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Notes about some subjects I am planning on talking about in the podcast premiere. The podcast will be in Portuguese however most notes are in English below. This podcast will also be posted at my youtube channel and is expect to go on air by the end of the month. Subjects not met in this episode will be saved for the next ones.

See the podcast index here.

References

General notices

About youtube and podcast content frequency.

BBC's podcast 'What Planet Are We On' with David Attenborough

The interviewer tried to start the conversation with hope but I am not sure Sir Attenborough managed to to inspire her very much. Also noteworthy how other people on the beginning of the podcasts already forecast grievance only.

Prince William and Sir David Attenborough join forces on 'Earthshot' prize

Grants worth £50m until 2030, which is about R$360.7m total.

The best and most innovative ideas to help:

• Protect and restore nature
• Clean our air
• Revive our oceans
• Build a waste-free world
• •Fix our climate

Attenborough: 'Curb excess capitalism' to save nature

Sir Attenborough says he is not an economist, which is fine IMHO, however nothing stands in the way of his learning some of that. When he says we need to curb capitalism, what does that really mean? That does not mean anything. Beware of vague expressions.

Netflix is accused of 'eco-tragedy porn' in Attenborough documentary [from 2019]

Usage of drones instead of narrow-angle lenses to film walruses made them afraid and led them to falling off a cliff. Note that the polar bear which was at the scene is only partly to blame for the tragedy. If no drones were around, probably walruses would not just fall off the cliff.

UN World Food Programme wins 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, as hunger mounts

Hunger is really worrying. Perhaps total world production of food is enough for all human beings, however there is a big problem with distributions systems. There are not enough distribution. We need more roads to take food (and fuel and technology) to those who live in very difficult places to access and cheap fuel.

Nobel Peace Prize: UN World Food Programme wins for efforts to combat hunger

Número de famintos vai quase dobrar este ano, preveem ganhadores do Nobel

World Food Program Awarded 2020 Nobel Peace Prize

Mosaic expedition logs from Polarstern

Comments on the almost year-long transpolar-turned-peripolar expedition of Mosaic on the German ice breaker Polarstern. A copy of the forum thread in plain formatted txt can be found here. The Mosaic expedition tried to follow the steps of the Nansen's Fram expedition (1893–1896), which aimed to reaching the geographical North Pole.
This article says Mosaic Polarstern reached geographical North Pole, however the forum logs say closest approach to North Pole was 166.3 km, information from post on February 26th from young ice. After the originally planned floe was abandoned during the covid pandemics, in search for a new floe they crossed the North Pole on August 19th, but that was a detour and not in the original plans of the expedition.
A lot of public money was spent in this expedition, however the scientific groups released little data and there was not a centralised data or information supplier other than the kindergarten-like portal (entering deprecation as soon as the expedition was over last month). Most available info is spread across blog and social media posts. Official scientific papers with data from Mosaic expedition are planned to be released by 2023! IMHO, data should have been streamed live from the ship and everyone should be able to get that and do their won research, why not?!

BR do Mar e o desenvolvimento do agro

Brazilian legislation makes it hard for cabotage type of navigation. Cabotage navigation would allow transporting a lot more resources along the very extensive coast of Brazil. Railroad development has been stagnant for decades in Brazil. Cabotage is not the silver bullet for the transport problems but would greatly help and reduce road transport.

Governo lança "banco nacional de genomas"

Governo pretende investir R$ 600 mi para criar 'banco nacional de genomas'

The Brazilian govt says Brazil is lagging 8 years behind in genomic research. Thus, now they want to sequence 100 thousand Brazilian genomes (who must have some sort of rare disease) in the next four years with spending of R$600mi (US$~107mi) and be the leading country in that field of research. Does that make sense? Some ethical and financial problems arise. For example, the project first aim is to generate a said 'reference' genome of the Brazilian people. Perhaps they could generate a reference genome for peoples from Iceland, Norway and Japan, but hardly Brazil due to its great population miscegenation. There are lots of gene sequences or genome assemblies from people with rare diseases available in publicly accessible data banks and I reckon a research group could obtain more whole genomes from specific public-restricted banks. If Brazil groups cannot advance in genomics with data already available, they will hardly advance with 100 thousand more genomes because data is not automatic information!

Jesse Livermore’s $100 Million

Jesse Livermore book, that is not very longa nd should be fun and productive to read.

Reminscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre

An account of the early life of Jesse Livermore, the Boy Plunger, as a stock operator. In this book, Livermore character wears the pseudonym Livingstone.

How to trade in stocks, Jesse Livermore

Ugly Old Goat - BitMEX targetted by the regulators (CFTC etc)

Ugly talks about the risk US regulatory entities present for Bitfinex and thus blocking US citizens (and many more) from dealing with them, see also Americans Trading on Bitfinex/Bitmex. The problem with the BitMEX case is the US govt has not got jurisdiction power over BitMEX however the US govt wants everybody under their dirty thumbs. Tip from Ugly: evading taxes is illegal, however avoiding them is legal. Dica do Ugly: sonegação de impostos é ilegal, porém evitá-los (elisão fiscal) é legal.

BRL Bitcoin has broken highs from 2017

On 17^th of December 2017, bitcoin reached BRL 65,952 (almost 66K in Brazilian Reais). On 17^th of August 2020, a new all time high reached BRL 68,695.

Saved for next episodes

Vacinação compulsória (Fhoer)

"Quem decide não tomar vacinas não deveria poder frequentar espaços públicos"

Compulsory vaccination: is that feasible? While OMS says SARS-CoV2 vaccine will be widely available only in 2022, is that fair that whoever is not able to get vaccinated until then should stay at home, isolated? There are many bad points about compulsory vaccination:

• SARS-CoV2 vaccines are still under testing, nobody know if they are effective
• As for all vaccines however small there is a chance of collateral effects; that is a risk a person must decide to take or not
• Universality passes through the self first; in Japan, use of masks is to protect one self, the extended benefit of protecting others is only secundary and not as powerful as self protection
• The person may not even get into contact with the virus in her lifetime
• If a person is not able to get a vaccine, should he be disciminated?

