CALLING ALL COOL CATS!!

               

                       

                       

                      

Difficult

  'Il l'a cherché...' (He asked for it...) I thought it and said it in 

an unreflective moment the day after the murder of Samuel P., 

the French teacher who had shown the Charlie hebdo caricatures 

of the Prophet in a class on Freedom of Expression. I wouldn't have

done that and - apparently - neither would have Justin Trudeau,

the teacher. He has been quoted to the effect that it is a simple question

of respect.

Yet, in France, the response from president Macron has been a clear "Nous ne 

céderons pas' (We are not compromising on this!). While the 'this' in question

is some pretty rude humor. Even the very serious Le Monde has been with Macron, 

because France is a non-religious polity and won't tolerate 'l'intégrisme'

in any form.

Looking at the question again, especially in light of a second attack, this time

killing three in a Church in Nice, I am forced to reconsider. France is a Republic,

where every citizen carries his or her own conception of the State. Indeed,

the bloody history that ended monarchy in France was itself the product of extreme

rudeness about the behavior and the very person of Aristocrats. Louis XVI was 

overweight and bored; Marie-Antoinette coquette, and flirty; Versailles was an endless

sleep-over given over to excess. What was all this in service of? A new conception

of the person, not divine but self-interested and that was okay. We hold each other in

check.

So, undoubtedly, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo themselves 'asked for it' with their

outrageous humor; it was their job, if you will. Making a French society where 18 year-olds

need not be murderers to gain the respect of their families or the redemption of their souls.

It is a difficult fight.

Restart

  Closest I have come to a built-in pause function

in Love 2d is the following. It makes the program restart after exit.

I am NOT giving up!!

                                              *     *     *

https://rvagamejams.com/learn2love/pages/01-01-interactive-coding.html

A suggested pause function:

https://rvagamejams.com/learn2love/pages/02-08-reading-documentation.html

Will be testing this out ASP! 😊

                                            *     *     *

Works like gangbusters. As the little film below shows, the

quit code works as well as the top-right x on the window. And I have

made a pause twice with the space key ( and exited pause with that

same key both times).

Tormorrow, will try adapting this approach to bird12!?

The Office

 Who needs to go to the office:

 

                                           *     *     *

Bob Woodward on Donald Trump:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-can-you-not-be-worried-a-42133579-7a1e-495c-9d61-f74b2f5603a6

Assignment

 Been struggling to complete the Flappy Bird assignment.

There is just no getting around it, I am going to have to figure

out how this thing works, and learn Love2d lua.

So lua is a simple, easy-to work with scripting language which one

can master using an interpreter. One would be on command prompt

for the code below.

https://www.lua.org/pil/1.html

Love2d is a friendly game engine on which one codes in lua.It does

have its own requirements.

https://love2d.org/wiki/love

As page 1 would have it, the usual game sequence is load__update__draw.

Yessum, that first example works!! One merely needs to put the code

in a file called 'main.lua'. And that code, in a folder to be dragged over the

Love2d shortcut.

1966

 It's 1966 all over again in downtown Montreal: 

no coffee shops to lounge in, and office workers going to

work in their cars!! 😏

https://www.msn.com/fr-ca/actualites/r-gion-de-montr-al/coronavirus-portrait-sombre-du-centre-ville-de-montr%c3%a9al/ar-BB1aiQjK?ocid=msedgntp

Astonishing

 A rather astonishing piece of news went through, yesterday,

and nobody commented. the US has joined with a number of

'hard-on-women' governments to promote its agenda of family

values. The Trump administration does get things done...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/us-trump-administration-signs-anti-abortion-declaration

                                        *     *     *

source: Libération

author: Julien Lecot 

translation: GoogleTranslate/doxa-louise

Thirty-two countries unite against the right to abortion

Alex Azar, the Trump administration's health secretary, at the Capitol in Washington on October 2. Photo J. Scott Applewhite. Reuters 

In a joint declaration, the governments of the United States, Brazil and Hungary affirm their desire for national sovereignty on laws related to abortion.

