Here's my Marvel Defenders No Spoilers Early Review video and Final Trailer. It's everything you hoped for! 👊 ► http://bit.ly/2uNJJX2


#defenders #marvel #netflix #daredevil #ironfist #lukecage #jessicajones #avengers #infinitywar #comics #punisher

President Donald Trump's comments about the white nationalist rally last weekend are hurting not just his political standing, but his pocketbook.

Obonu TV Homowo Health Walk On Saturday - The 2017 Obonu TV Homowo Health Walk comes off on Saturday August 18, 2017. According to the organisers, the programme starts at 6:00am from James Town (Manste Agbona), where selected Keep Fit Clubs will converge and march through the principal streets to the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation at Kanda. Theo Armah, Sports Producer and Presenter on Obonu TV and Radio said the programme ...

Nigel Hayes agrees to Knicks deal after calling New York ‘dirty’ http://nyp.st/2fQE4J8

FINAL: The Baltimore Ravens start the preseason 2-0! #BALvsMIA

#Sports #NFL

(Credit: NFL)

On Monday, August 21, 2017, all of North America will be treated to an eclipse of the sun.
Anyone within the path of totality can see one of nature’s most awe inspiring sights - a total solar eclipse. This path, where the moon will completely cover the sun and the sun's tenuous atmosphere - the corona - can be seen, will stretch from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. Observers outside this path will still see a partial solar eclipse where the moon covers part of the sun's disk. NASA created this website to provide a guide to this amazing event. 

An update today to Instagram adds new ways to reply with photos and videos and also includes the option to send split-screen replies.

A day after burying her daughter, the mother of a woman killed during Saturday’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville said she has received death threats.

MIT Tech Review recognizes Lorenz Meier of The Linux Foundation's Dronecode as a top young innovator:

NASA Voyager at 40: Keep Reaching for the Stars | JPL
Aug.17, 2017: In the late summer of 1977, NASA launched the twin Voyager spacecraft. These remote ambassadors still beam messages back to Earth 40 years later, with data from their deep space travels. Voyager 1 is about 13 billion miles from Earth in interstellar space, and Voyager 2 is not far behind.

For more about the Voyager mission, visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/

Credit: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Duration: 3 minutes, 27 seconds
Release Date: August 17, 2017

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+NASA Solar System Exploration
+COSMOSonTV
+The Planetary Society

#NASA #Astronomy #Science #Space #Voyager #Spacecraft #SolarSystem #Interstellar #Exploration #History #JPL #Pasadena #California #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #HD #Video

NBA Draft Prospects - Luka Doncic
Preseason Breakdown

NBA Draft Comparison: Danilo Gallinari

Luka Doncic is truly unlike any prospect scouts have seen recently. Regularly, when it comes to European prospects, it is 18 year old benchwarmers and role players that are drawing attention from NBA scouts. The vast majority of the European prospects such as Porzingis, Bender, Ntilikina, Hezonja, and more often are on professional teams where they struggle to get playing time. However at only 17, Doncic was a rotational player for Real Madrid getting big minutes in the best second best league in the world. Most expect him to be a starter next year, which would make him the first 18/19 year old European prospect to start for his professional team. This experience and ability to produce against professional athletes will prove to be more impressive to scouts than the prospects playing against college talent.


Strengths:
There is no real comparison for Luka Doncic, but Gallinari is as close as it comes. He is a growing 6'8" point guard who is a gifted passer and floor general. He's already a great ball handler, especially for his size and is one of the more crafty players in recent memory. At 6'8", he has the legitmate ability to run an NBA offense. He also at the same time is a great shoot both off the catch and off the dribble. His abiltiy to isolate, create, and hit difficult shots under pressure and very promising for his offensive potential. This expands his game and ability to space the floor, complimenting his playmaking ability very well.