I reckon that when a person is diagnosed with covid or any other contageous disease, he should stay at home but we cannot make people stay at home or discriminate them when they are not infected. The fears they are trying to mitigate with mandatory vaccination cannot be universal rule itself: imagine now that we must get a shot of vaccine for every possible disease because we must protect "others"?

Arch Linux update notes on sync'ing with Arch Linux Archive (ALA)

I sync Arch Linux with the monthly repo (snapshot of the 1^st of a month) from ALA. However, sometimes even the monthly repo snapshot (which is used to generate the official Arch Linux install iso image) is not 100% stable for my specific hardware and thus I need to try and sync again some days later..

I took the car and headed to university yesterday, about a 40-minute ride. Walking about, I found a little centipede about 6 centimetres long squashed down by half onto one paved walkway. It was moving its little antenna quickly. Desperately, I reckoned.

Someone had walked and stepped on the posterior half of the little creature body. What to do? Seeing that little thing hapless mounts to much more suffering in my head than it probably should. I have been more sensitive to animal pain as of late because one of my friends was having a troubling time thinking about animal suffering, specially cattle suffering, and also my father touched on this meaty subject this year (or last year?), so we have been thinking about that a little more over the course of the last months..

Should I put an end to the little creature suffering? I have done such deeming merciful acts in the past when I was a kid or teen, and they never felt right..

For some years, I took Aikido classes with the Buddhist monk at the temple in little town we lived back then. He mentioned many frogs would appear after a rainy day. I asked him if I could have some for generic experimentation. I actually had already prepared somewhat and had asked my dentist for some vials of injecting anaesthetics, of which he gave me about 20 (incredibly!), so I was up to no good..

Sensei (the monk) thought it over for a while and decided to dissuade me from this idea of experimenting with living animals (vivisection). He said something that has clung to me ever since, he said any animal would prefer to live a little longer in any case.

I was never a killer of animals. I had a friend who was kind of bad with animals, he and another one who lived in at the same street would shoot down dove birds with slingshots in front of me and I always found that cruel.. They would eat some of the hunt and I heard more than once from different people these doves are yummy.. Sometimes they would kill only to practice their slingshot skills.

If I have to, I will smack cockroaches and mosquitoes, specially if these creatures annoy me.

During master course, I run many rounds of experiments at the biochemistry lab and consumed 80+ rats, total. That is interesting my co-workers seemed always willing to kill rats under my project, so I would always let them do it for me. One of my co-workers under the PhD programme who was a religious fellow dealt with a lot of personal trouble about sacrificing rats for experimentation at the lab. At the same time he was always willing to sacrifice rats under my name.

At the period of time, as I lived in the neighbourhood of the university, I would go treat my rats during experimentation periods everyday by morning. When there was no experiment, I would usually go to the lab to prepare something, clean up or use the internet even during weekends, bank holidays, Christmas, New Year and in the last year the Carnaval. I would always check the animal room and fill up the water bottles of whoever rat was there. I got to know the people form the Central Animal Facility of the university who apparently liked my dealing with rats and so I could have extra rats if I needed them (sometimes some co-workers would need extra rats and would take mine). I also changed a very bright light to a very dim light at the lab animal room (bioterium) after detecting a possible lack of animal well-being of the rats immediately below this very bright incandescent light bulb..

I much prefer to be the rescuer outside research. I did many glorious rescues of bugs that were drowning in bad waters and I could help them over the years (including some cute bugs from the privy). I cannot save all bugs from drowning and it certainly does not make a difference for the species as an entity, I definitely got stung more than once trying to save bees at the pool, but I changed the future of those bugs I saved, right?!

Life seems to be very common, not rare, not special and trivial when we look at that from zoomed out perspectives. However, life becomes incredible the more we zoom in. What I mean is, certain things have no meaning, purpose or benefit for the grand scheme of things but they make more sense in smaller scales.

So I decided to remove the little half-crushed centipede to the grass. I reckon that he would prefer to spend his time over the soil instead of the pavement. It also makes more sense that he is in contact with more natural structures.

That was more sad than needed be. I myself crushed many ants on those same paved walkways nights before.

Later that day , I was crossing a road on the opposite side of the university and found a beautiful centipede also crossing the road. I thought better to save it from cars so I hunkered down and tried to grab it delicately when a car came headed for us. I would not have more than a few seconds and the damn animal was avoiding my fingers, so I grabbed it against its will, got out of the road and placed it on the grass nearby (no stinging!).

That really reminded me of a reasonably funny episode of a series named 1000 Dumb Ways to Die, in which a vegan or hipster girl was driving along when she found a dead animal on the road and stopped to try and help it. She started crying when she saw the animal was dead, she was desperate by its side when another can came and killed her, too. That is like Darwin Awards. LOL

Anyway, a little more seriously, I have got some tips for when you see an animal crossing the road ahead:

Limit driving speed

It makes sense to driving slower when passing in an area one knows has got frequent animal crossings. I like to drive at below 80km/h on the highway. Not everyone is patient at the wheel and I know that is not possible to drive at such intermediary speeds at all times, but it has become clear to me animals tend to have a clean escape when the car speed is at about 60km/h (~38miles/h) at the highway. If the car is too much faster, the driver cannot slow down adequately or on time. Animals are not used to super high speed in nature, so they don't realise the car is approaching much faster than normal speeds, nor can they run away at enough speed to get out of they road.

Slow down or stop the damn car!

This is extremely risky for the driver. However, usually the driver has got some moments to make a decision and looking at the rear mirror is, hopefully, a habit. In case there is sufficient long space until the car at the rear, the driver may choose to slow down to give the animal a chance to run away or finish crossing the highway. In the city, usually the driver is at slower speeds and it may be safe to stop the car if needed. I have seen many people that simply don't stop the car for animals!! That is very sad, sometimes just braking a little would save cats and dogs..

Use headlight signalling and Horn

Some animals don't care about the horn blow but will unfreeze and respond if one toggles high/low headlights.

When I see any animal on the road, ideally I do many things at once (which became more natural over practice) : I check the rear mirror, pull the brakes a little, blow the horn and toggle headlights. If that is completely safe and necessary, I may stop the car, too.

That came the time to run the spell checker on all my website pages. There were many errors. Spell checking is very important.

