Finland’s weekly news show in Latin cancelled after run of 30 years

Finland’s weekly news show in Latin cancelled after run of 30 years

“Nuntii Latini finiti,” was the blunt headline: after three decades on air, Finnish public radio’s weekly Latin news bulletin was over. In terrarum orbe unicum – unique in the world – for most of its unexpectedly long life, Nuntii Latini was a five-minute review of world events, broadcast every Friday just after the main six o’clock news, in Latin, in Finland. “It was precious,” said Christian Laes, a professor of ancient history at Manchester University, who along with other leading Latin academics led a global listeners’ protest imploring the Finnish broadcaster Yle to save the show when it was first threatened with closure in 2017.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Temperatures in France cross 45°C threshold for first time since records began

Temperatures in France cross 45°C threshold for first time since records began

The meteorology agency warned that temperatures could rise even further throughout the afternoon and said: “We need to wait until the end of the day to know which town will hold the record as France’s hottest city.” Read more: Hundreds of schools closed throughout France as temperatures top 40C

A heatwave has struck the whole European continent this week. “In terms of the time of year and spatial pattern of warmth, the ongoing event in Europe is quite similar to the 2015 European heatwave, which most severely affected southern and central Europe, which set the all-time temperature records for Germany and Switzerland,” Day said, adding that we will need to wait until after the peak of this event to really know how severe it has been.

Source: www.euronews.com

White House weighs restriction to end to end encryption

White House weighs restriction to end to end encryption

Senior Trump administration officials met on Wednesday to discuss whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using forms of encryption that law enforcement can’t break — a provocative step that would reopen a long-running feud between federal authorities and Silicon Valley. The encryption challenge, which the government calls “going dark,” was the focus of a National Security Council meeting Wednesday morning that included the No. 2 officials from several key agencies, according to three people familiar with the matter. Tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have increasingly built end-to-end encryption into their products and software in recent years — billing it as a privacy and security feature but frustrating authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography.

Source: www.politico.com

Qwant Maps: opensource and privacy-preserving map

Qwant Maps: opensource and privacy-preserving map

Thus Qwant Maps uses OpenStreetMap data to generate its own vector tiles, its own base map, its own web APIs. Also Qwant Maps feeds its geoparsing web service as well as its online applications thanks to OpenStreetMap data. All components developed by Qwant Maps are open source so that users can contribute directly to improve their experience with the map: they can contribute either to the Qwant Maps code or to the enrichment of the data directly in OpenStreetMap.

Source: betterweb.qwant.com

Eva – A distributed entity-attribute-value database in Clojure

Eva – A distributed entity-attribute-value database in Clojure

We don’t use to make a query but rather we obtain an immutable database value like so:

Next we execute a query that returns all entity ids in the system matching the doc string . The simplest data-modification commands ( , ) correspond to the accumulative tuples described above:

When this transaction is committed it will produce the following tuples in the database history (where is the next transaction-number):

In addition to the command-form, you can also create/update data using the object/map form of an entity:

This form is equivalent to the command-form:

Because all stored data reduces to EAVT tuples, schemas are defined per Attribute, rather than per Entity. Additionally, development on Eva began before many powerful features of Datomic were released, including Datomic Cloud and Datomic Client.

Source: github.com

Temperatures in France cross 45C threshold for first time ever: Meteo France

Temperatures in France cross 45C threshold for first time ever: Meteo France

Read more: Hundreds of schools closed throughout France as temperatures top 40C

A heatwave has struck the whole European continent this week. “In terms of the time of year and spatial pattern of warmth, the ongoing event in Europe is quite similar to the 2015 European heatwave, which most severely affected southern and central Europe, which set the all-time temperature records for Germany and Switzerland,” Day said, adding that we will need to wait until after the peak of this event to really know how severe it has been. “While the seasonal average is not a perfect indicator of the risk of heatwaves (or of the severity of any such events), over Europe there is a direct correlation: seasons which include more heatwaves than usual are likely to record above-average seasonal means.”

Source: www.euronews.com

I Felt the Fear of Abduction by China in Hong Kong. Appeasing Bejing Has to Stop

I Felt the Fear of Abduction by China in Hong Kong. Appeasing Bejing Has to Stop

In China’s huge city boulevards and vast deserts and mountains, my thoughts always felt imprisoned, but in Hong Kong’s narrow streets and tiny, cramped bookshops they were set free and given infinite space to wander. Shortly before setting off for the Hong Kong literary festival to discuss my novel China Dream, a satire of Xi’s tyrannical rule, I was told that the Tai Kwun arts centre no longer wished to host my events. But in China in 1989, and in Hong Kong this month, they brought out the best of human nature: courage, wisdom, compassion.

Source: www.theguardian.com

A Unicorn Lost in the Valley, Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

A Unicorn Lost in the Valley, Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

Smiling cryptically, Ian Small, the chief executive of Evernote, handed me some socks. At the peak of Evernote’s success, as part of an ambitious plan to expand from software factory to lifestyle brand, the company sold the socks and other “exceptional products that satisfy our desires for greater ease and efficiency,” like high-end scanners and backpacks made by Côte&Ciel, a French boutique. Instead, the company cycled through four chief executives, several rounds of layoffs, three office closings and the shuttering of numerous side projects, including Japanese-made smart covers for your feet.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Eva: An open source entity-attribute-value database in Clojure

Eva: An open source entity-attribute-value database in Clojure

We don’t use to make a query but rather we obtain an immutable database value like so:

Next we execute a query that returns all entity ids in the system matching the doc string . The simplest data-modification commands ( , ) correspond to the accumulative tuples described above:

When this transaction is committed it will produce the following tuples in the database history (where is the next transaction-number):

In addition to the command-form, you can also create/update data using the object/map form of an entity:

This form is equivalent to the command-form:

Because all stored data reduces to EAVT tuples, schemas are defined per Attribute, rather than per Entity. Additionally, development on Eva began before many powerful features of Datomic were released, including Datomic Cloud and Datomic Client.

Source: github.com