Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

For his business blog, visit http://www.digitaldeliverance.com

Esoterica

25 July 2016

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Late July and early August are slow times for me. My consulting practices slows down as clients in the northern hemisphere go on holiday plus I’m on summer holiday from teaching my New Media Business course at Syracuse University’s graduate school (although I annually during August update its eight-year old syllabus for the latest changes and developments in media business).  So, in my spare time, I’m doing cooking and drinking (no, not that type of drinking!) I mention new media, which is all technology-based, and cooking because even the later subject is being changed by technology. I’m not talking about molecular cooking or other esoteric cuisines, but about even such things as simple as outdoor grilling.  Consider the robotic BratWurst Bot, presented at the Stallwächter Party 2016 summer political festival in Berlin where it perfectly cooked more than 200 sausages autonomously. People grilling meats outdoors is neolithic, which you might says means somewhat traditional. On a nice, sunny, summer day, however, I wouldn’t mind having one of these contraption—provided it came with an option that also automatically serves German beers! While on the subject of drinking, the BBC has collected nine famous drinking quotes from Ernest Hemingway. Beans, I say. This past weekend, The New York Times published an excellent guide to cooking beans. By the way, if you get a chance, check out how Humanitas, a retirement home in Deventer, the Netherlands, provides the elderly with the care and social interaction that they need to remain physically and psychologically healthy, by providing free lodging in the retirement home for six students who spend at least 30 hours a month with the 160 elderly residents living there, helping the elderly whether prepare their meals, shopping with them, or teaching them to use computers or even paint street art! Great video about it at this website. Am listening today, via YouTube, to ElectroHouseBangers‘ Best Music 24/7 Live Stream | Best Remixes Of Popular Songs | Summer Dance Charts Mix 2016 | New Pop #  

Bucolic Connecticut

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My native state of Connecticut lacks high mountains and grand canyons, but its scenic wealth is its lush and gently rolling forests and small farms. That is what attracted most of the American Impressionist landscape painters to it a century ago. The tiny state has been one national park, the Weir Farm National Historic Site in the town of Wilton. It’s the 60-acre former home of artist J. Alden Weir (1852-1919), formerly of New York City, who owned homes here and 90 miles (145 km) east across Connecticut in my native town of Windham. Other late 19th Century and early 20th Century American Impressionists, such as  Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent, and John Twachtman, also visited Weir and painted here. Weir’s landscapes hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and many other museums. My sister-in-law and I’m are fortunate to have inherited two Weir landscapes, one of which the artist apparently gave to my great-grandfather a century ago. Earlier this month while visiting Weir Farm, about 45 minutes from where I now live in Connecticut, I decided to ‘channel’ Weir’s vision through my digital single-lense reflex camera.

In the Mood Today for East Asia

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I’m in an eastern Asian mood today. Many things have reminded me of it. For instance, Thailand is renown for its Public Services advertisements on television. Here is a recent example, a full movie told in only three minutes: Click here to read Adweek’s story about why and how it was produced.  The same producers two years earlier created a possibly even better Public Services short, about compassion: The story behind that one is here. ∅   Kudos to Chinese pharmaceuticals billionaire Li Jinyuan who took 6,400 of his employees on a nine-day vacation in France.  They arrived aboard 84 commercial flights and occupied 140 hotels.  the cost was €15 million ($18 million). ∅   Who exactly won? Forty years after Communist North Vietnam took over capitalist South Vietnam, an international poll reports that Vietnam is now the world’s most capitalist country. China was ranked fourth. ∅ When traveling to such places, or anywhere in the world, I’d always thought that the best passport to have was Swiss, because nobody blocks the politically neutral Swiss. However, CNN reports that the best passport to have is actually U.S. or U.K., followed by France, South Korea, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Denmark, Singapore, Finland, Japan, Luxembourg, or Netherlands, and only then Swiss. Those groupings are based upon how many countries the passport holder is allowed to enter either without a visa or by relatively easily obtaining a visa upon arrival at the border. One hundred forty-seven countries permit that for U.S. or U.K. passport holders. ∅ Speaking of travel, it was interesting to see the the CEO of the Starwood Hotel Group concede that his company’s Sheraton brand has become tired and in need of change. ∅ You might say that I’m sensitive to submarines. Although my naval officer father served aboard surface ships during World War II and the Korean Conflict, I grew up around New London, Connecticut, headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet. Seeing nuclear submarines silently leave that port (which was actually across the river in the town of Groton) was a routine sight. By far the most advanced submarines in the world are the Seawolf-class submarines constructed just after the end of the Cold War. These ships indeed are parts of a trio of U.S. ‘superweapons’ that no other nation possess. The other two in the trio are the super-accurate LGM-30G Minuteman III missiles (each capable of delivering within 30-minutes a thermonuclear warhead, […]

