arkuat

arkuat @ 2009-10-19T14:33:00

2009-10-19T19:34:18Z

Convivial was wonderful, especially the Brother Seamus concert. I'm suddenly distraught that I don't actually own any Ween albums.

Writer's Block: And the Apple Goes To

2009-08-18T05:48:34Z

Who is/was your favorite teacher in school?

View 516 Answers

That is hard for me to answer. I can start with a list: Miss Davison in kindergarten (or was it Mrs Davison? She got married and changed her name halfway through the school year, and when I was five years old this business was quite mysterious to me). Mrs Haring in sixth grade, who encouraged me to write and illustrate my first science fiction story (it sucked, let me tell you: I named a planet Bodidley a good ten years or more before I became consciously aware of the musician I had named it after), or Mrs Curtis, the social studies and math teacher who played the double bass and took us to a White Sox game and separated me and two others out from the rest of the math class to force us to learn all the elementary-school math we had been shirking before sixth grade (I'm most grateful to her for that last part). Or David Pierato who taught me English in ninth and eleventh grade and who was the faculty sponsor of the school literary magazine that I edited for three issues from halfway through my junior year until I graduated. Mr Jenike, who gave me an F on my first history essay question responses in ninth grade, because I had not understood the instruction to answer "in complete coherent paragraphs, not in lists full of hyphens" (I'm paraphrasing the instruction), and who later taught me in the European History AP class. Dr Byerly, whose doctorate was in science education, and whose first lab got me wildly excited about thermodynamics because I fell straight into his trap and made wildly wrong predictions about the temperature vs time curve for heating ice-water to boiling, and who then explained carefully to us (and me) why we had predicted so wrongly. Coach Foreman, who taught the Chemistry AP class (which I never would have taken if it hadn't been for Byerly), and whose method was to retire to his office after a brief lecture, and allow all of us "AP" kids to teach one another the material (I think I got called on for a little help about partial pressures, but that's all the payback I gave my fellow students for teaching me elementary chemistry). Harriet Russell, who had run for office in Hamilton County as a Democrat many times, and who withstood my flaming adolescent Libertarianism unflinchingly while she taught me all about the many good and bad things that Andrew Jackson (among others) had done for his country. Mr. Brengelman, who not only taught me and my classmates Algebra I in a lecture-heavy way that was hard to learn from (but I learned something) but who also owned a used bookstore just down the street from where I lived on McMicken Ave where, during my last two years of high school, I could retreat onto comfy sofas and chairs on four floors full of bookshelves and read to my heart's content while listening to Radio Free Newport (WNOP, the local jazz station). I bought a lot of good used books from him, very cheap. Ms McIntyre, who ought to have flunked me out of Algebra 2 because of how poorly I did in the last quarter of the year, but passed me after I pleaded with her (I still don't know why). Mr Doyle, who taught me pre-calc and trigonometry while barely containing his temper against the vandals of the class. Ms McIntyre again, who taught me the rudiments of calculus (a non-AP class, this time), to build on Doyle's work.

Okay, that's enough. Sorry to my many, many teachers who didn't get a mention here.

recent reading: gorging on Egan

2009-07-14T22:00:26Z

So I happened across a hardback copy of Incandescence that the local public library was retiring from its shelves. ("So soon?" I thought, as I took it to the register to buy it. "Egan's fans in Minnesota must buy all their stuff off the internet and have no truck with deadtree public libraries.")

It was fantastic, and after I raved about it some, my sweetie lent me copies of Distress, which I had yet to read, Diaspora, which I had tried to read before but bounced off because I was going through a hard period in my life, and Permutation City, which I had read over a decade ago, but the rereading of which I thought would make it easier for me to get my head into Diaspora.

Distress and Diaspora were even more amazing than Incandescence. In fact, when I finished Diaspora, I immediately began to reread it, and didn't put it down until I had reread the first two chapters and part of the third (it was very late). I can't remember the last time I've done this with a book, or even been tempted to do it: I think I might have been tempted after reading some Niven & Pournelle paperback when I was a teenager.

