Sunday, January 15, 2017

The Age of Miracles and Moron Phones: Charter 77 Dream Songs


In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.
— Isaac Newton, born on this date in 1643

NSW government to apologise for Granville train disaster



Forty years after it happened, the NSW State Government will apologise to the families who lost loved ones in the Granville train disaster


The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

What makes things cool on the banks of Cold Rivers of life?

After more than half a century I can still hear my mother laughing when I asked her what job I could get that would pay me to read books. Did she think I was joking? Or merely being a moron?

I consider this a super human talent. Alien in fact. Seriously, why aren’t they checking this painter’s DNA for extra-terrestrial origins? His name is Yigal Ozeri, an oil painter from Isräel best-known for his cinematic-scale portraits of pretty girls hanging out with nature in perfect sunlight. Let me know when  you see a brushstroke…Paintings


“I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”Helping man endure by lifting his heart ...Levertov


… Why James Joyce said he was a Jesuit (but rebelled against the Catholic Church) 

Joyce also remained a fan of of Thomas Aquinas, routinely reading the Summa in Latin



Sister Frances Carr, one of the last remaining members of a nearly extinct religious society called the Shakers, has died. She was 89

… A Poem Distills Life and Death Into Two Lines - WSJ

… Watch John Berryman’s Drunken 1967 Interview for the BBC:

He Resigns By John Berryman

Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts. 
Her having gone away 
in spirit from me. Hosts 
of regrets come & find me empty. 

I don’t feel this will change. 
I don’t want any thing 
or person, familiar or strange. 
I don’t think I will sing 

any more just now,
or ever. I must start 
to sit with a blind brow 
above an empty heart.




Box Near The Queen’s Seats In Royal Albert Hall Offered For £2.5 Million


Nicholas Shaw of Harrods Estates said it was “the most expensive box we have ever offered for sale”. The box is on the western side of the auditorium and has approximately 849 years remaining on its lease.




Book Sales Rose In 2016, Led By A Familiar Character



“Led by Harry Potter’s newest incarnation in a West End play, Rowling’s first screenplay and titles by diet and fitness guru Joe Wicks, annual book sales in the UK rose to just over £1.59bn in 2016, from £1.51bn in the previous year, according to the annual sales roundup from data specialist Nielsen BookScan. The number of physical books sold also rose, from 190m in 2015 to 195m, in the 12 months to December 2016.”

It is 100% soy wax, in case you are wondering

Ultrasound Tracking Could Be Used to Deanonymize Tor Users Bleeping Computer Another reason to have only a stupid phone!



 On Whitewashing Russia: Power-worshippers Only See Black-and-White Counterpunch. Resilc, from story: “The trouble with this latest fairy tale is that the media has swallowed the state-sponsored story without demanding a scintilla of evidence, and has turned the entire factitious endeavor into a witch hunt aimed at alternative media.”

ComputerWeekly.com: “The UK government’s data portal, data.gov.uk, currently shows 36,552 published datasets available, but how usable are they, and is anyone actually downloading them?…There are examples of data being linked in useful ways. In several, but by no means all, cities in the UK and Europe, Citymapper draws on open datasets, including mapping data and public transport timetables, to show people where they are and what their options are for getting where they want to go. To do this, the data should, first and foremost, be available and up to date. It should also be in machine-readable format. Bus timetables in PDF form are not much fun for human beings – and they are almost useless for navigation apps

News release: “Every hour of every day, people use Uber to get around the more than 450 cities we serve. From Sydney to Summit, we’ve been working hard to get to know these cities, with the goal of making them cleaner, more efficient and less crowded. Along the way, we’ve found that local leaders, urban planners, and civic communities are all working to crack their city’s commute and figure out how best to invest in new infrastructure. That’s why we’re introducingMovement: a website that uses Uber’s data to help urban planners make informed decisions about our cities. Uber trips occur all over cities, so by analyzing a lot of trips over time, we can reliably estimate how long it takes to get from one area to another. Since Uber is available 24/7, we can compare travel conditions across different times of day, days of the week, or months of the year—and how travel times are impacted by big events, road closures or other things happening in a city. This data is anonymized and aggregated into the same types of geographic zones that transportation planners use to evaluate which parts of cities need expanded infrastructure, like Census Tracts andTraffic Analysis Zones (TAZs). In the weeks ahead, we’ll be inviting planning agencies and researchers to access our data and explore zone-to-zone travel times, and will soon make the website freely available to the public

More and more tweeters are getting more and more cruel and like narcissistic shell of a humanity ..