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Birha on the Doorstep
Sitting on the sun-warmed step at the end of her workday, Birha laid her hand on the dog's neck and let her mind drift. Like a gyre-moth finding the center of its desire, her mind inevitably spiraled inward to the defining moment of her life. It must be something to do with growing old, she thought irritably, that all she did was revisit what had happened all those years ago. Yet her irritation subsided before the memory. She could still see it with the shocking clarity of yesterday: the great, closed eyelid set in the enormous alien stronghold, opening in response to her trick. The thick air of the valley, her breath caught in her throat, the orange-and-yellow uniforms of the waiting soldiers. She had gone up the ladder, stepped through the round opening. Darkness, her footsteps echoing in the enormous space, the light she carried casting a small, bobbing pool of illumination. This was the alien stronghold considered invincible by the human conquerors, to which the last denizens of a dying race had crawled in a war she had forgotten when she was young. She had expected to find their broken, decayed bodies, but instead there was a silence like the inside of a temple up in the mountains. Silence, a faint smell of dust, and a picture forever burned into her mind: in the light of her lamp, the missing soldier, thunderstruck before the great mass of machinery in the center.
That was the moment when everything changed. For her, and eventually for humankind. She had been young then.
"Hah!" she said, a short, sharp sound—an old woman laughing at her foolishness. It felt good to sit here on the doorstep, although now it was turning a little cold. On this world, the sun didn't set for seven years as counted on the planet where she had been born. She knew she would not live to see another sunset; her bones told her that, and the faint smell in her urine, and her mind, which was falling backward into a void of its own making.
But the clouds could not be ignored, nor the yellow dog at her knee, who wanted to go inside. There would be rain, and the trees would open their veined, translucent cups to the sky. There would be gyre-moths emerging from holes in the ground, flying in smooth, ever-smaller circles, at the center of which was a cup of perfumed rain—and there would be furred worms slithering up the branches to find the sweet moth-meat. In the rain under the trees, the air would quiver with blood and desire, and the human companion animals—the dogs and cats and ferrets—would run to their homes lest the sleehawks or a feral arboril catch them for their next meal. Yes, rain was a time of beauty and bloodshed, here at the edge of the great cloud forest, among the ruins of the university that had been her home for most of her life.
She got up, noting with a grim satisfaction that, in this universe, old knees creaked. She went in with the dog and shut the door and the windows against the siren-like calls of the foghorn-trees, and put some water on to boil. Rain drummed on the stone walls of her retreat, and she saw through the big window the familiar ruined curve of the university ramparts through a wall of falling water. Sometimes the sight still took her breath away. That high walk with the sheer, misty drop below was where she had first walked with Thirru.
A Very Short Rumination
When I was born my mother named me Birha, which means "separated" or "parted" in an ancient human language. This was because my mother was about to die.
Difficult Loves
Thirru was difficult and strange. He seemed eager to make Birha happy but was like a big, foolish child, unable to do so. A large, plump man, with hair that stood up on end, he liked to clap his hands loudly when he solved a difficult problem, startling everyone. His breath smelled of bitter herbs from the tea he drank all day. Even at their pairing ceremony he couldn't stop talking and clapping his hands, which she had then thought only vaguely annoying and perhaps endearing. Later, her irritation at his strangeness, his genius, his imbecility, provoked her into doing some of her best work. It was almost as though, in the discomfort of his presence, she could be more herself.
One time, when she was annoyed with Thirru, she was tempted by another man. This man worked with her; his fingers were long and shapely over the simulator controls, and he leaned toward her when he spoke, always with a warmth that made her feel as though she was a creature of the sunlight, unfurling in the rays of morning. He made her feel younger than she was. She didn't like him very much; she distrusted people with charm as a matter of principle, but he was more than charm. He was lean, and wore his dark hair long and loose, and every posture of his was insouciant, inviting, relaxed as a predatory animal; when he leaned toward her she felt the yearning, the current pulling her toward him. At these moments she was always stiff and polite with him; in privacy she cursed herself for her weakness. She avoided him, sought him out, avoided him, going on like this for days, until, quite suddenly, she broke through the barrier. She was no longer fascinated by him. It wasn't that his charm had faded; it was only (she congratulated herself) the fact that she had practiced the art of resisting temptation until she had achieved some mastery. You practice and it becomes easier, just like the alien mathematics on which she was working at the time. Just like anything else.
This freedom from desiring this man was heady. It was also relaxing not to feel drawn to him all the time, to be able to joke and laugh with him, to converse without that terrible, adolescent self-consciousness. She could even let herself like him after that.
In this manner she carried herself through other temptations successfully. Even after Thirru's own betrayal she wasn't tempted into another relationship. After the reconciliation they stayed together for an entire cycle, some of which was marked by an easy contentment that she had never known before, a deep wellspring of happiness. When they parted, it was as friends.
But what he left behind, what all old loves left behind were the ghostly imprints of their presence. For her, Thirru came back whenever she looked up at the high walk where she had first walked with him. Thirru was the feel of damp stone, the vivid green of the moss between the rocks, the wet, verdant aroma of the mist. She didn't have to go there anymore; just looking up at the stone arch against the clouds would bring back the feel of his hands.
After Thirru, she had had her share of companions, long and short term, but nobody had inspired her to love. And when the man happened along who came closest, she was unprepared for him. His name was Rudrak, and he was young.
What she loved about him was his earnestness, his delight in beautiful things, like the poeticas she had set up on the long table. He was an engineer, and his passion was experimental craft designed to explore stars. She loved his beautiful, androgynous face, how it was animated by thought and emotion, how quick his eyes were to smile, the way his brow furrowed in concentration. That crisp, black, curling hair, the brown arm flung out as he declaimed, dramatically, a line from a classic play she'd never heard of. When he came, always infrequently, unexpectedly, always on a quest for the woman Ubbiri, it was as though the sun had come out in the sky of her mind. Conversation with him could be a battle of wits, or the slow, easy, unhurried exchange of long-time lovers. She never asked him to stay for good (as though it were possible), never told him she loved him.
Now she was pottering about in her kitchen, listening to the rain, wondering if he would come one more time before she died. The last time he had come was a half-cycle ago (three and a half years on her birth planet, her mind translated out of habit). There was not much more than a half-cycle left to her. Would he come? Pouring her tea, she realized that despite the certainty with which she loved this man, there was something different about this love. She felt no need for him to reciprocate. Sometimes she would look at her arms, their brown, lean strength, the hands showing the signs of age, and remember what it was like to be touched, lovingly, and wonder what it would be like to caress Rudrak's arm, to touch his face, his lips. But it was an abstract sort of wondering. Even if she could make him forget Ubbiri (and there was no reason for her to do that), she did not really want him too close to her. Her life was the way she liked it: the rising into early mornings, the work with the poeticas—which was a meditation in sunlight and sound—then the long trek up the hill to the now-abandoned laboratory. Returning in the early evening before the old bells rang sunset (although the sun wouldn't set for half a cycle yet) into the tranquility of her little stone house, where the village girl entrusted with the task would have left her meal warming on the stove just the way she liked it. The peace of eating and reading by herself, watching the firelings outside her window, in the temporary, watery dark created by the frequent gathering of clouds. In those moments the universe seemed to open to her as much as it seemed shut to her during the long day. She would stare out at the silhouettes of trees and wonder if the answers she was seeking through her theories and equations weren't instead waiting for her out there in the forest, amidst the ululations of the frenet-bird and the complex script of the fireling's dance. In those moments it would seem to her as though all she had to do was to walk out into the verdure and pluck the answer from the air like fruit from trees; that it was in these moments of complete receptivity that the universe would be revealed to her, not in the hours at the simulators in the laboratory. That the equations would be like childish chatter compared to what was out there to know in its fullness.
She took her tea to her favorite chair to drink. On the way she let her fingers brush lightly over the wires of the poeticas that stood on wood frames on the long table. The musical notes sounded above the crash of the rain, speaking aloud her ruminations in the lost alien tongue. Rudrak had left his ghost behind here: The remembrance of his body leaning over the instruments, brushing them as he might, in some other universe, be brushing the hair from her face. Asking how this sequence of notes implied those words. Since she had walked into the alien stronghold so many years ago, since the time that everything had changed, Rudrak had visited her nine times. Each time he remembered nothing of his previous visits, not even who she was. Each time she had to explain to him that Ubbiri was dead, and that he should come in, and wouldn't he like some tea? She went through the repetition as though it was the first time, every time, which in a way it was. A sacred ritual.
Would he come?
A Rambling Rumination
Simply by virtue of being, we create ripples in the ever-giving cosmic tree, the kalpa-vriksh. Every branch is an entire universe. Even stars, as they are born and die, leave permanent marks in the shadow universe of their memory. Perhaps we are ghosts of our other selves in other universes.
It was not right for Ubbiri to die. There is a lack of symmetry there, a lack even of a proper symmetry breaking. Somewhere, somehow, Ubbiri's meta-world-line and mine should connect in a shape that is pleasing to the mathematical eye. Sometimes I want to be Ubbiri, to know that a part of me did wander into another universe after all, and that separated, the two parts were joined together at last. There is something inelegant about Ubbiri's return and subsequent death. Ubbiri should have shared consciousness with me. Then, when Rudrak asks: "I am looking for Ubbiri. Is she here?" for the umpteenth time, I, Birha, will say yes. She's here.
Instead this is what I say:
"I'm sorry, Ubbiri passed away a long time ago. She told me about you when she died. Won't you come in?"
What is the probability that I am Ubbiri? If so, am I dead or alive, or both?
Ubbiri is dead. I am Birha, and Birha is alone.
The Discovery
When Birha was neither young nor old, when Thirru had already moved off-planet, a young soldier volunteered to test-fly an alien flyer, one of two intact specimens. The flight went well until upon an impulse he decided to swoop by the alien ruins in the valley below the University. During the dive, he lost control of the flyer, which seemed to be heading straight for a round indentation like an eye in the side of an ancient dome. The indentation revealed itself to be a door, by opening and then closing behind the flyer.
When Birha was consulted about the problem, she suspected that the door worked on an acoustical switch. Calculating the frequency of sound emitted by the alien flyer at a certain speed in the close, thick air of the valley took some time. But when a sound wave of the requisite frequency was aimed at the door, it opened almost immediately, with a sigh as though of relief.
She volunteered to go alone into the chamber. They argued, but she had always been stubborn, and at the end they let her. She was the expert on the aliens after all.
The interior was vast, shrouded in darkness and her footsteps echoed musically. She saw the flyer, in some kind of docking bay, along with a dozen others. There were no decaying alien bodies, only silence. The young man stood in front of the great mass of machinery at the center of the room. In the light from her lamp (which flickered strangely) she saw a complexity of fine, fluted vanes, crystalline pipes as thin as her finger running in and out of lacy metalwork. The whole mass was covered in a translucent dome that gleamed red and blue, yellow and green, in the light from her lamp. There was a door in the side of the dome, which was ringed by pillars.
"My hand . . ." the soldier was staring at his hand. He looked at Birha at last. "My hand just went through that pillar . . ."
Birha felt a loosening of her body, as though her joints and tendons were coming apart, without pain. If she breathed out too hard, she might fling herself all over the cosmos. Her heart was beating in an unfamiliar rhythm. She put her hand in her pocket and took some coins out. Carefully she tossed each one in the air. Thirteen coins came down on the floor, all heads.
"There's nothing wrong with you," she told the aviator. "It's the machine. It's an alien artifact that changes the probabilities of things. We're standing in the leakage field. Look, just come with me. You'll be all right."
She led him into the light. The round door was propped open by a steel rod and there were crowds of people waiting at the foot of the ladder. The young man was still dazed.
"It tickled," he said. "My hand. When it went through the pillar."
A Rumination on the Aliens
What do we know about them? We know now they are not dead. They went through the great probability machine, the actualizer, to another place, a place we'll never find. The old pictures show that they had pale brown, segmented bodies, with a skeletal frame that allowed them to stand upright. They were larger than us but not by much, and they had feelers on their heads and light-sensitive regions beneath the feelers, and several limbs. They knew time and space, and as their culture was centered around sound, so was their mathematics centered around probability. Their ancient cities are filled with ruined acoustical devices, enormous poeticas, windchimes, and Aeolian harps as large as a building. Their music is strange but pleasant to humans, although its frequency range goes beyond what we can hear. When I was just an acolyte at the university, I chose to study what scripts were left after the war. They were acoustical scripts, corresponding to the notes in a row of poeticas on the main streets of their cities. I was drunk with discovery, in love with the aliens, overcome with sorrow that they were, as we thought then, all dead. For the first time since I had come to this planet, I felt at home.
To understand the aliens I became a mathematician and a musician. After that, those three things are one thing in my mind: the aliens, the mathematics, the music.
Rudrak's Story
A bristleship, Rudrak told Birha, is like no other craft. It burrows into the heart of a star, enduring temperatures beyond imagination, and comes out on the other side whole and full of data. The current model was improved by Rudrak in his universe, a branch of the cosmic tree not unlike this one. He did it for his partner, Ubbiri, who was writing a thesis on white dwarf stars. Ubbiri had loved white dwarf stars since a cousin taught her a nursery rhyme about them when Ubbiri was small:
Why are you a star so dim
In the night beyond the rim
Don't you want someone to love?
In the starry skies above?
Ubbiri had to write a thesis on white dwarf stars. As dictated by academic custom in that culture, her thesis had to connect the six points of the Wheel of Knowing: Meta-networking, Undulant Theory, Fine-Jump Mathematics, Time-Bundles, Poetry, and Love. To enable her to achieve deep-knowing and to therefore truly love the star, she took a ride on the new bristleship with Rudrak. They discovered that when the ship went through the starry core, it entered another reality. This was later called the shadow universe of stars, where their existence and life history is recorded in patterns that no human has completely understood. Some poets call this reality the star's memory-space, or its consciousness, but Ubbiri thought that was extending metaphor beyond sense. The data from the bristleship told her that this star, this love, had been a golden star in its youth and middle age, harboring six planets (two of which had hosted life), and much space debris. In the late season of its existence it had soared in largeness, dimming and reddening, swallowing its planetary children. Now it was content to bank its fires until death.
After this discovery, Rudrak said, the two of them lived quiet lives that were rich and full. But one day before he was due to take off for another test flight, Ubbiri noticed there was a crack on the heat shielded viewscreen of the bristleship. Rudrak tested it and repaired it, but Ubbiri was haunted by the possibility of the tiny crack spreading like a web across the viewscreen, and breaking up just as Rudrak was in the star's heart.
