fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Anita’s Mixed Vegetable Soup
By: Anita Anand
Tags: Summer, Vegetables, Health Recipe, Herbs And Spices, Soup Recipe

Vegetable Soup on the Stove

Summer is a time for coolness. What could be cooler than a cup of chilled soup, full of nature’s goodness and nutrition. Over the years, I have been experimenting with various kinds of soups and this is kind of my special. I like it because it is so simple and can be made with whatever you have in your garden or in the kitchen.

Ingredients

4 cups of cut vegetables (carrots, squash, potato, cauliflower, beets, zucchini, other green seasonal vegetables you have lying around at home)

2 onions, chopped

2 tomatoes, quartered

Ginger (1/2-inch piece)

Garlic, 8–10 segments, peeled, crushed

Salt and pepper to taste

Herbs (oregano, dill, basil, mint,) fresh or dried

4 TBS Cooking oil

Method

Cut the vegetables into cubes, leaving the skin on.

Put oil in a pot and when hot, add onion, ginger and garlic. When browned, add all the vegetables and stir.

Add 4 cups of water or enough to cover the vegetables. Add the herbs and tomatoes.

Bring to boil then cover half the pot, turn down the heat and let it cook for another 15/20 minutes.

Remove from heat and let it cool. Once cool, add salt and pepper to taste. Put in a blender and blend, with ice cubes. If needed, you can add some more water. If its too liquid, remove some of the water.

Refrigerate and drink cool. To your health!
Taraxa Weekly Update — Week 50.. Optimizing the PBFT execution on Taraxa…
By: Olya Green
Tags: Taraxa Weekly Tech Update, Taraxa

Taraxa Weekly Update — Week 50.

Optimizing the PBFT execution on Taraxa public testnet and the DAG network syncing.

Taraxa public testnet up and running, you can go check out the block explorer here. On to the updates!

Consensus and PBFT.

Reviewed the code to optimize the DAG syncing; RPC calls thread pool, and the logger refactoring;

Implemented a condition variable for the block executor;

Added a PBFT executed chain size and fixed the unit tests;

Merged the execution asynchronous with the PBFT manager into the master branch;

Fixed the unexecuted PBFT queue consistent with the PBFT chain head;

Fixed the checking empty before removing blocks in the PBFT unexecuted queue.

Block DAG.

Optimized and simplified the DAG network syncing for non-finalized blocks;

Fixing and debugging the issues related to the PBFT executor and failing unit tests;

Looking into GraphQL.

Check out our updated Ledger Roadmap and follow GitHub to be in the loop of our latest!

Stay tuned:
How to Build an App that Stands Out?
By: Ruslan Galba
Tags: App, UI, Design Thinking, App Design, App Design Company

The battle to stand out in app stores is getting tougher with every passing day. But going above and beyond with the work you put into branding, user experience and user interface, can skyrocket your app. 🚀⠀

Courtesy of @teamhyper

Be free to send us any feedback by reply or reach using DM on Instagram

Do you want to receive insights using FB Messenger or Telegram or Email? 👈 Subscribe now.

Useful tools to the blogpost: Notion, Webflow, Crello, Funnelytics.

Share your thoughts in the comments 👇
Major Update of Investy platform
Tags: Trading, Portfolio, Investing, Platform, Bitcoin

Friends, the Investy team welcomes you!

It’s April! The snow is thawing, the birds are singing, and we are trying to make Investy platform convenient for your use and releasing a great update. Rather, it is great for us, developers, because it was necessary to sift through a large amount of code. But, now it will be more convenient for you to work with our platform.

The update includes the following changes:

1. Portfolio statistics have been added. Now it contains much more useful information for making decisions:

- main portfolio cryptocurrency;

- schedule of changes in the portfolio rate for: 1 hour, 4 hours and 24 hours;

- number of subscribers for the signals of this portfolio;

- maximum daily portfolio drawdown;

- percentage of portfolio profitability for 24 hours, 1 week, month and all the time.

2. The portfolio page has been added. It contains:

- portfolio creation date;

- last portfolio rebalancing date;

- total number of rebalancings made for all time;

- a table with the full content of a portfolio; percentage ratio of cryptocurrency in a portfolio; daily portfolio drawdown in respect of main portfolio cryptocurrency.

3. The possibility of extending and upgrading of the selected tariff plan for the autofollowing function has been added.

4. The ability to replace API key from its exchange account with a new one f the autofollowing function has been added.

5. On the marketplace page the portfolios are sorted by profitability for the day, week, month, and all the time.

6. FAQ and new platform function usage guidelines have been updated.

Thank you for using our services!

Send your comments on the platform to: support@investy.io

P.S. A month has passed since the launch of the Investy platform beta version and it is already possible to talk about successful and losing portfolios. Ruthless statistics will help you to throw out all the irrelevant and choose the best portfolio. We found portfolios with good growth and, most importantly, with a cheap subscription. Search for them on web.investy.io

That’s it for today. We can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Bitcointalk. We are waiting for you in our Telegram community to discuss issues concerning Investy platform and cryptocurrencies in general. And yes, in order not to miss the latest news, subscribe to our Telegram channel.