Just this week fraud was discovered in the candidate for a position in the Supreme Court (STF) in Brazil. The fraud suspicion was confirmed because even bad orthography was copied from a lawyer's articles to the Supreme Court nominee master degree dissertation! His former supervisor said the university will need reviewing his thesis again due to the facts exposed in the media. He has just recently completed his PhD degree in Universidad de Salamanca (Spain), but has not published his thesis yet. It is speculated the nominee has not completed formal postdoctoral work as written nis his curriculum, either.

Here are some tips of what spell checkers I am using.

Aspell and Hunspell

GNU Aspell is a clone of old Lspell and it stands out because it suggests the correct words in some cases when Hunspell does not, see this blog post comparison between both programmes and this extensive list of comaprison. It must be noted, though, that Aspell development is well and active, contrary to what was claimed by the blog post from battlepenguim.com .

Hunspell is the most popular spellchecking library. It is included in OpenOffice, LibreOffice and it appears to be included in Firefox and Chrome, too.

The difference in popularity may also have to do with fear of copyright law enforcement amongst other things. Even though Stallman said it was OK for GNU Aspell to use a copyrighted word list for the English language, there seems to be a message in the mailing lists with some worries from one developer about the case.. See the mailing list and the follow-up message.

Aspell seems to have had better utf-8 support than Hunspell over time.

Other factors of comparison:

1.1.2 Comparison to Hunspell

• Hunspell is based on Myspell. Myspell was created as a simple spell checker for use in OpenOffice. Myspell’s affix support was merged into Aspell 0.60 so Hunspell and Aspell can use the same affix file to some extent.
• Hunspell has better support for language peculiarities including compounding and complex morphology. However the Hunspell (v1.7.0) utility currently has problems with apostrophe (') in words.
• Aspell generally has better suggestions for non-phonetic langauges such as English and French. Aspell suggestion speed also tends to be significantly faster than Hunspell. For a comparison of suggestion quality and speed see http://aspell.net/test/.

Hunspell supports setting multiple dictionaries at once while Aspell requires the user to create a custom dictionary. For example merging en_US with en_UK and pt_BR dictionaries. Sincerely, if there is that option in Aspell, I could not find it. I found this page with a little how to get word lists from the dictionary .rws files, but that is just an example link, I don't know if that is the best tutorial over there if you are really going to do it. However, since different languages have different suggestions strategies and affix rules this is a non-trivial task. Afixing rules are used to generate inflection lists, for example.

One alternative for Aspell is to list all words of a document that are wrong in one language with the option list, pipe to another instance of Aspell which will list all words that cannot be found in the dictionary of another language, such as

$ aspell --dict-dir=/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/ --lang=pt-BR list <index.html | sort -u | aspell list

The only problem here is that you cannot know what line number the wrong word is. See also this blog post which details on the same workaround example.

For checking spelling of a single word, I wrote this shell function. While not ideal it should work for multi language checking if you don't mind some verbose scat:

# ~/.bashrc


#spell check
sp()
{
	echo "PORTUGUESE"
	aspell --lang=pt-BR --encoding=utf-8 pipe <<<"$1"

	echo "ENGLISH"
	aspell --lang=en-GB --encoding=utf-8 pipe <<<"$1"
}

Both Aspell and Hunspell command line interfaces are good and a clean way to fixing bad words in multiple or single files. If you use Vim beware about losing its undoes for files edited with the spell checker default interfaces!

Vim spell checker

In order to avoid losing Vim undoes it is best to use Vim built-in spell checker. I remember configuring my .vimrc with some extra dictionaries knowing that would be useful at some point. But as said, I have got the poor habit of not using spell checker, hopefully we will change that now!

I got a medical terms wordlist and placed it at file path ~/.vim/spell/medicalterms-en. Then I set the following in my .vimrc:

" ~/.vimrc


"spelling check

"dictionaries
set spelllang=en_gb,pt_br,medicalterms-en

"custom dictionary
set spellfile=~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add

The filename of the custom dictionary is en.utf-8.add because a dictionary starting with en will be read for all variants of English (I haven't got the reference but that is what I can remember).

Vim help page from :help spell cites en-rare and medical_ca dictionaries but I could not find wordlists for them on the internet so far.

Setting the spellfile property (custom words) is not as important as setting at least one main language for the spelllang property in .vimrc, however you can just set vim for a single session with:

:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

If you don't care the setting applies only to current buffer, you can use :set spell and :set nospell to disable.

Other than configuration, usage is very simple. Perhaps the most important shortcut for the spelling function is z= when cursor is on a highlighted (bad) word. It will prompt the user to pick a suggestion from a list.

Other useful shortcuts are ]s to go to the next misspelled word and [s to go backwards. More on usage on vim help :help spell-quickstart or from this tutorial.

The user will end up composing a custom dictionary with words she uses the most, such as frequent proper names and particular expressions of her labour niche.

zg                                       Add word under the cursor as a good word to the first name in 'spellfile'.

:spellr[rare]! {word}         Add {word} as a rare word to the internal word list, similar to |zW|.

I reckon that checking spelling and grammar should happen in-flight for simple mistakes or after the text is complete in order to avoid breaking the trail of thoughts while writing. Running the spell checker is a habit to be acquired! ;]

Since this blog started, I have been searching for other biology blogs, web tips and such. Many blogs are seemingly abandoned or perhaps their authors could not keep up with posting frequency but nonetheless plan to update them later.. It was possible to find many short blogs, which I tried to promptly read or skim through, and some longer ones, which will demand more time.

Below is a short list of the blogs I want to take my time and explore in the following weeks.

• The Secret Life of a Field Biologist
• Confessions of a Marine Ecologist
• The Biologist Is In
• Dispatches from the Field
• Scientist Sees Squirrel

There are some books in bookshelves and in boxes to avoid their collecting dust. Most of my books are second-hand although there are a few which cost a lot. It took many years to grow my personal library. As I still have not read all of them, I have been avoiding to buy more books; now I try to download those books I want to keep.

Until recently, I mostly read news sites, forums, tutorials websites, manuals or university-related papers on the internet, so I did not read a physical book from head to tail regularly lately.. The problem is there is so much diverse types of text I read on the internet of which much is absolutely garbage, like for example politics. That can and should be avoided because that takes so much of my time. I will not digress much but I will only say YouTube videos have drawn a terrible token on me, too, time-wise..

