Sunday, September 06, 2015

Fathers Day at ARRAS and Beyond


Blues of Arras Porcelain
Thank you for being there every day with just love and guidance we have needed ... We are more grateful than you could ever imagined ...

When you come upon a sentence so impeccably crafted, so astounding, soperfect that you can't turn the page, you are said to be:
Sentranced

The Purple Past of Arras ...

Greg Inglis reveals secret son

Father Figures: Profiling The Quintessential Aussie Dad
Nielsen, 4/9/15. The analysis paints a picture of a father who is sports mad, likes to share a beer with mates, enjoys electronic games and going to the movies to take in the latest action flick, loves his pooch and has big plans for home renovations in the next 12 months.




Cold Wind by Cold River

At the Crossroads in the Swamps of Jervis Bay Sep 2014

Cold Wind is about a, a dig at my ex-wife.
I shouldn't say this; I'm gonna get killed. But it's a dig at my ex-wife for not letting me see my kids and now they're grown-up adults and they're like strangers, you know. Cold Wind is just a song about separation.
You'll never be separate from your memories, but you can't cuddle memories, you know, like your daughter or your grandson or your granddaughter, you know.
That was my younger sister. She passed away in 1992 and she had a massive heart attack and, yeah. And I believe in the other side, the other side is just a heartbeat away and it's just a thought away and she's there today happy and all that. And I know one day I'm gonna see her again and as I say, we'll, you know, forevermore, maybe not for a few 1,000 years or whatever, but we'll go somewhere together, we'll be somewhere together, yeah 
Cold Wind: Life According to Frampi (sic)
Red Faces at Jervis Bay
Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami
The two novels, penned at a kitchen table in 1978, that gave birth to this beloved author's career.
Walkabout (jb sep 2014)
Of course, Elena Ferrante, like any writer, no matter how brilliant, isn’t for everyone. I’ve also known people to confess (somewhat sheepishly) that they just “couldn’t get into” Ferrante’s books, and that there were too many characters, and too much detail. They’re not wrong. The books can seem slow to start and there ARE a lot of characters with similar and overlapping names and stories. It’s just that, like the taste of anchovies or of Tolstoy, you either like it, or you don’t. Ferrante Mania

I am named after the daughter my father lost.
Trying to Hide from the world (jb sep 2014)


The State We're In by Ann Beattie
A collection of linked stories that explores why we live in the places we have chosen... So many nests in so many strange places ;-) 
Gorgeous Swamp Based Duck Family  (jb sep 2014)

Yellow Fever by Cold Sprinkler (jb Se 2014)





Death Wish: Whose Fault When Citizens Disobey?

...their faces misted and revealed
in the steel of it, their moment passing,
passing; nothing but sleep in their eyes.

~ Natasha Trethewey 


“If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.” Yet Falling is makes us stronger ;-)

  TMZ called the pictures part of a “crazy death wish cliff workout”. Lutz said Palm Beach was “stunning”.
Kellan Lutz working out at Palmy.
Kellan Lutz working out at Palmy Sydney 

Of all the predators implicated in man-eating events, none conjures up more intense dread than the shark on Antipodean beaches. It is certainly terrifying to be confronted by a bear deep in the Vrbov woods, or a tiger in some remote Loharan village in India, but it is, perhaps, of some small comfort to know that a single shot from a rifle can thwart the danger from such a visible terrestrial predator. It is quite another issue, however, to imagine being a shipwrecked sailor, a surfer, or a beach bather about to be attacked, dismembered, and consumed by a dark, black-eyed monster with razor-sharp teeth, viselike jaws, and sandpaper-like skin...

