25 Years Ago the Web Became Public Domain and 16 Years Ago MEdia Dragon Came out of the Parliamentary Steve Jobs' Internet Forums

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
- George Bernard Shaw not related to Catherine

It was formerly a terrifying view to me that I should one day be an old woman. I now find that Nature has provided pleasures for every state.
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, baptised on this date in 1689

Imrich - What's in an author name?

Social scientists study beauty as physical appearance. The natural sciences study it as pattern and structure, fractals and spheres. But a messier form of beautyis coming into view   


National Review at 15

DON’T CALL IT STYLE: "The writer’s voice may be more audible when it is shrieking or shouting or cursing. But the voice of the strategically neutral writer is still a voice, one that we need when we try to get at the truth without fear or favor," writes Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark

Andrew Douglas Macintosh of Australia's leading retirement village company Aveo fame  "Poo Jogger" Caught In The Act (*added as per SMS ;-)


*'Doubt' the key to being a successful investigator

Aveo's billions: behind the impenetrable aged-care empire - Michael West ...

After Friday’s Mediawire on “scandal inflation,” reader Anne Visser Ney writes: “We have scandal fatigue. Mitigate that, please. Stop the 24/7 reporting on stupidity. Dig out the harder story, the one about the acts of Everyman — Republican, Democrat, or otherwise — who is out there sailing in nasty seas trying to hold the good ship of republic together.”

Jan Assmann, The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus.  One of the best introductory works on the best and most important book ever written. 

Why read old philosophy?

A number of commentators pick the most important economics books 

Biblioburro

Atlas Obscura: “For as long as libraries have been repositories of wisdom and knowledge, there has been a place on the shelf for cookbooks. In fact, many early cookbooks were more than just recipe collections—instructions for concocting medicine often jostled with dinner ideas for page space. Atlas Obscura has previously displayed ancient recipe collections, such as the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian tablets, which contain theoldest known recorded recipes, and the New York Academy of Medicine’s 9th-century De re culinaria, the oldest surviving cookbook in the West. Cookbooks were once intended mainly for upper-class households. Only relatively recently did printing and educational advances make them more democratic. Today’s versions tend to hold well-lit photographs and elegant prose. But humanity has long turned to cookbooks for inspiration and entertainment, and whether sauce-stained or Gothic-lettered, cookbooks offer glimpses of humanity’s food history. Here is a collection of some of the oldest cookbooks from libraries around the world…” 

How to fact-check politics in countries with no press freedom

“Power in authoritarian countries is about control of information, getting around those controls is a major challenge for the independent press.”

Did Armenia Just Dance Its Way To Revolution?

This puts a new spin on the old Emma Goldman quote, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." … Read More

Recently we came across this wonderful Anna Akhmatova poem, entitled N.V.N. and translated by Jane Kenyon:

There is a sacred, secret line in loving

which attraction and even passion cannot cross, —

even if lips draw near in awful silence

and love tears at the heart.

   

Friendship is weak and useless here,

and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,

because the soul is free and does not know

the slow luxuries of sensual life.

Those who try to come near it are insane

and those who reach it are shaken by grief.

So now you know exactly why

my heart beats no faster under your hand.

You Think You’re Waiting A Long Time To Publish? This Zora Neale Hurston Book Took Ninety Years To Get To Print 

She first tried to publish the novel in 1931, but its genesis was earlier. “Hurston began researching Barracoon in 1927, when she first interviewed the former slave Kossola (later named Cudjo Lewis) on an assignment from the famed anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas.”

Massive sinkhole in New Zealand exposes earth from 60,000 years ago Inhabitat. Shane: This piece was derived from one in The Mirror, but the Inhabit one has a longer, better video, which is worth watching.

Are Fake Books On Amazon Being Used For Money Laundering?

“Worthless” books priced at up to thousands, of dollars on Amazon.com and which contain only nonsensical text have been identified as possible vehicles for money laundering by an author whose name was, he says, used to send almost $24,000 (£17,200) to an unknown and fraudulent seller.

Popular Mechanics: “Twenty-five years ago today, the World Wide Web announced that it was for everybody. On April 30, 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) put the web into the public domain a decision that has fundamentally altered the past quarter-century. While the proto-internet dates back to the 1960s, the World Wide Web as we know it had been invented four year earlier in 1989 by CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee. The internet at that point was growing in popularity among academic circles but still had limited mainstream utility. Scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which allowed for easier transfer of information. But there was the fundamental problem of how to organize all that information. In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of management, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal, Berners-Lee asked CERN management to “imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse.” Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies…”

Russian literature and society

The Guardian, Finland to End Basic Income Trial After Two Years:

Europe’s first national government-backed experiment in giving citizens free cash will end next year after Finland decided not to extend its widely publicised basic income trial and to explore alternative welfare schemes instead.

Since January 2017, a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 have been paid a monthly €560 (£475), with no requirement to seek or accept employment. Any recipients who took a job continued to receive the same amount.