I want to change that, revert to spending my time reading and dreaming about how I could accomplish things eventually in the future with good company from the book author and their ideas flowing in my mind.. Nothing better than to carefully choose a book for reading. There are so many good books to choose from written over millennia.. Think about that!

The most relevant literature I must take is also the most boring: environmental law. And all of Brazil environmental law is important.

Since I got my master's degree, I got to know bitcoin and did not study environmental law very much.. Finance was a universe I was not familiar with. Indeed most of my initial investment capital was brutally scammed in the first months and only now, almost two years and a half later, is that I am barely on the green (up eight percent total).. But I cannot be too hard on myself as there was absolutely no one to help me learning crypto and finance in general and I was on my own. I reckon this enterprise will prove a lot more profitable over time and I will have got some sound money.

That only will not make me rich. That is why I need focus on environmental law so I can try and get a good public gov't or private job position. Ted Nelson talks about generalistimos in one of his videos. His first advice is to know the law, specially if you want to be a consultant.

So my plans are to keep on reading those biology blogs to get some inspiration instead of "news" or YouTube videos, compile and study all the environmental law. Not easy but that is what I need do.

Also, this time of year until December is a great window for sending curriculum to private companies. I did that already soon after I got my master's degree and was unsuccessful but that is a good idea to try again (and again next year!).

Mr Walter "Blaacky" Schwartz is a USA citizen. The young American man studied and graduated as a photographic engineer at the United States Army request and cost. He was trained and refined his skills to do it right: press the shutter at the perfect timing and capture the moment of the strike. Although Mr Schwartz preferred not to reveal what institution he received training, he carries the name of at least one very famous camera maker company in his diploma.

The first story is about a mission over the eye of a hurricane, at a very high altitude to be able take photos for a weather committee of scientists. At the time we talked, he reasoned about one elegant and simple definition for the purpose of narrow-angle lenses: it was to go in pursuit of further detail of the subject when it was not convenient to go closer, of course. Another group of men could never have passed as near a spiralling rotatory to death and return home with mission accomplished but those men in the crew.

On other occasions, Mr Walter entered volcanoes under mission assignment to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

One of the most admirable trace of character of Mr Walter was his courage in face of such dangerous situations. While he talked about those remembrances, we would not quiver his voice. His life stories are truly fascinating.

Another one of his military stories he could and was willing to share is as follows.

He was sent to one military missions aboard the Memphis Belle bomber craft. It was the first heavy bomber to return to the US after completing 25 successful missions during the Second World War in Europe. The Memphis Belle is an American icon, it represents sacrifice and what Americans will do to protect their freedom.

The mission started upon arrival of the crew members at the War Front, located somewhere in the coast range of England. The Air Front was composed of dozens of wings and for this mission, as many as 35 aircrafts would campaign together. The air front faced France and Germany, territories which were taken by the enemy at the Second World War. All crew members were gathered with the group commander at the target map room. It was where they were informed the whereabouts and objectives the commission was to carry out for the first time. All crew members synchronised their wrist watches, just before the little spare time they had before lift off. The spirits of them were high, expectant and hopeful. Many soldiers went to see the base priest for their prayers.

The aircraft he was sent to board was a B-17 heavy bomber craft, a B-17 made by Boeing and was propelled by four engines. The particular design made it possible for the aircraft sustain flight even when severely damaged. It had a big wing which could bear many holes..

It had a nearly frameless clear-view nose, which was transparent and bore the pilot stick panel, sharing the tight space alongside one head gunner. Most of the 10-men crew were gunners, positioned at specific angles to cover most attack angles. Each gunner had a radius range of 1,000 yards frontward and adding all gunner posts, they were protected almost 360 degrees. Others would take care of the bombs to be dropped. There was one chief bomb engineer at the wing formation who would decide the precise moment of bomb release, after which every other bomber group crew would release their bomb load in sequence. The air formation provided them even more protection at altitude of 25 thousand feet (7.6 kilometres approximately).

About a week and a half after the crew finished their 25^th mission, they were visited by the King and Queen on the 26^th of May 1943. That is thought the pilot, Robert Morgan, named the craft Memphis Belle for his Memphis sweetheart, Margaret Polk. There were other markings, such as Irene underneath the window of the radio operator Hanson and the name Virginia on the right-hand side where the waist gunner position was. The very well-known nose art was a drawing of 25 bombs, represneting 25 succesful missions, and some stars over the bombs, representing when the Bell was a lead in the attack formation. There were some swastikas around the aircraft around mid to late May that year. Soon after, the aircraft had it's 26^th mission while still in the 91^st Bomb Group. The markings changed over time.

Mr Schwartz said his aircraft was not carrying bombs, his mission was to take photographs, footage of the mission execution.

Outside the Memphis Belle, many black specks were part of the scenario and were increasing. These were the result of detonation of anti-air missiles shot from ground territory. They were always apprehensive and concerned, or scared, because the flak was coming up, the blue black puff of seemingly innocent smoke is a bomb exploding. If that blew near to the wing, it would take the whole wing off. At that height, the enemy aim was very bad and most missiles would dischard before hitting the aircrafts, but many discharged close enough to the formation that many aircrafts had missing parts. Some of B-17 downed and others were out of sight into enemy territory. It was time to hold strong, keep to the Formation. The crew was plenty busy.

The American crew knew that if the German bombardiers ceased firing, enemy aircrafts would soon come firing from any side in the sky.

All anticipation culminated in the most important moment of the mission and their their sole purpose: drop the bombs and check whether they hit the targets. The targets were usually buildings and facilities that upon destroyal would warrant devastating political and economical impact.

Bombs dropped and the photograph plates were exposed. At that point, the first half of the mission had been done. It was the most important part but also the easiest, as they took the enemy by surprise upon arrival. The second part was most dangerous, the crew would try and return to the air base.

With the expertise of all men aboard, and some luck, they all landed well enough. Many of the return crew members who landed were badly injured, some dead and others intact. All of them, without exception, held strong to their honour and returned to America with glory. All survivor soldiers were received back with the utmost respect and love from their compatriots and friends. Those soldiers would be recognized for their impetuous spirits and firm minds. They would now return home and train new people, tell them what happened at the war front and how that was done.

