Digital artist Magdalene Visaggio uses her iPhone to transplant the portraits of U.S. Presidents into photo software and gives them modern clothes and haircuts as if they were U.S. politicians today. See her Twitter feed and meet George Washington (above) and others.
Scot mountain biker Danny MacAskill is arguably the best bicyclist of any type in the world. Here are two video clips [each six minutes long] of proof. In the clip above, MacAskill treats mountains the opposite way rock climbers do: finding new and challenging routes to descend the peaks. And in the clip below, a tour de force, he cycles down the rooftops to the sea in my wife’s hometown of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Wired magazine notes, “The oldest axle ever discovered is not on a wagon or cart, but instead on a potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia. These may seem like simple machines, but they’re the first evidence that anyone anywhere recognized the center of a spinning disk is stationary and used it to their mechanical advantage. It’s a completely ingenious observation and so novel that it’s unclear where the idea came from—perhaps from a bead spinning on string?—as it has no obvious corollary in nature. The pole is called an axle, and many scholars consider it the greatest mechanical insight in the history of humankind.
“Yet there exists another great intellectual leap between the potter’s wheel and a set of wheels on a rolling object. The full wheel set appears to have first been invented by a mother or father potter, because the world’s oldest axles are made of clay, are about two inches long, and sit beneath rolling animal figurines.
“The first wheeled vehicle, in other words, was a toy.
“In July 1880, the archaeologist Désiré Charnay discovered the first pre‑Columbian wheel set in the Americas. It was on a small coyote figure mounted on four wheels, and Charnay found it in the tomb of an Aztec child buried south of Mexico City.
“As Charnay presumes in his book The Ancient Cities of the New World, the toy was a memento of ‘a fond mother … who, ages gone by, buried [it] with her beloved child.’
“The Aztec child lived thousands of years after the inventor in the high steppe but before the Europeans arrived with their wheels in the Americas, which suggests that in both the New and Old Worlds a mother or father potter independently invented the wheel and axle to make a toy.
“The archaeologists I spoke with are hesitant to believe such a remarkable insight could have been made in the pursuit of something as frivolous as an object for play. The engineers, however, are not. Instead, they believe it would be far more remarkable if the first wheel and axles appeared on 500‑pound wagons. Small versions of inventions—modernly called models or prototypes—nearly always precede larger ones. They are far easier to build, take far less time, and allow an inventor to quickly discover potential problems and find solutions.
“Yet as ingenious as this inventor was, their toy did not spark a societal revolution. The person who scaled it into a full‑size set of wheels a few hundred years later did. The full‑size wagon first appeared approximately 5,400 years ago, and it may be one of the the first inventions in history to go viral. Archaeologists have discovered full‑size carts from southern Iraq to Germany within a few hundred years of each other at a time when cultural barriers were particularly impermeable. The wagon, it seems, was irresistibly useful.
“When I asked David Anthony, an anthropologist and the author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, what explains this viral growth, he believes part of the reason may be the wagon’s sheer size: ‘These were probably the biggest wooden machines anyone had ever seen,’ he says. They would have been loud; they would have been slow. And they were powered by teams of oxen, which were by themselves some of the largest animals in the steppe.
“The invention of the wagon was the prehistoric equivalent of Sputnik; it did not go unnoticed. Because the two oldest wheels archaeologists have found vary significantly in design—one has an axle fixed to the wheel as it does on a modern train, the other spins freely on the axle like on a modern car—Anthony suggests that at least some wagon builders copied what they saw from afar without being able to inspect it closely.”
This Might Be a Topic of Controversy in the Other 49 U.S. States
Yet FoodAndWine.com has hit the bulls eye in my native Connecticut! As are, I think, their choices for Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. Absolutely perfect choices!
Japanese Film Noir
If you are like American Film Noir and don’t mind subtitles (in other words, you’re not the normal American), you’ll love the Criterion Channel’s new selection of Japanese film noirs from the 1940s-60s. I can particularly recommend Kurosawa’s Stray Dog and The Bad Sleep Well, Nomura’s A Colt is My Passport, or Suzuki’s Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter. I’m looking forward to watching others. (That last movie is an odd one: the Japanese studio wanted to get rid of the director, who it had under contract, so it cut his film’s costumes, sets, and location shooting budget the shreds. He decided instead to film anyway on that shoestring budget. The result is a surreal gangster film that looks like it was filmed on rejected sets from 1960s American TV ‘Batman’ TV series (see photo below.]