 Thirty-two countries unite against the right to abortion

"There is no international right to abortion, nor any obligation of states to finance or facilitate abortion" : 32 countries, including the United States, Brazil and Egypt, proudly co-signed a joint declaration which directly attacks the right to terminate pregnancy. This "declaration for women's health and family strengthening" , scheduled to be presented to the World Health Assembly which is held every year in Geneva, was unveiled this Thursday by Alex Azar, Mr. Health of the Trump administration, in a  virtual ceremony . 

Declaration praises 'traditional families'

Niched in the midst of progressive ideas such as access for women to  "quality education"  or to  "the same chances of accessing a job as men", the text clearly affirms a desire to restrict the right to 'access  abortion', under the pretext of  "the well-being of women"  and  "preservation of human life". The declaration also does not fail to extol the merits of  “traditional families” (meaning, heterosexual couples). Among the signatories, many African states. Also included are Indonesia or Pakistan, and on the European continent, Hungary and Poland.

"Some wealthy nations, and United Nations agencies, wrongly assert that abortion is a universal human right," said Alex Azar during the ceremony. The Secretary of Health advanc, flags waving on his back:  "We affirm that governments have the sovereign right to create their own laws to protect innocent lives and to write their regulations on abortion."  

Extreme conservative rhetoric

His speech finished, and after an intervention by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, video statements by representatives of the 32 signatory states were broadcast. "We defend the place of the family as the central unit of our society, and reaffirm our duty to protect life, from its conception" , says Ernesto Araujo, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil. Katalin Novak, Hungarian Minister for the Family, is indignant at a time when “the traditional values ​​of our societies are constantly under attack” , while women are given “false obligations pushing them to compete. with men, and to give up the privilege of becoming mothers ” .

If this flourishing of conservative speeches is cause for concern, the declaration presented this Thursday has above all a symbolic value. It marks one more step in the war waged by some governments against abortion and LGBT minorities, such as in the United States where many states have tightened access to voluntary termination of pregnancy. Or, more recently in Poland, where it was declared unconstitutional to terminate in the event of malformation of the fetus .

Julien Lecot

Health Care

 A few glimmers of clarity in the American Health Care

debate:

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/trump-biden-health-care_n_5f8741c8c5b6c4bb54723669?ri18n=true

What is perhaps at issue, but never really looked at, is the extent to which

health care insurance represents a mutualization of risk . In the Canadian system,

one pays taxes and receives the primary care one needs. that's it! In the the 

American system, some people seem to be paying more and receiving less while 

others 'cash in' from being sick... or not. Perhaps the oddest aspect of the whole debate.

https://www.hioscar.com/blog/how-health-insurance-works-risk-sharing

Curfew

Paris is on curfew for a month, from 9pm to 6am.

Who's out? Policemen and food delivery.

source: AFP/La Presse

Make it pepperoni!

                                               *     *     *

And for those interested in retro graphics for sprites:

https://www.aseprite.org/

Interesting

It's raining and we've been red-zoned. "The best

decision possible from a public health point of view'.

👳‍♀️

I'm off to buy canned soup. Below, a really interesting journey

by someone undergoing bariatric surgery for the second time;

this time, in Tijuana, Mexico. 

More Flappy Bird

 Another day with Flappy: an exponential function pulls him down,

a negative exponential inches him back up. Easy...

Flappy_1

 Have moved on to looking at how Flappy Bird is

put together. Our problem: how to give the illusion that

our bird is moving. We will be using the parallax scrolling 

effect: two things are moving but not at the same speed. The 

background line has to move faster than the mountains in the

 background. We are setting the one at twice the speed of the 

other. 60:30 pixels per second.

The images themselves are made to loop thanks to the modulus

function. Code below:

The trick is to then draw the image at its negative:

we draw our images shifted to the left by their looping point...

To better appreciate what is going on, I added a stripe across

the mountainous backdrop: it goes from dark to light:

This is what happens when I open bird1:

Going Red

 St-Jean sur Richelieu is going red as of Friday, October 16 2020.

🤨

No more lattes for a while...

source: Cyberpresse

                                             *     *     *

Granted, there isn't much that one can say in favour of military

dictatorship. Except that now, I think I might have something.