I just checked the records, and I'm surprised that Distress didn't make the short-list for the Tiptree award in 1996. In fact, I'm surprised that Russell's The Sparrow beat it out to win that year. I loved The Sparrow, mind you, but not only is it not as good a novel as Distress, it also doesn't address the focus of the Tiptree award (fiction "that expands or explores our understanding of gender") as directly as Distress does.

I'm also a little stunned that Diaspora didn't even make the long-list in its year. (1998? I couldn't find it on http://www.flaminggeeks.com/jellyn/blog/tiptree.html). It's the most ambitious and amazing science fiction novel I have ever read. It's just what Egan's early career led me to hope for, and I feel foolish for having ignored it for ten years. The first half of it alone is more ambitious than the most ambitious sf novel I'd imagined ever reading. Okay, I'll stop squeeing now. It's really good, though. If you haven't read it yet, you ought to. Distress too.

arkuat @ 2009-05-23T15:36:00

2009-05-23T20:36:27Z

Having a wonderful time at Wiscon!

One Year Closer to Balance

2009-02-13T16:33:51Z

I'm working today, but I've been thinking about the holiday I'm observing. Today I'm not doing anything new or unusual to achieve balance in my life, but I'm continuing what started over the summer and took a great leap forward in December. I'm recovering from trying to take care of my parents, which had me very unbalanced indeed.

page 56 game

2009-01-10T14:19:57Z

page 56 game
Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions (and the previous sentences).
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Here's my fifth sentence from my page 56: "(This example is only suggestive; any Pu-239 formed in ancient stars would actually have been long gone before the Earth formed.)"

arkuat @ 2008-12-04T22:38:00

2008-12-05T06:40:49Z

Proroguing Canadian parliament for seven weeks? Now? What I want to know is what the hell did Steven Harper say to the GG.

Harry Browne, we hardly knew ye

2008-11-22T05:30:33Z

Yeah, I know about all the bad stuff about Perry Willis double-dealing with the party. But I just recently read for the first time some splendid things Harry Browne wrote during the time when I was ignoring him (which unfortunately for me extended until his death in 2006), about the recent wars and why they were wrong.

It starts here: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24444 and continues for three more installments.

I'm a bit disturbed about the prospect of having Clinton succeed Rice as Secretary of State. If this is going to be the case, then I sure hope that Obama has read these posts of Harry Browne and paid close attention to them. I fear that this is not the case.

The initiative in Arkansas that hurts kids who are already hurting.

2008-11-16T07:16:22Z

This is the worst. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/opinion/12savage.html

Arkansas passed a law prohibiting those “cohabitating outside a valid marriage” from adopting children, or, get this, even serving as foster parents.

The existing foster parent pool in most states needs to be weeded, no doubt, but a weeding so hamhanded as this uproots as much of the good crop as it does the weeds. Probably more, if you think of the uphill struggle that "unmarried cohabitants" probably have had to go through in Arkansas to become foster parents even before this vicious new law was passed. California's Prop 8, which I pray will be overturned, doesn't directly hurt the most oppressed class of people -- children who are wards of the state -- so directly as this initiative of the Arkansas electorate does.

abolition of nuclear weapons

2008-11-11T09:51:19Z

It was good to campaign against land mines. It was good to campaign against cluster bombs.

We've got global warming on our hands now, and one of the obvious responses to that is to turn to nuclear power.

And one of the obvious objections to that turn is the contemporary existence of nuclear weapons. Well, the obvious counter to that objection is to abolish nuclear weapons. Then we can get on with what we need to get on with.

The United States of America possesses the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world today. The USA in fact invented nuclear weapons and was the first and only nation to actually use them in anger, against Japan, which is now a faithful ally.

Before this planet can properly turn against anthropogenic global warming by turning toward use of nuclear energy, nuclear weapons must be abolished. And the one with the greatest stockpile of such weapons must lead the way. Given what our US government has done to intervene in the government of Iran before the revolution of 1979, there is no way in hell that we can persuade the current government of Iran to relinquish its efforts to develop nuclear weapons without taking steps to diminish, and ultimately to relinquish our own nuclear stockpile.

