It would be really interesting to understand whether Meta is playing an active role in blocking the use of Whatsapp for users with a particular country code, but who are currently outside the affected country (as some trending but unsubstantiated posts on LinkedIn/Twitter allege), or whether it really is that easy for a single government to block the service globally for a subset of its users.
Also, when using an nginx reverse proxy, including 'X-Accel-Buffering: no' in the HTTP header of the server response may be required to keep events from being buffered.
Unfortunately, I haven't read the new translation! (I was thrilled to learn of the discovery only weeks after finishing Hardy, but the whole thing receded from my attention in the three years it took for the new volumes to actually become available. I've taken this opportunity to finally order the German text.)
A 2019 LA Review of Books article [0] gives Hardy quite some credit and concludes about the new translation by Boehm:
> Despite aspects that makes this a less-than-authoritative edition, the translation itself shines. It is a smooth, gripping read, and contains passages inserted after Hardy’s translation was made, which now appear in English for the first time. New details, such as the exact song sung by Rubashov’s neighbor in prison, add freshness. Boehm corrects the chapter titles from Hardy’s “The First Hearing,” “The Second Hearing,” and so forth to “The First Interrogation,” which makes more sense in context.
This is as good a place as any to mention that Koestler's long-lost original German manuscript titled "Sonnenfinsternis" was discovered in 2015 by a doctoral student digging through the archives of Zurich library. "Darkness at Noon" as known until then was a hastily completed translation into the English by Koestler's lover Daphne Hardy, available German versions being, in turn, back-translations from the English.
Both the German original and a new English translation have since been published.
> In general, people are sent to solitary not by a judge or jury, but solely at the discretion of prison staff. In many prisons and jails, solitary confinement has become a control strategy of first resort, although it has never been proven to reduce prison violence.
> Incarcerated men and women can be placed in complete isolation for months or years not only for violent acts, but for possessing contraband (including too many pencils or postage stamps), testing positive for drug use, ignoring orders, or using profanity. In some states, anyone who is believed to belong to a prison gang can be placed in solitary indefinitely. Other people end up in solitary because they have untreated mental illnesses, are children in need of “protection,” are LGBTQ, are people of color, are Muslim, have unpopular political beliefs, or report rape or abuse by prison officials.
I'm really sorry to hear what you had to go through. Thank you for sharing your experience (and to the many others who have written here). I wish you all the best in finding friends and a partner, which you definitely will. Please be good to yourself! Your nuanced writing shows your sensitivity is still there, and that's a good thing.
Right! I did assume a continuous space because that's what it looked like to me. Hence my pedantic comment which was sort of comically at odds with the light-hearted spirit of your article :) Very nice work. Thanks for sharing, and for the clarifying remarks!
At the time of writing the Gibbs phenomenon -- the overshoot occurring at discontinuities of a square wave, which does not go away no matter how many harmonics are included (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon) -- is not correctly represented in these visualisations, implying that important aspects of the underlying maths are obscured. In my opinion this limits the didactic value of an otherwise impressive presentation.