fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Manipulation
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Image, Reading, Musing, Poetry, Writing

Manipulation

A Poem

By itself, the room turns grey, turns into a manipulative shadow; the walls leak their paint like tears, the windows blink shut and stay that way; eccentric motions work their way to the language of the floor, the hardwood cobbling a story (a lie?) out of missing footsteps and absent pressures

each squeak of wood on nail lifting up the hands to the ears, the subtle vibrations, cues doomed to go unnoticed, and nothing fixes this upset right now, nothing comes close for relief. Just the closing in of neutral room, an illness that keeps you

rooted in the position of reaching for a way out, for a twist to the response to this stimulus, even if the words get older by the minute, reveal interpretations a hundred years too late. And by now you realize that just stepping out of your chair

won’t be the resounding answer to this new claustrophobia, the choking grip of fatalism, but you’re resisting one collapse, pushing back into the world of words you had just succeeded in losing yourself in the moment before.
Metaball loop ( Blender tutorial )
Tags: Animation, Blender, Design

If you’re looking for how to loop animated metaballs in blender, you’ve come to the right place. Since this is a procedural animation, it will be easy to control the number and size of metaballs, amplitude, speed, etc. Here you can check video version and I also added a link to the blender file containing all the nodes at the end.

Install ‘animation nodes’ add-on

First of all you need to have ‘animation nodes’ add-on installed in your blender project. You can download the latest version for your platform here. Then go to edit/preferences/add-ons. Click install in the right top corner and choose the downloaded zip file. Also, don’t forget to check the box next to the node name.

Add premade node group

Metaball movement is driven by a vector that is generated by wiggle node output. Looping a wiggle node output is not an easy task. In this topic i won’t dive into the details how to achieve it. Lucky for us there is a ready to go solution nicely provided by Razie. You can download it here. A blender file contains the node group that you can append to the project.

Also make sure to delete the additional scene that was created automatically after importing the node set.

Let’s get started! 🚀

First of all we need to add metaball object to the scene. Then for one of your views change editor type to ‘Animation nodes’.

Generate metaball instances

The node set below generates 12 metaball instances in one place. Because for now the ‘Object Transform Output’ node have the same location values for every generated metaball.
Our Story
By: D D Editorial Team
Tags: Publishing, Write, Editor, Publication, Writing

Dialogue & Discourse seeks to provide readers with a means for developing informed opinions regarding issues of significance, aiding in the creation of a dialogue between opponents of thought at a time where our society suffers from intense tribalism and partisanship. We strive to curate empirically-centered pieces that share news and ideas truly worthy of discourse, venturing far beyond the qualitative and surface characteristics that have grown to dominate the American news cycle.

Our rigorous editorial standards enforce our core principle of weighing quality far more than quantity. We have had the opportunity of working with some truly incredible individuals, including acclaimed professors, award-winning journalists and world-class scientists.

Our content is carefully curated with the consideration of maintaining a balanced amount of coverage that accounts for all perspectives, specifically on articles regarding political or controversial topics. We are not affiliated or in support of a particular political or social organization, though we avidly strive for roughly equal volumes of liberal and conservative pieces.

We are an international publication, comprised of contributors from every continent and spanning across many of the world’s major cities. This includes the following countries of China, Japan, India, Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Botswana, United Arabs Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Ukraine, Belgium, Portugal, Romania, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Estonia, Russia, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Cuba, Haiti, Panama, Mexico, Canada, and the United States.
Basics of graph plotting
By: Matt Crooks
Tags: Python, Data Analysis, Data Science, Data, Data Visualization

Most of us data scientists go into the industry because we love data (whatever that means? No, I don’t know either!). The ability to create easily readable plots is often an afterthought. Most job descriptions will mention that being able to visualise data is important but I have never had a sensible conversation with anyone either at interview or on the job about best practices around visualisation. Given how many bad plots are out there it is most definitely not because we’re all experts at it!

There’s no point in spending 2 months doing some analysis to then have all your stakeholders stare blankly at your presentation. While creating a fantastically complicated interactive d3 visualisation make look impressive, if the underlaying graph is poorly executed then it’s rather a waste of time trying to improve things with some java code. There’s a famous expression that involves glitter and a dog that I won’t repeat here.

To me, a graph should be minimalist and, where possible, self explanatory. Therefore, I have decided to share my opinions in a blog. I have included some approaches I consider when I plot a graph.
Kesalahan yang Dilakukan oleh Product Manager
By: Fitra Akbar
Tags: Product Manager, Indonesia, Startup Life, Startup, Product Manager Indonesia

Easy read, easy understanding. A good writing is a writing that can be understood in easy ways

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Hello Gail, My First Winter Storm.
By: Julie X
Tags: Happiness, Nonfiction, Joy, Life, Winter

Hello Gail, My First Winter Storm.

