Sunday, December 01, 2019

Sonoma Jen Jen And Kev: NYPL 2019 Best Books for Adults and MEdia Dragons

There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.”
Louis Althusser 




Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.
— Guy Davenport, born in 1927

German vlogger goes viral after dig at Aussie staple, Vegemite - 9Honey


       The Guardian offers a variety of Best books of 2019 lists -- notably also the one of author-selections, where: 'Bernardine Evaristo, Lee Child and more pick the best books of 2019'. 

       The Irish Times also asked a bunch of authors for their choices, in What writers are reading: The Irish Times books of the year 2019.


E. coli bacteria engineered to eat carbon dioxide Nature. Proof-of-concept. Nevertheless!


“To arrive at this conclusion, researchers spent five years painstakingly creating a database that features music created by people across the globe. They dubbed it the Natural History of Song.” –Newsweek


tatranka chamilova from amediadragon.blogspot.com

 Folkloric Group Subor Tribute to Marta Chamilova. Sergey Roldugin is a folkloric cellist for the St Petersburg orchestra, yet his name appears as the owner of offshore companies that have rights ...





Still Trying To Pin Down The Effects On The Brain Of Studying Music

“Current research implies — implies, not concludes — that studying music can help children develop spatial reasoning and listening skills and improve their concentration, but more study is needed to fully understand this relationship.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Research: Extraordinary People Are More Likely To Be Polymaths


Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist. They are also 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be a musician. – BBC

A Massive Art Theft In Dresden Is The Biggest Heist Since WWII


Uh, wow, Dresden: “The exact details of the operation, and what was taken, are not yet clear, but local news outlets report the thieves targeted the jewelry section of the historic Royal Palace after entering the building through a small window. Authorities said three diamond jewelry sets, consisting of as many as 100 pieces of diamonds, pearls, and rubies, were taken from the Grüne Gewölbe (or Green Vault) housed in the downtown palace.” – Slate 


Brainpickings – 800 Years of Symbolic Diagrams Visualizing Human Knowledge – “Why is it that when we behold the oldest living trees in the world, primeval awe runs down our spine? We are entwined with trees in an elemental embrace, both biological and symbolic, depending on them for the very air we breathe as well as for our deepest metaphors, millennia in the making. They permeate our mythology and our understanding of evolution. They enchant our greatest poets and rivet our greatest scientists. Even our language reflects that relationship — it’s an idea that has taken “root” in nearly every “branch” of knowledge. How and why this came to be is what designer and information visualization scholar Manuel Limaexplores in The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (public library) — a magnificent 800-year history of the tree diagram, from Descartes to data visualization, medieval manuscripts to modern information design, and the follow-up to Lima’s excellent Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information…”
  “Welcome to the 2019 Best Books for Adults. The New York Public Library is a premier resource for connecting readers with great books, with a staff dedicated to spreading a love of reading and sharing their book expertise. Our librarians—through their experience recommending books to patrons and as readers themselves—have highlighted their picks for 100 best books written for adults and published in 2019. No matter what kind of reader you are, what genres or subjects you normally gravitate to, we’re confident that you will find a book to pull you deep into its world or open yours up. Browse through the categories below, or go straight to our top 10 list (selected by a vote among our staff), and find your next great read…”


In any given year, an average of 275,000 books are published in the United States, some 43,000 of them fiction. Add to that centuries of books and you can see why it’s nearly impossible to devise a definitive list of the best 100 literary characters. But, undeterred, for our recent book, The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, my co-authors Gail Sinclair, Kirk Curnutt, and I decided that a reasonable list was possible if we gravitated toward time-honored reader favorites, classic prototypes, and cultural influencers—characters who had a life beyond the pages. There were at least 50 additional characters that we agonized over but ultimately left out of the book. Below are 10 who deserved to be included but were not.



UPDATED MANUAL: The new edition adds age, cultural & linguistic, gender & sexual, and disability diversity to its pages.



Library of Congress Blog –  1,000 U.S. Government PowerPoint Slide Decks  - The Signal: “The Digital Content Management section has been working to extract and make available sets of files from the Library’s significant Web Archives holdings. The outcome of the project is a series of web archive file datasets, each containing 1,000 files of related media types selected from .gov domains. You canread more about this series herePowerPoint presentations have become a nearly ubiquitous form of communication document in the digital era. At the most basic level, PowerPoint files present a sequence of slides containing text, images and multimedia. Today, we are excited to share out a dataset of 1,000 random slide decks from U.S. government websites, collected via the Library of Congress Web Archive, such as the presentation on transporting hazardous materials in Figure 1. You can download a CSV file of data about the files, you can learn more about the dataset from this README, and you can also download the entire 3.7 GB dataset of the actual files…”



Justin Hendry, via itNews
The SA government completes its biggest overhaul of its 10-year-old portal yet.
Corinne Purtill, via Medium
A day with the schlep-bot Gita gives insight into what daily life shared with robots will look like. Parents, elderly, disability people — take note.

Andy Borowitz, via the New Yorker
The research identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.
Matt Schudel, via the Washington Post
Mr. James, who occupied a central place in a London literary coterie that included Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, was, above all else, a master of incandescent English prose. 
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