Meet Ahmet Merabet, The Muslim French Policeman Who Gave His Life Defending Freedom of Speech

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Meet 49-year old Ahmet Merabet, a Muslim policeman from the 11th Arrondissement of Paris, who on Wednesday (7 January 2015) gave his life defending the right of free speech. He and 49-year-old policemen Franck Brinsolaro, a French Christian, where guarding the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo when three Islamicist terrorists attacked with assault weapons, killing Merabet and Brinsolaro then 12 members of the newspaper’s editorial staff. It was Merabet’s death that was pictured in a spectator’s mobile phone video.

Data Visualizations of Vital Statistics

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Here are two well done data visualizations by mathematician and software design Brad Lyon and graphic designer Bill Snebold. The first depicts real-time information about births and deaths in the United States. Whenever and wherever one of those events occurs, the map shows it. The second depicts the same real-time information worldwide. (Click ‘Restart Simulation’ if either data visualization doesn’t automatically start when you visit it). The Atlantic monthly magazine explains more background about these data visualizations.

Efficient Days

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A story in the Huffington Post  features a chart from the book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and RJ Andrews how famously creative people spend their average days. Besides Ludwig von Beethoven, it features people such as Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, et. a. Besides showing who was a ‘morning’ and who an ‘evening’ person, it’s helped me realize that my most productive working hours aren’t that eccentric. What else I’m reading today: For the first time in the history of the United States, the majority of member of its Congress are millionaires (as is President Obama and six of the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court). So, is the United States governed by rich people? Quite literally, it is: the majority are people in the top one-percent of incomes.

Is Mass Nudity Art?

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Are nude photographs art? Does nudity still shock you? If you’ve been perplexed by those questions, take a look at New York photographer Spencer Tunick’s ‘human art‘. During the past 20 years, thousands of people en masse have volunteered to disrobe and pose for him. I think his work is certainly art and nudity has ‘paint’ (even when his nudes are wearing paint!)

May my Robot Mix a Drink for You?

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httpv://youtu.be/8zP7yP8hdLE This amazing documentary from the Japanese TV network NHK (which someone on YouTube mistakenly labelled as from the BBC) details  how advanced technologies about humanioid robots have become. Because I think NHK erred by starting the documentary with an artist’s robot, rather than with something more interesting, feel free to start this video as 4 minutes 15 seconds.  This clips ends unexpectedly after 48 minutes, but continues (with a bit of overlap) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBWsSFgNsM Expect to see these robotic being around town in 2020. I’ll then be asking you if my home robot recognize who you are, greet you at the door, escort you to me, then get us some tea, coffee, or some other beverage?

My Favorite Quotations

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“The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.” – Yves Saint Laurent. “Don’t tell me how educated you are; tell me where you have traveled.” – Mohammed. “All is flux, nothing stays still. Nothing endures but change.” – Heraclitus. “The seen is the changing; the unseen is the unchanging.” – Plato. “It is not certain that everything is uncertain.” – Pascal. “The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” – William Gibson. “If you want to know the future, invent it.” – Peter Drucker. “The most important skill to learn is the skill to learn new skills.” – Paul Bourke. “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Einstein. “They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.” — Malcolm Gladwell. “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. … Its opponents gradually die out and the growing generation is familiar with the idea from the beginning.” — Seventy-eight year-old, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck in 1934. “Some see the glass as half empty, some see the glass as half full. I see the glass as too big.” — George Carlin. “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.” – Thucydides. “I have often reflected that the causes of the success or failures of men are dependent on their ability to suit their manner to the times.” — Machiavelli. “Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.” – Einstein. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your [creative] work.” – Flaubert. “”Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there” – Martial artist Bruce Lee. “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” – Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow “This is a great wall.” – U.S. President Richard Nixon at the Great Wall of China, February 1972.