I was a child again, for a day.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Snow day.

It started in a flurry — the storm I’ve been waiting for.

I stood by the window, working, one eye on the situation, watching fat flakes fall from the sky, powdering the ground in white.

My eyes delighted at the sight, for I’m from a tropical island, witnessing the first snowstorm of my life.

So new to me, I feel like a child.

And like a child, I left the warmth of the house and stepped onto the porch.

Snowflakes swirled in the wind, so clean and cold, deliciously refreshing. The tiny things caressed my cheeks, clung to my hair, lightly, gently. Such a cute feeling!

It’s unlike the storms I know, the tropical rainstorms, which come down heavy and mad. They drench bodies in an instant and drown all sounds with their ferocity.

A snowstorm is quiet, except for the wind.

I left footprints in the pristine whiteness, in my down jacket and unbearably thin lounge pants. Face upturned, there was no need to catch a flake with my tongue. They flurried into my mouth, slightly parted in a smile. Oh yes, I’m a dork. And the snow tasted like freshness.

Soon the cold caught up, work beckoned. I left the cold, but not the window, I wanted to soak up every second of it even as the light faded from the sky.

The night that followed was bright. Snow blanketed the streets, the houses decked in lights and the tops of cars, like the set of a Christmas movie. It looked both cold and cozy at the same time.

Later, I listened to the patter of the snow shower, the soft whipping of the wind. I imagined being out tomorrow, kicking up the powdery snow, a laugh escaping from my throat. Except that’s not my laugh. Just a memory from some TV show.

Experiencing my first winter storm, my wonder rekindled. The snowstorm had reduced me to a child again. I smiled, happy and warm under the covers.
The Start
By: Rebeca Ansar
Tags: Storytelling, Self, Emotions, Poetry, Poem

One

this is the start of pages and pages

poems in poems

a story

sloppy sometimes

mostly

uncertain spaces

misguided underscores

I don’t know what I am doing

but I am doing

something. everything.

this is the middle and

a shifting vantage point and

my whole heart except

the parts I hide (most of them)

I am a bird with chopped remiges

fidgeting in your love, hurting more

in metal skin

this is the way

murky, nebulous, inchoate

yes, I am afraid.
Hooked on Social J
By: Daniel Laplaza
Tags: Social Journalism, Cerebral Palsy, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Socialj19, Journalism

My decision to become a journalist is, what I see as, the coalescence of my previous career choices, each inspiring and bolstering the next. Although I feel confident with my decision, it took me working many different jobs to reach it.

I attended Boston University for my undergrad, where I focused on film and television communications. Upon graduating in 2015, I was fortunate to land a job at an entertainment PR firm, publicizing independent films and feature documentaries, such as Class Divide and Zero Days. The exposure to incredible filmmakers and their powerful works inspired me to move from publicity to production.

I left my job in PR to pursue a career as a freelance video producer. Reaching out to all my connections in the production community, I managed to pick up a semi-steady stream of gigs, from PAing commercials to editing start-up promotions, to shooting music videos. With my budding skillset, I managed to land a job on the production of HBO’s Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge and even produced two documentary shorts of my own.

Despite my growing network, I was not making enough money to support myself. So, I took a part-time job at the school where my mother works as a physical therapist; the Henry Viscardi School (HVS), in Long Island, New York. The school offers students with severe disabilities a traditional, yet specialized, educational setting along with “a variety of therapies, assistive technology and medical supports.” I worked as a teaching assistant there, helping feed, transfer and teach students with disorders such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and cerebral palsy (CP).

Please ignore Mr. Danny’s lopsided collar

I gained an extraordinary perspective at HVS. Connecting with these students helped me understand their experiences. It taught me what it’s like for them to access our inaccessible world. Above all, it demonstrated to me the importance of finding the humanity in others. Working at the Henry Viscardi school boosted me over, what Arlie Russell Hochschild describes as, my empathy wall. Equipped with this new perspective, I applied to the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Hoping to gain a fundamental knowledge of journalism, I originally applied and was accepted into the MA in Journalism program. However, after hearing Jeff Jarvis and Carrie Brown discuss an empathy-based approach to journalism that puts the communities’ needs first, I was hooked on Social Journalism.

With the techniques I acquire moving through the program, I hope to serve my community of differently-abled friends, particularly those living with neuromuscular disorders, like SMA and CP. Empathizing with this community of people is what exposed and encouraged me to correct my own misconceptions. Now my goal in the social journalism program is to understand how to replicate this experience through my work.

Wish me luck.
Fiction Opens Hearts and Minds
By: Tl Cooper
Tags: Life Lessons, Reading, Fiction, Writing

Let me tell you a story…

Let me paint you a whole new world to immerse yourself in for just a little while. A world where justice prevails and conflict is resolved. A world where people live happily ever after.