Rebound comes a year after being cleared of phone-hacking charges Brooks returns as News Corp’s UK chief

Egyptian court sentences Al-Jazeera journalists to three years in prison

Wilson Security guards handcuffed asylum seeker boy on Nauru as a 'joke'
Obsession with Doors - In Cesky Krumlov MMII (See Also Hluboka) 
Tyler Cowen:
I am glad I was forced to live in “book culture” and “meat space’ for my first forty years. Or maybe thirty-five years would have been enough. People these days have lost the sense of information being scarce, and counterintuitively that makes it harder for them to develop profound thoughts. It’s like practicing chess by asking the computer right away, all the time, what the right move is.
[and later] …contemporary academic is overly bureaucratized and there is a very good chance I would [if I were starting today] look for another model of success and contentment. It is an open question whether or not I could find one. Whatever its limitations, there is still a followable formula for academic success, which of course is part of the problem.
Other topics include when is the best age to live in various parts of the world, Alban Berg and Rilke, Marc Andreessen, my one hidden talent, Rene Girard, labor market networks, optimal travel into the past, and which is the most underrated or overrated wisdom tradition.  Do read the whole thing.

10 excuses for being absent from Bersih – Edward Beruang Malaysian. Big demo against President Najib, the guy with the mysterious $700 million in his personal bank account. Note that a Najib government would have had to sign TPP.

New NSW laws announced to combat council corruption amid a rise in complaints
 
UK Tax fraud investigator 'stole £150000 in VAT scam


Recalls of Organic Food on the Rise, Report Says
Advisen, 20/8/15. "What's striking is that since 2012, all organic recalls have been driven by bacterial contamination, like salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A, rather than a problem with a label," Mr. Pollack said. "This is a fairly serious and really important issue because a lot of consumers just aren't aware of it." 
Brian Bienkowski – Environmental Health News: Scientists report worrisome changes to liver and kidney genes in rats, adding to evidence that a popular herbicide may be toxic – Long-term exposure to tiny amounts of Roundup – thousands of times lower than what is permitted in U.S. drinking water—may lead to serious problems in the liver and kidneys, according to a new study

German literary critic reviews IKEA catalog ;-)  




Friday, September 04, 2015


Halt the Bias Against Simplicity of Single Statement: Zil-ch Evol

The courage is to be vulnerable ... Totally vulnerable :-)

MO'N who practices what he preaches: The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common: First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.
Rising Strong Brene Brown

Jervis Back 2014 Bird life

They seem to be everywhere. I enter an airport giftshop on my way to Chicago, and a stack of adult colouring-books stares me in the face. Go into any major newsagent, supermarket or bookshop and you’ll find a prominent display of adult colouring-books. Four out of the 10 bestselling books on Amazon UK are adult colouring-books. One,Animal Kingdom, by the illustrator Millie Marotta, has sold half-a-million copies since its publication last year. Hey grown ups put down the colouring pens


Just As we Thought:“You are mostly not you,”microbial ecologist Rob Knight wrote in hisfascinating exploration of the human microbiome, in which he pointed out that only 1% of the genes in our bodies are human and the remaining 99% are microbial. It’s a staggering realization even for grownups, so how are tiny humans to grapple with these tiny organisms and their enormous impact on us and the rest of life? That’s what zoologist and children’s book author Nicola Davies explores in Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes (public library), with gorgeous art by English illustrator Emily Sutton — a marvelous addition to the best children’s books celebrating science

Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration — it is how we fold our experiences into our being… The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”

Kieran Healy (Duke) recently presented a paper entitled “F**k Nuance” at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. He writes:
Nuance is not a virtue of good sociological theory. Sociologists typically use it as a term of praise, and almost without exception when nuance is mentioned it is because someone is asking for more of it. I shall argue that, for the problems facing Sociology at present, demanding more nuance typically obstructs the development of theory that is intellectually interesting, empirically generative, or practically successful.
He discusses the problem in aninterview at The Chronicle of Higher Education A hard core bias against simplicity


The intelligence behind complexity ...  IPR here we come ;-)
Calvin Hobbes writing academia
If all existing philosophical work—and all records and knowledge of it—were to be destroyed in some disaster, and only one sentence could be passed on to future intelligent beings (roughly like us we’ll assume) for them to restart the philosophical enterprise, what should that statement be?
The question is based on a similar one about science, which Richard Feynman originally asked and answered, and which Tom Chivers recently asked a dozen scientists (viaKottke). Feynman said: “I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” THE one statement To best restart philosophy ...

