Someone previously gave this book one star so I had to remedy the situation. From wikipedia: It became the first novel to win the “triple crown”[1] of science fiction awards—the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award for paperback original,[11] an unprecedented achievement described by the Mail & Guardian as “the sci-fi writer’s version of winning the Goncourt, Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year”

Truthout is a progressive news site that’s been around since 2001 and is run by a non-profit organization. Their most recent tax return shows about $1.4M in revenue. Most of that goes to salaries and most of which comes from small donations. I was impressed with their annual report which highlights some of the stories they’re proudest of – it’s very professionally done, even though the organization is much lavishly funded than, say, ProPublica.

They highlight their climate disruption dispatches, their reports from Ferguson, and their investigation into the anti-trafficking movement (which they call the American Rescue Industry) as examples of their best reporting.

In practice, the Truthout front-page offers original content alongside syndicated pieces from sources like Democracy Now! and FAIR. A significant part of Truthout original content is news analysis and opinions. If that’s your cup of tea, you’ll find some good reads here; personally, I’d prefer a stronger focus on news and investigative pieces.

The perspective here is progressive-left, but it stays away from conspiracy-mongering and clickbait. At a time when sites like “Bipartisan Report” and “US Uncut” offer stories that are often half-true or sensationalized, Truthout offers a rational alternative. That said, the site is simply too small to serve as a primary news source; I do recommend following it as a secondary one.

The Verdict

Let’s compare it with Common Dreams, which is quite similar in its political bias and focus. Common Dreams has a more vibrant discussion community, and it licenses its content Wikipedia-style, free for anyone to build upon (Truthout uses conventional copyright terms). I find Truthout’s content to be higher quality and their organizational transparency to be up to the standards of a well-run non-profit. I gave Common Dreams three stars; I’ll give Truthout 3.5, rounded down for now since there’s still quite a gap to larger non-profit efforts.

When I read Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, I was deeply impressed by the imaginative and intelligent writing, and recommended the book, a collection of several stories, many times. I always regarded it as a bit of a cult hit, so I never expected to see one of the stories (“Story of your Life”, which gave the book its title) turned into a movie.

The adaptation by Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Prisoners) adds many artistic layers to Chiang’s straightforward story. We share in the confusion of the protagonist Louise Banks (portrayed brilliantly by Amy Adams) who finds herself thrust into a military-led effort to understand the intentions of aliens whose giant pod-like ships have descended in multiple locations across the planet.

The aliens are large, looming octopus-like creatures who communicate in ways entirely unlike our own. The struggle to communicate turns into a race against time and against old prejudices.

Hollwood’s favorite sidekick, Jeremy Renner, plays scientist Ian Donnelly alongside Amy Adams, but he’s mostly there so she doesn’t have to talk to herself. There are similarities between Louise Banks and Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster’s character in Contact, but unlike that movie, Arrival avoids any “religion vs. science” detours and stays focused on the larger story. Interestingly, we don’t see many political leaders – we experience events strictly from the point of view of the main character.

As with his previous films, Villeneuve paces things masterfully. There are scenes where we slowly move in real-time towards the alien ship, mirroring the anticipation and anxiety of the protagonist. Later, we skip through what could be weeks or months, until the film returns to real-time as it works up to a furiously paced conclusion.

This is not a cheerful movie, but it’s also not a dark one – like Contact, it is an intimate story full of empathy and love, and like the best of Star Trek, it has a strong moral center. If you enjoy intelligent sci-fi, you will not want to miss this one.

Once you’ve watched the film, you may want to read Stephen Wolfram’s post about the alien language, the spacecraft, and other details he and his son Christopher advised the filmmakers on. Note the attention to detail: source code shown in the movie does real stuff!

I’m a vegetarian, but I do like the taste of meat and the ease with which it delivers densely packed proteins. So I’m always on the lookout for meat alternatives: seitan, tofu, tempeh, and various proprietary products from companies like Quorn, Beyond Meat, Field Roast, Morning Star, and others.

One of the newest entrants to the meat substitute market is Impossible Foods. Founded by biochemist Patrick O. Brown (co-founder of PLOS, a project I have great respect and admiration for), it’s received nearly $200M in funding, and after tasting it, I can see why. I suspect that, unless someone beats them to the market, this company is going to get really big, really soon.