We know these stories aren’t real, but they allow us to immerse ourselves in dreams of the world we wish we lived in. They also allow us to experience things we will never experience in real life.

I discovered the power of fiction as a child, and fell in love with the stories that changed my life. Fiction gave me the opportunity to envision a future beyond the farm where I grew up. Fiction showed me a world beyond the small farming community where I never quite felt like I fit in. Fiction even gave me my first glimpse into cultures and people across time and space.

I devoured the stories I read. Looking back I realize I was searching for my place in the world. I was searching for a place where I would fit in because I never felt like I really fit in anywhere. I searched for a connection to people who had been described to me as the “enemy”. I wanted to know those people. I wanted to understand why they were my enemy beyond some adult telling me they were. So I read stories set in places all around the world.

I read stories about women who controlled their own lives and who overcame great obstacles. I read stories about women who were rescued by one Prince Charming or another never seeing their own power and felt discomfited by them. I read stories about faraway places where people lived differently than me and who spoke different languages. I read and I read and I read some more. And I wrote. I wrote my stories about lives that I imagined for myself and for other people.

I discovered an insatiable thirst for wanting to understand the why of human nature. This lead me to study Psychology as well as criminality and juvenile delinquency. And still I read. I read romances but cared more about the lives of the main character than the romance. In fact, I often skimmed over the romantic sections of such books with a “yeah, yeah, yeah.” like it was something that had to be there but didn’t pertain to my life.

I started to identify with people who had nothing in common with me, at least on the surface.

This is the power of fiction. Fiction has the power to cast us in starring roles in other people’s stories as we read them. We find we can connect with their stories, empathize with their plight, and understand their decisions. Fiction has a way of conveying information to us that debunks misconceptions without feeling threatening.

Fiction can help us dream a little bigger. Fiction can help us reach a little farther. Fiction can help us

embrace a little stronger. Fiction can help us let go a little easier.

Fiction holds within it the power to change how we interact with the world and therefore to change the world itself.

Fiction opens our hearts and minds to the experiences of other people in ways that can help us understand the humanity that binds us all.
How to configure Gmail to work for you, not against you
By: Dominik Nitsch
Tags: Lifehacks, Productivity, Gmail, Inbox Zero, Email

How to configure Gmail to work for you, not against you

Email should be a tool, not a nuisance. Here’s how it works.

Photo by Webaroo.com.au on Unsplash

“You have read all messages in your inbox.”

To many of us, this is porn. The infamous Inbox Zero has been reached. All email has been taken care of. Nothing to see here anymore.

Inbox Zero comes at a cost: “During the workday, respondents reported spending an average of 209 minutes checking their work email and 143 minutes checking their personal email, for a total of 352 minutes (about five hours and 52 minutes) each day.”, according to CNBC.

Can you believe that? Assuming an 8-hour-workday, this leaves about two hours each day for everything else, including coffee with colleagues, chit-chat in the office and well, a tiny bit of actual meaningful work.

Essentially, the average American office worker does nothing but write and read email. The Germans are a little better with 2 hours per day, but the data is 5 years old and probably not super representative.

While communication is an important part of working in today’s world, it shouldn’t be the only thing we do. There are more important things out there that need to be done.
Day 20: Project, Project, Project
By: Dylan Thorwaldson
Tags: Design, Software Development, JavaScript, Coding, Learning To Code

Me from 9am to 4pm today

It is so fun to get to work on a project that I am excited about! Part of the reason today was so fun was because I was actually able to make some decent progress on my canvas Avalanche game.

I was able to draw all the icicles at the top of the canvas and draw our little stickman hero at the bottom, and I succeeded in making our hero move left and right when the arrow keys are pressed.

Here’s a screen cap of my progress so far:

It doesn’t exactly capture our little hero cruising left and right, but there is the general idea. Next is the (even) harder part: Getting the icicles to fall at random intervals and then replicate in a way that makes sense.

Then comes the hardest part: Implementing collision awareness so the game ends when an icicle comes down on our poor hero’s head! And then there’s the whole thing about keeping score by seeing how long the user can stay alive. Also, storing a high score with Local Storage.

Woooo. I have a lot of work to do, and I’m excited to continue over the weekend and next week!
Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding in Python
By: Chetan Ambi
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Programming, Python

Recently, I was attending a predicting house prices hackathon. That was the first time I was dealing with a dataset having geographic coordinates - latitude and longitude . While working on this hackathon I have understood about Geocoding, Reverse Geocoding, and finding the distance between two coordinates. In this article, you are going to learn these three techniques.

We will make use of geopy and reverse_geocoder libraries in this article. Let’s get started.

Geocoding

Geocoding is the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates (i.e. latitude and longitude).

Geocoding is provided by different service providers such as Nominatim, Bing, Google, etc. These services provide APIs which can be used by anyone for Geocoding. Here, geopy is just a library that provides these implementations for many different services in a single package.