Perhaps that was what she thought when Rudrak disappeared. Rudrak only knew that instead of passing through the shadow universe before coming out, the bristleship took him somewhere else, to a universe so close to his own that he did not know the difference until he had crashlanded on a planet (this planet) and been directed to people who knew the truth. They led him to Birha, who sheltered him for fifteen days, allowed him to mourn and to come slowly to life again. Each time, she sent him back to his universe, as protocol demanded, by way of the alien probability machine, the actualizer. Somehow he was caught in a time-loop that took him back to the day before the ill-fated expedition. He had returned to her in exactly the same way nine times. His return visits were not predictable, being apparently randomly spaced, and her current (and last) calculation was an attempt to predict when he would come next.
Each visit was the same and not the same. Surely he had had less gray hair the last time? And that healed cut on his hand—hadn't that been from his last trip, when he was trying to help her cut fruit and the knife had slipped? And hadn't his accent improved just a little bit since last time? They'd had to teach him the language each visit as though it was new, but perhaps it became just a hair's breadth easier each time?
She tried to make each experience subtly different for him. She was afraid that too drastic a change might upset whatever delicate process was at work in the time-loop. He was like a leaf caught in an eddy—push too hard and the time stream might take him over a precipice. But a little tug here, a tug there, and perhaps he'd land safely on a shore, of this universe or that one.
So far nothing had worked. His bewilderment was the same, each time he appeared on her doorstep, and so was his grief. It was only these small, insignificant things that were different. One time he wore an embroidered collar, another time a plain one. Or the color of his shirt was different.
Birha worked on her calculations, but the kalpa-vriksh gave senseless, contradictory answers.
A Rumination on Timmar's Rock
I remember when I first came to the University, I used to pass a flat-topped boulder on the way to class. There was a depression on the flat surface of the rock in the exact shape of the bottom of a water bowl. When I met Thirru, he told me that the great Timmar Rayan, who had founded the School of Wind and Water, had sat there in daily meditation for three entire cycles, placing his water bowl in the same spot every time. Over the years the depression had developed. I have always marveled that something as unyielding as rock can give way before sheer habit, or regularity, or persistence, whatever you might call it.
Practice, whether in mathematics or in love, changes things.
Ubbiri's Arrival
It was one thing to realize that the alien device in the center of the chamber was some kind of probability-altering machine. That it was the fabled actualizer hinted at in alien manuscripts, which she had always thought of as myth, was quite another thing. This knowledge she owed to Ubbiri, who was discovered lying on the floor of the chamber not three days after Birha had first opened the round door. Ubbiri was immediately incarcerated for questioning and only after several ten-days, when her language had been deciphered and encrypted into a translation device, had Birha been allowed to speak to her. They said the old woman was mad, babbling about shadow universes and tearing at her silver hair, but Birha found her remarkably sane. Ubbiri told her that she had tired of waiting for her partner, who had disappeared during a flight through a certain white-dwarf star, and when he didn't return, she had taken an old-model bristleship and dived into the heart of the star. When the ship passed through the core she defied its protestations and stepped out of it, seeking either him or death in the shadowy depths of the other reality. Instead she found herself lying on the floor of the chamber, aged beyond her years.
Over the course of four ten-days of conversation, Birha determined that the constants of nature were a hairs-breadth different where Ubbiri came from, so it was very likely another universe entirely. She realized then that the machine at the center of the room did not merely change probabilities. It was an actualizer: a probability wave interference machine, and the portal inside it led to whatever branch of the kalpa-vriksh you created by changing the parameters. But the portal only opened if you'd satisfied consistency checks and if (as far as the machine could tell) the universe was stable. Somehow the pathways to other universes intersected within the cores of stars, hence Ubbiri's surprising arrival.
Not long after, Ubbiri died. She left a note stating that there were three things she was grateful for: her white dwarf star, Rudrak, and spending her last days with Birha.
A quarter-cycle after Ubbiri's death, Rudrak came for the first time into Birha's life.
A Rumination on Thirru, or Rudrak
There is a rift valley between us, a boundary that might separate two people or two universes. I've been exploring there, marveling at the tortured geometries of its sheer walls, the pits and chasms on its floor. Through them I've sometimes seen stars. So far I've avoided falling in, but who knows? One day maybe I'll hurtle through the layer between this universe and that, and find myself a meteor, a shooting star falling into the gravity well of a far planet.
What if a meteor changed its mind about falling? Would the universe allow it? Only if the rock fell under the sway of another imperative that lifted it beyond gravity's grasp. But where, in that endless sky, would it find the rift from which it had emerged? It would have to wander, searching, until the journey became an end in itself. And then, one day when the journey had changed it beyond recognition, it would find the rift and it would stand on the lip of it, wondering: Should I return?
But I am not a rock. I am a person, slowly ripening in the sun of this world, like a pear on a tree. I am not hard, I am not protected by rocky layers.
Still, I cannot soar through your sky without burning.
Theories of Probability
What the actualizer did was change probabilities. So sometimes things that were highly improbable, like walking through a wall, or tossing five thousand coins so that heads came up every time—all those things could become much more likely.
Birha thought that in some sense people had always known about the other branches of the kalpa-vriksh. So many of humankind's fantasies about the magical and the impossible were simply imaginative leaps into different regions of the cosmic tree. But to go to the place of your imagining in the flesh . . . that wasn't possible before the actualizer's discovery. If you adjusted the parameters, the actualizer would tweak the probability amplitudes to make your fairytale universe. Or perhaps it only opened a portal to an already existing one. What's the difference? So much for you, entropy, for heat death, for death. Make it more likely that you live from fatal cancer than an ant-bite . . .
But you couldn't always predict how the amplitudes would work for complex systems like universes, and whether programming in coarse features you desired would give too much creative freedom to sub-systems, resulting in surprises beyond imagining, and not always pleasant ones. Thus a mythology had already grown around the actualizer, detailing the possible and impossible other universes and their dangers. One made-up story related how they put in the parameters, the universal physical constants and the wavefunction behavior in space and time, and there came to be an instability in the matter of that universe that made people explode like supernovas when they touched each other with love. It was a fanciful lie, but it made a great opera.
In her idle moments, Birha wondered whether there was a curtain through which she could slip to find the place that always stays still amid the shifting cosmi, like the eye of a storm. But the foghorn trees were calling in the rain, and she was nodding over a bowl of soup, like the old woman she was. She looked at the veins standing out on the backs of her hands and the thick-jointed fingers, and thought of the body, her universe, which was not a closed system at all. Was there any system that was completely closed? Not in this universe, at least, where the most insulated of systems must interact with its environment, if only very slowly. So was our universe completely disconnected from the others, or did they bleed into each other? Exchange something? Not energy in any form we recognized, perhaps, but something more subtle, like dreams. She wanted to know what connected the universes, she wanted to step back from it all and see the kalpa-vriksh in its entirety. But she was caught in it as surely as anyone else. A participant-observer who must deduce the grand structure of the cosmic tree from within it, who must work at it while being caught in it, a worm in a twig, a fly in amber, to feel the knowing, the learning, like a new intimacy, a love.
"All matter is wavelike in some sense," she told the dog. "The actualizer generates waves, and through interference changes the probability amplitudes. The tiny bubble universe so formed then resonates with an existing universe with the same properties, and a doorway opens between them."
The dog sighed, as though this was passé, which in a way it was, and wagged his tail.
A Rumination, Dozing in the Sun
One day I dreamed I was the light falling off the edge of a leaf, nice and straight, but for the lacy diffraction at the edge. At night I flew into the clouds, to the well of stars, and became a piece of the void, a bit of dark velvet stitched on to the sky. In the afternoon I am just an old woman dozing in the sun with a yellow dog sitting beside her, wondering about stars, worried about the universes. If I could be the tap of your shoe, the glance out of the corner of your eye when you see that man or this woman, if I could be the curled lip of the snarling arboril, or a mote in the eye of a dog. What would I be, if I were to be any of this?
I am myself and yet not so. I contain multitudes and am a part of something larger; I am a cell the size of a planet, swimming in the void of the night.
When They Left
After the actualizer's discovery, it became a subject of study, a thing to explore, and ultimately an industry dealing in dreams. Streams of adventurers, dreamers, and would-be suicides, people dissatisfied with their lives, went through the actualizer to find the universe that suited them better. The actualizer became a wish-fulfillment machine, opening a path to a universe just like this one, but with your personal parameters adjusted ever so slightly, the complexity matrices shifted just so. (This was actually not possible: Manipulating individual meta-world-lines was technically an unsolved problem, but tell that to the dreamers.) Among the last to go were the people who had worked with Birha, her colleagues and students. They claimed not to be deceived by the dream-merchants; their excuse was academic, but they went like so many other people into the void. The exodus left certain towns and regions thinly populated, some planets abandoned. Imagine being dissatisfied enough to want to change not towns, or planets, but entire universes! It was all Birha could do in the early days to stand there and watch the insanity until finally her dear companions were sundered from her by space, time, and whatever boundary kept one universe from another. Some people came back but they were strangers, probably from other planets in her universe. She had discovered the infinite branches of the cosmic tree, but it was not hers to claim in any way. She was the only one who wouldn't travel its endless ways.
Who knew how long her erstwhile companions would be gone, or in what shape they'd return, if they returned? She was too old to travel, and she liked the pleasures of small things, like tinkering with the tuning on the poeticas, designing and constructing new ones, and sipping the pale tea in the morning. She liked watching the yellow dog chase firelings. But also she was a prickly old woman, conservative as they come about universes and parameters, and she liked this one just fine, thank you. She liked the world on which she lived, with the seven-year day-cycle.
No, she wouldn't go. She was too obstinate and she disapproved of this meddling with the natural unfolding of things. Besides there was the elegance of death. The neatness of it, the way nothing's wasted after. It seemed as though only in this universe was death real. She liked to sit on the sunny doorstep and talk to the dog about it all. Dogs, she thought, don't need other universes; they are already perfect for the one in which they exist. She wondered if humans were refugees from some lost other branch of the Tree, which is why we were so restless. Always dissatisfied, going from planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy, branch to branch of the Cosmic Tree, and maybe rewriting our own life-histories of what-has-been. But we are not all like that; there have always been people who are like the dog, like Birha, perfectly belonging in the worlds of this universe.
A Rumination on Poeticas
A poetica consists of a series of suspended rods or wires under tension, mounted vertically on a frame. A sounding stick run by an ingenious mechanism of gears and a winding mechanism not unlike an old-fashioned clock brushes over the rods at a varying speed, forward and backward. A series of levers controls which rod or wire is struck. While this instrument can be designed to be played by an adept, it can also be fully automated by the mechanism, which is built to last. The enormous ones on public display recount the histories and great epic poems of the people, and are made of wood and stone and metal. Some kinds are designed to be played by the wind, but in these instruments, the sounds, and therefore the meanings, are always new, and ambiguous.
It took me years to learn the musical language of the aliens, and more years to learn to build miniature poeticas.
To sound these ruminations, I have had to interpolate and invent new syllables, new chords and phrases, in order to tell my story. There are no words in their language for some of what I feel and think, and similarly there are sounds in their tongue I'll never understand.
We call them aliens, but this is their world. We took it from them. We are the strangers, the interlopers, the aliens.
Birha's Loves
So Birha waits, watching the clouds gather over the university ramparts, walking every day to the abandoned laboratory, where her calculations give her both frustration and pleasure. Following the probability distribution of a single meta-world-line is tremendously difficult. Through the skeins and threads of possibility that arc across the simulator's three-dimensional result-space, she can discern several answers that fit the constraints. A problem with a multiplicity of answers as scattered as stars. Rudrak will be back in 0.3, or 0.87, or 4.6 cycles. Or in 0.0011, or 5.8, or 0.54 cycles. She is out of temper with herself and the meta-universe at large.
As she goes down the slope in the cloud-darkness that passes for evening, tripping a little bit because she wants to be in the stone house before the rain starts, it occurs to her that her irritation signifies love. For Thirru, for the man who temporarily attracted her, for the lesser loves of all the years after, for Rudrak, for all her long-gone colleagues and students, for the yellow dog who lives with her, for the village girl who brings the evening meal and cleans up in silence. For Timmar's rock, for the aliens and their gift to her, for the cloud forest, for that ever-giving Tree, the cosmic kalpa-vriksh, and especially her branch of it. And for death, who waits for her as she waits for Rudrak.
As she thinks this, her impatience at Rudrak's non-arrival dissipates the way the mist does when the sun comes out. In the stone house, she is out of breath; her chest hurts. There is an aroma of warm food and the yellow dog looks up from where he is lying and wags his tail lazily. She sits down to eat, dropping bits for the dog, sipping the pale tea. She thinks how it might be good for her to go out, when the time comes, into the deep forest and let her life be taken by a stinging death-vine, as is the custom among some of the natives. The vine brings a swift, painless death, wrapping the body in a shell of silken threads until all the juices are absorbed. The rest is released to become part of the rich humus of the forest floor. She feels like giving herself back to the world that gave her so much, even though she was not born here. It is comforting to think of dying in this way. The yellow dog will be happy enough with the village girl, and the old stone house will eventually be overcome by the forest. The wind will have to learn to play the poeticas, and then it will interpolate its own story with hers.
Only closed systems are lonely. And there is no such thing as a closed system.
Three days later, as the bell for morning tolls, there is a knock on the door. There is a man standing there. A stranger. No—it takes her a moment to recognize Rudrak, with his customary attitude of bewilderment and anxiety. The change is just enough to render him not quite familiar: more silver hairs, a shirt of a different fashion, in blue with an embroidered sash. He's taller, stoops a little, and the face is different too, in a way that she can't quite explain. In that long moment of recognition, the kalpa-vriksh speaks to her. The mistake she had made in her calculations was to assume that through all the changes between universes, through space and through time, Rudrak would be Rudrak, and Birha, Birha, and Ubbiri would always remain Ubbiri. But finally she's seen it: Identity is neither invariant nor closed. No wonder the answers had so much scatter in them! The truth, as always, is more subtle and more beautiful. Birha takes a deep breath of gratitude, feels her death only a few ten-days away.
"I'm looking for Ubbiri," says this almost-stranger, this new Rudrak. His accent is almost perfect. She ushers him in, and he looks around, at the pale sunlight falling on the long table with the poeticas, which are sounding softly. His look of anxiety fades for a moment, to be replaced by wonder. "This looks familiar," he says. "Have I been here before?"
© 2012 Vandana Singh.
Spread the word!