The United States of America must lead the way toward the relinquishment and abolition of nuclear weapons. No other nation will have any reason to take us seriously in this endeavour unless we lead the way ourselves.

good news about prop 8, and an interesting article in The Atlantic

2008-11-06T08:14:03Z

Jerry Brown went on teevee and explained that long-established legal precedent means that any enactment which doesn't specifically declare itself retroactive is only prospective. That's an Attorney General's stated opinion, so while prop 8 (while it is being fought out in the courts) prevents California from marrying any more same-sex couples, the same-sex couples that already got married in California before election day are still married with full legal force in California. So the framers of prop 8 neglected to arrange for it to annull any existing marriages (and if they hadn't, perhaps it wouldn't have passed). Arnie hasn't exactly rushed out any executive orders to the county clerks today, and they are kind of standing around wondering what exactly they're supposed to tell the new same-sex couples who come up to the window for marriage licenses.

This is good news. Because I hadn't analyzed things to this extent, I went out with desperate energy to vote against prop 8 because, semiconsciously, I was afraid it would legally annull some of my friends' marriages. I'm extremely relieved to realize that this is not the case.

In other news, I'm still all on tenterhooks about prop 11 and the Coleman-Franken recount in Minnesota. And hoping for a secretary of state whose response to a national government that hates America is to say "Wow, I have to go start up a conversation with those people and find out what the problems are" rather than to ignore them. The Atlantic has a great historical article about the transitions appointment process. Right now I'm hoping that Obama asks, and Gates agrees, for the current Secretary of Defense to stay on the job through the coming winter, because the pundits say that makes it much more likely that Bill Richardson (who wants to fly to your poor America-hating country and have conversations with your government before sending the military there) might get offered the Secretary of State job. And yes, Mr. Richardson, I know you will be as happy as a clam governing New Mexico for the next two years, that you love your job, and that you aren't looking for a job. We all know that at least one part of that wasn't true when you were running for the White House, though.

Unfortunately, I have to confess that if I were in Gates's position (and I have no such capability), I'd want out of that job commitment tout de suite. Gates has had to clean up Rumsfeld's mess, and had to oversee the Surge, which I, like everyone else who hated the invasion of March 2003 as a criminal attack of national insanity, opposed when it was first proposed. He has had a hard job of work, but he, more than anyone else, has the experience to manage the draw-down and the transition to local government. I hope he will stay on through February at least, even though I understand he might find Biden's past advocacy for the Balkanization of Iraq extremely disturbing.

I voted

2008-11-04T07:29:45Z

"Early", on the day before election day. The line, which took me ten or twenty minutes to get into after I arrived at the courthouse, was only forty minutes long or so. We were all sneakily intertwined along the corridors of the courthouse basement, with a courthouse worker who kept steadfastly walking up and down the line thanking us for turning out to vote and thanking us for hugging the wall on our right so's we could keep the passage clear. It was certainly a great people-watching opportunity.

I had to vote against Prop 8. I was also pleased to vote for Reb Kaplan for the Oakland City Council.

still trying to figure out my stupid california proposition votes

2008-11-01T07:50:24Z

Please advise:

My default strategy with California propositions (and I won't bore you with any further discussion of Alameda County or Oakland propositions) is to vote no.

On Proposition 8, my default strategy is eminently confirmed.

Now I'm going to discuss my puzzlements about which props I'm tempted to vote yes on, because that is the smaller set. Please do set me straight if you see that I'm stumbling into some sort of error.

These are my (tentative) yes props:

1A: will commit the state of California to building high-speed rail transit between the northern and the southern cities. Perhaps not phrased as well as an act of legislation ought to be, but I'm tempted to vote yes for it anyway.

5: Provides therapy and treatment to non-violent drug offenders instead of prison time. Given California's budget problems produced in part by prison overcrowding and inadequate prison health care (being rather harshly and expensively redressed by California courts right now), I'm inclined to vote for this. The opposition assures me that I'm voting for a get-out-of-jail-free card for the wickedest sort of meth dealer, but I'm thinking about more effective ways to steer California kids away from overuse and abuse of cannabis. Plus that fucking monstrous prison bill we pay out of every paycheck in this state and how to reduce it.