Official Investy site

Investy web application

Stay Tuned!
Lavender Soul Light…
By: Diem Jones
Tags: Poetry, Community, Self-awareness, Spirituality, Wisdom

Photo: J.M.Garcia

Controlled or affected, I seek to be unshackled, but not unchecked/How can I miss a light filled room?/Why should I miss the sky?

Pushing the buttons of affection, I choose the reflection of the forest which nourishes my soul/I choose…

My choice to hear my voice along-side yours and beside yours…/I hear

Our choice to see the being/our choice to be seen/our choice to choose…

Unshackling from the attempts of the helms of destruction, I choose to let go/I choose to hold onto the love-light I hold dear/I choose…

My choice to feel my heartbeat, before the thundering hooves…/I feel

Our choice to be as One/our choice to merge/our choice to win…

…now I lay awake to leap…the next opportunity to fly…herein lies the we of it.
What we can learn from Facebook’s $610 million failed IPL bid
By: Nilesh Deshmukh
Tags: Facebook, Ipl, Digital Marketing, Opinion, Digital Video

IPL is India’s biggest sports league. In a span of 10 years, it has become one of the hottest and most sought after sports event for traditional and digital broadcasting.

The recently concluded IPL media rights bidding process was a testimony to the growth and demand of the league. In probably the most transparent of all sports broadcasting bids, IPL proved it’s demand with 14 out of 24 companies vying for National and International television and digital broadcasting rights for 5 years.

Rupert Murdoch owned Star network was the eventual winner of both television and digital rights in an astonishing $2.6 billion for a package that included broadcast and streaming rights. They won the rights for being the only global bid bidder.

The highlight of the bid process, however, was the battle for the India subcontinent digital rights, which saw a mix of big players from India and the silicon valley going head to head.

The most anticipated category of the bid process attracted companies like Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter, ESPN Digital, BAM Tech amongst the top names turned out to be a five-way race between TIL, Airtel, Jio, Star and Facebook.

Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter, ESPN Digital picked up the tender but did not enter the bid and BAM Tech was disqualified for lack of documentation (submission). This left Facebook the only representative of the Silicon Valley.

What really surprised me was Facebook seemed to be unfazed by the asking price and in fact, Facebook were the highest bidders with a $610 million bid to digitally broadcast the 2-month league in India!

Facebook and Twitter are focusing very heavily on video and in this case sports based content seems to be an anchor content for Facebook. In February, Facebook was reported to have live streamed all 46 football matches of the top level Mexican football league Liga MX 2017 season. Facebook has also actively live streaming ESL esports events.

Recently at the Soccerex, Jerry Newman — Facebook sports partnerships Europe, spoke about their new video platform ‘Watch’, their platform for sports content. They launched it with a documentary about Real Madrid.

How serious is Mark Zuckerberg about video content and in particular sports as anchor content, you may ask? Facebook eventually wants all of its shows and content deals to move to an ad-revenue-sharing model, but right now it’s clearly comfortable spending money upfront — even hundreds of millions of dollars — to secure streaming rights for marquee content.

Facebook may have lost in spite of their mammoth $610 million bid but their bid is a proof about their ambition to become a leader in sports video content.

Visit our website to read opinions and infographics on trending sports business news from India and rest of the world.
Introducing Hello Buddy, the Smart Pop-up!
By: João Romão
Tags: Product Development, Features, Product, Product Management, Startup

Hey everyone, we’re wrapping up what has been a fantastic year for all of us (we hope this includes you). We’d like to share a super exciting product update we’ve just launched, the Hello Buddy.

Hello Buddy, the Smart Pop-up.

We’ve worked really hard on this one over the past weeks. A few hundreds of you had sent us emails requesting a pop-up feature and through our vision to make your websites perform better, it totally made sense. The Hello Buddy is the perfect tool to increase your shares, subscribers and redirect traffic to specific pages.

So, how does it work?

First of all, you’ll be able to include in your Hello Buddy, one of the following GetSocial features:

Then, we made it very easy for you to define when you want the Hello Buddy to be triggered. We’ve covered some interesting options here:

Time on Page : triggers the pop-up after the user spent x seconds on the page;

: triggers the pop-up after the user spent x seconds on the page; Page Scroll: triggers the pop-up after the user went through y% of the page’s content.

triggers the pop-up after the user went through y% of the page’s content. Exit Intent: triggers the pop-up when the user is about to close the page.

There’s some other options on the Hello Buddy feature that optimize the end-user experience and give flexibility to your design but I don’t want to spoil everything.

Shall we create your first Hello Buddy?
⚡️The whole market is moving higher !
By: Yann Quelenn
Tags: Chainfund, Market Protocol, Cryptocurrenct, Bitcoin, Chainfundreport

⚡️The whole market is moving higher !

Chainfund report 02/09/2018

Dear Investors,

As of the 1st of September, the share prices of our portfolios are the following: $79 for the Dynamic and $80 for the Extreme.