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Habits that are not Meant to Be
Breaking news: Men are just not careless about their things and relationships but also about their bodies. They unintentionally end up hurting their health on a daily basis; all thanks to their callous habits. There are certain habits that are typical to men and don't do their bodies any good. Men need to quit them today should they want to save their vital organs. Remember, it is never too late to quit something harmful. So men, reverse the following habits and save your organs the horror of failing at their functions. Image Courtesy: Getty
Of course you have heard that every cigarette that you smoke robs off six minutes of your life; the six minutes that you could have spent with your parents, wife, children, friends, gaming console, television and so many more dear things. A single cigarette can cause blood clots, preventing swift blood flow and causing plaque build-up in your arteries and blood vessels. Image Courtesy: Getty
Binge Drinking
You could blame binge drinking for causing so many deaths and hospitalisations all over the world. It causes liver troubles, weight gain, dizziness, and fatigue. Can you even imagine how many organs in your body you are putting at the risk of damage with every episode of binge drinking? Image Courtesy: Getty
Being a Night Owl
Whatever be your excuse, without 7-8 hours of good sleep, men damage their immune system and other bodily processes. Insufficient sleep makes the immune system weak, which in turn produces fewer germ fighters and the body is hence, exposed to contracting infections and disease-causing bugs. Image Courtesy: Getty
Wearing Headphones for Long
Do you ever consider the warning on your Smartphone that says, "Listening to music above this volume can be harmful?" Of course, you don't. Plugging in headphones continually for long hours can make you deaf- as simple as that. So, keep the volume within its scientifically imposed limits because that is the real culprit. Image Courtesy: Getty
Watching Too Much TV
Men may sit for hours glued to the idiot box watching their favourite match, thereby putting their eyes and heart at risk. Too much TV can increase your risk of heart attack, stroke and obesity. Not enough? Your immobility affects the fat and sugar levels besides straining your eyes and causing damage to the refractive lens. Image Courtesy: Getty
Living on Medicines
Men have to juggle endless meetings, sales calls, marketing conferences and wife's shopping tours,, which can give them an agonising headache, but regularly popping a pill to manage it can put their health at stake. Medicines may cause severe side–effects and can be especially harmful for the kidney. Image Courtesy: Getty
Skipping Breakfast
Just because men are just five minutes late to leave for office and the traffic can be maddening, they tend to often skip the most important meal of the day- breakfast. No wonder their digestive system is off. Skipping breakfast harms your energy reserve and negatively affects your metabolism. Image Courtesy: Getty
Eating Fast
Men are often seen taking big bites and not chewing their food properly. Moreover, they have the urgency to get the food off their plate. Every meal that you eat should be finished in no less than 20 minutes. Gulping your half-chewed food can cause acidity, bloating, and formation of excessive gas in your stomach. Image Courtesy: Getty
Driving Long Distances
Driving for many miles without taking a break gets blood pooled in the legs that can lead to clotting. Stop the car after every 100-150 miles and walk around to improve blood flow and reduce inflammation. You must do the same when you are flying long distances. Not walk around inside the plan, but get up and go to the bathroom. Image Courtesy: Getty