China put Wuhan through hell, forcing everyone to stay inside

and grow potatoes on the window sill , with occasional rice deliveries.

Home! Hom! Home!  Folks listened and they have controlled

the epidemic like no one else. Whereas we - I am speaking for Quebec, now -

seem caught in this hellish situation that the darn numbers keep going up

at every turn. Damper here and things flare somewhere else...

And I don't think it is a matter of lack of discipline on the part of Quebecers. 

We don't need any tut tutting! I think it is because the rules we are given 

are incoherent, especialy if followed as rules, and not guideposts to what 

should be happening. China sending everyone to their rooms had the effect of

letting the latent coronovirus cases develop. Everyone is sick until the

incubation period is over. Everyone.

Herd immunity cannot be relied upon, check. But pockets of good behavior

in an otherwise open system cannot but lead to flare ups. Pick-up food, hair dressers, 

washer repair people...everyone needs to work. But unless and until there

are cures and vaccines that work, we cannot advance much without consequences.

No more bullying, please!

If you go out, you rest on the bench after. That's how I have been living.

It is not a matter of 'legal' behavior.

                                       *     *     *

Investment

source: Journal de Montreal

author: AFP Monday, October 12, 2020

translation: GoogleTranslate/doxa-louise

AstraZeneca: US invests in COVID-19 treatment

The US government is investing nearly half a billion dollars in the development and large-scale distribution of a treatment for COVID-19 from the British laboratory AstraZeneca, in late clinical trials, the giant pharmaceutical company in a statement Monday. 

With an investment of $ 486 million, the US government will contribute to the development and distribution of 100,000 doses by the end of 2020 and may acquire a million more in 2021, he says.

"The AZD7442 antibody combination is advancing rapidly in phase 3 trials", adds the group.

Two trials "in the United States and elsewhere" will "enroll 6,000 adults for the prevention of COVID-19 and additional trials on about 4,000 adults will focus on the treatment of contaminations" by the new coronavirus, t is claimed .

The pharmaceutical group, which is developing in parallel with the University of Oxford a "vaccine candidate", considered one of the most promising, announced at the end of August that it had launched phase 1 trials on its drug AZD7442, already funded to the tune of $ 25 million by the US government.

The drug AZD7442 is a combination of two long-lasting antibodies derived from convalescent COVID-19 patients, discovered by the US Medical Center at Vanderbilt University and licensed by AstraZeneca in June.

                                                            *     *     *

GameState

Sometimes, I just have to congratulate myself for being thorough:

been listening to every word of the Pong lecture and caught that

certain things are done "for computer engineering purposes". 

In this case, collision detection should be a boolean ie return

true or false, and not do anything else. Other structures will take care of 

what happens next.

Also just found out about game state modelling. Below, an example of how

to keep track of game state for a Mario-type game. Pong just works from

'if... then' constructs, but more elaborate games will be making use of this.

Finally, got the reference for sounds that can be used for small games like Pong:

www.bfxr.net

Quick Ten

 No, water-weight is not a lame excuse for putting on wieght.

If one has been on a low-carb diet, chances are one has used up 

glycogen from the liver and muscles, a quick-use form of fat stored in 

a 1:3 proportion with water. The body stores between 1 and 2 pounds of

glycogen, so depleting stores can drop a quick ten pounds.

And, of course, those ten will come right back the minute one eats carbs 

again...

https://www.barilife.com/blog/how-can-i-tell-if-my-liver-is-shrinking/

https://www.leanhigh.com/glycogen-weight-loss

Pong7

 Nice, nice, nice!

Once one hits Pong7, one encounters Object Oriented

Programming. Classes are not built into LOVElua, but the

project defines class itself. In short, LOVE is designed so that one

can do this. One can see what is involved - in my experience - for

th first time. And I have finally come to appreciate what the concept

of class simplifies in programming: it is a handy form of housekeeping

which dramatically reduces the amount of coding needed. 

So Ball is now an instance of a class, and has a method called update.

All I have to do is call this in main, and the position of the ball gets updated...

From Ball.lua:

From main.lua:

The next game intro references two books that seem very interesting. The

first goes into the particularities of the LOVE engine. The second - which one can 

read online - talks about game paradigms.

