“A hypocrite like that doesn’t even have to tell lies to always be on the right side of the fence.”
~ Strange Characters on this earth
This New Neighborhood Will Grow Its Own Food, Power Itself, And Handle Its Own Waste Fast CoExist. “The Tesla of eco-villages."
Our Unfortunate Annual Tradition: A Look At What Should Have Entered The Public Domain, But Didn’t TechDirt
FASTER, PLEASE: Damaged Mitochondria Associated With Aging and Cancer Can Be Removed Using a New Process
IS THERE NOTHING IT CAN’T DO? Don’t want to go deaf? Have a pint of Guinness each day: High levels of iron helps to prevent hearing loss, study finds.
It’s an Imperial pint-sized glass of science. You wouldn’t want to argue with science, would you?
One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die New York Times
2017 is not just another prime number 松鼠博士的魔法眼鏡. Math-minded readers?The Pessimist’s Guide to 2017 Bloomberg. NC ran this when it appeared, but for those who missed it…A Leap in the Dark The Archdruid Report
Metior passes behind Turrialba volcano YouTube. Robert H: “The volcano has been in a low level eruption for a few months.”
Follow up to update my previous lengthy posting on resources related to the Russian hacking of the US election, via the Washington Post today By Juliet Eilperin and Adam Entous: “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officialsTor and its Discontents: Problems with Tor usage as panacea Medium. Bill B, from the article: “Download and run this and you get a free proxy / VPN; oh, yeah, but you’ll stand out like a fucking glow stick and you have no good reason to use it except as an evasion tool against state authorities. Good luck explaining that when they ask uncomfortable questions”
Depicting the dead was a fixture of 19th-century painting. The genre is marked by skewed bodily proportions and blunt symbolism ... rite de passage
Unsettled #6, Parsons Harbour, South-West Coast (1999)
The six stories in Fortune Smiles, Dark told the audience, are the literary equivalents of amusement park rides—an apt description for fiction that finds a weird dark grace (with an equal emphasis on each of those three descriptors) in cancer, a former Stasi prison warden, a man fighting pedophiliac tendencies, Louisiana post-hurricane, and the hologram of an assassinated president. “I’ve learned over the years to trust my obsessions,” Johnson said. He read from the collection’s lead story, “Nirvana,” which featured the aforementioned hologram, and talked with Dark about the challenges of writing technology into fiction—particularly how the need to include cell phones in contemporary fiction, and their suspense-annulling immediacy, has the potential to screw with everything authors hold dear—“What do they to do plot? To brooding?” A Tremendous EmpathyPopcorn! Peanuts! Iris Scan! NBA, MLB Teams Enter Biometrics Age Bloomberg. I know I should know better, but I can’t believe how readily people give up biometric information.
Why Politicians Are to Blame for Most Terrorist Attacks Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch
“You expect too much from other people. You’re responsible for your own life.”
Gavin Bryar’s mesmeric “Jesus blood never failed me yet”, which was written to accompany a repeating loop of an unknown homeless man’s song recorded in London ...Perhaps you thought that you, as the writer, were the one who had to do all the imagining, and that the reader was to get every detail of the picture from your words. The reader of fiction takes pleasure in doing some of the work, and will more readily believe you and trust you if there is work to do. Strangely enough, the strength of fiction seems to lie as much in what is left out as in what is included, as much in the spaces between the words as in the words. This is one of strange powers at the heart of good writing. The writer’s skill likes perhaps as much in creating the spaces as in finding the words to put down.
Most of the texts in this piece (all by Australian poets) emphasize the celebrative and reflective qualities of the sea rather than following the European tradition of the sea as a metaphor for human struggle.
Turning back to Stach’s Kafka, some resonances and reverberations:
“Kafka had a strong preference for deep conversations with a small group of friends, and if confronted with too many faces and voice, he tended to sink into daydreams–and look almost apathetic–or slip into the role of an intent and smiling but silent observer. Both reactions were perceived as aloofness, and Kafka’s prim and proper clothing, only heightened this impression, and so it too patience and empathy not to misread his appearance as an affectation.”
“Nevertheless, this friendship [Kafka and Felix Weltsch] never developed the intensity of Kafka’s bond with Brod–even Weltsch’s written recollections of Kafka are oddly bland–most likely because Weltsch did not look to writing for existential expression and was therefore shielded from the torments of literary productivity. Both were after the truth. For Kafka, this pursuit remained a problem of linguistic and visual expression, burdened with a great many subjective reservations and the profound skepticism about language that was quite widespread at the turn of the century, while Weltsch’s approach to philosophical problems was based on his view that education and precise thinking were the best routes to solutions.”
“Many a book,” he wrote to Oskar Pollak, “seems like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”
“Instead, Kafka pursued these perplexing trains of thought as a reader of literature, keenly observing the waves of mutually enhancing associations that emanated from them. If they welled up with particular intensity, he concluded that he had touched on an inner, subjective truth of which he had been unaware until that moment–a process he was able to grasp only on imagery.”
