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Sunday, March 06, 2016

Six: The right time is any time


“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.” 
– Henry James

 How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see... We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die. – interview with Der Spiegel in 2009

 The manuscript of William Empson's The Face of the Buddha was thought to have vanished in a taxi in 1947. It's been found, and it's tremendous 1947-2016  

“Ah, it appears that, fleeing human connection, lost to their reductive gender-specific pastimes of sports and, um, friends, teen hyphen agers (The teen hyphen ager! In the pizza parlor! With the smart phone!) have murdered reading. But soft – no one is dead yet, not even you, geriatric Cassandra. Nor are the teen hyphen agers brain-dead.” ~ Slate

“When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another.” The New Yorker 

Allens Linklaters:  The Commissioner of Taxation has, in a recent Australian Senate Estimates hearing, expressed frustration that companies potentially subject to Australia's cross-border anti-avoidance laws (including the new Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law or MAAL) which have documents offshore, outside the reach of his access powers, are not providing him with relevant information – either at all, or in what he regards as a timely manner. He has threatened to raise assessments, which would force these companies to object against those assessments and provide further information if they wish to prove the assessments are excessive.
Focus: Commissioner threatens to issue higher tax bills
Tax Commissioners or Collectors feature in a number of Biblical stories, still the one that most tax collectors identify with is notably the story of Job, who was chosen by the Old Testament God to suffer innumerable sufferings as a test of his faith ...

 The key to any project is metrics — without ways to measure progress toward the goals you set, how do you know if what you are doing is working? Here are some metrics to track and why they matter:
Taken from Social Media: Strategies and Tools for News, a self-directed course by Susan Mernit at Poynter NewsU

 Superbosses, a term coined by academic Sydney Finkelstein, are particularly aware of the importance of incorporating people with potential into groups of achievers. The key is to not limit what these unique individuals can do by putting them into an assigned box. That just kills potential. Finkelstein gives some good examples in an article in theHarvard Business Review from iconic institutions like Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant, George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic and Saturday Night Live.  So why are we attracted to the unknown? Apparently it’s a human psychological bias that leans us in that direction. A study by Stanford University professor Zakary Tormala explains that it is the mystery that draws us in. “It's as if people engage more as they try to work through the uncertainty and figure out what the truth will be,” says Tormala. Spotting potential 

Yves Béhar on Retro Design In An Instantaneous World

fuseproject's founder on creating an up-to-date filmmaking experience with a film-based cartridge
Yves Béhar on Retro Design In An Instantaneous World
 


Norway’s Radioactive Reindeer Atlantic 

"Never forget" is one of humanity’s highest moral obligations, an unassailable piety of our age. But what we need is more forgetting Kundera''s Eulogy
“The private event, which is run by the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, is a little-known fundraising vehicle where lobbyists for Wall Street banks, insurance companies and accounting firms gather monthly to discuss literature with a Republican panel member.” You don’t have to have read the book, and yes, of course they’ve done Atlas Shrugged. Bloomberg 

 Cold Rivers the 100 best nonfiction books 


Regarding “Death predicts whether people vote for Donald Trump,” this bit from Mark Ames is à-propos:
“I really started with the idea that in every age, there is some awful oppression that is not yet recognized and therefore doesn’t exist, but later seems horribly obvious. This became clear to me working in Moscow in the ’90s. No one in the ‘liberal’ Western press corps, academia, world financial aid organizations or Clinton Administration had a shred of sympathy for the millions of Russians suffering from so-called ‘privatization’ programs that we rammed down their throats. Literally millions of Russians went to their graves early in the ’90s, yet many respectable Westerners openly said that the old generation would ‘have to die off’ before the proper mindset set in to allow full Westernization in Russia. Those millions of deaths are still not seen as part of something larger and evil.” A brief history of rebellion and rage

In one scene from Americana, Don DeLillo’s 1971 debut novel, narrator David Bell turns off a light and turns on a radio:
Sound filled the room, huge noise, bass and drums booming out of the speaker, beating and scratching, then the sting of a fierce needling trumpet. In the darkness that trumpet had a deeper beauty, filling space, leaving time behind, a difficult sound departing and returning, and I did not feel I was in a room with four walls. A note hung at eye level, dim speck on the railroad horizon, then vanished into a long silence shaded by the revving bass. Theaters of the mind ...radio literature
 The tension between the benefits and challenges of encryption has been an issue for law enforcement and policy makers since the 1990s, and was reinvigorated in 2014 when companies like Apple and Google implemented automatic enhanced encryption on mobile devices and certain communications systems. Companies using such strong encryption do not maintain “back door” keys and, therefore, now cannot easily unlock, or decrypt, the devices—not even when presented with a valid legal order. Law enforcement concerns about the lack of back door keys were highlighted by the November and December 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and San Bernardino, CA . Questions arose as to whether the attackers used strong encryption and, more importantly, if they did, whether and how this might have hindered investigations.
Court-Ordered Access to Smart Phones: In Brief – Kristin Finklea, Specialist in Domestic Security; Richard M. Thompson II, Legislative Attorney; Chris Jaikaran, Analyst in Cybersecurity Policy. February 23, 2016.

“On Wednesday, CNET published a 5,500-word story about a female social media guru in Silicon Valley who is kidnapped by a taco truck owner. The man handcuffs the woman in the back of his truck and forces her to create a social media campaign to promote his tacos."  Promoting MEdia Dragons and Tacos via New  York Times 






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