For now, you can’t buy their plant-based burger in any supermarket. The company has adopted the clever marketing strategy of piloting their patty in selected fine restaurants. We tried a three course menu at Jardinière, not ordinarily in my budget, but it was a special occasion with friends.

The menu consisted of

• broccoli salad with impossible “ground beef”
• impossible burger with lettuce, red onion, pickle, chips
• Baked Alaska
• selected wine pairings

And yeah, this meat substitute is the real deal. A little charred on the outside, red and “bloody” on the inside, near-perfect texture, and most importantly, very tasty (easily above average by hamburger standards, owing of course in part to the highly professional preparation). It felt like eating a science experiment that’s worked. One of our friends was an omnivore who acknowledged she’d happily eat this anytime instead of real meat. I don’t think she would have reacted the same way to any of the substitutes currently on the market.

Unless people break out in hives after eating these or there are other weird side effects (none for me so far!), I think they’ll sell a lot of these, easily, once they hit the market.

Telegram is yet another IM service which is pretty similar to all the others currently available. Telegrams main defining features are the ability for users to make their own sticker packs, private chats and a GPL licensed client.

Pros

• A client for almost every platform
• Custom sticker packs
• Private chats with semi secure encryption
• Nice UI

Cons

• Server is closed source
• Requires a phone number to register (Possibly a pro for making blocking bad users easier)
• No clear way to get involved with the client development.
• Contributes to the problem of IM fragmentation by creating another service incompatible with the rest.

In Conclusion

Telegram is not a bad IM service but its not a great one either, I would rate it above others like WhatsApp and Skype for the fact that it has open source clients but in the end its another app that people have to download to be able to talk with all their contacts and can never truly be a standard due to the closed off nature of the telegram server software.

KeePassX is a great password manager for securely storing your passwords locally. KeePassX makes it simple to organize and generate passwords for all your services.

Pros:

• Cross platform
• Open source
• Easy to use

Cons:

• No integration with cloud services for syncing data. This can be resolved by storing your keepass file in a synced folder however
• No integration with browsers.

In Conclusion

KeePassX is my password manager of choice however the lack of browser support can be a real hassle. The peace of mind from knowing my data can only be accessed by me and is not stored on a 3rd party server makes the lack of features included in other password managers worth it.

This site provides a services which lets you have phone cases custom made with images of your choice.

When I made my order for a case for my Nexus 5X I was a little worried about if the printing would turn out well. When I revived my case about a week later the case design turned out very nice, judging by looks the case was very pretty and just how it looked on the website.

Where I was disappointed however is the actual design of the case is close to useless for actually protecting the phone. There was no fault in the manufacturing but simply the case was made to be just a skin for looks and not to actually protect your phone. If this is what you want then go ahead and order one but if you are looking to actually protect your phone I recommend looking elsewhere.

Note that this review was for the Nexus 5X case sold by case custom and many not apply to their other phone cases.

Matrix is a protocol for sending messages across the internet. Its main use is as an IM platform similar to WhatsApp and Telegram although it has other uses such as controlling IoT devices.

Pros:

• Federated/Decentralized: Matrix servers are decentralized in a similar way to email. Anyone can host their own server and talk to users across on other servers. This means there is absolutely no lock in and you are free to move to another server at any time without losing any of your contacts.

• Fully open source: The Matrix protocol and reference server and client software are licensed under libre licenses which ensures your freedom to use the software however you like

• Intercommunication with other protocols: matrix.org hosts bridges to other messaging services such as IRC, Gitter and Slack. This means you can talk to users who do not use Matrix, expanding the number of people you can talk to using Matrix.

• Great mobile support: There is a wonderful app for Matrix on Android and iOS called Riot

• Active development: There is a very active team of full time developers working on Matrix which listen to community feedback and are constantly adding more features.

Cons

• No feature complete native desktop clients: The reference client for matrix Riot is only available as a web app for desktop. While there are desktop clients under development which can be found on the matrix website; these clients are still lacking many of the features which riot supports.

• Still lacking some features from other IM platforms: Matrix clients while being completely usable for daily use are still lacking some desirable features however these features are quickly being added in.

