― Pearls Of Eternity
'Cancel your trip to Bali': the tourist towns crying out for visitors
As the threat from bushfires subsides, NSW south coast towns are welcoming back tourists in the hope of fending off an economic crisis. Adopted godson James helping north ...
Artists Add Value? Here’s a List Of Practical Ways During The Australian Fires
Artists have stepped up in a huge way at this dark time in Australian history by volunteering their talents and resources to support communities and firefighters. They have demonstrated artists and arts practice can contribute to our society with passion, ingenuity, and imagination. –The Conversation
So, you want to live in a tiny house? Here's what you need to know
[The New England Patriots have] won six Super Bowl titles, matching the record held by the Pittsburgh Steelers, and it has done so in less than 20 years. As notable, the Patriots have been so consistently successful that they had not had to play in the first round of the playoffs since 2009; and since then, until this season, they had never failed to make it to at least the divisional round of the playoffs. ...
New York Public Library: “Since The New York Public Library’s founding in 1895, millions of books have been checked out by patrons of all ages throughout the city. In honor of the 125th anniversary, a team of experts from the Library carefully evaluated a series of key factors to determine the most borrowed books, including historic checkout and circulation data (for all formats, including e-books), overall trends, current events, popularity, length of time in print, and presence in the Library catalog. Read on to discover the top 10 checkouts in our history…
OCLC – Reflections on Collective Collections By Brian Lavoie, Lorcan Dempsey, and Constance Malpas: “Collective collections are the combined holdings of a group of libraries, analyzed and possibly managed as a unified resource. Constructing, understanding, and operationalizing collective collections is an increasingly important aspect of collection management for many libraries. This article presents some general insights about collective collections, drawn from a series of studies conducted by OCLC. These insights identify salient characteristics of many collective collections and serve as a starting point for developing collective collection-based strategies for such library priorities as shared print, digitization, and group-scale discovery and fulfillment.”
Hyperallergic: “Paris Musées announced yesterday that it is now offering 100,000 digital reproductions of artworks in the city’s museums as Open Access — free of charge and without restrictions — via its Collections portal. Paris Musées is a public entity that oversees the 14 municipal museums of Paris, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais, and the Catacombs. Users can download a file that contains a high definition (300 DPI) image, a document with details about the selected work, and a guide of best practices for using and citing the sources of the image…”
Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong. - The New York Times: “…The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.” The 70-year-old observes these same events and worries about her brain health. This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder. In the absence of brain disease, even the oldest older adults show little or no cognitive or memory decline beyond age 85 and 90, as shown in a 2018 study. Memory impairment is not inevitable. Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience. (This is why computers need to be shown tens of thousands of pictures of traffic lights or cats in order to be able to recognize them). If you’re going to get an X-ray, you want a 70-year-old radiologist reading it, not a 30-year-old one…”
The tortoise whose rampant sex drive helped save his species is finally retiring WaPo
We’re Approaching the Limits of Computer Power — We Need New Programmers Now’ Guardian
Are We on the Cusp of an ‘AI Winter’? BBC
New Lithium-Oxygen Battery Could One Day Power Electric Cars NBC
Living robots created as scientists turn frog cells into ‘entirely new life-forms’ Telegraph
Team builds the first living robots Techxplore
On the history of Prohibition (NYT).
Tiny houses are just that: tiny. Space is at a premium and some serious lifestyle adjustments may be required. So how do you know what type of tiny house is for you? Heather Shearer and Samuel Alexander explain.
At hlo they collect "the twelve most important books from 2019" in Hungary, in Best Books of 2019 --
Scientists Design Bacteria-Based Living Concrete Smithsonian
Bloomberg, What the Patriots Can Teach Us About Business:
[T]he Patriots excelled continuously. Among the many reasons for this, five have stood out for me consistently and are extremely relevant for sustained business success:
New York Public Library: “Since The New York Public Library’s founding in 1895, millions of books have been checked out by patrons of all ages throughout the city. In honor of the 125th anniversary, a team of experts from the Library carefully evaluated a series of key factors to determine the most borrowed books, including historic checkout and circulation data (for all formats, including e-books), overall trends, current events, popularity, length of time in print, and presence in the Library catalog. Read on to discover the top 10 checkouts in our history…
OCLC – Reflections on Collective Collections By Brian Lavoie, Lorcan Dempsey, and Constance Malpas: “Collective collections are the combined holdings of a group of libraries, analyzed and possibly managed as a unified resource. Constructing, understanding, and operationalizing collective collections is an increasingly important aspect of collection management for many libraries. This article presents some general insights about collective collections, drawn from a series of studies conducted by OCLC. These insights identify salient characteristics of many collective collections and serve as a starting point for developing collective collection-based strategies for such library priorities as shared print, digitization, and group-scale discovery and fulfillment.”
Hyperallergic: “Paris Musées announced yesterday that it is now offering 100,000 digital reproductions of artworks in the city’s museums as Open Access — free of charge and without restrictions — via its Collections portal. Paris Musées is a public entity that oversees the 14 municipal museums of Paris, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais, and the Catacombs. Users can download a file that contains a high definition (300 DPI) image, a document with details about the selected work, and a guide of best practices for using and citing the sources of the image…”
Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong. - The New York Times: “…The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.” The 70-year-old observes these same events and worries about her brain health. This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder. In the absence of brain disease, even the oldest older adults show little or no cognitive or memory decline beyond age 85 and 90, as shown in a 2018 study. Memory impairment is not inevitable. Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience. (This is why computers need to be shown tens of thousands of pictures of traffic lights or cats in order to be able to recognize them). If you’re going to get an X-ray, you want a 70-year-old radiologist reading it, not a 30-year-old one…”
The tortoise whose rampant sex drive helped save his species is finally retiring WaPo
We’re Approaching the Limits of Computer Power — We Need New Programmers Now’ Guardian
Are We on the Cusp of an ‘AI Winter’? BBC
New Lithium-Oxygen Battery Could One Day Power Electric Cars NBC
Living robots created as scientists turn frog cells into ‘entirely new life-forms’ Telegraph
Team builds the first living robots Techxplore
On the history of Prohibition (NYT).
In contrast, I say museum dates are good (though brutally enforcing a separating equilibrium).
“Many Amish are moving north, leaving their historic districts in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana for relatively cheap farmland in the deindustrializing Rust Belt and the prairie out west. This means they are farming colder, rockier ground and need plows that are stronger and more pliable. At the same time, different Amish communities have different sorts of religious proscriptions—some reject rubber wheels, for example, while others embrace them—so Pioneer offers roughly 90 different options.” Link here (WSJ), from the new Adam Davidson book.
That was then, this is now, from a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street: “Rejecting Davos is easy when one hasn’t been invited. Now that I have a chance to go, I want to discover its revolutionary potential.” (Not from The Onion.)