskrant voorbij komen waarin Leo Lucassen voor de miljoenmiljardste keer uitlegt dat de ‘massa-immigratie’ in de jaren 70 niet door links maar door rechts in gang is gezet. Waarbij opvalt dat Lucassen het domrechtse begrip ‘massa-immigratie’ heeft geïncorporeerd, en dus blijkbaar díe deelstrijd heeft opgegeven. Turkse en Marokkaanse gastarbeiders werden in de jaren 60 en 70 inderdaad door het bedrijfsleven naar Nederland gehaald. Waarom leren de kinderen dat niet gewoon op school? Dirk Wanrooij lepelt dit ook al op in zijn nieuwe boek en schrijft erbij dat dit voor hem allemaal nieuw is. Islamitische homo’s van kleur En […]
Het bericht Waarom ik altijd gelijk heb verscheen eerst op Frontaal Naakt.