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Ruskin Ready For a Revival, After the $120,000 Banana
We haven’t checked in on the Primitive Technology guy in awhile and — whoa, he has umasked himself! After more than four years of anonymity, the man building all of the tools, huts, weapons, and other Stone Age technologies in the wilds of Australia has revealed himself as John Plant. And in this video compilation from October, he announces that he has a book out: Primitive Technology: A Survivalist’s Guide to Building Tools, Shelters, and More in the Wild. Looks like a step-by-step guide to building all the things in his videos, accompanied by illustrations and photos
Every organization wants engaged employees who are committed and likely to stick around. But as sweeping industry disruption, mergers and increasingly demanding customers consume our attention, employee engagement often takes a back seat.
Remember the Dutch kid whostuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent
It only took colleagues an hour to notice our hero was
missing
Liberal party member denies links to Chinese Communist party after Belt and Road controversy
What technology will courts be using in 5 years’ time
National Center for State Courts – Court Technology Bulletin, December 5, 2019 – “We are pleased to share the following post from our friend, the Hon. Judge Andrea Tsalamandris from Melbourne, Australia on “how technology can be used by judges and court administration to create efficiencies in our courts, and enhance access to justice. As a judge who was appointed to the County Court of Victoria (CCV) a few years before my 50th birthday, I was very pragmatic in embracing technology in my new role. I thought it was safe to presume that when I retired in twenty years’ time, I would not be working with paper court books or handwriting my signature on court orders. My initial interest in technology was simply to see how it could make my life as a judge easier. However, after attending an E-Courts Conference in the United States in 2018, my eyes were opened to the manner in which technology could be used within courts, to benefit court users, as well as judges and court staff. Shortly after attending that conference, I was asked to chair a newly created IT committee at the CCV, to guide the court in our digital transformation. My teenage children thought this was hysterical, as they did not consider me to be in any way “tech-savvy”; and that was indeed true. But I was willing to learn and was keen to see, in practical terms, how technology could assist all areas of our court, from registry, to the courtroom and in chambers. Whenever I talk to people about our plans for the future, I invariably pose the question – what will we be doing in 5 years’ time? Most of us accept that change is coming, and that it is probably coming more quickly than any of us expect. Having spoken with other judges and court IT managers in Australia, USA, UK and UAE, here is a list of where I think we are heading…”
Former council CEO jailed for corruption compares punishment to 'terminal illness' in video shot behind bars
A former Ipswich council CEO convicted of official corruption and attempting to pervert the course of justice speaks from prison about the impact the charges had on his life.‘It’s This Culture of Secrecy That’s Pervading the Courts’ FAIR
- Chilling stuff in ProPublica as Robert Moore, Susan Schmidt and Maryam Jameel go “Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.”
- From The New York Times: “What the CIA’s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured.” (The sketches are sobering.)
- Remember the old TV show “Lou Grant?” In this week’s “WriteLane” podcast hosted by Tampa Bay Times Pulitzer Prize-winning features writer Lane DeGregory, she and Times’ editor (and podcast co-host) Maria Carrillo discuss how they wanted to be bad-ass reporter Billie Newman.
- Finally, congrats to longtime college basketball analyst Dick Vitale, who celebrated his 40th anniversary at ESPN on Thursday. Here’s a nice tribute video.
Harvard Law Today, Clinic Stories: Prepping for the U.S. Court of Appeals:
In this video, we follow Adeyemi “Yemi” Adediran
’21, a second year student in the Clinic, as he prepares to argue an
appeal on behalf of a military veteran with PTSD in the United States
Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, in Chicago. The veteran’s appeal
to the Seventh Circuit centered on his eligibility for innocent spouse
relief under the Internal Revenue Code. Over a three year period, the
veteran’s wife embezzled $500K from the Appleton, Wisconsin Blood
Bank—where she worked as a bookkeeper. She was arrested and sentenced to
jail, but because the couple filed taxes jointly and embezzled money is
taxable, they were both legally responsible for back taxes on the
money.
This sounds exciting — the operative word being “sounds.” The
Pulitzer Prize Board is adding a new category for the 2020 prize cycle:
Audio Reporting.