Weaknesses:
Most of the draw of Doncic is due to his all around play, his ability to do a little bit of everything on the court. However, this mostly only applies to his offensive game. Defensively, he would be one of the worst defensive point guards in the league if he does not already find himself at the bottom. In Europe, against much less athletic players than in the NBA, he is constantly blown by and bullied on the defensive end. While he can easily build a larger frame to handle the physicality of the game, his lack of athleticism gives him very little room to grow. This will force him to play Small Forward in the NBA most likely, as his complete inability to guard NBA guards would be too harmful to any team. His athleticism as a whole is also an area of concern, as he is not athletic by NBA standards. This will hold back his ceiling as currently elite athleticism is becoming a necessity to become a star in the NBA. It will be interesting to see how he adapts to a more athletic and faster paced league.

Join us at the launch of our 2018 Swimsuit Calendar!
Read more on: bit.ly/2fPfybA

#Sports #NFL #Cheerleaders

(Credit: New England Patriots Cheerleaders)

A writer who has known Donald Trump for three decades believes the US president will resign from office before the end of the year.

This was Alexander Stevens, a Senator from Geogia, who served as Vice-President under Jeff Davis, The President of the Confederate States of America.

Get Rid Of That Stubborn Belly Without Doing A Single Abdominal Exercise With The Help Of This Powerful Juice!

Lots of people who wish to have a flat stomach, usually go through strict diets, or spend hours and hours in the #gym, without getting the wanted results. Today we will show you how to prepare an effective natural juice to lose weight, which will also fill you with energy every day.

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Houses That Think...Smart Homes! (https://goo.gl/YojMMj)

At the height of electronics, two places show the most innovative progress. The fields of industrial manufacturing and lifestyle products are making progress by leaps and bounds. Industrial manufacturing and electronics have a long relationship of creating easier workflow processes and increasing production.

Lifestyle products are perhaps where you can see the most advancement in the field of electronics of any other enterprise.

Of course, high dollar electronics are rearranging the field of industrial manufacturing, but the largest quantity of sales are showing up in high volume production of things that make life easier for the average person. With talking smart houses and refrigerators that can keep track of what needs to be bought at the grocery store, electronics are redefining what it means to be a smart house.

Find out more about these cool smart homes and the way that electronics are making the house of the future interact with human beings on a new level at https://goo.gl/YojMMj.

Ready to talk to an +ACS Industrial Services, Inc. expert customer contact representatives about your electronics repair? If so, we are ready to talk to you!

All you have to do is check us out online at https://goo.gl/k3u6h7 or call 800-605-6419. Let's talk about your repair today! #electronics #repairs #equipment

Solar eclipse will reveal the roiling fog of plasma we call home

FINAL: The Tampa Bay Buccaneers win! #TBvsJAX

#Sports #NFL

(Credit: NFL)

faded © Holger Nimtz
https://www.holge.de

Elegant dispersal

Bloody crane's-bill (Geranium sanguineum)

Svartskog, Norway

Taking the time to observe the development of the seeds of the many plant species is perhaps not remotely as interesting as watching the colorful blossoms of summer. Yet many know and love the seeds of the dandelions, and you definitely have some other plant species in your garden, then it is easy to just take a regular glance at one or more flowers and see how each slowly transforms to a fruit. And what kind of fruit it develops can be truly amazing and sometimes requires a magnifying glass. Or a macro lens.

This species got its name from the long beak-shaped fruit, and looks really amazing long before the seeds are ripe and ready to be transported as far from the plant as possible. Some species rely on attaching their seeds to fur or feathers, others to be carried by the wind, and some simply eject the seeds into the air.

Although I have plenty of this species growing around my house, I rarely find such beautiful specimens like this one. I still am looking for one where all four are ejected, but this one will most definitely do in the meantime.

Image Copyright © 2017 +Morten Ross
Image Capture Date: 13 August 2017 19:09
Altitude: 10 meters

#flowers #plant #summer #svartskog #norway

#hqspflowers +HQSP Flowers
#BTPFlowerPro – +BTP Flower Pro , owned by +Nancy Dempsey , curated by +Иванка Гущерова
#flowerpower +FLOWER POWER

Welcome to the new space race.