subset: commoncrawl


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Dynamic partnerships between GPE and philanthropic foundations leverage technical expertise and networks, catalyze advocacy and accountability, and crowd-in financing that leads to innovative, sustainable responses to education challenges in developing countries.
This collaboration supports more inclusive and informed policy dialogue, generates creative approaches to planning, implementation and monitoring of sector plans, and provides better coordinated and more efficient financing.
GPE has established links with a growing group of foundations, and plans to expand this collaboration.
GPE's engagement with philanthropic foundations is framed by GPE 2020 and the partnership's Financing and Funding Framework. In its work with foundations, GPE aims to:
- Explore innovative ways to strengthen the education sector.
- Involve foundations in national and global policy cycles and processes.
- Increase foundations' involvement in scaling up pilots in key areas, including early childhood development, learning assessments, gender-responsive education sector planning, and disaster risk financing.
- Deepen the understanding of foundations' interests, experiences, technical expertise, and advocacy within the global education aid architecture.
- Co-construct a strategic plan for equitable, inclusive and quality education for all by 2030.
How GPE works with foundations
The relationship with foundations is governed by the GPE Charter that highlights the unique and complementary role that foundations can play in advocacy, policy dialogue and education planning process in partner countries.
GPE works with the International Education Funders Group (IEFG), the foundation constituency, and individual foundations on a range of initiatives including:
Assessment for Learning (A4L). This initiative aims to build capacity for national learning assessment systems to measure and improve learning. A4L provides technical and financial assistance to support sector planning and analysis, capacity building and knowledge exchange at the regional level, and promotes more holistic measurements of learning globally. Foundations help develop diagnostic tools for benchmarking learning assessment systems to support knowledge exchange across ministries of Education and technical partners.
Foundations supporting A4L:
Better Early Learning and Development at Scale (BELDS). Through knowledge exchange with developing country partners, GPE shares and develops good practices on scaling equitable, quality early learning programs. This includes support for developing analytical tools, methodologies, data, and sharing lessons learned to boost stronger and more effective inclusion of ECCE in education sector plans and policies.
Foundations supporting BELDS:
Gender Responsive Education Sector Planning (GRESP). GPE works with governments and national stakeholders to improve gender responsiveness in their national sector strategies and policies through funding training and technical assistance for national teams; cross-border knowledge mobilization and advocacy to influence policy; collaboration with Global Fund and other organizations to address the needs of adolescent girls; and improved evaluation and reporting of gender equality in education.
Foundation supporting GRESP:
Disaster Risk Financing (DRF): GPE is exploring the applicability of risk finance to education as tools for protecting education investments from the impact of natural and man-made disasters that affect tens of millions of children every year. These disasters cause loss of classrooms, learning supplies, and a reduction in school days, which directly impact drop-out rates, and interfere with broader social benefits.
Foundations supporting DRF:
How foundations can engage with GPE
GPE welcomes discussions with foundations about mutually beneficial partnerships.
- As technical partners
- Engagement in Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX): Foundations can engage in existing pilot investment programs on ECCE, A4L, and GRESP. There is also scope to co-construct new KIX initiatives over the course of 2018-2020 on thematic areas to be determined, apply for innovation program funding, and support the development of the KIX knowledge platform.
- Engagement in advocacy and social accountability: Foundations can engage in the implementation of GPE's advocacy and social accountability mechanism, Education Out Loud, as thought-partners that provide new tools, approaches and modes to support local, national and cross national, cross sectoral advocacy.
- Risk financing in education. Foundations specializing in risk management and risk transfer instruments can help protect education investments from shocks. Foundations can provide knowledge sharing, staff secondments, and seed funding to strengthen GPE's support to its partner countries.
- As advocacy partners
- High-level advocacy campaigns: Global education financing is under pressure and coordinated campaigns that leverage foundations' social and political capital with extensive media reach can help generate additional education financing and well as assist national governments to prioritize education financing.
- Thematic advocacy at national level: Foundations with sub-sectoral and thematic expertise can work with national stakeholders to generate data and information that drives policy and programing responses to priority areas.
- As country partners
- Philanthropy at the national level: Engaging directly in national policy cycles through local education groups brings contextual knowledge, program expertise and enhances financing efficiency. Philanthropy-government partnerships can be formed around collecting, using and analyzing non-traditional data, leading to more informed policy dialogue and cohesive and comprehensive monitoring and evaluation frameworks. Further, foundations often have strong links to local communities and government authorities. There exists momentum therefore to develop greater ties with individual provinces or districts within countries.
- As financiers
- GPE Fund: Foundations can provide unrestricted financing to GPE's pooled fund in support of its operational model in partner countries.
- GPE Multiplier: Foundations can leverage GPE financing by co-financing national education sector plans.
- Knowledge Innovation Exchange (KIX) and Education Out Loud: GPE is seeking targeted financial support of US$30 million and technical collaboration for KIX. Another US$10 million are sought to support civil society actors to take on social accountability programs and advocacy in partner countries.


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Within the American Library Association, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) is the division whose mission is "to advocate excellence, facilitate change, and develop leaders in the school library media field."
AASL works to ensure that all members of the school library media field collaborate to:
- provide leadership in the total education program
- participate as active partners in the teaching/learning process
- connect learners with ideas and information, and
- prepare students for life-long learning, informed decision-making, a love of reading, and the use of information technologies.
General Readings and Resources
American Association of School Librarians. Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs. Chicago, Ill: American Association of School Librarians, 2009.
Coatney, Sharon. The Many Faces of School Library Leadership. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.
Downs, Elizabeth. The School Library: Media Specialist's Policy & Procedure Writer. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2010.
Fontichiaro, Kristin. 21st-Century Learning in School Libraries. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2009.
Hand, Dorcas. Independent School Libraries: Perspectives on Excellence. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.
Harvey, Carl A. The 21st Century Elementary Library Media Program. Santa Barbara, Calif: Linworth Pub, 2010.
Lanning, Scott, and John Bryner. Essential Reference Services for Today's School Media Specialists. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.
MacDonell, Colleen. Essential Documents for School Libraries. Santa Barbara, Calif: Linworth, 2010.
Nebraska Educational Media Association. Guide for Developing and Evaluating School Library Programs. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.
Scheeren, William O. Technology for the School Librarian: Theory and Practice. Santa Barbara, Calif: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.
Small, Ruth V. Teaching for Inquiry: Engaging the Learner Within. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2012.
Stephens, Claire Gatrell and Patricia Franklin. Library 101: A Handbook for the School Library Media Specialist. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007.
Blog posts
Ever Wonder What a School Librarian Does?, by Deven Black, on "Education on the Plate," Feb. 3, 2012.
"Elegy for a Thousand Stolen Books", by Julie Goldberg on "A Perfect Whole," Jan. 1, 2012.