The whole market is moving higher and Bitcoin has stopped below $7100. The thing is that while the bitcoin price was increasing, the altcoins price were not increasing much except a few coins like NANO. Charlie Lee, Litecoin creator has said that this project has everything to succeed. His influential power in the crypto world has certainly participated in boosting the NANO price higher.

Chainfund Weekly Reports are communicated to investors prior to publication on Medium

Waltonchain has also strongly increased over the last week gaining almost 100%. Bithumb has listed the coin and I believe that this info has certainly leaked before. On top of that Korean people are allowed again to make deposits after many months of ban. Koreans are often FOMOing very hard and it may be wise to countertrade them at times. The Walton price has increased around $5.3 on its Bithumb day before drifting towards $4.7.

Rumours of mainnet are coming for Chainlink and the token has had a great performance over the last two months jumping from below 20 cents to over 32 cents. The no-marketing rule from the team makes any official tweet pumping the coin. A partnership has also been signed with MARKET protocol “enabling derivatives traders to create highly complex derivatives”. LINK is a coin that we really like as this project aims to be a global standard for smart contracts.
She’s Married to the Idea of Loss
By: Tre L. Loadholt
Tags: Women, Poetry, LGBTQ, Audio, Audio Poem

An Audio Poem

She's married to the idea of loss.

I sit with my tongue waiting to savor

the depth of her beauty.

I will pay for a good thing,

just like the $0.25 most fast food

restaurants charge for extra sauce.

They know we'll want more.

Supply and demand . . .

Our culture thrives on greed

licking the last bits of this and that

for as long as we can.

We're motivated by the sound of

our sins — how loud can we be

in the face of God as we mock him?

Boisterous, manipulative Homo sapiens.

We think we know everything there

is to know about life

and we know nothing at all.

The curtain falls behind us.

We hide under the covers

shifting from one form to the next.

I'll be her grapevine in the middle

of a dirt road,

rumors spreading like wildfire.

She will come to me

before I ask after her.

That's her way.

She appears when I disappear.

Punctual but untimely . . .

I have gathered all my confessions

for the pastor to review.

On his pulpit, he'll stand

and applaud me for my efforts.

She'll take pictures.

Memories of my coming out.

Scrapbook worthy.

I will tell her my life

isn't up for sale but if she's

humane, I'm willing to let

her spend time on me.

But she's married to the idea of loss . . .

And I'm already gone.
【妊娠28～31週目（8か月）】逆子宣告に悩んで、後期つわりらしき症状に苦しむ
By: Aya Satoh Hoshina, ほしなあや
Tags: 妊娠, Pregnancy, Diary, 日本語, 日記

Written by

Japanese-English food/travel/lifestyle writer & translator. Lived 11 years in U.S., 5 years in Thailand. 海外居住歴16年の日英バイリンガル翻訳者／ライター。元記者／編集者。Loves 食／住／旅／写真／宝塚歌劇／猫
A Gentle Introduction to Interactive Geoplots With Plotly And MapBox
By: Mohammad Shahebaz
Tags: Plotly, Geoplots, Data Visualization, New York, Data Science

Prerequisites

Let’s import the basic libraries first. You will need to install plotly in your machine before executing the following code:

#import necessary libraries

import numpy as np

import pandas as pd

import plotly

import plotly.plotly as py

import plotly.offline as offline

import plotly.graph_objs as go

By default, plotly works in online mode, which requires you to generate a personal API token after you reach the public API limit. If you want to share your visualization with others and modify the data points dynamically to see updated visualizations, then the online mode will do that for you.

However, if you wish to work offline inside your Jupyter Notebook, then you can do so by adding the following line:

init_notebook_mode(connected=True)

Coming to our dataset, it has more than a million rows! A traditional computer might have a hard time processing all those data points without heating up (or even crashing). With pandas, we can just parse the first n_rows of a data frame:

You will need a personal ACCESS TOKEN from mapbox to plot custom maps. The plots are drawn from two objects:

The first one is data

The other is the layout of the plot

The data object is a python list object type with the go.Scattermapbox function from plotly. The parameters are declared as python dictionary key value pairs. For more details on parameters and implementations, refer to the plotly documentation page.

MapBox themes

shaz13_custom_style = "mapbox://styles/shaz13/cjiog1iqa1vkd2soeu5eocy4i" #set the geo=spatial data

data = [go.Scattermapbox(

lat= train['pickup_latitude'] ,

lon= train['pickup_longitude'],

customdata = train['key'],

mode='markers',

marker=dict(

size= 4,

color = 'gold',

opacity = .8,

),

)] #set the layout to plot

layout = go.Layout(autosize=False,

mapbox= dict(accesstoken="YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN",

bearing=10,

pitch=60,

zoom=13,

center= dict(lat=40.721319,

lon=-73.987130),

style=shaz13_custom_style),

width=900,

height=600,

title = "Pick up Locations in NewYork")

Almost done! Now, all you need to do is wrap this into a dict object referred to as a figure. That should initialize the data points and map into our fig object. You can plot this by simply using the iplot function:

fig = dict(data=data, layout=layout)

iplot(fig)

Another awesome thing you can do is zoom into the plots and check all the miniature points, as shown below:

Zoomed image with different theme

There is a whole gallery of different themes available at Mapbox that you can try out. You can also design your own theme in mapbox studio.
Graph Algorithms in Python: Locks and Graphs
By: Shuo Wang
Tags: Recursion, Python, Programming, Leetcode, Breadth First Search

Locks

The problem is simple. Suppose I have a combination lock of 4 digits, such as 0000, 0001, etc. I start out at a particular combination of digits, say 1010, and I want to reach another combination of digits, say 9876. At each step, I can increase or decrease one digit by one, like a real lock you use at the gym. The question is, what is the minimum number of steps I need to take to reach the target?