People and their robots are daring to dream for the Moon (as part of the #GLXP) - and National Geographic Magazine took an in-depth look for the August 2017 issue:

On this day:
At 17th August of 1995, MTV aired the final episode of "Yo! MTV Raps". "Yo! MTV Raps" is a two-hour American television music video program, which ran from August 1988 to August 1995. The program (created by Ted Demme and Peter Dougherty) was the first hip hop music show on the network, based on the original MTV Europe show, aired one year earlier. "Yo! MTV Raps" produced a lively mix of rap videos, interviews with rap stars, live in studio performances (on Fridays) and comedy. The advent of Yo! MTV Raps in the late 1980s was crucial to the spread of hip-hop around the world. This helped to create a worldwide appreciation and interest in the hip-hop scene, which is something that was celebrated on the "Yo! MTV Raps 20th anniversary".

The cultural importance of Yo! MTV Raps on the fabric of American music stems far beyond lyrics and beats to ignite the start of a movement. Hip Hop as a movement through the vehicle of rap not only helped to introduce the world to a new form of music, but fashion and style as well, and forever changed our culture.

For many of us it brought people of all races into suburban homes for the first time. Erik B, the lyrical genius summed up the impact of Yo! on his rap career, “it changed the whole way we had to think about marketing our music.” It created an opportunity, a platform for the music industry to not just sell cd’s, but it gave artist, who otherwise had no platform to be seen and not just heard.

MC’s like MC Lyte gained exposure to be able to book 250 shows per year. Hip Hop moguls had not quite been born and the foundations (for better or worse) of main stream rap were being laid. This led to the commercial interests of big business that took notice to recognize the importance of a being able to use the platform, both Hip Hop and Yo! to sell product.

Created by late film director Ted Demme, Yo! MTV Raps’ first video to appear was Rakim’s “Follow The Leader”, which was shown on the 1987 pilot, however, Shinehead’s “Chain Gang” was the actual first video shown during the show’s debut season. It helped spread Hip Hop across the globe with the help of MTV Europe, MTV Asia and MTV Latino.

Everybody has their own personal memory of MTV Raps. Whether it was during the era of comedians Ed Lover and Doctor Dre or during the Fab 5 Freddy reign, YMTVR gave the world its first continual, visual experience of Hip Hop music. Not to downplay the world famous VJ Ralph McDaniels and the esteemed Video Music Box show based in NYC as well, but the scenarios, special guests, live performances, and other exclusive footage was only available on Music Television’s first Hip Hop show.

The series finale aired on August 17, 1995, with an unforgettable freestyle session. There were several attempts by MTV to relaunch a Hip Hop video show that had a cultural impact like Yo!, including Direct Effect and Sucker Free, however, Yo! MTV Raps remains an unparalleled aspect of Hip Hop culture.

#YoMTVRaps #MTV #Rap
#MusicalSeries #MusicalShow #HipHop
#OldSchoolHipHop #Television #TV
#TVSeries #TVShow #90sTVShows
#80sTVShows #Onthisday

.@PaulMalignaggi reveals ‘dirty’ habits from sparring that could affect the outcome of #Mayweather vs #McGregor
#UFC
http://bit.ly/2iakE2V

At 17, Marcus Aurelius was adopted. It made him heir to the throne of Rome.
Born into a wealthy family, Aurelius was primarily raised in the household of his grandfather. Both his parents passed away relatively early in his life.
From the start, his defining characteristic was his pursuit of knowledge. He was drawn to philosophy, and he was particularly interested in Stoicism a subset based on the notion that behaviors, not thoughts or words, should define virtue.
According to legend, the old Emperor Hadrian took notice of him after a brush with death, and impressed with a young Aurelius, Hadrian adopted him into his line of succession. Aurelius upheld his duty to the state for over 20 years, through the death of Hadrian and throughout the rule of Antoninus Pius, until the day he became the Emperor of Rome.