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Cyclopean sīkləpē´ən [key], name often applied to a primitive method of prehistoric masonry construction, found throughout Greece, Italy, and the Middle East. The term is derived from Cyclopes, the mythological beings who were supposed to have built walls in this manner. The Cyclopean technique involves the use of huge, irregular boulders, carefully fitted together without the use of mortar, thereby creating a massive wall with an uneven face. These walls were characteristic of Mycenaean civilization. Remaining examples are found at Knossos, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens. There are many Cyclopean walls in Etruscan and Anatolian architecture. Somewhat similar examples are seen in China, Japan, and Peru.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Archaeology: General


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- For the latest ideas, and to make comments, please see species-brainstorming.
People use the vernacular AND taxonomic names of species in everyday speech and writing - just read or watch any populist gardening magazine or television programme.
Consider this list: "Blackbird", "poodle", "T Rex", "potato", "French Marigold", "Wisteria", "E. Coli", "HIV", "Rubella" and "human being".
"T Rex" is "Tyrannosaurus rex"; "E. Coli" is "Escherichia coli"; "HIV" is "Human immunodeficiency virus" and "Rubella" is "Rubella virus". All are the taxonomic (or scientific) names of unique species.
"Wisteria" is a taxonomic genus.
"Blackbird"; "poodle"; "potato"; "French Marigold" and "human being" (arguments about Neanderthals not withstanding) are vernacular (or common) names, but still refer to individual species.
Imagine viewing a web page with a reference to a species - and being able to use an add-on to you browser to be taken directly to information about that species, on, say, Wikipedia, or Wikispecies, or Google Images, or another site, such as in an academic database, of your choosing.
Your software would automatically know to search site A if the scientific name referred to a moth, site B for a bird, and site C for a plant - and you could set your preferences as to which sites those were to be, and in which order two or more were to be searched (e.g. for moths, try UK Moths first, if not found try The Global Lepidoptera Names Index).
Or supposing someone writes a long, chronologically-ordered web page about all the birds, insects, mammals and plants they saw on a wildlife safari, with lots of prose description about the paces where they saw them and the people they were with, but you want to extract a list of species, sorted into alphabetical order within taxonomic class (birds first, then insects then...) or in taxonomic order.
Those are just two of the things a "species" microformat might do for you.
Existing taxonomies
The proposal respects all existing biological taxonomies, and is not intended to change or supplant any of them - it is intended merely to provide webmasters (from personal hobby sites to major academic databases; from news outlets to retail organisations) with a method of either:
- marking-up a taxonomical name (or taxon-common name pair) in such a way that its components can be recognised by computers or
- marking up a common name, so as to associate with it a taxonomical name, in such a way that the latter's components can be recognised by computers.
Embedding within other microformats
The proposed plant microformat (with care regime, supplier, etc.), hListing draft or hReview 0.4 (in progress) (and possibly others) could contain a scientific name microformat, in the same way that an hCalendar 1.0 can contain an hCard 1.0.
See also: species-brainstorming
- Wikipedia: Scientific classification
- http://www.iczn.org/ International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature
- International Code of Botanical Nomenclature
- RHS Plant Finder: The naming of plants
- International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants
- Taxonomic Databases Working Group
- Hortax - The Names of Garden Plants
- www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/iapt/nomenclature/code/SaintLouis/0000St.Luistitle.htm
- WikiSpecies
- Wiktionary: Taxonomy
- Andy Mabbett (proponent)
- Roger Hyam (interested party?)
See also
Here's some work-in-progress:


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SaaS leader joins SAP® PartnerEdge®, releases Zilliant Price Manager on SAP App Center, and opens new European office
AUSTIN, Texas, June 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Zilliant, an industry leader in AI-driven pricing and sales growth solutions, today announced that it is joining the SAP® PartnerEdge® program and releasing Zilliant Price Manager integration with SAP Cloud Platform. Additionally, Zilliant has strategically expanded by opening its third European office co-located at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany.
Zilliant's Price Manager application is now available to explore and purchase on the SAP App Center, bringing immediate benefit to businesses running SAP solutions by consolidating core pricing tasks, eliminating manual processes and enabling pricing teams to identify and prevent profit leakage across the business. The new release rounds out Zilliant's price optimization and management SaaS offering to businesses that use SAP solutions, many of whom already benefit from Zilliant's industry-leading AI-driven pricing optimization and sales growth solutions. Supporting the SAP Cloud Platform also allows businesses with SAP on-premises solutions to leverage the latest technological innovations and cloud solutions from SAP and Zilliant.
The SAP PartnerEdge program gives Zilliant access to leading intelligent technologies and platforms from SAP to rapidly design, develop and bring to market new integrated applications. In addition, Zilliant will now deepen its existing cloud-based offerings with SAP Cloud for Customer, SAP® C/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA®.
"Zilliant is honored to expand our relationship with SAP through this technology and business partnership," said Greg Peters, Zilliant CEO. "As leading B2B companies turn to SAP to help them digitally transform and create the Intelligent Enterprise, Zilliant's AI-driven pricing and sales growth solutions enable our mutual customers to maximize the immediate value of every transaction and lifetime value of every customer. Customers that have deployed Zilliant as a part of their digital transformation have achieved return on investment within six months of deployment, funded additional initiatives, and accelerated their transformation initiatives."
Zilliant's new office, co-located on the SAP world headquarters campus in Walldorf, Germany, allows Zilliant to accelerate its growth within the region in collaboration with SAP. With offices now in London, Paris, and Walldorf, customers across Europe benefit from Zilliant's industry-leading strengths including best customer satisfaction, highest value delivered, and fastest time-to-value, per the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide B2B-Focused Price Optimization Applications 2018 Vendor Assessment.
A world leader in end-to-end pricing solutions for B2B, Zilliant solves pricing and sales challenges for enterprise customers operating in complex B2B product and sales environments. Included in Zilliant's comprehensive set of AI-based SaaS pricing solutions are the following:
- Zilliant Price Manager helps pricing teams establish, manage and automate the pricing process, adjust prices quickly and accurately, and visualize the financial impact of price changes.
- Zilliant Price IQ is a market-leading AI-powered price optimization solution, delivering predictive and proactive guidance to pricing, sales and management.
- Zilliant Deal Manager automates the 'Deal Desk' and creates collaboration between pricing and sales to ensure the best prices on every deal.
- Zilliant Sales IQ provides predictive analytics and sales guidance that identifies cross-sell, upsell and customer retention strategies for every customer account.
- Zilliant Sales Planner delivers AI-derived sales analytics and insights that help your sales teams spot customer specific opportunities, take actions that increase sales wins with existing customers, and provides closed-loop collaboration tracking to enable effective sales performance.
- Zilliant IQ Anywhere is an API framework that allows Zilliant's insights to be delivered across every engagement with the customer, ensuring that every selling interaction, regardless of channel, is optimized.
For more information please visit zilliant.com or contact email@example.com.
About Zilliant:
Zilliant offers flexible end-to-end pricing and sales growth solutions, from price list management to advanced, AI-driven pricing and sales guidance to maximize the immediate value of every transaction, and the lifetime value of every customer. Powered by the most advanced technologies, Zilliant's SaaS solutions enable B2B companies to transform data into actionable intelligence, empowering them to achieve revenue and profitability goals.
With over 15,000 users in 90 countries receiving pricing and sales insights across 40 vertical B2B industries, Zilliant's platform is the most advanced and broadly deployed use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics in B2B enterprise markets. Learn more at www.zilliant.com or follow @Zilliant.
SAP, SAP S4HANA and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Please see http://www.sap.com/


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Immigration hurts unemployed Americans
Now that the shutdown circus in Washington is over, the president wants to address our immigration situation. The Senate passed S744, which not only would increase legal immigration threefold but also would reward illegal immigrants with work visas. The House Republicans want to work on a smaller more manageable piecemeal approach, which would be a better way to handle this.
The CEOs of Facebook, Netflix, Groupon and Yahoo are lobbying for reform and stand to make billions off of an increase in immigration, but what about Americans who are unable to find work? Should we allow big money to decide their bank accounts are more important than the constituents who the politicians are supposed to represent? Sen. Joe Donnelly was against amnesty when he campaigned but voted for S744. Reps. Susan Brooks, Luke Messer, Andre Carson and Todd Young all expressed support for legalizing most of the illegal aliens in our country. But what about their unemployed constituents? It's almost like we don't matter to these politicians.
Greg Serbon
State Director
Indiana Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforcement


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So, we made it – a Rakudo Star release based on the "nom" development branch has landed. It's based on the compiler release moritz++ cut earlier this week, and pmichaud++, masak++ and myself have been involved in getting the Star-specific build and installation scripts in shape.
Getting to this release has been a lot of work; in many sense this is a revolution in Rakudo's development rather than a small evolutionary step over what we had before. It's taken a while (indeed, longer than I'd first hoped) and has been a lot of work – but it was worth it. Not just because of the many improvements that are in this release, but because of the enormous future potential that we now have.
Here's some of the things I'm happiest about in the release.
- The performance improvements in many areas. Yes, we've plenty of work to do here – but this is a solid step forward for a wide range of scripts, and in some cases an order of magnitude improvement.
- That 6model – something I started designing a year and a half ago – has not only cleanly supported all of the things we needed to do in Rakudo, but also opened up so many other doors. For example, the new NativeCall module uses its representation polymorphism support to great effect.
- Protoregexes doing real NFA-driven Longest Token Matching rather than the cheating version we had before that only operated on literals.
- The optimizer, along with the various extra compile time error reporting it gives. This will be an important future area for Rakudo.
- Initial native type support, and bigint semantics for the Int type.
- The POD6 support, thanks to tadzik++'s Google Summer of Code grant in summer.
So, what's next? Currently I'm working hard on getting true bounded serialization support in place. This should further improve BEGIN time support (including constructs that depend on BEGIN time), greatly cut down resource consumption during CORE.setting compilation (both time and memory) and give us faster startup. It's hard to guess at figures for the improvement, but I'm expecting it to be a noticeable improvement in all of these areas. I'm aiming at getting this landed for the next Rakudo compiler release (which I expect us to do a Star release based on too), though largely it depends on whether I can get it working and stable enough in time; while some parts are a simple matter or programming, other parts are tricky.
That aside, we've already got various other new features in the pipeline; even since last weekend's compiler release, there are multiple new regex-related things in place, moritz++ has continued with his typed exceptions work, we're catching a couple more errors at compile time rather than letting them slip through until runtime, and there's various other miscellaneous bug fixes. Also, masak++ is working on macros in a branch, and I'm optimistic that we'll have some initial macro support in place by the next release also. Busy times! :-)