Color-Blind Man Sees the Difference with Special Glasses
A video camera of RITV in the Croatian city of Rijeka captures live an aftershock from the earthquake that nation this past week.
R.I.P., bassist Eugene Wright, 95.
R.I.P. bassist Eugene Wright, 95, last surviving member of jazz legends the Dave Brubeck Quartet and a pioneer in racial desegregation of U.S. music venues. For those of you who don’t know who there are, see the video clip above, in particular from the 4-minute mark, to discover that a group doesn’t need to look hip to be verrrrry hip! Wright’s solo turn then begins around the 5-minute mark. Or click the this link to see one of the greatest single jazz performance ever given: The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Carnegie Hall performance of their ‘Take Five’.
They Aren’t Coming for Your Jobs Yet, but Just Want to Dance
And an Autonomous Ship will Retrace the Mayflower’s Voyage
Speaking of Oceanic Voyages…
A traditional ‘King Neptune’ certificate from August, 1944, as my namesake uncle, then a private in the U.S. Marine 3rd Division, crossed the Equator for the first time (at a militarily “censored” latitude) aboard the Dutch freighter Bloemfonteim, on the way to an amphibious landing at the Battle of Guam. When in 1941 the Germany invaded the Netherlands and the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies, the ships of the Dutch Navy that escaped joined up with Australian, British, and U.S. navies. The Bloemfonteim became an Allied troopship. I’ve a similar Neptune certificate from 1942 when my father, then a U.S. Navy ensign, crossed the Equator for the first time, aboard the battle cruiser Santa Fe.
The 20th Century in Manhattan (as well as the ‘Mad Men’ era) finally ends. No matter how important who think you are, no longer shall ye get ‘power lunches’ at the Four Seasons nor drinks at 21.
A remarkable video [10-minutes] about how the construction industry is changing due to Global Warming and Automation. Construction nowadays accounts for approximately 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Qantas, the Australian airline, announces that once COVID-19 vaccines become available, having had one will be mandatory requirement for becoming one of its international passengers. I expect that this will become a trend among airlines.
Here is a notable, partially-interactive graphic about high Mt. Everest is and what the hike and climb up it involves. This week, China and Nepal, on whose border the summit lays, announced that the summit is some 3 feet higher than previous measured due to the geological force of the Indian subcontinent colliding with central Asia.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for someone to dissolve the bonds of friendship or acquaintance which have connected him with someone else, a decent respect to the opinions of others requires that he should declare what has caused which impel him to that separation.
Friends and acquaintances can have differing and even opposite opinions, provided such opinions are civil and rational. Although I am a liberal, I enjoy rational and civil discussions with friends and acquaintances who are conservatives. (For examples, my consulting business partner of 15 years, who died in 2015, was stolid western American conservative. I continue to enjoy being Facebook ‘Friends’ with the former publisher of one of the most conservative daily newspapers in the U.S., and with a former Republican party 2018 nominee for the U.S. Senate.) We might politically disagree, but we have rational discussions about those disagreements. Somethings they convince me that they are correct and sometimes I convince them that I am.
However, when I examine all of my my friends and acquaintances–whether liberal or conservative (or in-between), I notice that all fall into two broad, non-political categories. those who are excellent friends, worth having, and those who aren’t.
Below, I’ll explain what I mean by people who are irrational and not worth having as friends. First, however, allow me to note something else that I realized: most of my excellent friends (those denote by green in the box above) are people who I befriended or became acquainted with during my adult life, not when I was growing up or in school. In other words, these are people with whom I rationally chose to become friends; not people with whom I’m friends simply because I grew up near them or were in the same classrooms as they when at school The are friends by rational choice, not happenstance of birth. That makes sense: a youth doesn’t necessarily have the judgement or responsibilities of an adult and therefore isn’t always the best judge of character.