By JSN
interview and text around 2013-2014
text updated on 2020
in memoriam of Walter Schwartz

Articles

• Memphis Belle - A Story of a Flying Fortress
• Memphis Belle: The Legendary B-17 Flying Fortress
• Honoring The Memphis Belle And Her Crew
• American airmen see English royalty on tour of U.S. base somewhere in Britain
• Duties and Responsibilities of the airplane commander (B-17 Pilot Training Manual, 1943)
• Memphis Belle: 25 Trips to Hell and Back
• Kodak cold war project scientists finally honored
• A short article about the film Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, 1944
• The Memphis Belle flies its 25th bombing mission

Films

• Memphis Belle Reunion with Colonel Robert Morgan (very good!)
• Boeing B-17F Memphis Belle Restoration: Markings & More
• Landing the Belle, 1990
• Documentary about Flak, 1943

There started again the annual talk of forest fires! In the last two years, the headlines were Amazon is on fire! and now they are Pantanal is on fire!. For those who are not familiar with what a Pantanal is, it is actually a Brazilian ecosystem, which terrais flood in the rain season and dry up in the dry season, so there are many bogs and meandering rivers.

We are currently in the dry season! Also, this year it seems we are having a weak La Niña, which makes the Pantanal region (and where I live, some further south at the Capricorn Tropical Line), drier. On the other hand, the Amazon, cerrado and thereabouts in the northeast region, are in their turn more humid, and of course there are less forest fires there than the previous years.

I have been reading some material about fire management and found some very good Brazilian and Portuguese papers and documents. Specially, Portugal has got competent technical knowledge on the subject. In one the of the papers, after explaining Portugal fire index system through history (from ~1960), the author acknowledges the index could be far more useful for society if forest and fire management could make use of it!

I decided to start compiling a list of causes of forest fires other than criminal human or indigenous activity, which seems to be the only cause of forest fires the media knows and talks about.

This is a general list, forests may be more prone to some causes than others depending on geography and other factors. That is a shame I did not start making this list a few days ago, now it is rather hard to find some of the references and I can't be 100% sure about some technical wording, so while not ideal, I will link to similar references, leave them without reference or remove the item from the list eventually.

Causes of forest fires:

• Lightning storms (Fao), (Inpe), (University of Calgary), (Time)
• Accidental fires (from cigarette butts, fireworks, etc) and children play
• Bad fire usage in farming, criminous fires (such as balloon fire)
• Electrically-charged animal fur (friction with air, or vegetation) may produce an arc; friction between rocks; see also (a), (b)
• Dry weather, hot weather and other phenomena such as El Niño, La Niña , Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), etc
• Expontaneous combustion phenomena
• Fire/chacoal streams (geothermal ridges)?
• Strong wind and/or poor maintenance of electrical transmission channels (Dn.pt), (WildfireMitigation)
• Some high-reactivity metals (such as Na and Zn) in contact with oxigen
• Focal lensing effect of sun rays (by water droplets, reflection from water, glassware)
• Meteors (CNA Brasil) , also NASA and "Impact-generated wildfires"
• Rodents (chewing) (Indiana Gov't), (PetsUSA)

More links

• Biology of Fire
• Fire as a key driver of Earth's biodiversity
• Smokey Bear
• Índice de Incêndio de Portugal
• PRODES - Monitoramento do Desmatamento da Floresta Amazônica Brasileira por Satélite
• Ignition time vs temperature for selected forest fuels
• Floresta em chamas (I don't agree with their conclusions but there are some good material, such as historical material
• Holocene fire and vegetation changes in southeastern Brazil asdeduced from fossil charcoal and soil carbon isotopes
• Aspectos ecológicos do fogo no cerrado. II - As queimadas e a dispersão de sementes em algumas espécies anemocóricas do estrato herbáceo-subarbustivo / Ecological aspects of fire in the cerrado. II - Fire and seed dispersion in some anemochoric species of the herbaceous layer (1977), another copy here and also an extended version (1981)
• The need for a consistent fire policy for Cerrado conservation (2015), and also a copy from here

Interesting quotes

Deve-se distinguir claramente a diferença entre uso da terra e desmatamento. Todo desmatamento é uma forma de uso da terra, mas nem todo uso da terra é um desmatamento. Deve-se portanto, quantificar separadamente uso da terra e desmatamento. As áreas agrícolas (uso da terra) fora da região do domínìo da floresta tropical úmida que ocorre nas regiões de savana (cerrado, campos cerrados) dos estados periféricos da Amazônia Legal (Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Pará, Maranhão) não devem ser consideradas como áreas desmatadas e não o foram neste relatório. [..]

CONTRARY to widespread belief, evidence is mounting that pre-Columbian America was not a pristine wilderness inhabited by people who lived in such harmony with nature that they left it unmarked. Instead, many scientists now say, the original Americans powerfully transformed their landscape in ways both destructive and benign -- just like modern people.

[...] more extensive fires on the alluvial islands of the middle Rio Negro were those of the1925/26 El Niño year, witnessed and poetically described by Marchesi (1975): Thunder and lightning appeared every day without rain. Then the great forest fires began. Flames crossed from one side of the river to the other... Dense smoke covered the entire region, eclipsing thesolar disk. It was night for us too on the upper Rio Negro where the fire had not yet arrived. Weasked ourselves if it weren’t the end of the world. Finally, in early April after 100 days of drought unlike any known before, a tempest struck.

Fire triangle

Google has got a nice feature for defining a search date range. I always use that for checking papers, articles and writings in general. Older papers are usually better written and more thoughtful.

Some general problems become bolder as telecommunication technology evolves. Communication and data publishing changed dramatically, in such a way it is reaches a bigger proportion of people in less time. It may be appropriately to say a more fluid mode as opposed to crystallise thoughts or rationales. Perhaps that would be called a more fluid reality by Zygmunt Bauman..

To publishing an article on the internet, if one has got some basic connections, writing a piece and publishing that can be an almost immediate event.

Even unthoughtful one-liners can mess up general opinion. Take Brazil's president Bolsonaro, whose sons publish a lot of obscenities in his name and in the name of the Republic at Twitter.

That is how people are getting used to ever more, writing very short text. Incomplete text should be called note and as such a collection of notes are not organised very much, by definition.