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"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
When I was first asked the question, I apparently thought "a Queen" was something you could apply for and I'd be a nurse on the side. Then I moved on to a teacher or a "beautician." That term gives a hint as to my age. But if you asked me today, I'd say I'm still figuring it out. My passions change, limitations come and go. I'm learning as I go.
Reflecting on a recent media trip to three Hill Country wineries, it seemed that question, in both macro and micro sense, permeated the day.
What is Texas wine? Where is it going? What does it want to be when it grows up?
We visited Fall Creek Vineyards, Perissos Vineyards, and Wedding Oak Winery for an "en primeur" event. We tasted the 2017 vintage in barrel. The tradition is one in which members of the wine trade are able to taste and purchase wine in barrel. The buyers are able to hedge their bets on the quality of the vintage and get in on the game early. It requires one to be able to see the wine's potential, to guess what it will become.
A major topic of conversation was the state of Texas Wine. Dispelling myths, preconceived ideas about what Texas wine is and isn't. We talked about the ingenuity and passion poring into the industry, drawing in new players from around the country. We talked about where it is going, what is thriving and surprising.
For pioneers of the Texas wine industry, Ed and Susan Auler, their dream of growing wine in Texas may have sounded to others a little like my dream of becoming a queen. It required vision, forethought, experience. But through years of tenacity and dedication, by eliciting guidance from others and listening to the land, they've turned that dream into a reality.
While Fall Creek is a senior member of the Texas winemaking world, they continue to innovate, to experiment, to grow. We tasted with the Aulers, Director of Winemaking Sergio Cuadra and Winemaker Phil Price. There were seven wines in all, some classics, others were new and surprising additions to the line up. I think the highlight for many was the sparkling Lenoir. Also known as Black Spanish, it is a red-fleshed grape that is popular in Texas. But I've yet to see it done as a sparkling wine. It was fantastic. Also, keep an eye out for the Petit Verdot. They haven't solidified plans for it but look for it whether on its own or blended. I think it would make an amazing fortified wine.
Talk to Seth Martin of Perissos and he will tell you how much his wines have changed since he began. With four recent Best of Class and Double Gold awards, he's come a long way from what he would call "undrinkable" when he began. His goal is to create wines that reflect what the grapes foretold on the vine. Through trial and error, success and stumbles, Seth Martin has learned what does best on his estate. He is committed to producing 100% Texas wines, made from the "ground up." He has incorporated the most sustainable practices he can, going beyond "organic" to that which is best for the land, the grapes, and all living things on his property. His desire is to leave the land better than when he began.
At Perissos we tasted 2017s side-by-side with the 2015s, a fantastic way to compare. We began with Viognier, tasted a white blend and a rosé then moved on to reds. Tempranillo, Aglianico, and Petite Sirah. Some wines were similar, but softened, refined by time in barrel. Others I found markedly different. Martin used the same barrel treatment on each, leading me to theorize that the more tannins, the more acid in the grape, the more it was able to absorb, soften, and change in barrel.
Our last stop was at Wedding Oak Winery in San Saba. Winemaker and Viticulturist Penny Adams has been in the vineyards nearly as long as the Aulers have been producing wine. She's consulted with all the big names and mentored those just starting out. When asked where she sees Texas wine going, she thinks it's too early to know. We've figured out some grapes that work really well, others that require more work. She continues to experiment with clones, hybrids, but has seen how well Rhone and Mediterranean varieties thrive.
Together with founder Mike McHenry and new Winemaker Seth Urbanek, Adams walked us through several wines from 2016 and 2017. Viognier, Tioja, Tempranillo, Montepulciano, and Petit Verdot. Reared in Texas, Urbanek comes to us from Sheldrake Point in the Finger Lakes.
Reflecting, I was reminded of a post I wrote a few years ago as my youngest entered school. I was struggling with potential changes, my new role, a changing identity. I had just finished a private tasting with the winemaker at Sheldrake Point. He spoke about wild fermentation of an ice wine, how he allowed it to take its own path and was rewarded with the results.
As the Texas Wine Industry continues to grow, to adjust, it is developing its own identity. The Fall Creek site states, "We started with the dirt and the vines took root!" And so it often is. An idea is planted, vision takes root. With time, experience, education, the plan is refined. We can only control so much, we let nature take its own path.
An identity, on the other hand, is something that we develop over a lifetime. We nurture and focus on certain areas. Nature plays its role, beliefs and priorities change. We stumble, learn and dust ourselves off, hopefully growing through the process, and we hope.
On the Perissos site, we are given the story of its name. "Perissos" is Greek, found in the Bible (Eph 3:20). It refers to being blessed abundantly, beyond what is hoped for, imagined, or expected. A fitting name for this time, this place, for this industry as it develops its identity. An important ideal as we watch it become what it wants to be as it grows.
Many thanks to Matt McGinnis of Pen & Tell Us for being the consummate host, to each of the wineries who shared a piece of your world, to all the participants who made the day one to remember.


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Q: What's the quick and dirty version of Amazon's announcement today?
A: Amazon has unveiled a pair of new e-ink readers and three new tablets -- but each one is available in several versions. Here's a breakdown, with pricing and availability.
Kindle e-reader: A new bare-bones e-ink reader. Slight upgrade from last year's version (improved display, still no touch screen), and a tad cheaper: $69 (ad-supported), $89 without ads. Available now. Kindle Paperwhite: Amazon's first self-illuminating e-ink reader, and now its only touch-screen model. It's $119 with Wi-Fi, $179 for 3G (both ad-supported; add $20 for ad-free versions). Ships October 1. Kindle Fire: Amazon's new baseline tablet. For just $159, you get a faster CPU and longer battery life than the older model. Ships September 14.
- Kindle Fire HD (7-inch): The cheapest "new" tablet in Amazon's lineup. It's $199 for 16GB, $249 for 32GB. Fully featured tablet with Amazon's customized version of Android, 1,280x800-pixel display, front-facing camera, dual-band MIMO Wi-Fi, ships September 14.
Kindle Fire HD (8.9-inch): Same as above with bigger, more-high-res screen (1,920x1,200 pixels). The 16GB model costs $299, 32GB is $369. Ships November 20. Kindle Fire HD (8.9-inch, 4G LTE wireless): The same big dog as above, but with a built-in LTE connection (on AT&T). It's $499 for 32GB, $599 for 64GB, plus $50 a year for 250MB of data a month. Ships November 20.
All of the above products are available for preorder today from Amazon.com.
Q: OK, so what are the big new features in the Paperwhite?
A: The Paperwhite replaces Amazon's previous flagship e-reader, the
Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite ups the e-reader ante (pictures)See all photos
Q: How does the Paperwhite compare with other e-readers?
A: Pretty well. The $119 Paperwhite costs less than Barnes & Noble's recent
It's harder to compare the Paperwhite with the recently announced
Q: How about the Kindle Fire HD?
A: The Kindle Fire HD is a feature-rich tablet available in two screen sizes, 7 and 8.9 inches, and with multiple storage and data plan configurations. The 8.9-inch model has a 1,900x1,200-pixel-resolution screen, the 7-inch version is 1,280x720 pixels. Amazon says the Fire HD screen reflects 25 percent less glare (presumably compared with the original Fire tablet's screen). Amazon has also given the Fire HD Tablet stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus support, as well as dual-band MIMO Wi-Fi, a front-facing camera, and a Bluetooth receiver, all of which are improvements to the hardware in the standard Kindle Fire.
For storage, Amazon will offer 16GB and 32GB options for the 7-inch model, and 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB options for the 8.9-inch model, at varying price points. The highest-end model is the $599 64GB version, which also has a $50-a-year 4G LTE data plan. That plan only gets you 250MB of data per month, though, which you can wipe out with one decently sized photo album download. A $499 version of the 8.9-inch unit has the same data plan, but only 32GB of storage.
Amazon's bigger, better Kindle Fire HDs (pictures)See all photos
On the software side, Amazon has given the Fire HD an assortment of new capabilities. Whispersync for Voice lets you pause an audiobook and pick up where you left off in the e-book version. Whispersync for Games lets you transport your in-game progress when you pick it up on a different Amazon device. X-Ray for Movies allows you to pause a movie and look up the actor's onscreen, via a partnership with IMDb. You now also get multi-user support, and Kindle Freetime gives you a way to regulate how much time a particular user, like your kids, can use certain kinds of applications on the device.
Q: Does the Kindle Fire HD compare well with its competition?
A: It depends on the price point. Among the other 7-inch tablets, the Google Nexus 7,
On the 8.9-inch front, the baseline 16GB Kindle Fire HD doesn't have a lot of competition. The Samsung Galaxy Tab from 2010 had an
Once you start expanding the memory on the 8.9-inch Fire HD and driving the price up, you then might start to weigh storage space vs. screen size in terms of pure hardware comparisons. The 32GB Kindle Fire HD costs $369. If the 10-inch iPad 2 still seems out-of-date, the more recent
Q: Can I still buy the older Kindle products?
A: For the most part, no. At least not new from Amazon. The Kindle Touch is no longer available, and the older Kindle and Fire tablet have both been replaced by the updated products. The two legacy products still available are the
Q: When will CNET have these new e-readers and tablets reviewed?
A: As soon as we get them in for real, long-term testing. (In the meantime, click though the links above for our first impressions.) Based on the release dates Amazon has provided, look for reviews of the baseline Kindle, the Kindle Fire, and the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD as soon as mid-September. That will be followed by the Paperwhite (by October 1) and then, finally, the 8.9-inch Fire HDs in November.
Have more questions? Let us know in the comments.


