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Tuesday, September 01, 2015

Sacks RIP: Cyber Storytellers devils and angels


Oliver Sacks — doctor, humanist, contrarian, neurological novelist — is dead. He was 82... Telegraph... Guardian... Michiko Kakutani.... Jerome Groopman... NY Times and other Media Dragons

On his brief period of body-building, when he became known at Venice's Muscle Beach as "Dr Squat", after setting the California state record in 1961:
"I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I was timid, diffident, insecure, submissive. I became strong — very strong — with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same."
On religion:
"My religion is nature. That's what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me."
On sex:
"... sex is one of those areas—like religion and politics—where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings."
Speaking of irrational men, consider czeching (sic) out a story by Ross (the best entertainer at the Parliamentary Press Christmas Parties)  Ross Coulthart Hawkers access call message send world moment German computer experts just easy eavesdrop smartphone

Ruth Leger Sivard has passed away: “With what she knows, she has every right to get on a rooftop and scream,” Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy wrote in 1986. “Instead, after 10 years of analyzing what 142 of the planet’s governments spend their citizens’ money on, she remains a clarifier. The field is small. Few are as skilled.”
 Life on Planet Zuckerberg
  1. If you're one of two people left on your block getting a print newspaper delivered, hold on dearly to a virtuous past. "For the first time, 1 billion people visited Facebook in a single day on Monday. Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox both posted celebratory notes on Facebook (where else?)." (Slate) It's got nearly 1.5 billion active monthly users, but this was a first. By one bit of comparison, the number of folks who tuned into Fox, CNN and MSNBC on Wednesday were 1.6 million, 660,000 and 485,000, respectively.
Google this week announced that it wants to fix your home Wi-Fi, but internally, it has long been working on far more complex networking issues. To connect the hundreds of thousands of machines that make up a Google data center, you can’t just use a few basic routers and switches. So to manage all the data flowing between its servers, Google has been building its own hardware and software, and today, it’s pulling back the curtain and giving us a look behind the evolution of its networking infrastructure How Google’s Networking Infrastructure Has Evolved Over The Last 10 Years TechCrunch

Google’s Project Sunroof shows your home’s solar potential for free Inhabitat. I don’t trust Google on this. Why should I tell Google that much about my house?


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