In the below example, we are using Nominatim service for Geocoding. The results stored in the location variable. We can then use location to get the required values such as latitude, longitude, etc. The raw method returns a dictionary containing all the returned values and we can access the required field from location.raw .

Note: Different Geocoding services such as Nominatim, Bing comes with their own limitations, pricing, quota etc. For example, Nominatim is free but provides but there is a limit on the requests it can process.

Reverse Geocoding

Reverse Geocoding is the process of converting geographic coordinates (latitude & longitude) into a human-readable address.

Note that we need to pass latitude and longitude in that order to reverse function.

Another alternative library for reverse geocoding is reverse_geocoder . Let’s look at an example:

Distance between two coordinates

Suppose you want to find the distance between two coordinates (i.e. distance between two locations given its latitude and longitude), you could use geodesic function from geopy to calculate the distance.

Conclusion
Basketball Stories That Have Almost Nothing To Do With Basketball
By: Ben Kassoy
Tags: Storytelling, Humor, Sports

Freshman year we were blowing out a team, so they put the scrubs — me — in the game. For some reason, the other team continued to intentionally foul. I just happened to have the ball every time they fouled, so I ended up taking twelve free throws in just a couple minutes. I made eight of them, and considering a few years before I’d only scored eight points the entire season, this was one of the most prolific games of my career.

Immediately after the game, my mom drove me to visit my sister at college by myself for the first time. It was also the first time I drank alcohol.

“If Mom asks what we did, tell her we saw a movie,” my sister told me after Mom drove away. She was on the diving team and wasn’t supposed to drink during “dry season.”

“What movie did we see?” I asked, already paranoid about an interrogation.

“I don’t know. Big Fish.”

Then about a dozen of us crammed into someone’s dorm room, and I had four Coronas and an entire bottle of Boone’s Farm Melon Ball, which I haven’t consumed — or even seen — since that night. On a trip from the dorm room to the bathroom, I passed out on the floor. The next day I swore to myself I’d never drink again. My mom drove me home and never asked what we did. A decade later I saw Big Fish and loved it.
Looking Back
By: Mark Starlin
Tags: Medium, Essay, Other Stories, Reading, Writing

Medium has been one of those pleasant surprises in my life. And maintaining interest for a whole year was completely unexpected. I figured I would run out of material or interest after a few months. Yet here I am. Still enjoying it. Still writing.

The simple reason is, I have found an audience that responds. I don’t get too hung up on numbers. Audience size is not that important if they honestly like your efforts. I learned that as a musician. Polite applause stinks. I want people to stand and cheer, or get up and dance, or come up to me personally after a gig just to say how much they enjoyed it. Then I know their appreciation is real. It’s a good feeling.

I feel the same way when I get responses on Medium. Claps are nice and I greatly appreciate them. But if someone makes the effort to actually respond to one of my stories then I feel like I have accomplished something. Sure, I’d love to get thousands of reads on every story. I’d also love to win the lottery. But neither is likely so I am thankful for the reads I get.

I have a small group of regular readers on Medium. I consider them my friends as I have gotten to know them through their responses. A person’s personality eventually comes out in their response writing, which is not usually as edited and polished as their published stories. It is more revealing. So I feel like I get to know them after a while. And I enjoy writing for them. I won’t start listing them. You know who you are. But I will say thank you, Medium friends, for reading and responding. You bring me joy.
How I Got Promoted in a Year from Junior to Mid Senior Developer
By: Yen Huang
Tags: Technology, Software Engineering, Computer Science, Work, Programming

How I Got Promoted in a Year from Junior to Mid Senior Developer

Effective Tips From Being Promoted at Twitter

Photo by cgower on Unsplash

Everyone wants to get promoted. You get a title change. You get a compensation increase. You can work on larger-scope projects. But what does it take to get promoted? What are the steps to take so that one does not stagnate in his or her career?

There is no one perfect way to get promoted as a software engineer, but following these tips should set any developer for success!

1. Work on Multiple Projects

The main objective is to ensure that you can work on multiple projects and drive them to completion. You need to prove that you are a competent coder.

When selecting which projects you want to work on, you must ask yourself these questions and make sure the project satisfies these requirements. If not, discuss with your manager to see if it is possible to work on a different project that can meet these requirements.

i.) Is it significantly impactful?

This question can be answered in numerous ways. Does it improve the team’s operational load significantly? Does it improve the reliability of your services? Does it support new, important use cases for other external teams?

All projects are impactful in some sense. The keyword here is significant. If you are not sure about the impact of the project, ask your manager for clarity.

ii.) Is it high visibility?

You want to work on a project that many people are waiting on and are excited for it to be completed. Working on a high visibility project will require you to collaborate with multiple teams, which has several benefits.

