Tag Archives: en

Red Panda based Cuteness Scale

The cutest animal in the world is red panda, there is no discussion about that. Some other animals and things may come close but never quite reach the level. We can take the cuteness of one red panda as a basis reference for the standard scale of cuteness.

Then, we can compare other things and animals to the red panda and give them scores relative to the cuteness of the red panda. Let’s say we take a scale from zero to one and we say that zero is basically a neutral rating, not cute but not ugly either. At the same time, the top of the scale will be the red panda with the score of one. Anything else that is at least a bit cute will fall in between.

Red panda is the benchmark of cuteness, so it is rated at 1.0.

Your average cute minion from Despicable Me will rate at about 0.6 or so.

Cats are probably the only animals that are able to come close to red panda in terms of cuteness rating sometimes as high as 0.9 on the red panda scale.

I hereby donate the Red Panda Cuteness Scale to the public domain, free to use and abuse as you see fit, no strings attached. Now, go, go! Rate! Rate! There is not a moment to lose, the cuteness of the world is waiting! :)… -->

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Robert A. Heinlein, “Have Space Suit – Will Travel”

“Have Space Suit – Will Travel” is another wonderful book from one of my favorite authors, Robert Anson Heinlein. It is classified as science fiction, as, I think, all of his books are. There is science fiction in it all right. However, as it is usual for Heinlein, there is quite a bit of adventure and a serious amount of political and societal wisdom in the book. Adventure is thoroughly enjoyable and a couple of times takes completely unexpected turns. What piqued my attention though was the end of the book.

Nearly at the end, there is a court of sorts that judges whether Earth would present a danger to the survival and well-being of the existing system in the future. It is a “Security Council” of sorts, for the three participating galaxies.

“The facts have been integrated. By their own testimony, these are a savage and brutal people, given to all manner of atrocities. They eat each other, they starve each other, they kill each other. They have no art and only the most primitive of science, yet such is their violent nature that even with so little knowledge they are now energetically using it to exterminate each other, tribe against tribe. Their driving will is such that they may succeed. But if by some unlucky chance they fail, they will inevitably, in time, reach other stars. It is this possibility which must be calculated: how soon they will reach us, if they live, and what their potentialities will be then.”

The book is written in 1958 and the United Nations Security Council had its first meeting in 1946. Apparently, Heinlein saw quite clearly the danger of the organization: such an overarching organization of powerful nations is charged with keeping the world “stable” and may destroy other nations that threaten the status quo. Both organizations are charged with keeping the peace but the one in the book easily destroys whole planets and civilizations for the sake of safety. What does the one we know in our world do? What will it do in the future?

Anyway, even besides this obvious political twist to the story, the book is quite amazing. It has a very romantic story, in fact, without ever mentioning anything about love. It is rather about romantic friendship and I nearly forgot that the friendship can be romantic. It is so good that there are authors like Robert Heinlein to remind me.

“The best things in

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Vibram FiveFingers Class Action Lawsuit

I heard that Vibram has settled a class action lawsuit that “alleged the company made false and unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of its glove-like footwear.” That was apparently back in May and I was too busy with my brand new FiveFingers Komodo Sport to pay attention, apparently.

Frankly, the company should not have said the FiveFingers bring definite improvement to the health if they did not have any evidence to back that up. On the other hand, after my experience with FiveFingers shoes, owning three pairs of them and walking them every day wherever I go, I have to say that for me those claims are true.

Once you wear the FiveFingers shoes and learn to walk properly, there is no turning back. Anything else is just clumsy and uncomfortable. So I feel sorry that they got slapped with that court case. The shoes are brilliant. Walking in them is a bliss. I am afraid to recommend them because you will get addicted if you bother to learn how to walk right :)

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Getting WordPress cron work in multisite environment

There are several bits and pieces around that tell you how to get the WordPress cron work properly in simple situations. I just spent a morning getting it all working in a multisite environment so here come my notes on how to get it to work properly.