In conclusion

Matrix is an exciting protocol which hopes to unite everyone together and break down walls for communication set up by proprietary solutions. Using Matrix with the Riot client is a very pleasant experience. With luck we may all be using this protocol to communicate and be done with issues of different contacts using different apps.

What determines the shape and fate of societies? It’s ideas and stories, and their ability to persuade us that in order to stay true to our beliefs, we must take action to upend or to preserve the social and political structures that surround us. That, at least, was the motivation of Cold War operatives on both sides who sought to win the war of ideas in the 20th century. In her book “Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War”, Frances Stonor Saunders documented the workings of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to support anti-communist intellectuals.

In Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan takes this grand battle for hearts and minds to a human scale, by inventing the eponymous and decidedly less ambitious program by the United Kingdom’s internal counter-intelligence agency, MI5, to bankroll writers of both fiction and non-fiction. Amidst the domestic and international turmoil of Great Britain in the early 1970s, the protagonist and narrator, Serena Frume, finds herself entangled in more ways than one.

When Serena, a low-ranking desk worker at MI5, is asked to bring a young writer named T. H. Haley into the program, she relishes the opportunity to psychoanalyze Haley through his short stories. We get excerpts and summaries of those stories, enough to leave us hungry for more, but the story progresses quickly as Serena and her subject predictably fall in love. Just as we fear that this little world will unravel completely, McEwan sheds a whole new light on “Sweet Tooth”, and brings the story to fulminant closure.

This is not a conventional spy novel, and it lacks the scale and ambition of McEwan’s “The Innocent”, the sheer emotional force of “Atonement”, or the darkly cynical satire of “Solar”. But it tells a compelling story about freedom, integrity, trust and corruption, drawing inspiration from the sordid historical realities of the Cold War. It feels in some ways like a reflection on McEwan’s own life and times. The degree to which this becomes apparent gives the novel a light touch of narcissism, which is just sufficiently tempered by irony to not become a serious flaw. “Sweet Tooth” is perhaps not “utterly brilliant” (as Serena Frume characterizes Haley’s stories, perhaps to win him over), but it’s a challenging, enjoyable story worthy of McEwan’s caliber.

Mother Jones (MoJo) is a progressive magazine and website, and yet, when it came to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US presidential election, they were one of the more consistently critical publications.

They kicked things off in 2015 by digging into Sanders’ 40-year-old writings (when he was in his 20s), highlighting anything that could be scandalized, and wrapped it up by calling him a con man. No, that was not enough, even after Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton and began campaigning on her behalf, Mother Jones titled: “Don’t Hate Millennials. Save It For Bernie Sanders.”

In fairness, most of those stories were written by one of MoJo’s most prolific commentators, Kevin Drum, who on the other end filed stories like “Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy”, “Hillary Clinton Is One of America’s Most Honest Politicians”, and “New Email Dump Reveals That Hillary Clinton Is Honest and Boring”.

I personally don’t see much value in a progressive news source engaging in trivial commentary to elevate an establishment candidate running, literally, a billion-dollar campaign, while belittling and dismissing her progressive opponent. It’s after half a dozen such stories that I stopped paying attention to MoJo for a while.

But one shouldn’t assess a news source based on the work of a single contributor. Other parts of MoJo did break more critical stories, such as “Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger: It’s Personal. Very Personal.” and “Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Problem”, both by David Corn. That’s the same man who broke the story “SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters” during the 2012 election, arguably the most influential single story in that campaign.

The currently featured investigations include a four-month undercover report about a private prison that MoJo rightly compares to Nellie Bly’s pioneering work in the 19th century to uncover abuses in New York’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum. This is the kind of journalism that’s incredibly hard to find and deserves kudos.

In other words, while I sometimes would wish for more depth and rigor, and less participation in rationalizing the status quo, it would be unfair to not acknowledge that MoJo is still a pretty remarkable publication that can pack a punch. I’m not a subscriber or donor, but I do read it from time to time.

The Foundation for National Progress is the nonprofit behind Mother Jones magazine, with a pretty diverse funding model that includes grants, subscriptions, donations and advertising. As of 2012, ads made up only 13% of the overall revenue.