11: You had to be here. But if you've been watching poor Arnold struggling with the California budget this year, if you've been watching him closely, then you know that he was right in trying to reform California redistricting in his first package of proposition reforms. That one went down in flames (largely because the other propositions he was proposing back then were so bad), but Prop 11 meets with the approval of the League of Women Voters, and when the League of Women Voters and Arnold "My opponents are all girly-men" Schwarzenegger agree on something, I think it's time to reform California redistricting, and allow voters to choose their legislators instead of having legislators choose their electorate, the way it has been done recently in California to our disappointment and our dismay.

As for the rest of the non-local propositions on the California state ballot, if our legislators can't deal with these things without involving the electorate, then they aren't earning their legislative paychecks. Vote no, no, no, on all the rest. And especially vote no on prop 8: prop 8 is designed to undermine established Californian society, is un-American, unethical, and just plain nasty.

Vote no on California Prop 8.

2008-10-21T06:21:38Z

I wish I had already set up a proper local politics filter for this, but I haven't. I've already encouraged Californians to vote for Prop 11, but even though my own instinct is to vote No on any California proposition I haven't researched, I know this is not the case for everyone, and there's actually another proposition on the California ballot that I feel even more strongly about.

If you live in California, and you're planning to vote for Proposition 8, please think twice. Proposition 8 will forbid marriages between couples who are good marriage partners. I believe that marriage, when it works well, is one of the pillars of our society, and is something that ought to be encouraged, not forbidden. Please consider that if Proposition 8 passes, all the members of the couples who are currently married under current
California law whose marriages would be dissolved by Proposition 8's passage, are unlikely to remarry under the terms that Proposition 8 allows. Please allow those who have a will to marry, to marry. Please don't vote against one of the pillars of our society. Please vote no on Prop 8.

Vote Yes on California Proposition 11

2008-10-07T09:17:19Z

I'd like to draw attention to one of the few good ideas that Arnold Schwarzenegger has brought to Sacramento. Arnie tried to get competitive redistricting early in his first term and failed, but competitive redistricting is actually a much better idea than term limits, and I hope that we can get rid of legislative term limits in California once we introduce competitive redistricting.

This time around it's Prop 11, and this time around Arnie's proposition for competitive redistricting has gained the support of the League of Women Voters. I think that's a signal worth paying attention to, and although I'm almost as suspicious of the proposed commission as I was the last time around, I do think we in California need to improve on the current system in which incumbent legislators redistrict and gerrymander so as to create safe seats for themselves. I tend to vote no on any California proposition unless I've studied it closely, but I'm planning to vote yes on Prop 11, and I encourage all other Californians to study Prop 11 and its history closely before voting against it.

I do solidly disapprove of the guaranteed 10-4 Republicrat-vs-Third/independent built-in majority, but honestly, the current status quo that obtains is even worse than what Prop 11 proposes. Let's take this one step at a time, and move forward.

I searched for "extropy" on youtube

2008-10-07T06:35:28Z

and I found an excellent gentleman named Cordeiro from Venezuela explaining NBIC technological Convergence and Arthur C. Clarke's three laws of the future, and on side-trips I found internet videographers attempting to explain the con known as Convergence to their audience, and I found Kennita Watson running for the California Tax Equalization Board again in 2006, and I also found this almost snake-oil stuff from McKenna:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctjNqQPnAk8

The attitude of my compatriots in the modern world toward the ancient traditions of the shamen, who do weird things such as eating small quantities of known poisonous plants, or eating bread baked on a fire of dried shit (see the book of Ezekiel in the Bible for that one) is something that I've been sneakily wondering about for far too long. Just come up and tell me about how it has been for you, please. I'd really like to know.

Minnesota summer movie thing

2008-07-22T09:19:43Z

So, for the third year in a row now, I'm doing this summer in Minnesota arrangement which involves my getting to see a lot more movies per week than I'm used to seeing. The last 24 hours involved Trek, a homebrew documentary about doing all 2189 miles of the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 2001, and The Lives of Others, a German-language film (yes, I did rely on subtitles) which had me sobbing and bawling with tears streaming from my eyes right after it ended. Even though I got to see that last in privacy with an audience of one, I'm not so sure I wouldn't have been crying if I'd seen it for the first time in a public movie theater. I saw the Frida biopic in a public movie theater, and sobbed during it, after all.

