Dr. Lynn Vavreck, Professor of Political Science at UCLA, and contributing columnist to The Upshot at The New York Times, sits down with Jon Favreau to talk about 2022 midterms. After 2020, Lynn and her colleagues interviewed over 500,000 voters, leading them to conclude that our politics aren’t just polarized, but calcified. She argues that calcification has placed our politics on a knife’s edge, raising the stakes of every election, and that 2022 was the biggest case of calcification we’ve seen yet.
Let’s be real. Most books (and web sites) providing instructions for building projects with an Adruino assume the reader is just starting out in this arena of Maker-World. That is probably a reasonable assumption, but it also means that those of us who seek an Arduino guide that provides more advanced work are out of luck. Arduino for Arduinians fills that void. I highly recommend this rich, detailed, and extensive treatment of Arduino makery.
Arduino for Arduinians is suitably named, as it provides guidance and a beyond-the-basics level, for folks who have already been bitten by the Arduino bug, and can already tell the difference between a CAN Bus and an RS232, or Charlieplexing and ATtiny microcontrollers. In fact, one of my favorite applications laid out in this book is using the CAN bus interface to diagnose why the dashboard “transmission fault” light won’t go off on my friend’s Land Rover.
Arduino for Arduinians covers I2C bus devices, interfacing with or emulating the action of keyboards and similar devicese, some inexpensive but advanced Bluetooth mojo, and working with higher than novice-level voltages and currents. Be careful though.
You should know the basics of how Arduinos work (I recommend Arduino Workshop to get that if you don’t have it already). You should be able to read standard circuit diagrams. You should be familiar with Sketch and the Arduino IDE. Also, you will need parts. Helpfully, Arduino for Arduinians has a web site (see the inside of the book) with the Sketch related software, and yu can find in the intro a suggestion as to where to get parts (but you can get these parts lots of places, including Amazon.
The Author, John Boxall,is a master projecteer, and author of several Maker-supportive books in multiple languages.
I was getting the impression that the media have settled on a Trump-Biden match up in over 500 days from now, and wondered what the list of potential candidates looked like at this time (plus or minus a few weeks) during previous election cycles at this time. So I made some lists.
2017
Barack Obama; Hillary Clilnton; Mitt Romney; Jim Gilmore; Tommyh Thompson; John McCain; Sam Brownback; Bill Richardson; Duncan Hunter; Ron Paul; Chris Dodd; Tom Tancredo’ Mike Gravel; Joe Biden; Mike Huckabee
2011
Jon Huntsman; Michel Bachmann; Herman Cain; Tim Pawlenty; Mitt Romney; Garyh Johnson; Ron Paul;
2015
Vermin Supreme; Pogo Mochello Allen-Reese; Hillary Clinton; Rick Perryh; John Kasich; Marco Rubio; Donald Trump;
2019
Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kristen Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard, Marianne Williamson, Pete Buttigieg, Donald Trump, Andrew Yang, Cory Booker; Steve Bullock; Julian Castro; Bill De Blasio; John Delaney; Mike Gravel; John Kickenlooper; Jay Inslee; Seth Moulton; Beto O’Rourke; Tim Ryhan; Eric Salwell;
2023
Donald Trump; Ron DeSantis; Nikki Haley; Mike Pence; Ryan Binkley; Larry Elder; Asa Hutchinson; Perry Johnson; Vivek Ramaswamy; Tim Scott; Kristi Noem; Mike Rogers; Chris Sununu; Greg Abbott; Chris Christie; Joe Biden; Robert Kennedy
I’ll leave it to you to search for meaning in this.
Having recently revived and updated my KDE Linux install, I went looking for the context menu to manipulate images. This tool makes life easier. Like when you want to toss an image into your blog post, but WordPress complains it is too large, it is nice to be able to simply right click on the image and in a click or two resize it (or rotate it, or maybe do other things to it). Historically there was a tool called KIM (KDE Image Management) that did this, but this seems to be no longer maintained and is not that easy to install. Instead, install “ReImage” from KDE Services Menu. Look for the “deb” link on that page if deb is your preferred install method. There is also a tar file there for other architectures.
Evangeline Reed was a woman with some seriously disturbing secrets, at least one of which threatened to sideline her in a quest to put to rest a decades old and still ongoing crime. Jess Lourey, the author who created Reed and put her in the new novel “The Taken Ones,” continues in her own ongoing and highly successful quest to lure various facies of her readers’ limbic systems into a dark room and her her way with them.
Jess Lourey winning the Minnesota Book Award for The Quarry Girls.Evangeline’s childhood was a horror, a horror that seems to have given her a gift, and a drive, that she would eventually put to use as a Minneapolis homicide cop to save lives, and to help snatch others from their own horrors. Known in adulthood as Van, detective Reed required the trust and goodwill of her partner to literally turn her nightmares into evidence, and procure extremely unlikely legal convictions. But that partner was now gone, and Van Reed was now barely holding on to her job as a cold case investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, her drive and her apparently preternatural evil detector now untethered.
There is an abyss, and Jess Lourey knows where it is. The Taken Ones, a complex mystery-adventure with a terrifying antagonist, a really annoying boss, a close-in set of very sympathetic compatriots, and a real jerk-face of a rival, implores the reader to visit multiple abysses, which may or may not (no spoilers) be linked in interesting ways.
Agent Harry Steinbeck, straight laced, well bred, and very put together forensic scientist is now the closest thing to a partner to Van. He seems to know more than he lets on. The years 1980 and 2022 bookend the activities of a spooky, demented, and highly unusual taker-killer. The four decade gap in time allows Lourey to create complex and interesting then-and-now type characters that seem to appear in many of her books.
You should read several of Lourey’s books, many of which are organized in series. The Taken Ones sports the subtitle “A Reed and Steinbeck Thriller.” We can rightfully assume that this is the first in a series, and it looks like it is going to be an excellent ride. I strongly recommend you pick up The Taken Ones as soon as it is available (pre-order here), then wait impatiently with the rest of us for the second Reed and Steinbeck to come out. In the meantime, read Lourey’s breakthrough book “Unspeakable Things,” her latest and highly acclaimed “The Quarry Girls,” and one of my favorites “Bloodline.”