Also, there are potential blocks, where a particular combination cannot be used, say 1111.

So, let’s start analyzing the problem with a simpler setup. For now, my lock has only one digit, I start out at 0, and I want to reach 8, what is the shortest path?

For a single digit, there are only two paths from one number to the other, in this case, they are:

or

and it’s obvious that the second option is the shorter one.
How to Create a Tesla Geofence: Automated SMS from your Model 3/S/X
By: Jamie Bailey
Tags: Geofencing, Gps, Technology, Tesla, Data

*Update 11/13/2020: Unfortunately, Tesla has started restricting access to their API through most major services including AWS. This decision has broken this tutorial.

Introduction

Your Tesla can do many amazing things from driving itself to updating itself. Let’s add another cool trick — automatically texting someone when you get close.

Here is my motivation for implementing such a feature. Every day I pick up my daughter from swim practice, which means driving through an obnoxious pickup process. She stays inside until I arrive, park, and text her that I am here. Or, she just texts me over and over “are you here yet?” while I am driving. Once she knows I have arrived, she grabs her stuff and walks out to the pickup area, which has a car line I pull up to after giving her a couple of minutes to get outside.

After repeating this 500,000 times, there are some unnecessary steps in this whole process I really want to eliminate for my own sanity. I could make everything so much quicker if I text her that I am almost there while driving and her meet me at the pickup area without parking first. That solution would be unsafe for obvious reasons (don’t text and drive!).

Here is what I want to happen. When I am about 3 minutes away from the pool, my Tesla automatically sends her a text message to get her stuff and meet me at the pickup area. I don’t park but go straight to the front where she is magically waiting for me, ready to get in the car every time.

This tutorial will show you how to create a Tesla geofence to automatically send a SMS text from your Model 3/S/X when you get close to a location. This is particularly useful for daily tasks like picking up the kids from school or practice. It is also another “look at what my Tesla can do that your puny car cannot” feature.

What is a geofence?

A geofence is a virtual perimeter or “fence” around a physical location.
Dining for a cause
By: Kelly Flynn
Tags: Volunteering, Charity, Giving, Dinner, Food

Dining for a cause

Volunteer Center of South Jersey sets a date for annual Taste of the Community event.

By ANTHONY J. MAZZIOTTI III, The Sun

The Volunteer Center of South Jersey is a unique organization because it supports many causes. Where one nonprofit might go toward fighting cancer, and another is geared toward feeding the less fortunate, the Volunteer Center of South Jersey tries to match volunteers with the cause that best suits their needs. With that, it is only fitting the jack-of-all-trades organization would have a food sampling event as a fundraiser.

The Volunteer Center of South Jersey’s “Taste of the Community” is in its 21st year and is thriving. Executive director Michele Epifani said between 350 and 400 people are in attendance each year. This year, the event is scheduled for Monday, April 8, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at Auletto Caterers in Deptford. There is a VIP reception from 5 to 6 p.m. as well. The event will feature 20 eateries from South Jersey, wine tastings and a cash bar. Tickets are available online at https://taste2019.eventbrite.com and are $75 apiece for the VIP package and $55 each for the regular event.

“It’s a fun event,” Epifani said. “It’s not like a sit-down dinner with a lot of speeches. It’s more of a fun, relaxing atmosphere.”

She added there will be vegan options this year as well.

The proceeds for the tasting go back into the volunteer center. Epifani said their goal is to raise $40,000 this year.

“It helps to operate the volunteer center all year long,” she said of the fundraiser. “It funds day-to-day operations as well as programs we do like the Martin Luther King Day of service, the family day of service and crocheting for a cause.”

Epifani added the volunteer center is aiming to provide more resources into education and helping its nonprofit partners with training.

In addition to the food and drinks, there will be a Chinese auction, 50–50 raffle and a jazz band playing. Attendees will be able to vote for their favorite food, and the winner will receive the prestigious “Tasters Choice” award.

Volunteer opportunities are available for those who are looking to lend a helping hand. Epifani said volunteers could help at registration, serve wine, assist in selling basket auction tickets or help clean up/pack up at the end of the night. Volunteers are given a shift, they will not be asked to work the whole event.

The volunteer center services Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, Salem, Atlantic, Cumberland and Cape May counties. According to Epifani, there are more than 3,500 volunteers in a database, and the volunteer center assists them in connecting with nonprofits that are registered with them.