First, it will foster relationships with various engineers and teams. You will start to understand what are the different projects that each team is working on and how they all fit together.

Second, you will increase your scope of influence. External teams may start asking you for feedback in evaluating their new services or feature changes.

These skills are the essential characteristics of any staff engineer as well as even a senior engineer. These two skills take a long time to build, and that is why it is important to start early.

iii.) Will I be the project lead?

You need to get clarity if you are leading the project or if someone else is leading the project. It may be that in your first project or first two projects, you are not the project lead, which is expected, since you may still be onboarding onto the team.

However, in subsequent projects, you may want to start taking on project lead responsibilities one at a time. You want to show proof that you can be an independent engineer as well as an engineer that can drive projects to completion. That would include tasks, such as writing technical design documents, planning the milestones, communicating to external teams for collaboration if necessary, etc.

If the project satisfies all 3 checkboxes, then it is a good project to work on! This will help you write an effective promotion document when the time comes.
by Martino Pietropoli
By: Martino Pietropoli
Tags: Humor, Wednesday, Comics, Cartoon, Psychology

First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.

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5 Top Artificial Intelligence Frameworks for 2021
By: Behic Guven
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Education

Introduction

Let’s say you decided to practice and develop yourself in this field. Today we will see how software engineers can apply deep learning and Artificial Intelligence into their programming work.

The first thing that we must know is how it can be applicable, and here is a nice question to make a research on: “What are the most useful frameworks/ libraries to begin learning in 2021?” This is exactly the question I asked myself.

This is just what we’re going to address today in this article: I gathered the most popular five Artificial Intelligenceframeworks and libraries that every software engineer/ developer needs to know about. You will also find the official documentation pages and some practice applications on how to apply them.

This will help us to know them more than just their names. Enough with the introduction. Let me introduce you to the squad! 😄
Getting Started With Concurrency in Python: Part I — Threads & Locks
By: Narmin Jamalova
Tags: Python, Threads, Programming, Python3, Concurrency

The Basics of Threads

Python has two main modules that implement threads — thread and threading . The difference between them is that the latter one is an object-oriented implementation — and that is what we will be using in this article.

A Thread class is instantiated as follows (target is the function we want to execute in the thread):

Thread Class Instantiation in Python

In basic terms, once we create a thread instance, we have to start it with the .start() method. Take a look at the very simplistic example of just one thread below, where I/O bound is simulated with .sleep() .

Example of a Thread in Python

A thread is considered to be alive once it has started. The thread stops being alive after its run is terminated (upon either successful job completion or an interrupt/error). We can check the state of the thread using .is_alive() .

Building up on this simplistic example, if we want to run multiple threads in parallel, we have to start each one and join them in the end, using the .join() method. It’s important to understand that all threads belong to the same process, which means they all share the same data (variables, resources, etc.) — and we shall see how this can create problems later on.

Multiple Threads Example in Python

Threads can have names (either default or custom names passed as an argument) and machine-oriented identification numbers. We can access these using t.name and t.ident , respectively. Moreover, any given thread can know its own name — this is possible with threading.currentThread() module function.

We can also pass arguments to threads as in the (rather silly) example below:
Holiday Programming Is Soooo Important to Me
Tags: Self, Family, Love, Wellness, Holidays

While beginning to browse online as I do every year around this time looking for airing dates and times for my cherished television specials, I said “Oh, crap” aloud as I remembered something: Charlie Brown airs on the ‘ABC’ channel. The majority of other favored holiday specials also air on channels of the like: NBC, CBS, etc. Since I canceled the household cable earlier in the year and switched solely to streaming services in order to save some money, I don’t receive those regular channels anymore. This is where the big realization hit me: I need my Peanuts specials. They cannot be skipped over.

Panicked, I went straight to Amazon. I purchased the Peanuts holiday edition on Blu-ray and it arrived two days later. I have some relief because it’ll do the job, but it won’t be exactly the same — and here’s why:

For me, whether it was the years watching with my auntie or the ones spent watching alone, part of the annual tradition is actually watching it on the TV when the show is airing on a live broadcast.

I remember throughout my life, if I’d say something along the lines of “I gotta be home to watch ‘so-and-so’ tonight at 8,” my mom would respond with “Okay, but don’t you already own it on video?”

Yes, Mom, I do… but it’s not the same.

I prefer watching the holiday programs on the same night that everyone else is watching. Makes me feel all warm and cozy.

Knowing that other folks are watching the same animated, claymation, or musical holiday movie at the same time as me in their own living rooms across the country makes me feel like part of something special; as if others are watching along with me.

Somewhere, in another home — maybe down the street, or across town, or even a few states over — there’s someone who’s sprawled across their couch with their fuzzy-socked feet up on the armrest, and they’re watching too. There might be somebody in a big puffy recliner chair rocking back and forth (as I am), with the flames from their faux fireplace and remote-control candles flickering and creating ambience in the room, and they, too, are awaiting one of the much-loved specials to begin.