Don’t get me wrong: there are many rational people with who grew up near me or attended the same schools are I, and they are excellent friends. However, when I examine the ranks of people I know who are irrational and so, no matter what their politics, don’t make good friends, almost all of the irrational people I came to know either are who grew up near me or attended the same schools as I. People I knew not by choice but by geographic happenstance of my birth, childhood, and adolescence. I wish it weren’t so, but almost all the racists, misogynists, conspiracy theory loonies, propaganda parrots, serial liars, or otherwise irrational miscreants I know are people with whom I grew up or attended schools more than 50 years ago. I regret that because I am a sentimental and nostalgic man. I loved my childhood and my native town, I still frequently revisit it, even though I left the town 37 years ago. Nevertheless, the time has come for me to sever several of my friends and acquaintances from those days.
The risk of limiting the number of your friends is that you could surround yourself only with friends whose thinking and opinions are exactly the same as your own. Indeed, becoming caught in a ‘bubble’ or ‘echo chamber’ can be seductive for gullible or weak-minded people. Yet, as the German philosopher Hegel noted, human progress is often a result of the dialectic between thesis and anti-thesis ultimately resulting in synthesis. To lead a healthy life, you need to hear different opinions than just your own. Exposing your own hypotheses and prejudices to attack by others is what corrects, hones, and strengthens them (and sometimes destroying them). That is why I maintain friendships with rational conservatives. It is the irrational ones are who I need to jettison.
Who am I jettisoning as a ‘friends’ or acquaintances? I won’t name names, but I will their characteristics. Any one of these characteristics is enough to jettison the person. Unfortunately, many of these miscreates have more than one of these characteristics:
Racists: For more than 40 years I have traveled the world and know first-hand that no individual is superior to another according to race or religion. If you are an anti-semite, anti-moslem, anti-hindu, anti-oriental, anti-hispanic, anti-caucasian, etc., beware because I will try to eradicate you. Know too that this includes miscreants who protest that they are not racists yet they, for examples, question the nationality of an African-American U.S. president born in Hawaii, or disparage Jewish emigres to the U.S., or claim that Moslem immigrants should be banned from emigration simply because they are Moslems. The United States Constitution states that my nation does not discriminate on the race, creeds, or national origin. If you are an American who does, then leave this nation–you are a disgrace to it.
Sexists: if you are posting mostly sarcastic pictures of the female politicians of party that you oppose, when female politicians comprise only a fraction of that party’s politicians, then you a sexist wimp who needs to see a psychiatrist about your inferiority complex about women or your ‘mommy’ issues. That’s what you telegraph when you (supposedly an adult) post such pictures.
Crayon Toddlers: Likewise, if you habitually post physically-distorted photos of politicians from a political party you oppose or photo of them simply calling them ‘idiots’ and the like, without explaining why you think this, then you are demonstrably not an adult but clearly a immature fool with the emotional stability of a five-year old. Intelligent people (in other words: adults) don’t use online forums as toilet bowls. Instead, they reason with people. If someone above the age of sixteen feels the need to act like a three-year old, to hell with them. They need the help of a child psychologist, not me. I’d rather deal with an adult.
Propaganda Parrots: The birds named parrots are loud but lousy conversationalists. They lack any cognitive abilities to examine what they say. They instead just stupidly repeat whatever things they have heard. However colorful, these stupid animals just make noise and the favorite pets of propagandists. Propagandists thrive on them.
Intentional Liars: If you are someone who has been given known proof that something is untrue, yet you “wish it were true”, then you knowingly spread that lie, you ably demonstrated what a deceit you are. Likewise, if a person has been documented to be a serial liar (by which I mean not tens or scores but telling thousands of lies), then that person should be clearly be removed for hygienic reasons: he has proven to be a fecal liar.
Conspiracy Theorists: Hey, maybe John F. Kennedy is still alive and with Marilyn Monroe in Paraguay? How do you know that is not true? To most conspiracy theorists, lack of evidence means proof of conspiracy. They are incapable of understanding chance, probabilities, the devastating full capabilities of single actors (viz, Lee Harvey Oswald), or that the probability of keep an actual conspiracy secret decreases, according to Metcalfe’s Law, with the number of people such a conspiracy needs to involve. As an adult, I prefer evidence and proof, rather than fishing expeditions fantasies. Some people can’t tell the difference between reality and comic books.