The night before I watched a recently (1997) declassified US military training film about Operation Tumbler Snapper (1952?). I was too bemused to sob (and besides, that military-sounding snare-drum soundtrack is designed to prevent sobbing), but hey, that was weird too.

Frida Kahlo's work touring at the SFMOMA

2008-07-04T06:31:07Z

So Sunah and my dad and I went to the half-price night tonight, even though that would be more crowded, but I am so glad I did. Moses and My Dress Hangs There really can't be reproduced as posters... you'd have to do posters + blownup detail sections, which really isn't quite the same thing.

My favorite of her self-portraits, the one with the thorn-necklace and hummingbird (and cat and monkey and peculiar flower-insect chimerae) was there, and I was amazed how much I enjoyed gazing at the actual painting, even given all the time I had already given over to gazing at reproductions of it. There were a couple of paintings at the show I had never seen before even in reproduction, of which I particularly liked the one of a young Mexican girl with a toy-warplane in her lap. A sun and a moon hang in the sky behind and above her, and two Mesoamerican pyramids are on the far horizon behind her.

It was crowded though. Especially in two slow-moving clotted corners: the one in the big room with Henry Ford Hospital, My Dress Hangs There, and Self-portrait on the border between the US and Mexico hung all right next to one another, and the other slow-moving clotted corner in one of the smaller rooms, next to which hung Moses.

Moses was actually easier for me to get to than My Dress Hangs There, but they were both always crowded, more so than the other paintings. I think I may go again on a full-price night after my first paycheck comes in September, perhaps during the day, so I can study Moses to my heart's content without fretting that I'm hogging the view. I certainly didn't get to do that today, unfortunately.

Even though I complain about the crowding, it was actually pretty cool to be in a room full of Kahlo fans. In San Francisco. If I have to be in a crowd, that's one sort of crowd I like. It was fun to get my dad out of the house too, and give him and Sunah a chance to catch up with one another.

And another interesting painting detail. In the family-tree self-portrait, little toddler Frida standing at the base of the tree is standing in the courtyard of a dollhouse-sized Casa Azul, her house. I had certainly never noticed that before, because I've never seen a poster-sized reproduction of that one.

It wasn't until a couple of hours after the show that I realized that What I saw in the water had not been part of this exhibit. But I forgot to be disappointed about this omission during the show itself.

ETA:
http://images.google.com/images?q=frida+kahlo+moses
http://images.google.com/images?q=frida+kahlo+my+dress+hangs+there
http://images.google.com/images?q=what+i+saw+in+the+water

that booklist meme that's been going around

2008-06-29T04:19:10Z

I didn't want to handcode my responses into the list, because that would just remind me of that booklist I made back in the 90s that is probably still floating around on archive.org somewhere. But it's always interesting, when these lists resurface, to see which most recent entries make it on. The two that caught my eye were The Life of Pi and The Lovely Bones. I read the former a year or two ago, and the latter in the last few weeks. Discussion of either of these, anyone?

shinies from wikipedia

2008-06-14T11:55:07Z

It just occurred to me that I've spent some of my own personal funtime for the last several years constructing shinies on wikipedia that I haven't really told anyone about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Arkuat/Sandbox

P. S. Thanks to zephyrcrow and jelloisfun for the neil neil orange peel icon.

P. P. S. Please praise me and scold me for them, but if you want to scold me for something specific, you know, it's wikipedia. You could just go ahead and fix my mistakes for me. Don't worry, I will notice... eventually.

P. P. P. S. As a totally irrelevant aside, I think this planet would be a much better place if the White Stripes had never decided that it would be a good idea to record a cover of "I just don't know what to do with myself". I always have to skip that one, because it is false to my heart.

attn timprov (recent reading)

2008-05-16T05:27:38Z

Finally laid hands on a copy of Butler's Bloodchild and other stories (second expanded edition). It rocks. Does nothing to change the tone or tenor of my criticism of Butler, but since my criticism of Butler is gushy praise, I'm okay with that.

The more I read, the more pissed off I am at myself that I neglected her work while she was alive. :-( I had read the story "Bloodchild" too, when it was first published, because I was subscribing to IAsfm at that time. Memories flooded back as I was rereading the first half of the story, but the second half of the story seemed all new to me, especially the business with the gun. I think it was just too emotionally intense for me when I was a callow youth. I probably couldn't relate to any of what was going through Gan's mother's head at all, for instance.