Sosa is a gynecological teaching associate, and she holds one of modern medicine’s most awkward jobs, using her body to guide med students through some of its most delicate, dreaded exams. Every week, she lies back for dozens of the next medical generation’s first pelvic and breast screenings, steering gloved fingers through the mysteries of her own anatomy and relaying the in-depth feedback they’ll need out in the wild.
She is not, in the traditional sense, a medical professional herself: A 31-year-old theater actor, she has also worked recent jobs at a bakery and Barnes & Noble. Yet what she lacks in faculty prestige, she and her compatriots — including a squad of male urological teaching associates, who teach genital and prostate exams — make up for in humor, candor and endurance. For nervous students, she is like an enthusiastic surgical dummy, awake through the operation and cheering them on…
In New York and Los Angeles, the simulated patients are often actors; here, in eastern Virginia, they are part-time or former professors, baristas, retail workers and house spouses, all contract workers paid by the session, and not extraordinarily so. Gliva-McConvey, the program director, said wages were confidential but added, “All I can say is, we don’t pay them enough.”
Vocabulary becomes hugely important to avoiding clumsy wording. Teachers are taught to neutralize sexual language — it’s a “table,” not a “bed”; a “drape,” not a “sheet” — and cut back on awkward phrases: Say “footrests” instead of the too-equestrian “stirrups”; “lots of pressure” instead of “this is going to hurt.” Students aren’t supposed to “grab,” “stick in” or “pull out” anything, though in the moment, instructor Kelene Williams said with a laugh, “sometimes neutral doesn’t come out.”
The article is…unsettling…throughout, kudos to Drew Harwell, and I thank M. for the pointer.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.KDJUunmN.dpuf

Who Hacked Ashley Madison? Courtesy of Curators B*n and L*ch

 Who Hacked Ashley Madison? Krebs on Security



A love of AC/DC may have inadvertently outed the identity of someone associated with recently hacked AshleyMadison.com, an influential IT journalist and consultant suggests...The police say the company became aware of the attack when employees came into work one morning and all of their computers saw a threatening message from the Impact Team, as the hacker group claiming responsibility for the attack calls itself. That message was accompanied by AC/DC song Thunderstruck.

 
Last Tuesday, a group calling itself “Impact Team” followed through on its threat to release data it had stolen from Ashley Madison, an internet service that facilitates encounters between people interested in having extramarital affairs. The data included information on approximately 37 million people who had signed up for the site (see news reports at Wired and The New York Timesfor example).
Philosophers on Ashley

The Ashley Madison Hackers Just Released a Ton of Stolen Data Gizmodo. We said Ashley Madison = extortion futures.



If you want to succeed in business, you need to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. But judging by a cache of alleged internal emails published by hackers, Noel Biderman, the CEO of Avid Life Media (ALM), the company that owns Ashley Madison, wanted to go a step further.
 

 
The Evolution of Magazine Covers
Karen X. Cheng and Jerry Gabra offer a fascinating look at how magazines have changed (or not changed, New Yorker,) over time.

Jeff Bezos Assures Amazon Employees That HR Working 100 Hours A Week To Address Their Complaints Onion


What Amazon Didn’t Understand About Overwork The Nation
In landmark case, labor board will let more workers bargain with their employer’s employer WaPo

Obsession with Doors - Praha MMXII

Posh doors versus poor doors


Will technologists digitize themselves out of jobs someday?
ZDnet, 23/8/15. New Deloitte study asserts technology has created more jobs than those destroyed. IT opportunities have grown substantially, but will automation, cloud and mobile sustain or reverse this trend?
*Report -
Technology and people: The great job-creating machine

Civil unrest is already happening in America and it could get a lot worse in 2016 Business Insider

George A. Akerlof – Phishing for Phools Chronicle of Higher Education

TaxGrrrl, Owner Of ITS, Formerly Fourth Largest Tax Prep Biz In Country, To Face Criminal Charges. “Readers sent me numerous emails advising that ITS was still in business for the 2014 tax season, despite the court order.”

Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science Scien2


Exclusive: Read Julian Assange’s Introduction to The Wikileaks Files Gizmodo