Maybe there’s a child somewhere sitting on the floor of a small above-garage condo loft, with their hard-working single mom on the other side of the wall making their dinner, and this child is getting to see the show for their very first time, beginning yet another personal lifetime of loving this seasonal experience.
COVID Destroyed My Social Life
By: Brenda Mahler
Tags: Faces Of Covid, Reflection, Poetry, Coronavirus, Covid 19

With a desire to connect faces to this insidious disease, people where asked to participate in a project. Everyone who participated were asked the same questions and their responses developed into poems sharing their experiences.

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Far away from India, a Vedic ecosystem rises in Texas Gaushala
By: Sahana Singh
Tags: Environment, Nature, Agriculture, Culture, Lifestyle

Meanwhile, two individuals, one in Russia and one in California (who happened to read my Medium article on Abhinav in January 2020) decided to donate one cow each to the gaushala. This time Abhinav selected two brown cows from the Sahiwal breed. They were named Asha and Kamala. The new cows made themselves comfortable faster than the first ones had, and soon they were all feeding and wandering together.

“They might be just five cows but I get the satisfaction that we saved them from slaughter,” said Pratibha.

The cows were still not being milked. Both Abhinav and Pratibha were unwavering in their decision to not use force. “Getting cow’s milk requires tapasya,” said Abhinav. “Until the cows willingly allow us to take their milk, we will wait,” he added. “And even when they get old, this is their home.”

But milk is just one of the gifts given by cows. Dried cow dung has been used as fuel, manure, an ingredient in Panchagavya (Ayurvedic formulation), pesticide, antibacterial cleaner and plaster for millennia in India. It is the stuff of folklore. Pratibha and her children lost no time in collecting cowdung and drying them into cakes of various sizes. It was hard work. Since the cows were free to walk all over the estate, they could drop their dung anywhere, which meant that collecting it involved a great deal of walking.

During one of my walks with Abhinav, he pointed out that wherever the cows had dropped their dung, the grass around it had grown in thick clusters. It was indeed true! There were clumps of grass sticking out in different parts of the meadow. Suddenly I remembered the thick grass clusters I had seen in childhood but never thought about the phenomenon. How oblivious we are of the subtle workings of nature.

Once the flyers announcing the sale of cow dung cakes were circulated, many Hindus began placing orders to buy them from mid-October. Gomaya (cow dung) is considered very auspicious to use in yajna or fire ceremonies. During the Navaratri festival, many individuals and temples perform yajna. The Gomaya from Texas Gaushala was donated by many Hindus to temples.

“Until now, we were only using Gomaya substitutes in our yajnas; we are glad there is a gaushala now to supply us with real Gomaya,” said the priest of Sri Krishna Vrundavana, a Hindu temple in Houston. Orders began to come even from other parts of the US.
Reflections
By: Heather Ann
Tags: Poems On Medium, Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Poem, Writing

Reflections

My Weekly Roundup

Photo by Matheus Bertelli from Pexels

I’m doing my weekly roundup again! All my posts for the previous week together for anyone who’s interested.

Here’s last week’s featuring poetry.

I appreciate all the kind feedback on these posts and I hope that if it’s your first time reading them that you’ll enjoy them too.
Magnificent is the Quran
Tags: Religion, Nonfiction, Quran, Islam, Poem

Magnificent is the Quran

Breathtaking words have come from above;

Full of guidance and love.

Like a rain that makes barren land alive;

Rain that helps you survive.

Written by the master of the worlds;

Giving a hope to fallible slaves.

Teaching you to become slaves of the merciful;

Freeing you from the slavery of mortals.

Guiding you to become thankful;

Making your life wonderful.

Words that bring the dawn;

Magnificent is the Quran.
From the Blackfeet Reservation to Great Falls, Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians Will Scare You Good
By: Erika T. Wurth
Tags: Review, Books, Novel, Literature, Book Review

The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones. Saga/Simon & Schuster, July 2020.

The inimitable — and prolific Blackfeet master of horror is back with a killer of a book. The Only Good Indians (out with Saga/Simon & Schuster onJuly 14, 2020), will take you up to the Blackfeet reservation and down to Great Falls, and along the way, it’ll scare you good. Four men are being haunted — and hunted — by a vengeful spirit who won’t rest until she takes them down, one by one.

