Wave functions: 1D Hydrogen atom (Part 1)

Part 2 and be foud at the former link.

Maid (Netflix)

The Netflix NFLX limited series, Maid, was released on the streaming platform on October 1 and has remained in the Top 5 Shows most viewed ever since in many countries. According to Netflix, the series is on its way to reach 67 million households in its first four weeks, surpassing the record set by last year’s big hit, The Queen’s Gambit, which was watched by 62 million subscribers.

If you’ve not seen Maid yet, its popularity being overshadowed in the headlines by Squid Game’s overwhelming success (viewed by an amazing 142 million accounts), the 10-episode limited series takes viewers on the personal emotional journey of a young woman dealing with domestic abuse, the precarity of poverty and homelessness, and a troubled mother/daughter relationship.

Maid is inspired by Stephanie Land’s Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, a New York Times best-selling memoir. The series expands on the book, putting more emphasis on Alex’s relationship with her ex-Sean and her mother Paula.

Alex, played by Margaret Qualley, is a young mother escaping an abusive relationship. As the series opens, Alex is leaving her boyfriend Sean (Nick Robinson) in the middle of the night, taking their daughter with her. Homeless and without a job, Alex battles to make ends meet for her and her young daughter Maddy, played by Rylea Nevaeh Whittet, to survive. Alex has no one really to turn to for help. Her mother Paula, played by Qualley’s own mother Andie MacDowell, is an eccentric artist who proves to be unreliable and incapable of looking out for Alex. Her absent father Hank (Billy Burke) is at first unwilling to help. Alex’s friends are all Sean’s. She is alone, fending for herself and her daughter. She seeks help from social services, but finds no real support. The social worker though does help her find a job at Value Maids, but the pay she gets from it barely covers her finances.

From the synopsis, the series sounds like a dire ten hours to go through, so why has it become so popular? What showrunner and writer Molly Smith Metzler, and her team of writers, Marcus Gardley, Bekah Brunstetter, Colin McKenna and Michelle Denise Jackson, along with the directors John Wells, Nzingha Stewart, Lila Neugebauer, Helen Shaver and Quyen “Q” Tran, have managed to create is a tender and at times funny series that makes viewers feel invested in Alex’s journey. The camera never strays too far from Alex, showing her point of view of the situations she finds herself in. We, the viewers, go through her experiences with her, thanks to Qualley’s incredible performance.

The series is at its most powerful in its raw depiction of the devastating impact domestic abuse has, showing the clear difference between couple arguments and emotional abuse. The series emphasizes the sense of complete isolation in which a young woman such as Alex would find herself. One of the most chilling moments (amongst many) in Maid is a scene where Sean is emotionally abusing Alex, forcing her to go sit at the table, while her father looks on, not saying a word. It is one of the most difficult episodes of the series, showing Alex sinking, removing herself from reality, only her unmoving shell remains, inert. Throughout the episodes, Alex has received no support. No one around her seems to understand her actions. In the opening sequence, when seeking refuge at her friend’s, one of Sean’s friends appears telling Alex “to stop being a bitch.” Perhaps none of them have seen the way Sean can be with Alex. But in that scene with Alex’s father Hank, there is a witness to the behavior. And he does nothing.

There is a rawness to Maid that prevents it from falling into the melodramatic. It plunges us into Alex’s reality, her tender moments with her daughter, her difficult relationship with her mother, who needs help herself, and her darkest moments. It is a must-see.

Forbes.

Tony Greenstein's Blog: Israel is not just racist towards Palestinians but...

Tony Greenstein's Blog: Israel is not just racist towards Palestinians but...: If Israel is primarily a Jewish Supremacist State it is ALSO a White Supremacist State In February 2019, in response to an article on Al ...

