A petition for certiorari (full text) was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court last week in Sause v. Bauer, (cert. filed 11/17/2017).  In the case, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed on qualified immunity grounds a suit for damages alleging that police who were investigating a noise complaint violated plaintiff’s 1st Amendment rights when an officer who had come to her home ordered her to get up and stop praying. (See prior posting.)  First Liberty issued a press release announcing the filing of the petition for review.

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=27vL

A suit was filed last week in a North Carolina federal district court by an anti-abortion group which contends that the city of Charlotte acted unconstitutionally when it applied an ordinance directed at preventing installation of permanent or semi-permanent signs and flyers in the public right of way to prevent plaintiffs’ display of placards. The complaint (full text) in Cities4Life, Inc. v. City of Charlotte, (WD NC, filed 11/17/2017) alleges in part:Defendants, through their enforcement of City Code § 10-212, prohibit speakers from resting their signs on the ground while they are assembled outside of abortion facilities and thereby restrict Plaintiffs’ right to free speech on significant portions of land. This restriction does not apply to many other types of signs whose content is different from those used by Plaintiffs. Defendants thus unconstitutionally restrict Plaintiffs’ rights because of the pro-life messages their signs convey.Thomas More Law Center issued a press release announcing the filing of the lawsuit.

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=27vK

Dog Owners Live Longer

Owning a dog is linked to a reduced risk for cardiovascular disease and death, a Swedish study found.

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=27Dd

Noémie Jewelry Giveaway

Do you ever buy jewelry for yourself? It can feel great to chose your own piece to mark a life event, a career milestone or just because.… Read more
The post Noémie Jewelry Giveaway appeared first on A Cup of Jo.

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What paint colors do you like for bedrooms? Right now, our master bedroom is white, but since it’s on the lower garden level of our building, it can feel a little dreary when it’s not super sunny outside.… Read more
The post Help! Which Bedroom Paint Color Would You Choose? appeared first on A Cup of Jo.

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StarSpace: Embed All The Things!

We present StarSpace, a general-purpose neural embedding model that can solve
a wide variety of problems: labeling tasks such as text classification, ranking
tasks such as information retrieval/web search, collaborative filtering-based
or content-based recommendation, embedding of multi-relational graphs, and
learning word, sentence or document level embeddings. In each case the model
works by embedding those entities comprised of discrete features and comparing
them against each other — learning similarities dependent on the task.
Empirical results on a number of tasks show that StarSpace is highly
competitive with existing methods, whilst also being generally applicable to
new cases where those methods are not.

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=VTG

Back in 2005, you needed a standalone GPS device if you wanted a disembodied voice to yell at you when you made a wrong turn. Before smartphones existed, a pocket-size GPS device that was small enough to be convenient for motorcycle and bike use was novel and useful. However, such a device available on the shelf at Walmart in 2017 isn’t so impressive. It’s also not much of a deal.
Reader Patrick is one of the Raiders of the Lost Walmart, a brave team of retail archaeologists who comb through the electronics sections of big-box stores to find gadgets that aren’t just obsolete or just plain old, but are also comically overpriced.
Reader Patrick noticed the Garmin Quest 2, a device first released in 2005, for sale at Walmart. He looked back at the price stickers, noting the rich history. It had been marked $578.76 in May 2009 and in July 2016, and finally discounted a little bit to $350.00 in June of 2017, a few days before he unearthed this artifact.

If you don’t mind having a used unit and downloading the manual online, you can buy this same GPS on eBay for $84.
Or you could spend more than four times that much in the bizarro electronics universe of Walmart.
“Hey, that could just be a photo from 2008!” you might be saying — so here’s a close-up of the dated shelf tag.

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=24WY