Lewis is your average rez dude turned sort-of-suburbanite, with his super-athletic, super-cool white wife Peta, his job at the Post Office, and his bumbling-yet-charming crush on the Native girl who works with him. But one day, in climbing the stepladder to fix a light, in-between the blades of the fan, he sees an animal he killed back home — in a way he still knows was wrong. So begins his descent into a world of paranoia that brings out all of his fears and insecurities about the choices he’s made to get to this point in his life. Lewis loves his wife, but wonders what it means as a Native man to have chosen to be with a white wife — who doesn’t want children. He also can’t help but wonder if it was the right move for him to even leave the rez — and the spirit that haunts him pushes on these insecurities — until they become full manifestations –with gory consequences. What follows are the stories of the friends he hunted with, years ago — most of who stayed — some who made bad choices — and the fight for their lives that all of them — and their children — must now face.

Subtly funny, and trigger warning: definitely gory, this novel is engaging — and as per Jones’ usual, beautiful and strange. In many ways, this novel moves Native literature in a direction only Jones knows how, as it allows for the kind of writing and world-building that moves beyond the traditional, and into the new, without losing its Native roots.

Jones, a winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Award, a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction, and winner of the Bram Stoker Award for long fiction has given us a story that will stay long in our minds — even if in nightmare form.
The ‘UI and UX Design’ Pocket Guide (Volume One) 📘
By: Marc Andrew
Tags: UI, Design, Sketch, UX, Web Design

1. Why Creativity is more important than the Design Tool 🛠

“From the Darkside, to the light… and relax. Just don’t mention The Last Jedi.”

In a recent article I read, they touched upon tools for Wireframing, Prototyping, and those tried and trusted UI Design tools that we eat, sleep and breathe (you know the ones). Oh boy, there’s quite a few to choose from, and they cook up all sorts of debates in #DesignTwitter and beyond!

Now, I won’t be touching on the Wireframing and Prototyping tools portion of the article I mentioned, but concentrate on the UI Design tools that are mentioned briefly in the article, and why you need to just choose the one that suits you and roll with it. There’s no magic tool to suit all types of designers, and you need to remember that, however many times you may be bashed over the head with advocates of a certain design tool.

Photoshop is what many designers turn still turn to, and what many, should we say, time-served designers still use on a regular basis, even with the introduction of Adobe XD in recent-ish times. And this can be for all manner of reasons. Something like Sketch not being available to Windows users for a start. The unity between applications inside of the Adobe Creative Suite. Stronger design tools for working with text and imagery. The list goes on.

The same goes for users of Sketch for example. They may have been looking for something more suited to UI Design today, an ability to move more swiftly through a project, or they just hate Adobes walled garden. Who knows. But like I’ve always said the skills maketh the designer, not the tools.

Every single one of the design tools available to us, either desktop or cloud based, is just that, a tool. If a designer has the will and determination to be the very best they can be, then they will become that with whatever tool they decide to go with. Certain tools may place restrictions on how far you can push your creativity, but they’ll never completely stifle it.

Great, no amazing, work can be produced in any design tool that you decide to go with if you’re willing to push yourself as far as you can go creatively.
How to Stay Awake For Date Night
By: Keith Dias
Tags: Books, Advice, Relationships, Love, Self Improvement

How to Stay Awake For Date Night

Try this for 10 minutes, so you can Netflix and Chill.

Photo by SeventyFour

Sleeping beauty

There were a few fairly awkward points during my early 20’s where I found myself without anything to do on a Friday evening. On those occasions, I would sometimes tag along with my cousin Conrad and his girlfriend to see whatever movie was opening that night. Yes, I was the ‘third wheel’ on their date, but I never felt the least bit guilty.

Why?

Well, when the lights went down in the theater, and the movie started playing, I could guarantee that the nice young lady (who Conrad eventually married) would fall into a deep unwakeable sleep.

Every. Single. Time.

Clearly, the demands of the week had taken a toll on her, and she utilized the darkness of the theatre to catch up on some much-needed shut-eye.

But as the prices of movies started to rise over the years, I often lamented the financial waste that was occurring each time he paid for her movie ticket. He was essentially paying double the price for a movie that only one of them was actually seeing.

The whole thing seemed like a travesty to me, but it didn’t appear to bother my cousin. As she quietly snored in the seat next to him, the two of us would have a great time whispering about the movie, making jokes, and sharing popcorn.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help wondering if there was anything she could do to stay awake for their date.
Introduction To PYCARET For Your First Data Science Project | Beginners Guide
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Pycaret

In this introduction to Pycaret, you will learn how to automate your data science workflow with Pycaret, an automated machine learning library for your data science projects. Pycaret makes work easier by automating your exploratory data analysis (EDA) process and gives you results in a minute.

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What is PyCaret?

PyCaret is an open-source low code end-to-end machine learning library in Python. Its primary objective is to reduce the cycle time of the hypothesis to insights and make data scientists more productive in their experiments. It does this by providing a high-level API that is sophisticated yet easy to use for data scientists and analysts who seek to perform iterative, end-to-end data science experiments in a very efficient way. Through the use of PyCaret, the amount of time spent on coding experiments reduce drastically.

Who should use PyCaret?