Poignant

 Paris Fashion Week has brought some creative adaptations to 

the pnademic restrictions. Fashion House Miu Miu showed it's collection

sprts-themed virtually, with people watching from various restaurants. 

The twist: the commentator screens showed people from the audience.

It is, in fact, rather poignant. Watch Lila Moss (yes, daughter of Kate Moss)

open the show:

Macaroni

 Well, call it macaroni! The pong game our Gaming course is taking us

through runs on a virtual screen, defined thanks to a LOVE lua

libray of functions called 'push'. Stuff happens in delta time, that fraction of a second, 

used by one's computer to re-draw. Just specify 'push' as required and use the relevant

variables one wants to work with and go.

Below, the code for moving the paddles. The left works on 'w' and

's', the right on 'up' and 'down'. Awesomely clever!

CCases

Estimates form the World Health Organization are that

some 10% of the World population may have been infected

by COVID-19, which would mean a very serious stretch ahead.

Officially reported cases are much lower, around 10% of the population

of the United States. From Le Monde:

https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2020/05/05/coronavirus-age-mortalite-departements-pays-suivez-l-evolution-de-l-epidemie-en-cartes-et-graphiques_6038751_4355770.html

Walter_Reed

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trumps-specialist-hospital-suite-looks-more-like-a-fine-hotel-0qn52wfss

                                                  *     *     *

https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/how-to-understand-trumps-evolving-condition

                                                  *     *     *

Woa; it's a brad new banana game!

Halves

 https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-to-game-development

Getting into this Game course. For me, half the battle is

getting set up!

The below code -given Pong0 and its main.lua on the C drive - will open, as well.

*     *     *

The course itself is being given by someone on a Mac, but it is easy enough to

follow from a windows 10 machine. 

This is explained in the first lecture, which deals with looking at the classic Pong

game: LOVE itself is a runtime, but without  an interface. Lua is the coding

language, so that running anything involves dragging it unto the runtime.

Seems primitive, but it is actually time-saving. All of the game is in code blocks

one either uses as such or overrides with new values. One can navigate form  the

command prompt, but I have chosen to work from the desktop. 

The ever-growing code is in segments one can either look at or run by dragging the

segment over the LOVE shortcut. LOVE itself stays in Program Files and love.exe

is what opens the game window.

https://love2d.org/wiki/Getting_Started

https://github.com/Games50/pong

Regeneron

source: Le Nouvel Observateur/AFP October 3, 2020

translation: GoogleTranslate/doxa-louise

What we know about the "experimental treatment" against the Coronavirus that will benefit President Trump

Experts point out the danger of injecting the most powerful man in the world with a drug that is certainly promising but still so little tested.

US President Donald Trump is being treated with an experimental treatment against Covid-19 , synthetic antibodies, and is suffering from fatigue, the White House doctor announced on Friday without giving more details on the president's symptoms.

"This afternoon, the president continues to suffer from fatigue but is in high spirits," Sean Conley, the president's doctor, said in a statement.

Experimental cocktail

He said he was injected with a dose of the experimental cocktail developed by biotechnology company Regeneron, which has shown encouraging preliminary results in clinical trials on a small number of patients. He received the highest dose, 8 grams.

Donald Trump also takes zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin and aspirin, according to his doctor.

Experts are examining the president and will make recommendations for "next steps," the doctor added. Other experts also point to the danger of injecting the most powerful man in the world with a drug that is certainly promising but still so little tested, because of the possible side effects.

A treatment worth 600 million dollars in subsidies

Sean Conley said Melania Trump, also infected, was suffering from a "mild cough and headache" . But he did not give more details on Donald Trump's condition, beyond the fatigue experienced.

Synthetic antibodies are made in laboratories and, when injected into a patient's body, work on the virus to neutralize it just as the immune system is supposed to do. Last week, Regeneron announced that in a trial of 275 patients, the cocktail reduced the amount of virus in infected patients who were out of hospital and accelerated their recovery.

A triple cocktail using the same method showed its effectiveness against Ebola last year.