Fans of criminals or of abusers: When you claim that a politician you hate must be guilty because he has had nine women accuse him of sexual assault, yet you says a politician you like is being falsely victimized by the nineteen women who accuse him of sexual assault, then you’re clearly a hypocrite. How many accusations of rape should cause a public official’s resignation? One, five, ten, nineteen? I advocate that if an establish police agency has found evidence to bring such charges, then a trial should be held. No one is above or immune from the law. Nonetheless, I do know that if a politician boasts before an election that he loves to grab female strangers by their genital (indeed, boasting that while he knows he is professionally wired for sound, a demonstration of his profound stupidity, then his political party should remove him from the ballot. That is the way it had been for all political parties during the first 227 years of the United States’ 231 in existence. Likewise, if a state or federal court has banned a politician, due to “a pattern of criminal behavior,” from ever again operating a charity. To do otherwise is immoral and un-American. And what if that politician did indeed openly shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue? If you continued to support him, you clearly abet such conduct.
Blithering Irrationals: The domestic and global success of the United States is based upon respect for facts, laws, and truths. If you fantastically deny facts (including science), ignore existing laws, and disregard established truths (which are a function of evidence and scientific method), then you’re not only un-American but an idiot.
Bouncer Fodder: If Facebook or Twitter or any other social media company has ever ejected you from them banned your account for a period of time, then you’ve clearly proven yourself to be contemptable. I don’t need to await anything further.
I write all this in case you had been one of my Facebook ‘friends’ or acquaintances but have noticed that you no longer are. I regret that among those racists, conspiracy theory loonies, propaganda parrots, and intentional or serial liars I am jettisoning as friends were my two best friends while growing up, plus a dozen or so other people whom I have had found memories from those days 40 or 60 years.
If instead of first meeting these people more than 50 years ago when I was in kindergarten, elementary, or secondary schools, or even college, I first met them today, I would not befriend or otherwise become acquainted with them. So, why should I remain friends with them today just because they once were? No amount of childhood memorial fondness or nostalgia should permit adult friendship with racists, liars, misogynists, etc. Shame on me for not having booted them earlier.
Indeed, now that American voters have fired President Donald Trump, many of these miscreants are posting statements saying things such as “Just because we had different political opinions, doesn’t mean we can’t stay friends!” Wrong. Political opinion differences were not what we had. They instead went extreme: racist, misogynist, a propaganda parrot, intentional liar, conspiracy theorist, acolyte of a criminal or an abuser, or blitheringly irrational. I regard them as no better than the Germans who during the enthusiastically backed Hitler and his plans for ethnic cleansing yet then from 1945 onwards ingeniously claimed not to have known or realized that any such things existed. No, you didn’t put anybody in gas chambers. Yet you did begin enthusiastically goose-stepping America rightwards. That’s why rational Republicans such as the Bush and McCain families, as well as renowned Republican political commentators such Bill Kristol and George Will, condemned Trumpism from its onset. Goodbye and good riddance.
‘Indian Summer’, the period during mid-autumn when warm weather often returns for a week to ten days, is a month late this year, perhaps due to Global Warming. Leaves would normally not still be on the trees this time of year. Yet here is the view late afternoon from my desk at home.
I today mourn the death of my longtime friend and former colleague, Gordon Joseloff, age 75. The former CBS TV News journalist in London, Moscow, and Tokyo under legendary Managing Editor Walter Cronkite, Gordon had previously worked for original United Press International (UPI).
Later, in his hometown of Westport, Connecticut, he founded, edited, and published WestportNowcom, one of the most successful online local news websites in the U.S. Indeed, he was so interested in the well-being of Westport that for eight years he relinquished his roles at WestportNow to run the town as its First Selectman from 2005 to 2013.