PyCaret is a free and open-source library that is easy to install and can be set up either locally or on any cloud service within minutes. The licensing agreement also allows for the commercial use of the software. While there is no limitation of use, the ideal target audience is as follows:

Citizen data scientists and analysts who want to easily implement end-to-end data science projects in a low-code environment.

Data scientists who want to increase the productivity and efficiency of their experiments.

Data science students and analytics practitioners with no prior background in coding.

Small to midsize companies looking to implement data science projects without committing significant amounts of resources.

In order for you to make the best out of this tutorial, I have put this tutorial in the form of a video for a better understanding

Watch and practice along
Crown Development Update 21.07.20
By: J. Herranz
Tags: Development, Crw, Crownplatform, Nft, Bounty Program

Crown Development Update 21.07.20

NFT resync functionality coming along. Trezor testers wanted. Crown Bounty program launched. Website drafts evolving.

Keep calm and buidl

Ashot

has been working on the nftoken database resync functionality. The release candidate should be ready for public testing by the end of the week. A non-mandatory update will follow shortly. This new version will resync the NFT database to avoid tx-nft db conflicts that led to client instability for some users.

New Crown-Electrum builds

are available for testing. You can get all the information in the Discord channel #bitcore-electrum-testing.

A Crown bounty program

has been launched by several contributors. Read all the details here and engage in open issues to receive rewards!

Bitcore

is progressing slowly, there are no relevant updates on this front.

Website

development for the new community presence has started after intensive feedback rounds on design and structure. You can have a look at the designs and discusssions in Discord.

Stay tuned for more development updates and general news.
In The End
By: Larry G. Maguire
Tags: Philosophy, Psychology, Reality, Life, Death

In The End

The voice inside our heads keeps us busy, distracted. But to what ultimate end?

As I carry on my daily work, my mind is focused. I’m immersed in the detail and the demand of the task.

But in the moments of reduced attention, in recent weeks particularly, it wanders to thoughts of my demise. I realise that I, my parents, my wife and children, and everyone we know, all one day gone.

Today I thought of a business friend who lost her child 10 or so years ago and the pain that she must know, and I hope that I never find myself there.

It’s a remarkable thought to contemplate one’s own mortality, and although it’s unnerving, it captures my interest. I had pneumonia a few years ago and I couldn’t take three steps without gasping for breath. I remember thinking, this must be what it feels like to be on the brink.

I often ask myself; who or what am I? Really, what am I?

I have no clue. It’s a pursuit of something I can never catch up to. It’s always just out of reach.

No, too scary.

Ok, just a little look.

No! Back to work now.

Yet, it pursues me, and away from the realisation of it I cannot get. Paradoxically, I seem to both know it and not, and it seems to know me.

Without this realisation, I could never come to terms with my own foolishness, the thoughts that rush in, my screaming and shouting, either on my own in the van as I drive, or at my son for his seeming unwillingness to embrace my allegedly solid advice towards efficiency.

Change that word, you use it too much…

Absent of the recognition and acceptance of my inevitable death, I would never understand that my demands on myself and others are utterly pointless. Success, happiness, money, recognition, reward and applause, every one ultimately a fool’s errand.

The disorganised dishwasher, the untidy hallway entrance, the shoes strewn around the living room, my insufferable insistence on timeliness and attention to detail, and my impatience at others’ apparent inability to meet my impeccably high standards — bollocks.

Every bit.

But I persist.

I think somehow it might end differently and my children will thank me for being as I am. As if that is a reasonable excuse.

Whatever it is — the fundamental basis of this monologue inside my skull — it doesn’t accept the wafer thin surface reasoning that it presents itself.

The fact is, none of us are getting out of here alive, so it matters.
Facebook Develops An AI-Translator For Software Programmers
By: Kevin Buddaeus
Tags: Technology, Software Development, Business, AI, Programming

TransCoder is highly versatile

Currently, TransCoder can translate freely between C++, Java and Python, but the research team behind TransCoder says that it will be able to adapt to any programming language pair and fluently translate in between them.

Software with the sole purpose of translating between languages is already available, but the results are more often than not underwhelming and can’t be used in a fire-and-forget manner due to the differences in how each language is structured. These so-called S2S (source to source) compilers are far from compiling code errorfree and need extensive bugfixing to get the final result to work. It’s often easier to just rewrite the code from scratch in the desired language.

Any programmer who needs to change code from let’s say C# to C++ or the other way around will tell you the same thing: “Learn both C# and C++, then spend a whole lot of time rewriting code from scratch.”

TransCoder learns by translating not only from a source language to a target language but also reverse translating it back. If you have used Google translator in the past, then you surely know that hitting “reverse translate” a few times can give you weird results as the translator pulls more things out of context.

TransCoder translates code both ways to pick up on these differences and tweaks the code until both ways give the expected results. This way, it ensures coherence.