Also, size of a text does not mean it is better or worse than a shorter text, although usually the shorter the harder to understand.

There is too much of the same ideas, ever poorer modification of existing bases for some unhelpful sophistication of one own creativity.

That may not be a new problem, however that is for certain more common now quantitatively than before, when a researcher wants to conform to general opinion, fearing cuts in research budgets or even salary. An overflow of limits means the paper may be under serious methodological problems when that suffices to say there is consensus and one's research confirms consensus.
Consensus should not be more important than a very well defined and rational function, which leverages logical deduction of further general aspects.

I reckon Einstein's genius may be in great part due to the fact of the environment he was brought up in, and also because of his acknowledgement and decision of developing on top of very important primitives defined by other scientists. Synthesis is harder than analysis, one needs a general understanding of the overall picture and be able to remove noise from what is really important.

I am not sure it is healthy to long to be like Einstein. Francis Crick and Ken Thompson would agree. Ken would probably also say to just do your own thing, no need to have got bigger perspectives than what is feasible at the time.

I fear this post has developed into something else than the title may strictly suggest. Indeed writing about Einstein made me question what are my objectives with this website and my youtube channel, anyways? Too much thinking, I will just leave it at that for now.

News about the website. I changed website structure a little more. There are two important directories in the website structure which are the graphics 'gfx' and resources 'res' directories. The res directory will hold anything that is not graphical, such as audio or text, although PDFs could arguably be placed in the gfx directory, too.

A robots.txt file was added to the home page directory. It has not got much, of importance only a pointer to a sitemap file.

I am using two scripts from Poor Man's Webmaster Tools to make a sitemap.txt and a sitemap.html files. While I will soon link the sitemap.html to visitors in the home page, Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, DuckDuckGo and other engines will actually prefer to read a sitemap.xml file, because it can hold some information about the links, such as last update time, update frequency and priority (this latter is not currently consumed by Google bots as explicitly said in Google's website).

It was not much hard to make the third sitemap script which generates a xml file last night, although it took me approximately 2-3 hours to write it.. Here is a static copy of the script. Although I will be improving it over time, it may serve as an example for some other person who reads this here.

The sitemap.xml file should actually be uploaded to these search engines (they have got a form for that), but I reckon if you are patient, you can just add the sitemap pointer to the robots.txt and the robots will eventually reach that.

I reckon having a website for link collection is a good reason for having a website. I started a new column on the website home page, called The Fool Environmentalist which is supposed to be a list with links and very short comments about some important point. Google News always sends me good and bad articles that I should be collecting for personal reference.. Internet news are easy to read but very hard to keep track and organise them. Google does not help, sometimes even Firefox isn't!

The Guardian has been very disappointing for the last decade. Too many news about how humanity is headed to total environmental disaster.. Generically, not only The Guardian here, what they completely mess up is the sense of cause and effect. Human beings are living on Earth because the Environment has allowed all conditions for our development and survival at this precisa moment, so we are actually an effect of natural forces. To think that we are the cause and source of natural order is very naive. We may as well be, however it seems more overwhelming that what little humans can do is due to workings of a much greater order.

And here order means simply physical laws. Indeed, order can emerge from chaos and they are really not different things. We may talk more about complex systems in due time.

I did a rewrite of a shell script to deal with updating the website blog section. I found a very useful sed command which allowed me to write simple template html pages to merge with the actual post content.

sed '2 r file2.txt' file1.txt

The first sed command adds text from file2.txt into file1.txt after a specific line (in that case, line #2). The following commands are more interesting as they add text from file2.txt after a matched pattern. file2.txt can be /dev/stdin! Also, if you want to modify the target file, you can use flag -i:

sed '/^PATTERN/ r file2.txt' file1.txt

sed -i '/^PATTERN/ r /dev/stdin' file1.txt

I was working on the HTML and CSS code of the website for the past days. Yesterday, I got some code snippets from W3 and made the home page responsive. It is using Flexbox, which, by the way, is not compatible with IE 10 and earlier.. I installed various web browsers available in the Arch Linux official repos:

• aur/tor-browser
• aur/google-chrome
• community/otter-browser
• community/opera
• community/netsurf
• community/elinks
• extra/w3m
• extra/lynx
• extra/konqueror
• extra/firefox
• extra/epiphany
• extra/chromium
• core/links

It is a good idea to check your website with all of these browsers. I personally like to using W3M, however I am not that familiar with all shortcuts yet. On the other hang, Links and ELinks are easy to use to even have got GUI versions! They are useful for navigating to many websites, though not all.

Specially useful is the Netsurf browser, which uses a simple engine and is akin in rendering to a version of IE 10 or thereabouts..

You can test your website with a different browser (cross-browser testing) at Browserling, too.

That is also good idea to check the code with an HTML validator and a CSS validator. They give you a code snippet to generate a validator logo at your website, however if you tested your HTTP version of the website, the code generated will make web browsers throw supposed errors of unsafe images when accessing it with HTTPS. In Linux, I found a very good HTML linter called tidy available in the extra repo in Arch Linux. There is a good CSS linter, albeit harder to use and requires some manual configuration is Stylelint, available in the community repo. Check the stylelint-config-standard package, too. Otherwise install via npm, check package instructions.

Lastly, you can check website performance with GTmetrix, a tip from Chris Titus Tech. It seems one of the most important optimisations you can do is improve image sizes, if your webpage is too large. My home page has approximately 200KB with images as of today..

PS: these webbrowser add-ons are almost essential webmaster tools, check Web Developer which adds a toolbar button with various web developer tools and HTTP Header Live which displays the HTTP headers.

Searching for personal website tips or something, I found some really interesting stuff. For example, this website talks about website cracking and hackery in general, which I found very amusing..

Anyways, it seems that indeed a webmaster needs to deal with some data base and layout management. He could avoid them by using Jekyll or WordPress, or if he knows some programming, he can try and manage his website all by himself. Reading Jekyll documentation, it seems to deal with three types of web pages:

• normal pages, usually not correlated to each other;
• blog posts and a blog home page;
• somewhat related pages, which they call collections.