“We make a lot of connections throughout the year and connect people with volunteer opportunities,” she said. “We’re supporting the nonprofit community by helping them find good volunteers and helping them with their volunteer management services.”

For more information, email Epifani at mepifani@sjvolunteers.org.
5 Reasons Why Facebook + Millennial Moms is a No Brainer
By: Julie Naidu
Tags: Programmatic, Facebook, Moms, Advertising, Social Media

Investing in Facebook advertising for millennial moms may seem like a no brainer, but if there isn’t enough media support, it’s necessary to make the case for the missed opportunity with your clients.

Ultimately we want our media channels to be appropriate for the target, but we should prioritize a smaller number of heavy hitting channels that work well instead of spreading our communications across an array of mediums without enough support to get the message across.

Since we know Facebook is a local watering hole for millennial moms, we should first make sure we have a solid investment in the platform before we explore other channels.

Here are 5 reasons that substantiate the investment in Facebook:

1. Facebook offers free brand lift metrics

Facebook gives you access to free measurement tools like Estimated Ad Recall Lift (EARL), which tells you how many people will remember the ad after two days (a critical new piece to solve the puzzle of advertising results)

2. Facebook ads are guaranteed views because you only pay if someone sees your ad and the platform is resistant to ad fraud

The newsfeed scroll on Facebook creates opportunity for ads to be seen. Facebook assesses an impression when an ad hits your screen, which suggests there is possibility the ad will be seen as the consumer actively scrolls through their news feed

Alternatively, banner ad view ability is at 48% and you are charged regardless of whether the ad is viewable or not (Unless you’re willing to pay a substantial premium for viewable impressions, which are new and not universally available)

Lastly, Facebook advertisers are not susceptible to ad fraud because the platform shut down its demand-side ad buying platform after it learned that many of the banner ads being purchased were often being served to bots

3. Facebook’s ads are instantly compelling — in a fraction of a second, Facebook videos increase lift in ad recall, brand awareness and purchase consideration

A Nielsen study revealed that lift occurred across ad recall, brand awareness and purchase consideration the moment a video ad was viewed and just watching under three seconds of a video ad created up to 47% of the total campaign value.

4. Facebook combats the growing ad blocker user base through its mobile app

Facebook’s mobile app is resistant to adblockers and the desktop version has codes created against them, which will counteract the growing adblocker user base that is predicted to be nearly 70mm by the end of 2017

5. Millennial moms rely on social media as a resource for parenting

A study of 1,000 millennial parents with at least one child 10 or younger revealed that more than 90% of moms and dads found Facebook as well as other social media to be somewhat to extremely helpful to their parenting

So even though Facebook may feel like a an obvious choice, it’s always a good a idea to see the statistics that support your intuition.
Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Kimdir? — A’mak-ı Hayal Çizgi Roman
By: Ahmet Çadırcı
Tags: Tarih, Kültür

in Eudaimonia and Co
Headwaters
By: Glen Hines
Tags: Stories, Drama, Fiction, Texas, Short Story

Out of this ancient, primordial wilderness, several routes emerged, and although they might lead west or east, simple geography took what rain that fell east and south.

A headwaters formed in the valley of the draw and slowly moved across the expanse as the elevation gave way to lower ground to the east.

For millennia, the waters cut deeper, forming a definite path, arising in what would become eastern New Mexico and crossing inexorably into western Texas, and eventually flowing into a confluence with other water.

There, a river proper formed on the plains of west Texas, and it would become one of the longest — if not best known — rivers in the United States.

The Salt Fork and Double Mountain Fork Rivers came together in Stonewall County to form the main channel of the bigger river.

And the river, like the land that spawned it, was hard, ever-changing, never-ending, and mean.

Over time, the animals, native Americans, European explorers, and the invading white settlers, would come upon its swirling currents to discover relief and danger simultaneously. The waters provided relief of thirst, but danger in any attempt to cross it.

Blood was spilled into the thirsty ground and in the devil currents as tribal conflicts flared, calmed, then reignited.

But as the 19th century passed into the 20th, and the ancient battles and the land itself were finally brought to heel — the former more than the latter — hard roads were cut into the land along the ancient river.

One of those roads came in from Quanah in the north and meandered south, until it turned southeast near a nondescript and uninhabited crossroads at Stamford.

The road would ultimately join the river near Waco, and the two would continue on together symbiotically, south and east crossing back and forth, until they both terminated at the Gulf.

The river was called the Brazos. The road was Texas Highway 6.

And so the man traveled slowly and methodically east and south down the road along the river because he had nothing but money and time.

And a target.
Life would be far easier if I could believe in God
By: Zachary Phillips
Tags: Mental Health, Christianity, Religion, Atheism, Psychology

Life would be far easier if I could believe in God

I would never have to worry …

Image Credit: Selvia

*The following is a passage of writing therapy. The views expressed are an expression of my mood at the time of writing. As such, they don’t represent the entirety of my thought on the matter.

God would have my back. If things went wrong, I would know that it was all a part of God’s plan, and that something good will come of it in the end; even if I couldn’t see that at the time.