The image of the man
There’s much uncertainty regarding the details of Marcus Aurelius’ story. It’s almost 2,000 years old, and most sources are questionable at best.
The clearest image of the man is painted through a series of notes he wrote to himself, known by the name of Meditations.
Meditations is one the most influential works of Stoicism.
There isn’t much left to be said about it that hasn’t been said before. It’s a timeless manual for living a balanced life. More than a philosophy, however, it also gives us insight into the clarity with which Marcus Aurelius thought. He very much saw the world as it was rather than as he hoped it would be. That may not sound like an accomplishment, but it’s rarer than most of us would like to think.
The application of this kind of awareness pays dividends in every aspect of life, and we can dissect Aurelius’ story to break down how it can be deliberately nurtured.
First, the hurdle.

The problem of having an efficient brain
Every day, we’re loaded with external stimuli, and if we were to absorb each one of these stimuli, we wouldn’t be able to function properly. It would overwhelm our brain, and we would cease to operate in a way that would allow us to attend to our daily responsibilities.
As a result, the brain has efficiency filters. It’s good at figuring out what information we need and when. It knows that if you’re in a busy restaurant, for example, the sound of the person you’re talking to is more important than the background noise, so it adjusts.
This mechanism, however, unfortunately also comes with an unintended side-effect.
The byproduct is that, sometimes, attention isn’t fully deployed to certain areas of importance unless we’re active in directing it there. With efficiency, there’s compromise.
Michael Kane is a cognitive psychologist at The University of North Carolina who studies the interaction between memory and attention. In one of his experiments, he sampled students for their thoughts at eight random times in a day for a week.
Out of 124 participants, he found that, on average, people were thinking about something entirely different to what they were doing about 30% of the time.
This is a conservative number compared to the results turned up by similar work, and it shows how easy it is to neglect relevant information and fall into the trap of our brain’s default setting.
There are three ways to fight this.

1. Train yourself to fight the autonomous loop
Throughout Meditations, Aurelius is active in pointing out the value of looking beyond what we intuitively see on the surface in daily life to better understand the world. In his own words:
“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.”
Although attention doesn’t automatically lend itself to each relevant piece of information, we can train our brain to be more proactive. By keeping this fact at the top of our mind, we can paint a more representative picture of the world. That’s where awareness and clear thinking begin.
Set a few times in your day to really look and to listen. Be deliberate in seeking to bypass the compromise made by the autonomous brain. There’s a lot out there, and a lot of it matters.

2. Harness objectivity through another pair of eyes
One of the cornerstones of awareness is objectivity. It’s a kind of neutrality that aims to see the world as it is and not through personal judgment and bias. It’s not easy to cultivate.
By design, our senses absorb information in relation to where we are, what we’re doing, and how we feel. The world bombards us with stimuli, and these stimuli follow a different neural pathway in each of us. We all make sense of them differently.
We predominantly go through life understanding the world and influencing our behavior like we’re at the center of reality, and that everything around us derives its importance according to how it fits into our narrative. It warps our perception of our surroundings and how they unfold.
In cosmology, the Copernican Principle states that Earth has no privileged position in the universe. In spite of its importance to us, on a grander scale, it’s very unimportant. The same reasoning applies to people. Despite the intensity with which we feel and sense, much of what happens in the broader world isn’t just about us. There’s a larger picture, and there’s more going on. The sooner we can put aside our personal biases, the sooner we can understand reality for what it is rather than how we feel about it. It’s a crucial distinction.
Throughout his work, one thing that stands out about Aurelius is his profound ability to step away and out of his own mind and see the world and himself without emotional attachment.
It helps explain the depth of his insights. He was able to expand his circle of awareness by tuning himself out and by aspiring to see things from a pair of eyes with more than just a singular perspective. It’s a very practical tactic, and most of us don’t use it enough.
Step outside your own shoes, conceptualize your observations as if you’re in the body of someone else around you, and try to harness objectivity through a different host of eyes.