I reckon that for unrelated and individual pages, it is a plus if we can craft them manually. There are so many structural HTML tags which can be used that I doubt Jekyll can apply half of them from a marked down text.. That seems incompatible: either use a mark up or a mark down language.
Such intricate structures can one make with HTML tagging, although much is condemned to null or discreet rendering by web browsers at this present time..

About the second bullet point, the blog portal and individual post management can be a hassle. It is easy if you just write in a single page, which gets ever longer. However, if you want to point to individual posts only, then you should also have got individual pages for them.
Jekyll (and other static webpage generators) uses a lot of databases, and that is not the easiest to familiarise with its defaults structures, although I am sure you can customise almost everything..

At this point, I was almost overwhelmed and giving up on trying to create my own tools for the job of managing a post database.. Most surprisingly, I found the Poor Man's Web Master Tools (PMWMT) and some silly scripts for maintaining a static website. Do note the referred scripts are shell scripts. I was most delighted! IMPORTANT: It seems the website for PMWMT is down, hopefully that is temporary.. If the link does not come online again, we still have got a copy from Wayback machine.

Much refreshed and elated, I got to work on my previous shell script, which dealt only badly with concatenating all blog post into a single page.
Some template files were created. One holds most of HEAD and HEADER contents while the other most of the BODY and FOOTER contents.
Now, article text is written in HTML but are written in individual files and only contains some metatags in a HEAD section and a ARTICLE section, which are then merged with the templates to generate a complete individual page for the post.
Finally, a function that merges all article sections of individual posts into a long page with all posts. There is a hard corner which is to fix all locally relative resource dirpaths in src tags, for example for images or gifs. Here, I had to think long and hard and created another directory at the root of the blog directory called res/ for resources, as it cannot be called gfx for graphics because I will be linking txt plain text, as well. When all resources moved there, I was able to use sed to remove '../' references in these fields..

The third bullet of the list above seems irrelevant as a worry now. Either we can specially craft individual webpages or use the same blog system for an eventual collection of related pages..

There are still some improvements or features to implement for my own use, that is a way to automatically update the website portal blog post section and the blog portal with latest post titles.. That should not be too hard to do with some shell scripting and sed..
You can check a script snapshot in this link. I will be improving that over time, but I provide it here just so as a reference of what can be done for the reader.

Although I am not currently using PMWMT's code (I am writing my own), reading those scripts are a blow of fresh air.. When I next write a script for generating a sitemap.xml file, I may use some of PMWMT code, though..

There may be a vague resemblance of functionality with Luke Smith's lb and sup, a blog script and site updater he wrote for his own blog. However, he does not seem to care about adding metatags to blog posts, such as keywords.. Other blogs could use their post categories as keyword metatags..

Just for the record, there are two more scripts o deal with website or blogging. The first one is Roman Zolotarev's ss5, which is a static site generator written in shell. There is also Slackjeff's hacktuite, a shell script that makes a static microblog.

PS: package tree can also make a directory (and file) listing in HTML with option -H. One can use flag -P to search for filetypes and flag -I to ignore some files. It must be run at the root directory of the website. Example:

$ tree -H "https://mountaineerbr.github.io" \
	-P '*.htm|*.html|*.php|*.asp|*.aspx|*.jsp' \
	-L 6 -F -o "tree.html" -v --noreport --charset utf-8 \
	-I '[a-z].html|index.html|fool.html|bak|css|gfx|js|res|misc|google*|PMWMT'

Luke Smith's blog has nice posts about his website development. Specially, today, I was reading the very first posts, from may 2008, and he states preference for a minimalist website. There is also depth to his website, browsing it I could find many links to different sections of his website: video, podcast and rss feed. He has got even a forum, which I avoided entering so far, may check it later. That LARBS distribution seems to have many users. I would't dare using it, because that would be one more layer -- instead of having to learn how to configure the tools themselves, I would have to learn how to configure his LARBS tools.. And I just found how convoluted his distro design might be, look at how redundant is this directory structure, which he cites in this post in which you navigate downwards levels until you can find the distro default configuration file at ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf.

His website has very interesting ideas, pages and depth to content. Specially, the podcast section got my attention. I already have got a YouTube channel (in portuguese), and some faithful followers, even though I advertise that channel as a B-side channel, meaning produced with as little time as would afford that.. However, a podcast, in which only the voice is the most important piece of the play, seems like good fun. That is easier to record, easy to upload, easy to download.. It can have high quality sound as any mobile phone has great microphone, much different from my computer microphone used for producing my youtube channel content!

It would make sense to have my podcast in portuguese, which means effectively splitting content in two languages in this website. Production would be slower, one episode a month. And I could have co-hosts or interviews, chatting with other cool people, so that is a big opened avenue.

I am reading a lot of HTML code from other personal blogs/websites.. I am seeing all those blogs I collected over the years in a new perspective. Some of these blogs are from people with information technology backgrounds, and yet they seem to use Jekyll or some other layout programmes, such as WordPress to generate pages. See Aurelio Jargas' website. Aurelio is using Jekyll now, however it was possible to find a very early webpage of his Brazilian music group called DUMBS written, presumably, by himself. The webpage seems to have started with a simple, cool design (and one picture of the band!), which was soon after buried under a lot of litter (gifs, pictures), which would leave important information out of sight. Sometime later, Aurelio writes in the website logs that the page was slow to load, too! We can compare with the music band final website he maintains as memoir of good times to this date.

There is no convincing me any of these programmes end up being easier to learn and use than to make your own webpages with good HTML and CSS code. The principle still ought to be a clean website with good content is superior than busy and heavy websites.

It is clear that if a website grows, it starts to getting harder to maintain the pages. However, CSS style sheets may prove very handy for changing formatting of a series of posts. While HTML structures the text, CSS will style it.
Not everything can be done with CSS but I reckon much can be done without need of a complete rewrite of the website. Plus, sed can be very useful in changing whole sections of HTML documents. Bash may not be the most recommended language for maintenance of a very large website, perhaps, however bash is already helping me with compiling the All posts page. Every blog post has got its own manually-crafted HTML page, with many logical tags which may serve to present this same content in different ways for different people, for example, for the visually impaired or the people in the future, whenever in time.

Aurelio's writing style can be funny and that keeps the reader interested. I shall try to keep this website light-spirited, too..

For now, I cannot grow this website too much without further defining and deciding on its basic structure. For that, I may even make some drawings on paper and try to implement that structure in HTML code..