I would have no fear of death. I would know how to act. I would know what was right.

I would have a community of fellow believers to connect with, share my thoughts with, and to pray with. We would have a common language, rituals and experiences. We would know each other deeply.



But I don’t believe in God. So I have none of these things.



Please don’t get me wrong, I have tried to believe. I have tried to ‘have some faith’, but it just didn’t stick. If there is a God, He (She? It?) would know that I am faking it.

What kind of a God would permit a faker to into heaven? What kind of a God could I fool?

I can’t fake a belief in God’s plan. Trust me I have tried. But I just can’t fathom Her (His? Its?) plan behind an earthquake, mass shooting or childhood cancer.

“God works in mysterious ways”



Maybe so, but why doesn’t It (He? She?) reveal some of the mystery to me. That would make belief far easier.

I have tried prayer. I have prayed to your God. And to your neighbours Gods. To the ones with names, and the ones long forgotten. I have attempted the rituals, attended the services and spent times in holy buildings. I have bowed at the feet of so called ‘living saints’ — yet I felt nothing.

Perhaps I am just not designed to be able to have faith. Perhaps I’m just not built that way.

If so, why did God choose to make me this way? Why create me with an inability to believe; despite all of my best intentions?

I see the billions of believers, praying daily and receiving the benefits of their worship. I want those benefits, I want what they have. I want their faith.

So I am left in limbo. Unable to believe, but equally unable to disbelieve.

But what do I know? I’m just a depressed agnostic.

~ Zachary Phillips

Website: zachary-phillips.com | Social @zacpphillips
How to publish a static web using Surge?
By: Anjula Shanaka
Tags: Front End Development, Deployment, Static Site, Publishing, JavaScript

As a front-end developer have you ever wondered how to deploy a web project and get things like clean URLs, graceful trailing slash handling, fallback 404 pages, or serve a catch-all file for apps using PushState?

Surge does all that while handling details such as setting long–live cache headers and setting proper HTTP status codes across a content delivery network.

Let me demonstrate how to get started with surge using an example,

Get Started

To get started with surge is easy. Just install using npm and then run surge within any directory you wish to publish onto the web.

install the latest version of NodeJS install using npm by running npm install -g surge

npm install -g surge

3. run surge from within any directory to publish that directory onto the web.

running surge

That’s it! Account creation will happen on the first run and you may deploy as frequently as you like.

Every project on Surge comes with…
YAZMA CESARETİ
By: Rüstem Yurteri
Tags: Kitap, Edebiyat, Türkçe, Yazma Cesaret, Nihan Kaya

in Eudaimonia and Co
MongoDB with Realm, an upgrade from Stitch
By: Daniel Kioko
Tags: Mongodb, Programming, Database, Sofware Development, Realm

MongoDB Inc. made it clear in their debut that they won’t change on how Realm works, but will instead improve it.

Realm won’t change to become a JSON database, but it will be compatible with new data types like Dictionaries, Sets, Mixed/Any data types and more database functions that will make developing for different platforms much easier.

Empty dictionary written in Swift

They’ve also introduced ‘universal’ sync solutions for all platforms which will make backups much easy, especially for app users who might shift from one mobile operating system to another.
Call for Work :: To Speak as a Flower : A Folio of Performance Writing
Tags: Performance, Featured, Poetry, Calls For Submissions, Writing

Call for Work :: To Speak as a Flower : A Folio of Performance Writing ANMLY Follow May 12, 2020 · 2 min read

Anomaly invites previously unpublished submissions of poems, prose, playwriting, video, art, and hybrid genres of work that might fall under a broad rubric of performance writing. We embrace this term’s wide scope, encompassing everything from Don Mee Choi’s turn to playwriting conventions in “Hardly Opera” (from which we draw our title) and jayy dodd’s scene in Anomaly‘s issue 26 folio Radical : Avant Garde Poets of Color, to Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance notations and Duriel Harris’ musical scores as poems.

We are interested in work that uses performance as one of its tools, work which is made possible by a relationship to performance — even if that performance never happens, or imagines impossible commitments. What forms might such composition take if it followed Etel Adnan’s provocation that “memory and theatre work in similar ways,” or if it pursued a stage “more open to different ways of moving” (as Hilton Als has characterized Adrienne Kennedy’s work)? We are committed to promoting the work of marginalized and underrepresented artists, including by Black, Indigenous, and other artists of color, as well as, disabled, neurodivergent, women, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming artists — and we wonder whether this form might be especially useful for these artists!

Please send up to ten pages of work to performancefolio@gmail.com — or query if you have something else in mind!

DEADLINE: 1 July 2020 at 11:59:59 PM

EXPECTED PUBLICATION DATE: 15 August 2020
Why We Listen to People With These 8 Traits
By: Aldís Elfarsdóttir
Tags: Self Improvement, Public Relations, Society, Books, Speaking

Status

“Work is worn, rather like a prestigious logo, as a sign of our socioeconomic position.” — Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks

Every time we ask someone ‘Where did you study? What do you do for work?’ we are gauging their status. The role of status in our judgments of people is that insidious. We also identify high status among people who display traits like monetary wealth, intelligence, assertiveness, ambition, drive, and tenacity (e.g. to rebuild wealth if it ever fades). And we listen to them more.

