Media Dragon: We’ve Just Had The Best Decade In Human History. Seriously.

Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.

— David Bohm, born in 1917

The world is hooked on Australian coffee culture. This is how it got so good

Rachel and John Banister's cyclying mates ...

Adelaide cyclist has 'never seen a koala do this' as heatwave continues

A thirsty koala latches on to a group of Adelaide cyclists, drinking water from them and climbing onto a bike as temperatures soar in Adelaide.

Dictatorships conform to type. “We can control him,” for instance, is the perennial belief of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator... Totalitarian Psychopaths

The team found that musical behaviour can be attributed three “dimensions”: degree of formality (from ceremonies to spontaneous singing or intimate infant care), degree of arousal (from calm and meditative to excited), and religiosity (from shamanic or sacred rites to communal sing-alongs). Songs are somewhat clustered in this “musical space”: across many cultures, for example, dance songs are high in arousal and formality, while lullabies are low in both. Western listeners proved pretty adept at identifying these categories: guessing, say, whether a song from an unfamiliar culture is used for dancing or as a lullaby.
The case for universality in music: Ethnographers have discovered that all of it has characteristics of formality, arousal, and religiosity... .. Tatranka and the Strange Sydney Academy of Ballet

Midcentury America was far more than Hemingway and Mailer. It was also hellfire sermons, vaudeville acts, and theNational Enquirer... Hem in Ways

This Land Art Installation Actually Helps Muffle The Noise Of Jets Taking Off And Landing

In fact, that’s what it was created to do. Installed in response to neighbors’ noise complaints following the opening of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport’s fifth runway, the Buitenschot Land Art Park was designed by landscape architects and acoustical engineers to dampen the noise from passing airplanes. – 99% Invisible

Colin Levy recently finished a sci-fi short that he’s been working on for several years called Skywatch. And spoiler alert: Jude Law is in it for a few seconds. As Levy admits, he had a barebones budget and didn’t have big Hollywood connections, so how did that happen? How do you convince an Oscar nominated actor to be in your no-name low-budget film project?

Ten Books That Shaped And Changed The 2010s

From “The Big Short” to Naomi Klein to “Normal People,” a list of books that made an impact. – The Guardian

“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in his gorgeous 1933 love letter to darkness. More than a century before him, Goethe observed in his theory of color and emotion that “color itself is a degree of darkness.” Darkness, we could say, is the sum total of all the colors and all the emotions — a totality of consummate beauty awaiting those willing to look.

That is the sentiment radiating from the spare, singsong pages of What Color Is Night? (public library) by beloved cartoonist Grant Snider.

Decades of psychedelic illustrations of scientific processes and phenomena from an 19th-century French physics textbook, and note the pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott’s gorgeous black-and-white abstractions of how nature work

The Wall Street Journal has published this wonderful editorial each Christmas since 1949, In Hoc Anno Domini:

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

A few more international books of the decade lists:

        - Benzine has a best-novel list, Les meilleurs romans de la décennie 2010-2019

        - at La Vanguardia they consider Los libros de la década

       Meanwhile, in The Guardian, Alex Clark offers From The Big Short to Normal People: the books that defined the decade
“You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people,” Olivia Laing wrote in her lyrical exploration of loneliness and the search for belonging. Our need for belonging is indeed the warp thread of our humanity, and our locus of belonging — determined in part by our choices and in part by the cards chance has dealt us in what we were born as and where — is a pillar of our identity. For those who have migrated far from their homeland, and especially for those of us who have migrated alone, without the built-in social support structure of a community or a family unit, this rupture of belonging can be particularly disorienting and lonesome-making. “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place,” Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in theirfantastic 1973 conversation about freedom — a freedom the conquest of which can be a whole life’s work.

How the rich plan to rule a burning planet Red Flag. Jackpot!

Property owner asks homeless Oakland mothers to leave vacant house San Francisco Chronicle (MoBee). “The real estate investment firm Wedgewood said it is partnering with the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Shelter 37 to provide training and job opportunities to at-risk Oakland residents and potentially sell the property at 2928 Magnolia St. to a first-time homebuyer.” Uh huh [nods vigorously]. More on the NGO from Boots Riley here (and here).

Wheeling Island’s Keeper of the Bees Belt Magazine

Why drink is the secret to humanity’s success FT. From 2018, still germane

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Selfies are causing a rise in people needing surgery for sore wrists, says doctor

CHEER UP: We’ve Just Had The Best Decade In Human History. Seriously.

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

This mind-bending optical illusion concocted by Frank Force has won this year’sBest Illusion of the Year contest. The illusion features a moving shape that somehow can be seen to rotate around both the horizontal and the vertical axisand rotates in two different directions around each axis. W. T. A. F.

The NY Times shares a selection of cloud photos taken by members of the Cloud Appreciation Society. The photos above are by Rod Jones & Jeanette Brown.

Clouds, their manifesto says, are not signs of negativity and gloom, but rather “nature’s poetry” and “the most egalitarian of her displays.”

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I’m a bit of a cloud nerd myself (e.g. see my Sun & Clouds Story). My favorite cloud pic I took last year (and perhaps even of all time) is this shot of some cumulonimbus mammatus clouds at sunset after a thunderstorm.

Report on public service overhaul a good start, but parliamentary inquiry is needed

The Conversation

While the long-awaited Thodey Report makes many sensible recommendations, the detail is often missing and the analysis weak. And the Morrison Government's response rules out