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Benzodiazepines are overprescribed and abused; are increasingly responsible for emergency room visits; and are contraindicated for patients with chronic pain.
Quick . . . name a class of prescription medications that, by most evidence, appears to be overprescribed and abused and the use of which has resulted in an increasing number of emergency department visits.
If you said "opioids," you would be right, and probably that would be the answer most health care professionals would give. However, there is another response that would be given much less frequently but would be equally true: benzodiazepines.
I wish I could say that this inattention to benzodiazepines is something new, but my personal experience indicates that it is not. Twenty years ago, I coauthored what was one of the first papers on a study that examined the use of benzodiazepines by patients with chronic pain and found that they were overprescribed.1 With rare exception since that time, the lectures I have attended on overprescription of medications have usually focused mostly on opioids. When I raise the question of overprescription of benzodiazepines, the speakers either respond that they are unaware of any problem involving benzodiazepines or, while acknowledging that there is, offer the odd response that the audience is interested in opioids rather than benzodiazepines.
Last year, the CDC reported that from 2004 to 2008 there was a 111% increase (from 144,600 to 305,900) in the estimated number of emergency department visits involving nonmedical use of opioid analgesics.2 During the same period, there was an 89% increase (from 143,500 to 271,700) in the number of such visits for benzodiazpines. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) reported that in 2009 approximately 25% of unintentional drug overdose deaths involved opioid analgesics other than methadone, while 33% involved a benzodiazepine.3
Of course, patients who use prescription drugs for nonmedical purposes may be purchasing drugs illicitly. It is thus difficult to determine how many of the overdoses reported by either the CDC or the NYC DOHMH were for legally prescribed drugs. However, findings from recent studies that looked at opioid prescriptions at the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system indicate that benzodiazepines continue to be prescribed frequently for patients with chronic pain.
Morasco and colleagues4 found that 32% of patients who took high doses of opioid analgesics for chronic noncancer pain and 25% of those who took a traditional dose of opioids for the pain were also taking a benzodiazepine. In contrast, only 10% of patients who were not taking an opioid were given a prescription for a benzodiazepine.
Krebs and colleagues5 looked at patients who received methadone or a long-acting form of morphine for chronic pain. Their findings show that 26% of the patients had also received a prescription for at least a 28-day supply of a benzodiazepine at the same time as they were taking the opioid.
Concerns about benzodiazepines for chronic pain
The use of benzodiazepines by patients with chronic pain has generally been contraindicated from as far back as 1990. Since that time, the evidence has been strengthened. Most notably, research findings suggest that benzodiazepines reduce the analgesic effects of opioids and that their long-term use can result in hyperalgesia, which can exacerbate pain by lowering the pain threshhold.6
In addition, benzodiazepines are known to be addictive. In fact, it is often harder to discontinue benzodiazepines than opioids. Combining benzodiazepines with opioids can increase the risk of death, which makes the frequent co-prescription of these drugs especially worrisome
Although benzodiazepines can be effective for the treatment of anxiety for short periods, they are, with rare exceptions, not generally indicated for the treatment of chronic anxiety in the absence of a diagnosable anxiety disorder. However, based on my experience, it is rare for patients with chronic pain who are given benzodiazepines to have a true comorbid anxiety disorder. Furthermore, many of those who have anxiety also have associated depression, which may be exacerbated by benzodiazepines. Obviously, treatment with an antidepressant would be a far better choice for these patients-the serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors can provide marked analgesia in addition to their antidepressant and anxiolytic benefits. For management of brief periods of anxiety, buspirone may be a better choice.
Benzodiazepines have been and continue to be frequently used for the treatment of insomnia. In fact, in our study, this was found to be the most common reason why patients were taking benzodiazepines.1 The results from studies of patients with chronic pain who have difficulty in sleeping show that the stages of sleep most likely to be problematic are those that are disrupted by benzodiazepines. It is interesting to note that the patients in our study found that benzodiazepines provided little benefit for improving sleep. With the availability of the nonbenzodiazepine sedative hypnotics, including zolpidem, zaleplon, and eszopiclone, there is little reason for benzodiazepines to be used to aid sleep.
Benzodiazepines often have also been used as muscle relaxants, but there is limited evidence for this. Whether benzodiazepines provide much direct muscle relaxation or whether the benefits are primarily related to their sedating effects is open to question. There are better choices if a muscle relaxant is indicated, such as cyclobenzaprine and tizanidine, which do not carry the potential problems associated with benzodiazepines.
The overuse of benzodiazepines may at last be attracting the attention it deserves. A New York Times article this summer7 reported that a community mental health center in Louisville, an area in which for several years there has been marked concern about prescription opioid misuse, had determined that benzodiazepines were being misused and that it decided to stop prescribing alprazolam. According to the article, hydrocodone, oxycodone, and alprazolam are 3 of the most commonly prescribed controlled substances in Kentucky.7 Whether the banning of a single drug is the best way to go is certainly open to debate, but the need for more focus on the prescription of benzodiazepines, especially for patients with chronic pain, is not.
1. King SA, Strain JJ. Benzodiazepine use by chronic pain patients. Clin J Pain. 1990;6:143-147.
2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Emergency department visits involving nonmedical use of selected prescription drugs-United States, 2004-2008. MMWR. 2010;59:705-709.
3. New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Preventing misuse of prescription opioid drugs. City Health Inf. 2011;30:23-30.
4. Morasco BJ, Duckart JP, Carr TP, et al. Clinical characteristics of veterans prescribed high doses of opioid medications for chronic non-cancer pain. Pain. 2010;151:625-632.
5. Krebs EE, Becker WC, Zerzan J, et al. Comparative mortality among Department of Veterans Affairs patients prescribed methadone or long-acting morphine for chronic pain. Pain. 2011;152:1789-1795.
6. Gear RW, Miaskowski C, Heller PH, et al. Benzodiazepine mediated antagonism of opioid analgesia. Pain. 1997;71:25-29.
7. Goodnough A. Abuse of Xanax leads a clinic to halt supply. New York Times. September 14, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/in-louisville-a-centers-doctors-cut-off-xanax-prescriptions.html. Accessed July 15, 2012.


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Saturday, March 4, 2017
Diu fort, was our first stop on the rickshaw tour of Diu. To read about our bus journey to Diu, click here.
|Diu Fort in Diu (Union Territory of India)
The fort walls are short in height. There is open space near the fort premises. How I love to sit there sipping on some ice cold beer in the hot weather. In its glory days ships might be halting here, hence it appeared like a port. There are a couple of cannons here. No inscription on them.
|Fathima and Me at Diu fort in Diu (Union Territory in India)
The fortress of Panikota is clearly visible from here. The fortress is not accessible to public. Not sure as to why entry to it is denied. By the look of it, it was beautifully constructed structure in the middle of the waters. Though it was far and I possessed just a mobile phone, couldn't get clearer photos of it.
|History of Diu fort in Diu (Union Territory in India)
Other beautiful sea forts I have visited are Murud Janjira near Alibag and Sindhudurg in Malvan, Vijaydurg near Devgad.
Atop the entrance of the fort, are places two symbols, which appear to me like lions, not sure what they symbolize. The door is made of wood, painted black with a small chor darwazain it. It was made for people to pass through. Most forts have a chor darwaza. I guess the big door is only opened when there is a occasion.
There is a jail in the fort premises, which is still in service, entry in it restricted.
Near the jail are places many cannon balls. The cannon balls are placed around a soldier like structure. They are also places around a Cross and a small bell next to the cross. The cannon balls reminded me of my trip to Vijaydurg near Devgad in Maharashtra. They had plenty of cannon balls for display.
Please refer to the photo for the history of the Diu fort.
The fort visiting hours are from 8 AM to 6 PM, everyday. There is no entry fee.
There are a couple of ruined structures within the fort premises.
We decided to walk on the walls of the fort to get a better view of what is inside and outside.
Some of the cannons on the fort are beautiful. They reported a wonderful design.They even had a royal emblem on them.
Fort of Daulatabad, Naldurg and Solapur in Maharashtra, Moti Daman in Daman and Reis Magos fort in Goa, have beautiful cannons in their premises.
Entry to certain structures on the fort premises is restricted.
I saw a different type of cannons sitting within one of the structures in the fort. These destructive toys looked like the ones which were used in the world wars. Not sure as to how they landed in the fort premises.
There is a church in the fort premises. It is currently under lock and key. Not sure if it is still in service.
There are a couple of under ground dungeons in the fort premises. Entry to them is currently restricted. I have seen dungeons even at Srirangapatna near Mysore in Karnataka . And in Goa.
The ruins of St. Tiago Bastion and Chapel is beautiful. They offer a wonderful view of the sea. They are airy too.
There is a light house. Not sure if it is still in service. As it was closed when reached it. There are a couple of cannons here. These cannons are beautiful. This the the highest point on the fort. The view from here is amazing.
There are a lot of unnamed structures on the fort premises, but they are completely in ruins. How I wish, I had a time machine, I could travel back in time to marvel the beauty of this fort.
There is food and water available outside the fort premises.
We then headed to St. Paul's church.