“Cron” is the scheduler of background tasks. You want to disable the built-in cron simulator when your site has the capability to run the normal UNIX cron jobs. The built-in simulator is quite unreliable and causes problems sooner or later. It is a good thing to have when the normal UNIX cron is not there but if you can install cron jobs you are better off with a standard reliable regular execution of your background tasks.

First of all, the usually advised first step is quite correct whatever the environment. You go to the installation directory, edit your wp-config.php and add the line before that last require_once statement (or anywhere in the middle of the file really) to disable the built-in cron simulator:

/* Disable wp-cron, we run linux cron */
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Next, for a site that is not a network, i.e. not a multisite, it is sufficient to add something like this as a cron job:

*/2 * * * * www-data /usr/bin/php /var/www/yoursite/wp-cron.php > /dev/null )

This executes the cron of WordPress every two minutes. If you cannot run the command-line PHP for some reason but have wget (or any other thing, like lynx, curl, whatever) you can add a line to cron to call a URL instead, although that’s going to consume a tiny bit more resources:

*/2 * * * * www-data /usr/bin/wget -q -O - http://yoursite/wp-cron.php > /dev/null

Many recommend adding the parameter “doing_wp_cron” at the end of the URL but that is a mistake. Having that parameter assumes that you already acquired a lock for the cron job execution and may cause problems if you have long running jobs. Without that parameter, the wp-cron will do what it is supposed to do: acquire a lock so there is no contention, and then run its jobs.

For the multisite, however, it does not work so easily. You must execute the wp-cron for each and every of the “sites” in your network separately. This is kinda nuts but that’s how things are. There is no way to do that from a command line (as far as I can tell), so you have to call the URLs at each site.

I have the following script that reads the names of the sites and goes through… -->

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Yoga considered harmful

I have been doing the same yoga exercise for years as a preventive and a cure for my spinal problems. It seems to help well and I think I might have been a stationary patient without those yoga poses. I never went for more than those few basic things that helped me though. Apparently, that was a good thing too.

I came across an article in The New York Times Magazine from 2012 that talks about the dark side of yoga classes. Apparently, we are all too hyped up on the usefulness of yoga and on how great it is to cure practically anything. What we do not know and never think about is that yoga could be extremely harmful.

“…awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.”

The yoga poses are developed in India where the everyday activities are quite different, for example, people customarily sit with their legs crossed under. These poses are not at all natural for the Western people. Another problem is that many teachers provoke students (or stimulate student’s own indulgence) to take more and more strenuous poses, causing eventually serious bodily harm in physically unprepared. The problems are numerous and we should be well aware of them before going too far. Yoga is actually suitable for physically fit and well-stretched people.

Read the article: “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body“.… -->

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Guardians of the Galaxy

Yesterday I managed to get into movies for the first time in … oh, years. We watched the “Guardians of the Galaxy” in 3D. Nothing better than an adventure filled heroic movie from Marvel for a Sunday evening. The movie was quite good, actually. I thought they cut some corners and removed a few scenes in a few places but overall it was a load of fun and is totally worth enjoying. And Rocket the raccoon totally rules.

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Grandson of a Nazi SS member to head EU from December 1

From December 1, 2014 Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk will lead the European Council in Brussels and preside over the summits of the eurozone.

Tusk’s appointment to key positions was confirmed last Saturday at the extraordinary meeting of the European Union. He promised to act decisively in the “Ukrainian question”. On this occasion, the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry Pavlo Klimkin even joked that the appointment of Donald Tusk is the “most significant sanction against Russia.”

What lies behind the determination of the new head of the European Union, the world has yet to learn. However, the determination of the grandfather of Donald Tusk, Joseph, is known in Europe firsthand. He was an accomplice of Adolf Hitler and served in a reserve SS death squad. This information was leaked to the media during the so-called “war of compromising materials”, which began during the presidential elections in Poland in 2005.

At that time Lech Kaczynski won the election. Later, he even apologized for his election headquarters employee  Jacek Kursk who provided allegedly false information about the pedigree of the opponent. But it was too late for Donald Tusk.

The hot topic became the subject of journalist investigation. Information about the fascist roots of Donald Tusk has been confirmed. The severity of the scandal was augmented by the fact that during the pre-election campaign Tusk said repeatedly that both of his grandfathers were in concentration camps for resisting the Nazis.