Regeneron has received more than $ 600 million from the US government to develop this treatment. The Eli Lilly laboratory is also developing synthetic antibodies against Covid-19 and previously announced promising preliminary results. But neither of the two treatments has yet received marketing authorization.

Tahini

In my on-going efforts to eat healthy and keep

the forces of decadence at bay, I recently bought

a jar of Tahini, which is sesame seed butter. It looks just

like natural peanut butter, only a touch lighter-colored.

150 calories per 2 tablespoons.

It is quite a healthy food - no carbs - and offers what

is considered  'good' fat and a protein boost. It tastes

bitter as anything. Indeed, one is advised is to  pair 

it with lemon juice and maple syrup for use as a spread: 

hence the recipe for humus which adds olive oil and chickpeas 

ie astringent and sweet.

My tasting adventures so far:

- Nice when added to mayo or mayo and sour cream dressing.

One can eat a salad meal and feel not hungry, with a satisfied

feeling. Tastes nutty.

- Hilarious when mixed with almond butter and used as a spread.

Tastes like... Wait for it...peanut butter. Expensive peanut butter!!

- Mixed with actual peanut butter and used as a spread -see if you can guess -

tastes like the brown envelope on peanuts in the shell. You can make

an 'envelope' sandwich.

- The above spread, and add banana, tasts like a spread version of the whole

wheat bread of the sandwich. Thus, a liquid bread sandwich.

Weird, I know. Hey, I'm still standing.

🍌

LOVE2d

 Long story short, have found a new free Harvard course

that seems awesome. Bilds onCS50, the introductory computing course,

this one on Game Development.

After much travail, got LOVE2d installed and working. Needed help

from YouTube to do it.

The programming language is Lua.

12 lectures to go...

                                           *     *     *

Reaction

 For a vieww of world reaction to the Trump annoucement

of a covid-19 diagnosis:

https://www.lapresse.ca/international/etats-unis/2020-10-02/trump-atteint-de-la-covid-19/vague-de-reactions-et-incertitude.php

THE DEBATE (Libé)

source: Libération

author: Frédéric Autan

transaltion: GoogleTranslate/doxa-louise

INTERVIEW

Trump-Biden debate "reinforces the idea that the United States is going through a dark period"

President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden during their first debate in Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday night. Photo Jonathan Ernst. Reuters 

For researcher Célia Belin, the first chaotic televised duel between Donald Trump and Joe Biden did not change the dynamics of a campaign marked by deep division.

Political scientist Célia Belin, a specialist on the United States and researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, looks back on the first televised debate between President Trump and his rival Joe Biden. An "atrocious" duel during which the former Democratic vice-president, however, succeeded, she believes, in highlighting the empathy which is the strength of her campaign.

Were you surprised by the brutality of this debate?

Donald Trump has not changed in four years. He is exactly the same debater. He is a "bully" ,  that is to say, he is in total invective. He seeks personal attack, humiliation, to demean his opponent, to impress him,  to not let him speak. What surprised me more is that despite the preparation that Camp Biden has boasted about, the former vice-president was a little tricked by Donald Trump. Without going so far as to losse his temper, he reacted very strongly, telling his rival to "shut up" , calling him a "clown". Whenever he had two-minute segments in which Trump pretty much let him speak, as the understanding between the two campaigns required , Biden tried to take the high road, to expose his vision. But since he was under fire from Donald Trump, he allowed himself to be distracted too much.

On several occasions, Biden nonetheless addressed  Americans directly, looking at the camera ...

And these were the strongest moments of the debate. The few times he actually addressed the American people, it was extremely effective. All this had been obviously carefully prepared, as for example on health olicy. He basically said to Americans, “It's about your health, your family. It is you who are at home, facing economic difficulties, you whose children do not go to school. The President hasn't looked after you, and we can do something. I have a plan for this. ”  Every time Biden has spoken directly to the Americans, we have seen the strength of his campaign, which is empathy., his ability to understand the suffering of people, because he himself has known many trials in his life. This is the opposite of the temperament of President Trump, who has always valued winners and never had a word of compassion, or so little, for the more than 200,000 Americans who have died of Covid and their families, for them: people stricken by unemployment or for blacks victims of police violence.