Now I find "Bloodchild" an exquisite story.

And those Afterwords. Such admirable control and restraint.

Next stop: Lilith's Brood, formerly known as Xenogenesis.

In other recent reading, I reread Dozois's Eighth Annual collection. That came out in 1990, I think, the year of Bisson's "Bears Discover Fire" (great story). I was also happy with the Egan stories (when have I ever not been?), and particularly impressed with the Molly Gloss and Pat Murphy entries. It was also nice to be reminded of what I do like about Michael Moorcock, even though his fiction can be so annoying at times. On the other hand, I have to say that the squeezed novel by mister skunk reminded me of everything I didn't like about the worst excesses of the New Wave (which, in sf of course, happened when I was a tiny child).

I also found and got a copy of Isaac Asimov's Understanding Physics (thank you Moe's!). I always think of Asimov growing up in a candy shop, because although I'm sad to confess that I'm pretty lukewarm toward the man's fiction, his pedagogical nonfiction has always been purest literary candy to me. It's sweet and simple but intellectually stimulating. For me it's comfort reading, in the same sense in which people use the phrase "comfort food". We're all busy in a joint project of understanding the world we live in (and understanding one another), and Uncle Isaac is here to explain big chunks of the story so far to you, the better for you to participate in it. It's a big wide view into a sane world that makes sense, with people working hard and doing good things for their own and each other's benefit, and for the most part he's talking about things that actually happened in the world we actually live in. I don't think anyone ought to be surprised that I find this sort of reading comforting.

recent reading (a report from the stfnal itch)

2008-04-11T00:55:49Z

So I got it into my head that I'd been putting off reading too much Delany and too much Butler for far too long. (Worry not, somehow I'm not feeling the same way about, say, Ellison.) This was largely because I reread Babel-17 (and liked it much better than I had on that first reading years ago) not long after I had read Wild Seed for the first time.

So, since then I've read Triton, and most of the stories in Driftglass. I bounced off of "Cage of Brass", which is near the end, and the last story in the collection, "Time considered as a helix of semiprecious stones", is one that I've read several times before. It's an old favorite from my Golden Age of Science Fiction (I was 14 years old in 1979). Somehow I had latched onto Triton as something to follow up Babel-17 with. I wasn't paying attention to how early Babel is, and was shocked to discover that Triton was published immediately after Dhalgren. I enjoyed Stars in my pocket like grains of sand and intend to read it again, but I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for Dhalgren.

Triton was fascinating, but frustrating. I'm not a fan of the antihero technique, but it's always lovely to see it being done well, because it is so hard to do well. Delany gets away with almost enough weirdness of the good-to-read kind to make me forgive his non-ending. You know, the Grateful Dead could hardly ever write a good ending for a song either.

But for Butler's Seed to Harvest collection of novels, I have nothing but gushy praise. I will limit myself here to this, which I finally managed to articulate in a recent conversation with pameladean: Back before I ever tried reading horror fiction, this (Butler's Seed to Harvest) is the sort of fiction that I imagined they were describing to me, before I went and tried to read some of the titles they actually recommended to me as good horror fiction (which I mostly didn't like, preferring to read horror nonfiction -- AKA sober history -- instead). The events in Butler's stories horrify me more often than not, but they keep me reading eagerly; they scratch the same itch that keeps me up late reading horror-nonfiction such as The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico.

And at the same time they scratch the stfnal itch, which conventional horror sometimes does in an oblique way, and history by definition never tries to.

warning you of the danger of stfnal stuff

2008-04-08T08:58:26Z

I went out wandering in the streets seeking Samuel R. Delany, and lo and behold Octavia E. Butler consumed Eric W. Forste's brain.

followup to "request"

2008-03-09T02:11:18Z

It seems a simple union grievance can work wonders:

"Pacifist Cal State teacher gets job back"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/08/BADRVG6CI.DTL

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request.

request

2008-03-07T07:56:30Z

Please direct your search engines at the name of my friend who I love:

Marianne Kearney-Brown

and then please comment here about what you think of the situation.