3. Routinely seek out ways to declutter the mind
One of the distinguishing aspects of Meditations is that Aurelius didn’t write it for anyone other than himself. By all accounts, it appears to be a very personal journal. There isn’t much coherence or structure to how it’s presented.
This tells us that his purpose for writing wasn’t necessarily to share his wisdom, but it was likely to practice clearing out and organizing his own mind.
There’s a lot of sense in doing that, and a look into the work of Dr. James W. Pennebaker explains why.
Pennebaker is a pioneer in writing therapy and a professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
The American Psychological Association has recognized his work on the benefits of journaling as some of the most important in the field.
In 1994, Pennebaker and his team split people who had been out of a job for eight months into three groups. The first was asked to write about their layoff and how they felt about it, the second was invited to write but about nothing in particular, and the final group was given no writing instructions.
The result?

The participants that recorded their layoff experiences were notably more likely to find new jobs in the aftermath of the study. By writing, they were able to formally declutter the stress and the noise in their minds and become more aligned with what they were feeling. It gave them the push they needed to grasp where they were and where they needed to go.
Similar studies by Pennebaker have shown the benefits of journaling range from helping people better manage trauma to a bolstered immune system.
By journaling, Aurelius was able to extract the information restlessly roaming around in his mind and organize it into concrete principles he could strive towards. For others, this same effect is reached through meditation, nature walks, or even certain types of exercise.
The human mind is extremely noisy, but by creating a routine that allows us to clear it up, we can make it less so. By building a habit that focuses on ordering our thoughts, we can declutter the complexity that comes with living in an increasingly busy and crowded world.

All you need to know
Awareness is defined as a state of being conscious. Conscious of relevant knowledge, conscious of surroundings, and conscious of personal feelings and thoughts. It’s a state of mind that aims to understand reality as close to the truth as possible.
Marcus Aurelius is known today as what the Greek philosopher Plato characterized as a Philosopher King. A political leader who actively aspired to wisdom and was primarily driven towards knowledge. A leader who relentlessly asked what it means to live well. More than his virtues and desires, however, what drove Aurelius to successfully lead one of the most powerful empires in history was his ability to leverage the clarity of his mind.
The scope of your awareness defines the outer limit of what you can accomplish. The more you know, the more accurately you can understand your surroundings. The better you are at organizing your thoughts, the more possibilities lie ahead of you.
The ability to think clearly is a keystone advantage, and it can be acquired like any other skill. Practice.

Deal: Grab the iPhone SE 32GB with AT&T prepaid service for just $149.99

Swiftly Moving Gas Streamer Eclipses Supermassive Black Hole

In this illustration, the position of a dark, absorbing cloud of material is located high above the supermassive black hole and accretion disk in the center of the active galaxy NGC 5548. Numerous other filaments twist around the black hole as they are swept away by a torrent of radiation "winds."
Credits: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

An international team of astronomers, using data from several NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) space observatories, has discovered unexpected behavior from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy NGC 5548, located 244.6 million light-years from Earth. This behavior may provide new insights into how supermassive black holes interact with their host galaxies.

Immediately after NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed NGC 5548 in June 2013, this international research team discovered unexpected features in the data. They detected a stream of gas flowing rapidly outward from the galaxy's supermassive black hole, blocking 90 percent of its emitted X-rays.

"The data represented dramatic changes since the last observation with Hubble in 2011," said Gerard Kriss of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. "I saw signatures of much colder gas than was present before, indicating that the wind had cooled down due to a significant decrease in X-ray radiation from the galaxy's nucleus."

The discovery was made during an intensive observing campaign that also included data from NASA's Swift spacecraft, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and Chandra X-ray Observatory, as well as ESA's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton) and Integral gamma-ray observatory (INTEGRAL).

After combining and analyzing data from all six sources, the team was able to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Supermassive black holes in the nuclei of active galaxies, such as NGC 5548, expel large amounts of matter through powerful winds of ionized gas. For instance, the persistent wind of NGC 5548 reaches velocities exceeding 621 miles (approximately 1,000 kilometers) a second. But now a new wind has arisen, much stronger and faster than the persistent wind.