4 Tips on Status

Counterintuitive: a high-status vehicle is less likely to be honked at — at an intersection where the light has just turned green but they haven’t moved yet — and less likely to be honked at sooner than a low-status vehicle. Intuitive: lower-status people have more desire to affiliate with other people and gain approval while higher status people are less inclined to make the first move in a waiting room full of strangers; the latter will occupy themselves with self-grooming. Surprising: Since we actually expect rewards to be given on a merit basis, we assume high-status people deserve it. This makes it problematic when we face the fact that actually, generations of social inequity have allowed status to be based on embedded racial and class privilege. Intuitive: We prefer to date people who’ve earned rather than inherited their fortunes because it signals hard work, grit, and determination.

We tap into the power of status when we reach for our wallets at an open market, or wear brand clothing to social gatherings. Some people are all for status symbols like owning a mansion, driving fancy cars, and wearing expensive watches. Indeed, status is one of the 16 Basic Desires from Who Am I? by Dr. Steven Reiss. Some people are more or less driven in pursuit of it.

But the point is not lost on us here: status is a powerful factor in determining who effectively gets a message across, and why we might listen to someone.

People with high status are favored as messengers more than people of low status, and this is not even context-dependent. Similar to the ‘halo effect’ of competence, celebrities are often recruited to promote unrelated brands — from shoes to shampoos — or support socio-political movements like the fight for climate action and calls to increase voter participation.
Abandoning Solutions
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Depression, Prose, Fiction, Frustration, Story

“I’m not sad!”

“…she said, sadly lacking in vigour and force.”

Gabrielle winced. It was the closest she got to a smile. Anyway, there was a massive stack of clothes waiting to be folded. Why does no one else fucking empty the change-rooms? There was Jean-Jean Josephine. Stupid name, hot jeans.

Jo carried a few extra pounds in her rear but they were good ones. They were pounds that Gabrielle would have lapped at in a second. Millisecond, even. Staring could be harassment. Gabrielle could have cared less. But Jason was busy trying to stop…what? What was she doing that required intervention?

“You’ve — I know,” Jason said, entirely too bright. “You should take a break. Go outside! I bet the winter chill will haul those blues right out your nostrils. Or, they’ll be so fucking cold you won’t be able to think about anything else. Capisce? Get out of here. You need it.”

“You’re not Italian, Jason.” The eyeballs rolled. And then didn’t stop. The inanity of the solution couldn’t possibly work. Gabrielle stared at the pile in front of her, then to the clock.

There were six other people in the store. Nobody buying anything. Or not from her. Clothes folder extraordinaire, she imagined herself flipping Jason off. Too many people to get away with it right then.

“Go on.” Jason made annoying clucking sounds.

“I’m busy. Maybe later.”

“Fine. But you need a break.”

I need something. Gabrielle avoided the faces, smiling vaguely as if it were all she could do to focus on the clothing tags she scanned, then staring at hands to anticipate which mode they were paying with, what kind of card…The background had no depth. Everything was sunken in and leaping out at her. Like Max-Something. Whatever. It was high and low down as she could go, but the minutes weren’t doing anything.

Suspended by her work. So…how long to go now?
Reason why you should grow with NRG
By: New Royals Team
Tags: Coinbase, Cryptocoin, Eth, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

NRG — A token of prestige

New Royals Gold was designed to be a token of prestige and as we all know, prestige comes with a hefty price tag.

Our token will carry just as much prestige as our brand.

As we increase the prestige of being associated with our brand and grow, this correlates to increase in the value of NRG!

With limited supply and large buy orders (due to the high cost of our products and New Royals Club membership requirements), NRG will grow exponentially in value!

It’s simple economics! Join us now at https://newroyals.io

Read more on our whitepaper at https://www.newroyals.io/New-Royals-Gold-Whitepaper.pdf
My Country Moved Out of Quarantine and it Feels Different Than I Expected
By: Kelly Eden
Tags: Mental Health, This Happened To Me, Coronavirus, Life Lessons, Self

We’ve lived through this many times before in human history — in the wars, the pandemics, the natural disasters.

I’ve lived through this before during the Christchurch earthquakes.

But when we emerged from that, the streets had changed. The place where I grew up was unrecognizable. When the aftershocks had reduced and we could move around more, I drove into the city. There were tanks in the street and armed soldiers. Tape separated us from red zones and piles of rubble appeared in the place of hotels and churches. What was there, do you remember? Was that the stone church? The pretty one with the arches?

The images in our mind, the map-memory of our city became a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

The smell of smoke reminded us that the CTV building, where over a hundred had died, was still smoldering. We circled the city, mouths open but soundless. Net curtains waved at us, like ghosts, from the broken windows of a leaning tower — a hotel in a creepy apocalypse movie that a few weeks before had been full of glamorous people, expensive restaurants, a man playing a grand piano, a glass elevator in a golden shaft. The two images lay in my mind side by side: the beautiful place I’d gone for romantic dates; the horror-film tower threatening it’s collapse.