The prize will be awarded for “a distinguished example of audio
journalism that serves the public interest, characterized by revelatory
reporting and illuminating storytelling.”
Submissions can come from producers of radio programs and
podcasts, as well as U.S. newspapers, magazines, wire services and online news
sites that publish regularly. Non-U.S. outlets are ineligible.
This is a great idea,
and long overdue. Audio storytelling and reporting — especially in the
ever-expanding podcast world — is among the best journalism out there. It’s
exciting to see the Pulitzer Board recognize that and it will be fascinating to
see the submissions, finalists and ultimate winners in the coming years.
Like the citizens of the Industrial Revolution, we’re longing for escape while participating in a widespread conversation about stress and self-care in a fragmented world.
The return of freestanding bath tubs.
Leonard Nimoy
“Do what scares you”
The 100 Best Recordings of 2019
DRIVERS OF LOYALTY: What explains these
two uniformed forces’ divergent attitudes toward bad behaviour?
Germany owns no nuclear weapons. It renounced the very idea when it reunified in 1990. But if war were to break out in Europe today, German pilots could clamber into German planes, take off from Büchel Air Base in Rhineland-Palatinate and drop nuclear bombs on Russian troops.The Luftwaffe can do that thanks to Nato’s nuclear-sharing scheme, under which America quietly stations nuclear bombs across five countries in Europe.
Here is more from The Economist, mostly covering Turkey and the tactical nuclear weapons stored there.
The Endangered Language Alliance has produced a map of the 637 languages and dialects spoken by the residents of NYC (past and present).
It represents ELA’s ongoing effort to draw on all available sources, including thousands of interviews and discussions, to tell the continuing story of the city’s many languages and cultures. The patterns it reveals — the clustering of West African languages in Harlem and the Bronx, a microcosm of the former Soviet Union in south Brooklyn, the multifaceted Asian-language diversity of Queens, to name a few — only hint at the linguistic complexity of a city where a single building or block can host speakers of dozens of languages from across the globe.
The online map embedded in the page works ok, but a $50 donation to the organization will get you a 24″ x 36″ print for your wall.
According to a Gothamist post about the map, the size and diversity of the city sometimes means that a significant chunk of a language’s worldwide speakers live in NYC:
Seke is a language spoken in just a handful of towns in Nepal-worldwide, there are fewer than 700 people who speak it. More than 100 of those people live in Brooklyn and Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance, a group that seeks to document and preserve smaller, minority, and Indigenous languages across New York City.
The Creativity Artificial Intelligence Might Bring
“In the future, we can expect computers to produce literature different from anything we could possibly conceive of. Our instinct is to try to make sense of it if we can. But when a new form of writing appears, generated by sophisticated machines, we may not be able to. As we learn to appreciate it, perhaps we will even come to prefer machine-generated literature.” – Nautilus
Artist Rob Kesseler is a master of the microphotography of plants and their intricately small parts (like pollen, cells, and seeds). At Colossal, Kessler says a childhood gift of a microscope set him on his way.
“What the microscope gave me was an unprecedented view of nature, a second vision,” he writes, “and awareness that there existed another world of forms, colours and patterns beyond what I could normally see.” The artist says his use of color is inspired by the time he spends researching and observing, and that just like nature, he employs it to attract attention.
Check out much more of Kesseler’s work on his website
“Do what scares you”
The films by or about Bob Dylan are every bit as strange, unique, intimate & evasive, as he is and Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story, streaming now on Netflix, is no exception, blending documentary footage Dylan had taken during the famous 1974-6 tour with more than a few fictional add-ons from the likes of Sharon Stone, Kipper Kid Martin von Haselberg, and studio exec (just not that studio nor thatexec) Jim Gianapolus. But as somebody who has been listening to, close-reading and watching the troubadour of Hibbing for at least 57 years, the real stars of this paradocumentary are Bob Dylan’s eyes. They are luminous, blue and often (in the faux Noh white paint that turns up pretty much everywhere on Dylan, violinist Scarlet Rivera, and even for a bit Joan Baez, during the tour) green.[i] Most importantly, they are searching, making contact, commenting on the action we see and the inner workings behind the mask that are not given to us during the two-hour, twenty minutes of the film.
The 100 Best Recordings of 2019
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