@lotlizard
harried and I appear to have done a pretty sloppy job. Thanks.

[comment:body]

@Lookout
naturally, we have showers forecast.

another 0.8 inches of rain yesterday. Everything is turning green, budding out, and blooming. Old man winter's frosty breath may reap havoc, but may be not. Almost 60 degrees this morning.

It is a trail clearing day for me. Lots of lopping going down. I've neglected what was once a drivable lane at the bottom of the orchard. It has grown so thick that you can hardly walk it....so out with the saw and loppers. Life in the humid subtropics. I've hired a helper for the project that ought to take about 4 hours.

Love the Ry Cooder piece about bankers. Thanks for the OT el!

@HenryAWallace

Numerology: 2 + 6 = 8, which is a money number, which means only that money will be even more important than usual, not necessarily that you will get some. However, to figure out what's going on for today, you also have to add 2 for the month and 2+0+1+8 for the year. So, it goes 2+2+6+2+0+1+8 for the month, date and year. That adds up to 21, or 2+1, which boils down to 3, which is a social number. So, friends, community, etc. will be more important than usual today.

Supposedly.

@eyo

So says Big Al in another essay this morning, I'm with him, says me. heh

Thanks for hosting Open Thread, cheers el! Extra points during house guests and other chaos. whoop

The Indigo Girls - Galileo - 10/2/1994 - Shoreline Amphitheatre
Sing along ...

Thanks y'all!

--- one big happy family
Apple confirms it uses Google's cloud for iCloud

Apple periodically publishes new versions of a PDF called the iOS Security Guide. For years the document contained language indicating that iCloud services were relying on remote data storage systems from Amazon Web Services, as well as Microsoft's Azure.

But in the latest version, the Microsoft Azure reference is gone, and in its place is Google Cloud Platform. Before the January update, Apple most recently updated the iOS Security Guide in March.

The latest update doesn't indicate whether Apple is using any Google cloud services other than core storage of "objects" like photos and videos. The document also doesn't make it clear when Apple started storing data in Google's cloud. Apple and Microsoft didn't respond to requests for comment.

That about covers every proprietary operating system available, doesn't it? good luck

Free Software, Free Society.

The free software movement is one of the most successful social movements to arise from computing culture, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing. But the ultimate success of the free software movement depends upon teaching our friends, neighbors and work colleagues about the danger of not having software freedom, about the danger of a society losing control over its computing.

@hecate
an amulet, nail uppermost, around the neck of Giordano Bruno's statue in the Campo de Fiori.

Ratzinger, before he became Pope Nazi IV, or whatever it was, opined that the Inquisition had been right, and Galileo wrong.

At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.

These days Galileo's bones are everywhere on the march, and sometimes you can buy them at an auction.

As a heretic he could not be given a proper church burial. But for years after his death, his followers in the circle of the grand dukes of Tuscany pushed to give him an honorable resting place.

Nearly a century later, in 1737, members of Florence’s cultural and scientific elite unearthed the scientist’s remains in a peculiar Masonic rite . . . According to a notary who recorded the strange proceedings, the historian and naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti used a knife to slice off several fingers, a tooth and a vertebra from Galileo’s body as souvenirs but refrained, it appears, from taking his brain. The scientist was then reburied in a ceremony, “symmetrical to a beatification[.]”

Galileo’s vertebra wound up at the University of Padua, famous for its medical school, while his middle finger wound up in the collection that formed the basis for the Galileo Museum. But the thumb, index finger and tooth disappeared in 1905, only to re-emerge last October, in an auction of reliquaries in Florence.

“He’s a secular saint, and relics are an important symbol of his fight for freedom of thought,” said Paolo Galluzzi, the director of the Galileo Museum, which put the tooth, thumb and index finger on view last month, uniting them with another of the scientist’s digits already in its collection.

“He’s a hero and martyr to science,” he added.