This is the last day of August. Today, I am trying to consolidate my health-wise plans for September. My routine needs improvement, it is already much better than it was between 2014-2017, but sometimes I fail my plans and that may lead me to some bad days too easily. That is what needs improvement, more resistance to a routine which can keep my frustrations in check.

Anyways, Luke Smith has got a video in which he explains how he manages his website. he has got a cloud Debian server server in which 'nginx' is installed.. The programme is called 'engine ex' and is a web server. In this website, I am doing everything manually and carefully, for example, all subdirectories will need have an index.html file in order for their contents not to be visible as raw file hierarch, even if that must be a 403-forbidden-type index.html..

There are other more important steps I could do at leisure first, for example, renting a custom domain for the website and a better place to host that than GitHub..

An important point is to decide what language this website will be. I reckon that would be a shame not to use English as a practical means for exposing content to the wide world web, however most people I know speak only Portuguese. There is just so much time and effort I can put into this website, and as much of the purpose of creating this is for my recordings of research and ideas, collating references and links for easily accessing them later, just as much my intent is to share and spread these writings with everyone else.
That leaves me in a difficult position but it is decided I will write in whichever language, but I cannot promise as much content in both languages. I hope this is may serve as stimulus for those who would like to read more of my posts. It may also be useful, there may be some information I would rather not expose in either English or Portuguese..

I know a little Japanese, too. That was the biggest movement of my life when I went to Japan and lived in Meitoku Gijuku, a boarding school, for one year and a half. There is a long recollection text in portuguese I wrote just before leaving Japan. That is hosted online at the blog A Viagem de ShigueS O Espelho de Jamil.

The first post of this website is to sync its code to GitHub. I started learning shell scripting about one year and three months ago and simple html code seems a good next choice because of its usefulness.

Watching m1xolyd1an videos about Bitcoin, he go me excited about html, as m1xolyd1an uses that (and other languages on top, too,) to hash Bitcoin addresses.

Plus, it struck me just the other day I could make my father, who is a lawyer, a website (he said he has got one but I could not find it on the internet).

Also, a friend of mine asked me to help him make a website last year and I could not be helpful (he has got a very stylish website now, he paid a professional, which I am glad for!).

Some references about website design:

Top-notch web tips

  Dan's web tips (from usenet)

  John Bokma (from usenet)

  Robin Willians

  Tom O'Haver -- How to Make a Web Page

  CSS Tricks (advanced)

  Top ten mistakes in web design

  Eric A. Meyer

  Henri Sivonen

Acceptable or admirable website designs

  Richard Stallman

  Ken Thompson

  Dennis Richie

  Brian Kernighan also see (a), (b)

  Ted Nelson

  Simon St.Laurent

  Gringene

  Luke Smith

  SlackJeff (pure HTML and CSS)

  Thobias

  Aurelio Jargas (he seems to use many programmes to generate pages)

  Mauro Rebelo (one of my first inspirations to start this blog, however Mauro's newer blog design is poor)

More

  W3school's Tags, Tag validator

  W3school's Css, Css validator

  Mozilla's HTML Tags

  HTML5Doctor HTML Tips

  HTML5 Standards for normal developers

  HTML.com Tags

  Html5Doctor on Microformats

  Mozilla on Microformats

  CSS Selectors & Combinators (a), (b), (c), (d)

  ScreamingFrog Crawler, for usage see (a), (b)

  Many tools..

Next step, I will detach this post from the front page -- ok!

This post will have to become a rough draft for an html post skeleton for future posts..

A very good website structure is needed to be able to scale the amount of code without much frustration..

Setting meta tags for <head> seems to be majorly important.. Interestingly, Luke Smith webpage has got almost no meta tags.. Actually, many websites don't seem to care about html tags at all, with the exception of the charset and http-equiv attributes.

It has been a few days since I started studying html for this website project. Now I am checking lots of websites source code. In Firefox, just press <CTR+U> to see the source code.

This website may seem already abandoned, but in fact, I have been putting some effort in writing good source html code in the three pages this web site has already got. Specially, I was worried about the meta tags, and now many important ones are added to the <head> section of the pages.

A visitor counter is added to the home page, but visibility is not enabled and I am not sure whether leaving it on is any good, because I cannot be sure what external scripts they may be running with my visitors, plus as I will access my website the most frequently, probably it will count only my own traffic..

That would be very similar to GitHub traffic to my repos, though I am not 100% sure, much of the traffic GitHub shows me in the insight section seems to be from myself when re-cloning own repos to update them.. Sometimes it is clear there is some traffic not from me, though..

I had to finally deal with solving a problem with my vim configuration.. The problem was using a parentheses colourising plugin from Luochen1990 called rainbow, which just messed up my syntax highlighting.. I removed it and now set to using kien's rainbow parentheses which is a little harder to use and has got a hidden command RainbowParenthesesLoadChevrons but that, I am mostly sure, is to avoid new users enabling it with incompatible language highlighters on. For example, the rainbow chevrons option must not be enabled when html syntax highlighting is also enabled, unless you want to break the html syntax highlighters..

Also, installed mattn's vim-emmets plugin, which really helps with writing html tags.. I actually found that on Arch Linux User Repository (AUR) .

I am being careful to writing these canonical html source pages because if I do hurry up and write bad html sources, I would need rewriting them later at some point. When my studying of Dan's Web Tips is finished (see reference above), I will be ready..

PS: I have included a google analytics script in the home page and will leave that on for some time, just to see how that works for now.
I checked Dan's web tips website and he has got an analytics/statistics script, so maybe that is not 100% an evil thing to do.. He also seems to have had a simple visitor counter before that, which is now commented out in the page HTML code.. I checked and it reached 38000+ hits before being commented out in favor of his new analytics script..

PPS: it seems that the bad thing is not really getting website guest statistics as much as showing ads! Content quality may decrease when all the author wants is the advertisement revenue.. For example, youtube incites vlog authors to make any type of content in large quantities in order to have channel monetisation via ad views..

PPPS: one of the trackers I was testing uses a third-party services matomo [[dot]] org which seems a very suspicious company. As their advertising of user information collection and selling is so outspoken in their website, I am removing it.. I will leave Google Analytics, though.