I knew Gordon as a fellow UPI alumnus (‘Unipresser’); as a fellow pioneer in online news (he was perhaps the eldest pioneer in those endeavors); and as a warm fixture in Connecticut, as well as national, journalism. I last saw him two years ago at the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists annual meeting, where WestportNow won a number of journalism awards..
Adam Grant delivers a counter-TED speech about the counter-intuitive nature of ‘originals’ thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most.” He notes that “you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones,” plus mustn’t let doubts about yourself get in your way.
Who gets what from every dollar you pay for a cup of coffee or coffee beans? This chart from visualcapitalist.com answers that.
I have a modicum of knowledge about healthcare in the United States and foreign nations, their relative qualities, and their relative costs. I’m married to a Spaniard who for the past decade or more has become handicapped with a rare combination of two neurological diseases. When I say handicapped, I mean fully-disabled, legally granted such status in both the United States and Spain. She has had some ten brain surgeries during the past decade; five during 2015 alone. She has been treated at top U.S. and Spanish hospitals (for examples in the U.S.: the Mayo Clinic‘s headquarters in Minnesota; Columbia-Presbyterian and Weill-Cornell in New York City; and Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore). We know quality care and we have massive medical bills in the United States.
I am constantly amazed by the gullible stupidity of the minority of Americans who believe in fear that ‘Universal Healthcare’ would cause a decline in the U.S. healthcare system, which is the most expensive in the world for average care and ridiculously expensive for intensive care. I’ve yet to encounter one of these stupid people who has actually had first-hand experience with hospitals in other developed nations. They instead parrot what right-wing propagandists and right-wing politicians, whose salaries or campaigns respectively are paid for by the same insurance companies desperately fund to keep U.S. healthcare expensive for Americans and massively profitable for themselves. The stupid minority of Americans who believe such propaganda are the same ones who complain or joke about American hospitals charging them $1.00 for an aspirin tablet, yet they nevertheless won’t admit how much they are being financially cheated due to the added layer of expense healthcare funded primarily by for-profit insurance companies costs
My wife and I have gotten equally expertise and specialized care at University Hospital in Navarra, Spain, as at Columbia-Presbyterian. The difference is that the Spanish hospital visit costs ten times less. Indeed, my wife unexpectedly spent an entire afternoon at a hospital in her hometown of Las Palmas de Canaria with what ultimately was diagnoses as severe dehydration, yet involved a CAT scan, blood tests, a two full hours with two doctors. The cost to use was 50 Euros ($55), and would have been zero if a specialist hadn’t been called in to consult about my wife’s neurological diseases.
In the United States, our costs would likely have been somewhere between $500 and $3,000. Indeed, my wife and I would have gone bankrupt several years ago had not the U.S. government declared her to be fully-disabled and eligible for government-paid Medicare.
A gullible minority of Americans, parroting right-wing propagandists, claim that if Medicare were expanded into ‘Universal Healthcare’, then the United States would become a “socialist” “hellhole” such as Venezuela. That’s akin claiming that enforcement of parking laws would turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany, a ludicrous claim. Do these gullible minority of Americans think that people inside the foreign nations that do have Universal Healthcare are sick or dying, refused treatment or getting substandard treatment? People in countries with Universal Healthcare, such as Canada, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.? They are obviously not. In fact, the people in most of those countries have better health and live longer lives than do Americans. And none of them ever go bankrupt due to healthcare costs. These are the reasons why after World War Two every other developed nation except the U.S. chose to enact Universal Healthcare rather than choose the U.S. system.
Worried that you can’t keep your own doctor under such a healthcare system. Take a look at this nine-minute video (above) about Switzerland’s system. It’s a nation with Universal Healthcare plus private insurance, yet with much lower healthcare costs for its citizens than Americans pay.
What I find the most gullible about the minority of Americans who oppose Universal Healthcare is that they vociferously object to it adding one or two thousand dollars to their annual taxes, yet don’t mind paying five to ten thousand dollars annually to private healthcare insurers for exactly the same coverage. As the British say, they are ‘penny-wise but pound-foolish.” That’s true gullibility in action.
Indeed, during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Britons celebrated (below) having Universal Healthcare–their National Health Service.