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|Rocío Joo, Matthew E. Boone, Michael Sumner and Mathieu Basille
|rocio.joo at ufl.edu
This CRAN Task View (CTV) contains a list of packages useful for the processing and analysis of tracking data. Besides the maintainers, the following people contributed to the creation of this task view: Achim Zeileis, Edzer Pebesma.
Movement of an object (both living organisms and inanimate objects) is defined as a change in its geographic location in time, so movement data can be defined by a space and a time component. Tracking data are composed by at least 2-dimensional spatial coordinates (x,y) and a time index (t), and can be seen as the geometric representation (the trajectory) of an object's path. The packages listed here, henceforth called tracking packages , are those explicitly developed to either create, transform or analyze tracking data (i.e. (x,y,t)), allowing a full workflow from raw data from tracking devices to final analytical outcome. For instance, a package that would use accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer data to reconstruct an objects's trajectory—most likely an animal's trajectory—via dead-reckoning, thus transforming those data into an (x,y,t) format, would fit into the definition. However, a package analyzing accelerometry series to detect changes in behavior would not fit. See more on this in Joo et al. (2019) . Regarding (x,y), some packages may assume 2-D Euclidean (Cartesian) coordinates, and others may assume geographic (longitude/latitude) coordinates. We encourage the users to verify how coordinates are processed in the packages, as the consequences can be important in terms of spatial attributes (e.g. distance, speed and angles).
The packages included here are mainly tracking packages though we include a subsection of other movement-related packages. The packages are mainly from CRAN and a few of them are from other repositories. The ones that are not from CRAN were only included if they passed the check test ( R CMD check; more details here ). Core packages are defined as the group of tracking packages with the highest number of mentions ( Depends, Imports, Suggests) from other tracking packages; the cutpoint is estimated using the maxstat_test function in the coin package. At the beginning and middle of each calendar year, we will update the CTV, making an assessment on the non-CRAN packages here and remove the non-CRAN packages that do not pass the check test. Bioconductor packages are automatically accepted here as they are required to pass by a similar scrutiny than CRAN packages. We are also open to include more packages every time we update the CTV. We welcome and encourage contributions to add packages at any time. You can contact the maintainers by opening an issue on the GitHub repository .
Besides these packages, many other packages contain functions for data processing and analysis that could eventually be used for tracking data or second/third degree variables obtained from tracking data; we encourage users to check other CRAN Task Views like SpatioTemporal, Spatial and TimeSeries.
This CTV was inspired on the review of tracking packages by Joo et al. (2019) , as an attempt to continuously update the list of packages already described in the review. Therefore, the CTV takes a similar structure as the review.
Pre-processing is required when raw data are not in a tracking data format. The methods used for pre-processing depend heavily on the type of biologging device used. Among the tracking packages, some of them are focused on GLS (global location sensor), others on radio telemetry, and others use accelerometry and magnetometry data.
Post-processing of tracking data comprises data cleaning (e.g. identification of outliers or errors), compressing (i.e. reducing data resolution which is sometimes called resampling) and computation of metrics based on tracking data, which are useful for posterior analyses.
The packages mainly developed for visualization purposes, and more specifically, animation of tracks, are anipaths and moveVis.
amt and trajr compute summary metrics of tracks, such as total distance covered, straightness index and sinuosity. trackeR was created to analyze running, cycling and swimming data from GPS-tracking devices for humans. trackeR computes metrics summarizing movement effort during each track (or workout effort per session).
Whether it is for the purposes of correcting for sampling errors, or obtaining finer data resolutions or regular time steps, path reconstruction is a common goal in movement analysis. Packages available for path reconstruction are argosTrack, BayesianAnimalTracker, bsam, crawl, ctmcmove, ctmm, foieGras and TrackReconstruction.
Another common goal in movement ecology is to get a proxy of the individual's behavior through the observed movement patterns, based on either the locations themselves or second/third order variables such as distance, speed or turning angles. Covariates, mainly related to the environment, are frequently used for behavioral pattern identification.
We classify the methods in this section as: 1) non-sequential classification or clustering techniques, 2) segmentation methods and 3) hidden Markov models.
Multiple packages implement functions to help answer questions related to where individuals spend their time and what role environmental conditions play in movement or space-use decisions, which are typically split into two categories: home range calculation and habitat selection.
The tracking packages implement trajectory simulation are mainly based on Hidden Markov models, correlated random walks, Brownian motions, Lévy walks or Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes: adehabitatLT, moveHMM, momentuHMM, bsam, crawl, argosTrack, ctmm, smam, SiMRiv and trajr.


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On Sunday, September 1st, get a jump start on #Oktoberfest. Put on your boots, your birks, and bandanas, and join us on the lawn from 2-6 pm for this section of the fun and fabulous Valley Beer Trail.
Live music, "outdoors" food such as barbecue, bratwurst, beans, and much more, and barrels and barrels and buckets and buckets of beer from our local breweries –BBC, People's, Lefty's, Element – the new seasonals and classic favorites.
$25 for tickets bought in advance
$28 for tickets on the day
$3/8oz beers
Call 413-774-5587 for will-call tickets, or pick up ahead from the inn's front desk
- Keepsake Champney's pilsner glass for the first 100 on the day!
- A chance to win one of two Mug Club memberships – a $50 basic value before membership benefits
Listen to 93.9 The River out of Northampton, MA for the chance to win tickets to the event, and on the Valley Beer Trail day you might win tickets to the Stowe Oktoberfest, or some other similarly awesome beer event, courtesy of The Riverlution!


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This weekend, a group of acclaimed food and beverage personalities will flock to Austin for the third annual Austin Food & Wine Festival, including pastry chef Jodi Elliott of the soon-to-open Bribery bakery in Austin. Below, Elliott spills details about her new dessert bar, leaving Foreign & Domestic, and her profound affection for Austin Tex-Mex.
Layne Lynch: The past few years have been really awesome for you as a pastry chef. What's been the greatest highlight thus far?
Jodi Elliott: Yikes, I have to choose just one? I would say the success of the bake sales. It's been amazing. My career thus far has been mainly restaurants, but now I have a whole different direction I'm going in because of the bake sales. To have people line up and wait for something that I created is unbelievable. Because of the die-hard loyalty and support of everyone, I'm now going to live out a dream I never knew I had. And winning Food & Wine's People's Best New Pastry Chef wasn't bad either. Icing on the cake – pun intended.
LL: You and Ned [Elliott] moved to Austin to open Foreign & Domestic. As outsiders who had to root themselves into Austin, what was one thing that did and still does surprise you about the culinary community?
JE: I think the diversity and sheer size of the culinary community here is surprising. Austin is growing, but it's still a small town next to Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. The restaurants we have here are stellar and there's a plethora to choose from. We came here because of the growing food scene and the mentality here. People are avid foodies and love to eat out and try new things. There's support here and it means the world to the small restaurants trying to get by.
LL: Are there any chefs or restaurants showcasing at the festival that inspire you or that you admire?
JE: Rick Bayless. I've never met him and have been a fan for years. I love and admire how he showcases Mexican cuisine and culture, which is my absolute favorite. Andrew Zimmern. He's such a sweet man. I love how he's game for anything, and his passion for all food is contagious. I love all the chefs from Houston: Chris Shepherd, Seth Siegel-Gardner, Terrence Gallivan, Justin Yu, and Monica Pope. I don't get down there often enough, but I love the food scene and these restaurateurs are really putting Houston on the map. They all are so deserving of the accolades.
LL: What are your top five food stops in Austin and why?
JE: Choosing only five is difficult, but I have a few. Whip In. I love, love, love the simplicity-and-no-frills-but-exceptionally-well-done food. Tex-Mex; it's something that anyone coming here has to experience. I love Maudie's, Angie's, Matt's El Rancho, Polvos, and Tres Amigos. The margaritas and queso are a must at each of these places. I love Lenoir and Fabi & Rosi. I think there are both doing amazing food that you get to enjoy in the most charming and cozy settings. The service is always stellar as well. Foreign & Domestic. I can say that now that I don't own it anymore. Ned is the most talented cook I've ever worked with or been around. I think his food is impeccable and thought provoking without trying to be. He deserves more attention for it.
LL: What can you tell us about your upcoming bakery Bribery thus far?
JE: Bribery is in the works! I hope to have a few locations, which I can't divulge just yet. It will be a bakery by day and a dessert bar by night. I'm beyond excited to be working on my very own pastry mecca of sorts. The day menu will definitely be an extension of the bake sales. We will have a few key items but the rest will change often. Think green chili chicken and Monterey jack cheese croissants, sausage, egg, and cheddar biscuit sandwiches, quiches, buttermilk pie, pineapple brown butter blondies, turtle brownies, etc. There will be a mix of sweet and savory and some grab-and-go lunch options. At night, a full cocktail program with syrups, candies, and garnishes made by me as well as plated desserts will be served. There will be casual food, like donuts, and fancy dishes, like soufflés, to choose from. I see it as a grown-up place to enjoy sweets and drinks after dinner out or at home. It will be somewhere you can begin or extend your evening out.
LL: There's been some talk of Foreign & Domestic opening a location in Houston. What makes you feel the restaurant would make a successful crossover?
JE: I'm out of the loop on that since I'm no longer Ned's business partner. Although, I do think it's a great idea. We've had an insanely loyal Houston following since we opened, so I'm not surprised. I haven't been at Foreign & Domestic for over six months, and Bribery is my main focus now.


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Often, the solution is both simple and obvious. You'll want to identify your target audience, and then decide how best to advertise your business to it. Defining your target market and figuring out how to reach it are crucial to spending your advertising dollars effectively.
Here are a few suggestions to help you determine where you should advertise your business:
- Put yourself in your customer's shoes. Where would you go to look for your business?
- Look to see where your competitors are advertising-they might have done some market research. But don't feel compelled to advertise somewhere just because someone else is.
- Identify publications or advertising media that most accurately portray your customer base. For example, some products become synonymous with a specific area, age, or gender group.
- If you're unsure of your target audience, try to narrow your advertising by geographic area, consumer group, or both. This can help you determine where you should advertise.
- Put your ad where customers will find it easily and logically (e.g., plumbing in the yellow pages or a local directory).
- Be sure to consider different forms of media when advertising. You can advertise in the newspapers, on radio or television, in magazines or directories, or by direct marketing. Each allows you to target different audiences.