"These new winds reach speeds of up to 3,107 miles (5,000 kilometers) per second, but is much closer to the nucleus than the persistent wind," said lead scientist Jelle Kaastra of the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. "The new gas outflow blocks 90 percent of the low-energy X-rays that come from very close to the black hole, and it obscures up to a third of the region that emits the ultraviolet radiation at a few light-days distance from the black hole."

The newly discovered gas stream in NGC 5548 -- one of the best-studied of the type of galaxy know as Type I Seyfert -- provides the first direct evidence of a shielding process that accelerates the powerful gas streams, or winds, to high speeds. These winds only occur if their starting point is shielded from X-rays.

It appears the shielding in NGC 5548 has been going on for at least three years, but just recently began crossing their line of sight.

"There are other galaxies with similar streams of gas flowing outward from the direction of its central black hole, but we've never before found evidence that the stream of gas changed its position as dramatically as this one has," said Kriss. "This is the first time we've seen a stream like this move into our line of sight. We got lucky."

Researchers also deduced that in more luminous quasars, the winds may be strong enough to blow off gas that otherwise would have become "food" for the black hole, thereby regulating both the growth of the black hole and that of its host galaxy.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. STScI conducts Hubble science operations and is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.

New Orange Pi board based on Allwinner H2+ processor with dual Ethernet port, which seems to be geared towards controller applications.

http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/08/18/14-orange-pi-r1-allwinner-h2-board-comes-with-two-ethernet-ports-256-mb-ram/

D Wade to Cleveland. First time I hope Stephen A is correct

People close to Steve Bannon tell NBC News he feels on safe ground amid White House infighting stemming from President Donald Trump’s divisive response to the violence in Charlottesville.

Bannon, who has rarely given on-the-record interviews since assuming his position as Trump’s chief White House strategist, reached out to speak with three news outlets in the past 48 hours, using those conversations to criticize colleagues, threaten to fire others and appearing to relish the ongoing national racial tensions.

His comments signal that Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, is digging in for the long haul amid the turmoil and turnover that has roiled Trump’s cohort of top advisers in recent weeks.

Well, I hope I don't regret this, but...
Instead of waiting for the Pixel 2 reveal, I decided to go ahead and order an Essential Phone. Don't let me down, +Andy Rubin!

Trump campaign chair Carl Paladino finally ousted from school board for racist tirade against the Michelle Obama

37 Days in Norway
Remembering the journey in May/June 2017 ...
Day 9 (2017-06-02)

It rained during the night, and the rain continued (with pauses) till noon. We drove to Drangedal where we saw a wooden church with an octagonal tower. On the way back to the coast we passed the first waterfall of this trip - a lot more waterfalls would follow in the forthcoming weeks.
In Risør (photo) we ascended the Risørflekken, a large white rock that offers panoramic views over the harbour and coastline.
The camper-van app showed a parking space for spending the night north of Risør. The distance to it was 12 km as the crow flies, but 48 km on the road (in fact we drove more than 60 km as we took another route along the coast).
Kilometer reading: 2366 km.







#fourwheeledfriday +Four Wheeled Friday by +Akhil Kalsh
+Kimberly Tweed +StPaul Herrmann +Four Wheeled Friday +Eric Hege +Virgil Cowen
#hqsplandscape for +HQSP Landscape
#LandscapePhotography +Landscape Photography curated by +Margaret Tompkins +Eric Drumm +Chandler L. Walker +Krzysztof Felczak +Jeff Beddow +H Peter Ji +Dorma Wiggin
#austrianphotographers +AUSTRIAN PHOTOGRAPHERS & Photo Mania Global - coop. +Edith Kukla
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Very Useful Contents For Every Working Professionals & Students

~~~~ Click Below Image / Link to Download Excellent Materials on HR, Jobs, Accounts & Finance, Tax Saving, Engineering, Marketing etc. ~~~~

Plot twist: @TheNotoriousMMA did not allow @ShowtimeBoxing to use the footage of him sparring @PaulMalignaggi. http://bit.ly/2fQzV89