Monday, March 19, 2018

Cold River Reading Directions

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.
— Penelope Lively, born in 1933


We remember what Charles Lamb wrote on Oct. 11, 1802 to Coleridge:

“. . . a book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum.”


Professors are banning laptops in class, driving college students to revert to handwriting—and to complain about it; ‘a hand cramp in government’
Adam Shlomi says he is a good student at Georgetown University. But the sophomore is failing in one unexpected area: note-taking.
Back in his Florida high school, he brought a Chromebook to class, taking “beautiful, color-coded notes.” So he was shocked to learn many professors at the elite Jesuit university in Washington, D.C., don’t allow laptops in their lecture halls.
With nearly illegible handwriting—a scrawl of overlapping letters with interchangeable t’s and f’s, g’s and y’s—Mr. Shlomi, 20 years old, begs notes from friends, reads textbooks and reviews subjects on YouTube when it’s time to take a test.
As professors take a stand against computers in their classrooms, students who grew up more familiar with keyboards than cursive are struggling to adjust. They are recording classes on cellphones, turning to friends with better penmanship and petitioning schools for a softer line. ...


Preaching to the choir – Why Reading Books Should be Your Priority, According to Science


Inc., Christina DesMarais: “More than a quarter–26 percent–of American adults admit to not having read even part of a book within the last year. That’s according to statistics coming out of the Pew Research Center. If you’re part of this group, know that science supports the idea that reading is good for you on several levels.
  • Reading fiction can help you be more open-minded and creative.
  • People who read books live longer. [Good to know!!]
  • Reading 50 books a year is something you can actually accomplish.
  • Successful people are readers….”
Coda 😈🏊



Without Jeff's Amazon River Cold River would have sunked to the bottom of the unread oceans ...


How Amazon Measures The Success Of Its Original Series…

Amazon execs, Reuters says, believe the first series you watch after signing up deserves the credit for luring you to Prime (whether you liked the show or not apparently doesn’t matter, nor is it clear whether you need to finish a full season of a show for it to count). Unfortunately, Reuters chose to only publish a fraction of the data it says it obtained, making it hard to draw any broad conclusions about the relative success or failure of Amazon shows. … [Read More]
The Billionaire Philanthropist – “It is an American tradition for CEOs to stockpile their wealth, avoid taxes, then in their later years, participate in the theater of giving. Will Jeff Bezos make it scale?..During the political chaos of the last year, one American institution has emerged stronger than ever. As its revenues soared, Amazon’s stock price has steadily ascended, cresting $1,500 and beyond. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO, has experienced what The New York Times described as “what could be the most rapid personal-wealth surge in history.” His net worth hovers somewhere around $130 billion. His 400,000 acres in land holdings — much of it in west Texas, where Blue Origin, his space company, is based — makes him the 28th largest landowner in the country, according to the magazine The Land Report. By any standard, Bezos is one of the richest people to have ever lived, while Amazon exerts an impossible-to-overstate influence on a range of fields, from retail to publishing to cloud computing. As part of the highly touted HQ2 contest, twenty North American cities — finalists winnowed from a list of hundreds of applicants — are falling over themselves to offer tax breaks and other inducements so that Amazon will choose their municipality for its next headquarters. The power of Bezos, and Amazon, seems unbridled…”



Meet the world’s deadliest female sniper who terrorized Hitler’s Nazi army Independent





 The bloodiest genre: books by dictators. Mao's Little Red Book,, Gaddafi’s Green Book,Saddam Hussein’s Get Out, You Damned One! ...  Damned ...