Sunday, May 14, 2017

Time stays, we go: New look ... same questionable content

Complaining about the press is as useful as a sailor complaining of the sea.

"For people like me, the Internet is the shipwreck as well as the life raft: you drown in the tracking game, in the expectation, you can’t grieve for a relationship, however dead it may be, and at the same time you’re hovering above it in a virtual world clinging to fake information that pops up all over the Web, and instead of falling apart you go online. If only for that little green light that tells you the other person’s online.”
—Claire Millecam, fifty-year-old college professor.



Nadia Khomami in London and Olivia Solon in San Francisco



NHS cyber-attack: GPs and hospitals hit by ransomwareBBC. Lambert: “Tories -> Budget cuts -> No upgrades -> Hacking […] -> Privatization of the NHS.”
74 countries hit by NSA-powered WannaCrypt ransomware backdoor The Register. Richard Smith: “The NHS is thought to have been particularly hard hit because of the antiquated nature of its IT infrastructure. A large part of the organization’s systems are still using Windows XP, which is no longer supported by Microsoft, and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt cancelled a pricey support package in 2015 as a cost-saving measure.”
Cyber-attack hits 99 countries with UK hospitals among targets – live updates Guardian. Martha r: “Live blog of current ransomware cyber attack.”



Former FBI director James Comey to appear before Senate inquiry

James Comey, the FBI director dramatically fired and then vilified and threatened by Donald Trump last week, is poised to exact his revenge on the US president by testifying against him publicly before Congress.



… EarlyWord: The Publisher | Librarian Connection — Blog Archive A Museum Dedicated to Writers

BC to confirm - Why do Japanese audiences adore Woody Allen films? Because Jewish humor has become a marker of elite sophistication... What Is Sophistication?


“There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.”

― Woody AllenAnnie Hall: Screenplay


Writers once sought silence, exile, and cunning. Today they seek dialogue, community, and workshopping. What's lost when writers are afraid to stand alone?... What Happens When Authors Are Afraid to Stand Alone

Wikipedia Blog: “Wikipedia editors can now draw on WorldCat, the world’s largest database of books, to generate citations on Wikipedia thanks to a collaboration between OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Library program

You’re in your early 20s, your first book is a big success, you're called a genius. How would you react? If you're Dostoevsky, you'd become an insufferable jerk...Early 20s 


Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump | PRRI/The Atlantic Report, Daniel Cox, Ph.D., Rachel Lienesch, Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., 05.09.2017

“Executive Summary

  • Perhaps the most contested question from the 2016 presidential election is what factors motivated white working-class voters to support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of roughly two to one. New analysis by PRRI and The Atlantic, based on surveys conducted before and after the 2016 election, developed a model to test a variety of potential factors influencing support for Trump among white working-class voters. The model identifies five significant independent predictors of support for Trump among white working-class voters. No other factors were significant at conventional levels.

In 1956 George Miller, a Princeton University psychologist, set out an important principle that you’ve probably heard of in a paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”
Miller revived an observation made by Scottish Philosopher William Hamilton. After throwing marbles on a floor, “you will find it difficult to view at once more than six, or seven at most, without confusion.”
More items, however, Hamilton noted can be remembered when they are “chunked.”
In the fascinating book Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's PotentialRichard Restak shows us how to improve the performance of our brain by improving the performance of our memory through better “chunking”.





Who’s banking whom in cryptoland? Izabella Kaminska, FT Alphaville. A terse debunking.



`Ah, Who'll Live to See His Likes?'



“I never knew the worth of him / Until he died.”



NEW SARSHA SIMONE SINGLE 'DAYDREAM'' OUT NOW
LISTEN AT: http://smarturl.it/sarshasimonedaydream


They are:
Johnny Rogan, The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited, The Sequel, get the full-length edition, not the much shorter 1980 volume.
…in addition to the very recent Dreaming the Beatles, which I just reviewed.
NBThese are music books and I am not even recommending them to most of you.  These books only make sense if you already know a good deal about the careers of the artists involved.
Here is my advice on how to find excellent management books and management advice: pick some areas you know fairy well, be it music, sports, military campaigns, a scientific discovery, the making of a historic plane flight, or whatever.  Read a very detailed book about that.  Think through the lessons of that book(s).  Unfortunately, book about corporations so often filter their management information through homilies, hidden agendas, NDAs, ego boosts, paybacks, and other forms of…bullshit.  Music and sports books won’t, as they are too concerned with other kinds of stupid filters.  But you will get the lowdown on management for the most part.

There are some special reasons why I find the Byrds and XTC fruitful areas for reading for management advice, above and beyond my knowledge of the history and the musical content.  Neither group was massively profitable in a sustained manner, though they had their successes.  The two histories contain both triumphs and some major mistakes.  The main creators worked very consistently at their music for decades, and were not afraid to take chances or to operate with a long time horizon. 
 Nor did they destroy themselves, even though they were fatally flawed as creators.  Both histories are also studies in small group dynamics, including their eventual collapse; the Byrds are more a story of changing personnel and its costs.  Both histories embody tales of retreat and also return, and an ongoing evolution of styles and media.  Both stories have (relatively) happy endings, but only for those who kept at work rather than partook in indulgences.  

Those features may or may not apply to your own personal circumstances, choose your management books accordingly, but I those kinds of stories more interesting than say books about the Rolling Stones.
If you can find books such as these, they are among the most valuable you will read.  Yet it is very hard to find them through recommendations, given the idiosyncratic nature of the content and its relevance.  Of course that is precisely why they have such high marginal value.

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING PHOTON: The World’s Fastest Camera Shoots Five Trillion Photos Every Second.


 Facebook publishes fake news ads in UK papers

Why Americans Smile So Much Atlantic