Back then, the outside was changed. The architects came and designed a whole new town — nothing was the same as it was.

This time, the outside is untouched. But we’re not.

The businesses are intact, no leaning buildings, no curtains flapping through broken windows, but some doors stay shut and the FOR SALE signs go up, because there are no tourists now and towns like mine are struggling. And some of our men are particularly struggling, because in New Zealand, men think they’re meant to be strong and be “blokes” and get on with it and not ask for help. But it means some of our men don’t survive when they need help. And now their families have to mourn their lost income and their lost father and husband.

Life has no guarantees. I was there two years ago — I get it. I lost everything in my divorce: the entire investment of 16 years into a family, a husband, into supporting a dream we had together. My heart still breaks some days, a deep unshakeable sadness, but you can’t collapse under it — we need to lean on each other for help. We are the broken towers now, but together we get up and start again. We rebuild ourselves and our lives.
Here’s How Your Brain Helps You Navigate Social Differences
By: Margaret Pan
Tags: Personal Development, Science, Society, Relationships, Self

Ever since I was a little girl, my family was always telling me that what defines a person isn’t their looks, their intelligence, or their skills. But rather, their socioeconomic background.

In other words, society will always judge you by how much money you make and what kind of work you do. It’s inevitable.

Truth be told, that led to me being a bit self-conscious whenever I had to talk with people who were evidently more prosperous and successful than me.

I was always thinking that they would be biased against me because I didn’t come from a rich family, I wasn’t making thousands, or my profession wasn’t highly respected.

I used to wonder whether people are raised in a way that they can’t help but treat those different from them, especially those coming from a lower social class, in a diminishing, disparaging way.

Turns out, our brain does work differently when we talk to people who are different than us — but not in the way you would imagine.

According to this new study by UCL and Yale researchers, our brain responds differently if we talk to a person of a different socioeconomic background from our own, helping us to regulate our behavior to avoid bias expression.

In this study, 39 pairs of participants with different socioeconomic backgrounds had a conversation with each other while wearing headsets that tracked their brain activity.

The calculated factors were each person’s education level and family income and the conversations’ topics were plain and simple: from “What did you do last summer?” to “How do you bake a cake?”

Researchers noticed that, among the pairs who had very different socioeconomic backgrounds, there was a higher level of activity in an area of the frontal lobe called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area associated with speech production, rule-based language, and cognitive and attentional control.

The findings match with previous research suggesting that frontal lobe systems play a role in detecting bias and helping us to regulate our behavior to avoid bias expression.

The increased activity in the left frontal lobe was observed in both participants and was more alike than the brain responses of participants talking to someone of a similar background.

Overall, as Professor Joy Hirsch stated, these findings are greatly optimistic for social interactions and interpersonal relationships:

“I believe our findings offer a hopeful message. We know that humans can have positive social encounters with others who are different. Now we have the neurobiological basis — our brains have apparently developed a frontal lobe system that helps us deal with diversity.”

In other words, from now on, there’s no need to feel self-conscious, uncomfortable, or worry about how people from different socioeconomic backgrounds than yours will treat you.

They might not realize it, but their brains will rearrange things in your favor — by responding positively to diversity, and regulate their behavior to avoid bias.
Amateur’s Motif
By: Zach Klebaner
Tags: Introspection, Poetry, Creativity, Time, Self

Amateur’s Motif

A poem of the interaction between self and time

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

The hands of unmet past meet the present pulpit

to rattle their equations

like convoys over Earth

as the future festers in a vat of unreality

stored outside elected history.
The Key to Staying Sane While Isolating With Your Partner
By: Kirstie Taylor
Tags: Health, Life, Love, Life Lessons, Relationships

I’m on Day 11 of social distancing with my partner. The last six have been just me and my boyfriend, no other human contact aside from FaceTime and our one trip to the grocery store.

And surprisingly, we haven’t killed each other; or at least, broken up.

I don’t think it’s because we’ve done anything magical. It’s not that I’ve been holing up in one room while my boyfriend goes into a catatonic state of staring at his computer.

No, in fact, what I’ve come to realize is key actually came pretty naturally. Luckily, my boyfriend and I have been practicing it since we started dating. It’s something we highly value in our relationship and is but one of the reasons I love him so gosh darn much.

The key to my boyfriend and I isolating so well is, simply put, our communication.

You may have already heard about how essential communication is in terms of relationship health. But communication is even more critical when it’s just two people, confined in one place, for the indefinite future.

All a sudden, you’re both going to be doing a whole lot of communicating. And if you’re communicating poorly, you may find yourself sleeping on the couch out of protest. But if you’re communicating well, all of that can be avoided.

So if you’ve decided to socially distance with your partner, there are a few ways to ensure your communication doesn’t ruin your relationship.
Korea Blockchain Week에 함께해 주셔서 감사합니다!
By: The Emx Team
Tags: Blockchain, Korean, Futures Trading, Crypto, Cryptocurrency

in Eudaimonia and Co