Thus the appointment of a man, whose ancestors were members of the dreaded fascist SS punitive battalions, as the new head of the European Council can be considered a landmark. After all, Europe does not condemn but openly supports modern fascist crimes in Ukraine.… -->

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Obama badly needs a lesson in European history

The Barack “Dove of Peace” Obama may need a lesson in European history, pronto. This time around he came to Tallinn to save Estonia from “Russian aggression” and made new historic blunders. The American President has the floor: “reaching back to the days of the tsars – trying to reclaim lands “lost” in the 19th century – is surely not the way to secure Russia’s greatness in the 21st century. (Applause.)”

Russia is no doubt thankful to Mr. Obama for his concern about Russia’s greatness. On the other hand, what lands did Russia lose exactly in the 19th century? Maybe the Crimea peninsula? Well, no, actually, Russia has successfully defended Crimea in bloody battles against Western countries when they tried to seize it in the 19th century. Leo Tolstoy described the Crimean War in his works.

Were there perhaps other territorial losses for Russia that the esteemed Nobel Peace Prize laureate could blather about from high tribunes? Well, no, not really. You see, in the 19th century, Russia has destroyed the Great Napoleon’s army, came to Paris and Istanbul. In general, the whole 19th century Russia was scaring the hell out of Europe and augmenting its territory, but no land has been lost.

Obama continues the tradition of proving to the world that American presidents are uneducated, ill-informed and short-sighted people. Oh, well, who needs history in geopolitics nowadays anyway? Fire away!… -->

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A note on NATO

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is touted as a “system of collective defense whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.” In reality, NATO does not perform any defensive functions in principle. All actions of the military alliance were and still are invasions of sovereign states.

NATO is one of the most aggressive international organizations in the world. So, the massive bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 by the North Atlantic alliance’s troops killed more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, after which the country was divided. In 2001, the NATO forces invaded Afghanistan and destroyed the government, as well as killed tens of thousands of citizens of this country. Next in line was Iraq. In 2003, NATO forces launched an operation to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein. According to various estimates, this operation killed over 1 million Iraqis. In 2011, in the war against Libya by the North Atlantic Alliance the NATO bullets killed about 50,000 people.… -->

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Fidel Castro: U.S. decided to settle scores with Russia and China

Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro compared NATO’s recent statements to that of Nazi SS and accused US and its allies of igniting conflicts abroad in an article published in Cuban media. Castro slammed John McCain for backing Israel and accused both of being involved in the creation of ISIS.

Apparently referring to the pressure the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been trying to exert on Moscow in connection with the Ukrainian crisis, which coincides with calls for the ramping up of military budgets of NATO member countries, Cuba’s iconic leader accused Western politicians of hypocrisy and aggression.

“Many people are astonished when they hear the statements made by some European spokesmen for NATO when they speak with the style and face of the Nazi SS,” Castro wrote in a column published in Cuban state media.

The statements of the 88-year-old leader came after NATO announced it will create a 4,000-strong “spearhead” high-readiness force that can be deployed rapidly in eastern Europe and the Baltic states to help protect member nations against potential Russian aggression.

“Adolf Hitler’s greed-based empire went down in history with no more glory than the encouragement provided to NATO’s aggressive and bourgeois governments, which makes them the laughing stock of Europe and the world.”

Castro attacked the West for its “cynicism” and said that it became “a symbol of imperialist policy.”

“The world has seen no respite in recent years, particularly since the European Economic Community, under the strict and unconditional leadership of the United States, decided the time had come to settle scores with what was left of two great nations – Russia and China – that… had carried out the heroic deed of putting an end to the imperialist colonial order imposed on the world by Europe and the United States,” Castro said.

Instead of promoting conflicts, the governments should “introduce more food, build hospitals and schools for the billions of human beings who desperately need them,” the Cuban leader believes.

Castro stressed that Cuba will continue to resist the US, despite the costs to the Cuban economy due to the US embargo, saying that “there is no worse price than capitulating before an enemy who attacks you without any right to do so.”

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