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Thursday, August 12, 2021

Almost Famous: Right here, right now. This is history

The Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the shortlist for the 2021 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. I’ve included a few favorites above (by Andrew McCarthyLarryn Rae, and Stefan Liebermann) but you can check out the rest on their site. (via curious about everything)



"Right here, right now. This is history"

This is history,” Noel told the crowd… “I thought it was Knebworth,” replied Liam. On August 10, 1996, Oasis played the first of two shows at Knebworth Park, Hertfordshire, to a combined total of 250,000 people.


The Most Important Act of the Last Two Decades?


Literary prizes remain a lottery, but they’re still worth havingby Jane Sullivan


ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Tall Were WW2 Leaders? (Video.)


For his Then & Now Portraits of Centenarians - Faces of Century project, photographer Jan Langer made portraits of Czech people who are 100+ years old that mimic the style of photos of those same people 70 or 80 years before. If you click on the ⓘ below each pair of photographs, you can read a short biography of each person. All of these folks lived through two world wars, the Cold  War, the space age, the computer age, and so much more. Incredible. (via life is so beautiful)


Lusia Harris, the Only Woman Drafted by an NBA Team

Precious Metals / FOI


Nautilus – It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things. By Peter Wohlleben July 21, 2021: “In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants). I was happy to say yes. The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this. It upends our view of the living world, putting plants at the top of the hierarchy with humans down at the bottom.


While Jeff Bezos enjoys his retirement from a career of empire building, Founder, Chairman, & CEO of LVMH – Bernard Arnault – has been steadily (re)gaining the confidence of investors, elevating the luxury conglomerate’s stock price (EPA: MC), and surpassing Mr Amazon himself to become the world’s richest man. 

At the time of this writing, according to the Forbes real-time billionaire rankings, Bernard Arnault has a mind-boggling net worth of US$198.9 billion (AU$268.6 billion), against Jeff Bezos who boasts of a recently diminished net worth amounting to US$194.9 billion (AU$263.2 billion). Finding a home in third place is none other than meme lord entrepreneur, Elon Musk, at US$185.5 billion (AU$250.5 billion), followed not-so-closely by divorced father of three, Bill Gates, who trails rather considerably at US$132 billion (AU$178.3 billion). And rounding out the Top 5 is old mate Zucc with US$130.6 billion (AU$176.4 billion).

Richest


Apocalyptic scares, front-parlor exorcisms, sightings of the Virgin Mary: Why did postwar Germany experience a wave of superstitious  belief?  


The New York Times Magazine: “The “HA HA” Tapback stands alone. It’s no exaggeration to say that it has saved many of my friendships…Thankfully, back in 2016, Apple was kind enough to create a democratic way for every person’s joke to get more, or at least enough: the “HA HA” Tapback. Apple’s Tapback feature allows users to smother an incoming text in iMessages with their finger until it coughs up a shortcut menu of cute little symbols, each mapped to some kind of basic emotional response. There’s a thumbs up or down, a heart, some exclamation points, a question mark — and a little “HA HA” bubble….”