Colin in Black and White review – Kaepernick drama will take your breath away

The athlete turned activist joins forces with Ava Duvernay for a bold and devastating docudrama mixing the story of his early life with shocking stats on racial inequality

Colin Kaepernick became famous in the US as an NFL quarterback. He became famous around the world, and infamous in his own country, when he became a civil rights protester and – shortly after that – no longer an NFL quarterback. Kaepernick drew admiration and condemnation when he took the knee during the playing of the US national anthem at a preseason game in 2016, in protest against US police brutality and racial inequality after multiple police shootings of black people and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

His actions inspired many more players to join him in similar actions – then president Trump to recommend that such players should be fired. At the end of the season, the managers at his team, the San Francisco 49ers, told him they were going to release him – a move largely seen as politically rather than practically motivated, despite the 49ers’ claim that he didn’t fit in with their new coach’s plans. His activism has increased and he has remained unsigned since.

Colin in Black and White (Netflix) tells the story of his formative teenage years. The six-part collaboration between Kaepernick and Ava DuVernay (the director of Selma and the creator of the magnificent drama When They See Us, about the young black men falsely accused of the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park) is a bold creation, shaped and fuelled by anger, aimed at educating as much as – if not even more than – entertaining. It takes your breath away.

Grauniad.

The price of truth: Al Jazeera marks 25 dangerous years

Killings, threats, and full-on aerial attacks on its bureaus; Al Jazeera has endured a staggering amount of tragedy and obstacles during its 25 years of covering the human story.

By Farah Najjar

Doha, Qatar – As Al Jazeera marks its 25th anniversary on November 1, the history of the media network is beset with the inherent risks, obstacles and outright attacks it had to weather by reporting from the world’s most strife-stricken places.

The dangers faced by Al Jazeera included multiple threats to shut down its bureaus and the killing or detention of its front-line journalists. They ranged from phone hacking and network-wide cyber-attacks, to state-sanctioned satellite scrambling and outright aerial bombardments on bureau locations.

Al Jazeera.

Are we really going to do this?

With humanity already struggling to cope with rising seas, more powerful storms, deadly heat waves and rapidly changing ecosystems needed to sustain life, the global climate summit in Glasgow opened on Monday with a series of desperate pleas for action from nations large and small.

“Climate change is already ravaging the world,” President Biden said in a speech at the summit, known as COP26, on Monday afternoon. But even while global warming is causing widespread economic damage and upending lives, he said, this was also a moment of opportunity to reshape the way humans live in better harmony with nature.

“We are standing at an inflection point in world history,” he said, calling climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.”

That point was echoed by Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados. “If our existence is to mean anything we must act,” she said.

Underscoring the urgency of the moment, with leaders of more than 120 countries gathered for the summit, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said that the effects of a warming planet were being felt “from the ocean depths to the mountaintops.”

“Sea level rise has doubled from 30 years ago,” he said. Oceans are hotter than ever, parts of the Amazon rain forest emit more carbon than they absorb, and in the last decade about four billion people were affected by events related to the changing climate. “Sea level rise has doubled from 30 years ago,” he said. Oceans are hotter than ever, parts of the Amazon rain forest emit more carbon than they absorb, and in the last decade about four billion people were affected by events related to the changing climate.

“Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper,” Mr. Guterres said. “We are digging our own graves.”

The conference’s aim is to prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with levels before the Industrial Revolution. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — such as deadly heat waves, water shortages, crop failures and ecosystem collapse — grow immensely.

Mr. Guterres called on countries to return to the summit every year to nudge one another “until keeping to 1.5 degrees is assured, until subsidies to fossil fuels end, until there is a price on carbon and until coal is phased out.”

Many countries will press against such specific measures, and the absence of leaders from Russia and China from the meeting cast doubts on how united the world can be in the struggle.

China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, proposed a new emissions target that is largely indistinguishable from one it made six years ago. The United States, the largest historic emitter, has an ambitious emissions goal but has not been able to pass legislation to achieve it. And Australia, India and Russia have not made any new pledges to draw down climate pollution this decade.

Much more...

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