Friday, July 10, 2020

Scott Sumner on Joseph Conrad

Never do we find two eggs or two leaves or two blades of grass in a garden that are perfectly similar. And thus, perfect similarity is found only in incomplete and abstract notions




Australia halts extradition agreement with Hong Kong, extends visas

UPPING THE ANTE: The prime minister said the government ‘remains deeply concerned about China’s imposition of a broad national security law on Hong Kong’.


Permaculture Expert Ben Shaw's Gorgeous Geelong Home (+ Garden!) Hits The Market

ON THE MARKET

If you’re a keen gardener, you’re going to want to take a look at this Geelong home that’s just hit the market!

This property currently belongs to permaculture expert Ben Shaw, who has lovingly turned the backyard into a thriving, edible paradise. We’re talking 30 fruit trees alone! 

After 12 years in the home, Ben, his wife Kerryn, and their daughters Maeve (7) and Clara (4) are moving on from their beloved 1920s home, offering it up to a new owner for only the third time in history.


Interior in UK



Patriotism is a moral mistake and an intellectual mistake, a mistake twice over," says George Kateb. "We are all  subject to it 

“Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”

Mary Shelley on the Courage to Speak Up Against Injustice and the Power of Words in Revising the World

“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men*,” the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote in her 1914 anthem against silence — a line Rachel Carson leaned on in summoning her epoch-making courage to speak inconvenient truth to power as she awakened the modern environmental conscience

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality… what I most regretted were my silences… My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you,” Audre Lorde admonished a generation later in her blueprint to “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” — her own courageous and catalytic manifesto for another vital awakening. 

Mary Shelley on the Courage to Speak Up Against Injustice and the Power of Words in Revising the World


4. R. James Breiding, Too Small to Fail: Why some small nations outperform larger ones and how they are reshaping the world.  A very useful book expanding on the theme that smaller nations have the potential to be much better governed and thus to have smarter policy and greater accountability.

I have not yet read Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt, but in general I enjoy his works and find them smart.

There is also Jim Tankersley, The Riches of This Land: The untold, true story of America’s middle class


Richard W. Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn is the latest Stripe Press blockbuster.  Here is more information about the book


‘A picture tells a thousand words.’ This adage is the inspiration for an innovative new online exhibition, in which the public becomes the curator.

A Thousand Words presents 100 of the most compelling photographic images from the rich collections of Sydney Living Museums and the State Archives and Records Authority of NSW, created between the 1880s and the 1980s.

A Thousand Words adopts a philosophy that everyone can interpret history through the lens of their background, experiences, values and aspirations. Unlike a standard exhibition, the images are presented without traditional curatorial interpretation. Instead, the public have been invited to contribute responses – whether emotive, nostalgic or imaginative – and this ‘crowdsourced’ material translated into the exhibition design. New creative works have also been commissioned from established and emerging writers and artists, each responding to an image from the exhibition.

View and respond to some of the unique images at #OneWordWednesday and #SayitonSaturday, on TwitterFacebook and Instagram.

A Thousand Words is a collaboration between Sydney Living Museums and NSW State Archives.