Donald Trump often attacks Joe Biden on his age, his lack of energy, his physical and mental capacities. He did not do so during the debate. What did you think of Joe Biden's performance?

He didn't seem confused, and I don't think this debate fueled the rumor of senility spread by Trump supporters on social media, and which the President often brings up in his gatherings. However, Biden did not put on a very good performance, we know that the debates are not his forte. Although he had probably practiced a lot, especially to use short sentences, I did not find him particularly good. Between the two men, Trump has shown more vitality, there is no doubt. He's punchier, bounces back faster, and like many people, Joe Biden sometimes loses track of what he's saying when he's constantly interrupted. It's very unique to compete with Donald Trump in this field, and Biden hasn't been particularly successful. But I don't believe this debate has changed the underlying dynamic. The polls put Biden in the lead, and as such, it was up to Trump to turn the tide, and he didn't.

Donald Trump has repeatedly accused his rival of being the puppet of the "radical left" . Joe Biden responded by clearly distancing himself from the left of the Democratic Party. Could it cost him votes among the progressives?

There is a sacred union of the left to beat Donald Trump. There is a general realization, including among the more progressive fringes of America, that no breakthrough will take place if he remains in power. This is also accompanied by a realization that the Supreme Court will soon be very largely dominated by  conservatives., once the next judge is confirmed, which is sure to happen. The goal of progressives right now is to beat Trump. So I do not believe that the positions taken during the debate by Joe Biden, whether it is his stranglehold on the party or the rejection of the Green New Deal, will cost him votes, or in extremely small circles. His response was intended to reassure and to leave no possibility for Trump to equate him with the "radical left". However, the day after the results, if Joe Biden wins, the progressive left will come at full speed to knock on his door, especially if it advances in the next Congress. The internal battle within the Democrats will resume.

One of the highlights of the debate was Donald Trump's refusal to clearly disassociate himself from white supremacists ...

He does not want to denounce these small groups, these armed militias , because it is those people who come to his meetings, who contribute to his fervent base of supporters. I did not expect anything else, but I am still shocked that the President of the United States failed to denounce white supremacists, and at the same time finds himself in a form of implicit support for groups whose dangerousness is established. Multiple attacks, in the United States and abroad, have been carried out in the name of these supremacist beliefs. And it is the number one priority of the FBI today, ahead of Islamist terrorism.

This implicit support is all the more worrying in a context of questioning of the integrity of the elections, in particular by the President ...

It is indeed beginning to become clear to observers of American political life. There have been violent clashes between militants and militiamen in recent months, which have left several dead in Wisconsin and Portland. Such political violence is very rare. What can happen if Trump does not recognize the outcome of the polls  ? He demonstrated during the debate that he has no intention of recognizing the result of the postal vote. He said it again, the moment that matters is election night, and we know he could be in the lead then as his supporters vote more in person, while Biden's vote. more by correspondence, and the ballots will take time to be counted.

Some Americans are deeply worried, because Trump's accusations of fraud, as well as his refusal to denounce the armed groups that are favorable to him, raise fears of episodes of violence, or at least of intimidation. The most shocking thing he did during the debate was once again to call on his supporters to come and watch the election. We know very well that it is not just a question of setting up citizen observation. Behind this call, there is a form of intimidation. He wants his supporters, by their presence in numbers, to demonstrate their strength. And this echoes his refusal, a few days ago, to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

Does this brutal debate ultimately sum up the state of division of the country and of the American political class?

It must be remembered that the three debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton four years ago were not very glorious either. Nobody expected this Tuesday evening to bring grand ideas and deep exchanges of points of view. Still, yes, it was atrocious to watch. And that signals to everyone  that the United States is really going through a very dark time, made even more difficult by the Covid epidemic. Democrats are deeply concerned for the future of their country. And Republican America, faced with the scarecrow of the radical left that Trump wields, also feels threatened and anxious. As Joe Biden said to Donald Trump on Tuesday night, "you have divided this country". And it's true that this is what we remember from four years of Trump's presidency: the divisions, the deep political tension. It leads to that kind of debate. We couldn't expect much else.

Frédéric Autran