Thursday, January 30, 2020

MODEL, BOXER AVRIL MATHIE WEIGHS IN HER SWIMWEAR AHEAD OF CLASH IN MIA...

  


Image






Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Pandemic Panic

  

 One person was pictured with a makeshift plastic bottle for a mask on the underground




 This family wrapped themselves up with plastic sheeting



 Shoppers were also spotted with different forms of protection




 Another was seen wearing their own version of a gas mask

 One woman was seen with a plastic bottle on her head



 A mother and child were spotted with plastic bottles on their head




Jun Fujita: American Visionary







Jun Fujita: American Visionary

by Newberry Library
Jun Fujita: American Visionary, copresented by the Newberry Library and the Poetry Foundation, focuses on the extraordinary accomplishments of poet and photojournalist Jun Fujita. This exhibition presents an expanded version of Jun Fujita: Oblivion, first mounted at the Poetry Foundation in 2017, and explores Fujita’s poetry, photojournalism, landscape photography, and uncommon life and love.
Born outside of Hiroshima in 1888, Fujita came to Chicago in 1909, becoming the first Japanese American photojournalist. As an English-language tanka poet, he published regularly in Poetry during the 1920s; as a photographer, he captured many of the most infamous moments in Chicago history, including the Eastland Disaster, the 1919 race riots, and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.
Throughout his work, Fujita put forward a vision of what “American” can mean, achieving unprecedented success in his profession despite the hostility, prejudice, and persecution he faced as a Japanese native.

OrganizerNewberry Library

Organizer of Jun Fujita: American Visionary
The Newberry is an independent research library that supports and inspires scholarship, teaching, and learning in the humanities. Our collection—some 1.6 million books, 600,000 maps, and 5 million manuscript pages—is a portal to more than six centuries of human history, from the Middle Ages to the present. We connect people with this history in the Newberry’s reading rooms, program spaces, exhibition galleries, and online digital resources.




 

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Super Squirrel


Image

Pot Cigarette?





Gustav Mahler : Symphony No. 9 (Hartmut Haenchen / Orchestre philharmoni...

   


Gustav Mahler : Symphony No. 9 (Hartmut Haenchen / Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France)

.
Hartmut Haenchen conducts the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France in the 9th Symphony of Gustav Mahler. Live recording from the concert of march 29th 2018 in the Auditorium of Radio France (Paris).

The life of Gustav Mahler takes a painful turning during his last years. In 1907, meanwhile he loses his young daughter (dead by scarlet fever), he discovers that he is sick of the heart. His last works take dark colors and the 9th Symphony in D Major, dated from 1909, doesn't escape the rule.
Click here to suscribe ro our Youtube channel : http://bit.ly/2oeEr3e









Gustav Mahler : Symphony No. 9 (Hartmut Haenchen / Orchestre philharmoni...

   


Gustav Mahler : Symphony No. 9 (Hartmut Haenchen / Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France)

.
Hartmut Haenchen conducts the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France in the 9th Symphony of Gustav Mahler. Live recording from the concert of march 29th 2018 in the Auditorium of Radio France (Paris).

The life of Gustav Mahler takes a painful turning during his last years. In 1907, meanwhile he loses his young daughter (dead by scarlet fever), he discovers that he is sick of the heart. His last works take dark colors and the 9th Symphony in D Major, dated from 1909, doesn't escape the rule.
Click here to suscribe ro our Youtube channel : http://bit.ly/2oeEr3e









Friday, January 17, 2020

Being a philosopher?




Non-professional actor Yalitza Aparicio’s performance as Cleo in Alfonso CuarĂ³n’s Roma (2018) earned her an Academy Award nomination. Photo courtesy of Netflix

Is there anything especially expert about being a philosopher?


by David Egan

Edited by Sam Dresser


REPUBLISH FOR FREE 933



Outside a university setting, telling people that I’m pursuing a career in philosophy can be a bit of a conversation stopper. More times than I can count, I’ve faced the bemused but well-intentioned question: ‘How is that useful?’ 

I seem like a nice guy, smart, capable – why am I intent on doing something that won’t make me rich and won’t make the world a better place?

The humanities in contrast with the ‘hard’ disciplines of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), are often disparaged as ‘soft’. You don’t need an advanced degree to read a novel, so why bother?


There’s a similar contrast we could draw between a first class in philosophy and a first class in electrical engineering. 

I lead my students into philosophical questioning by starting with intuitions that they already hold and then applying pressure to those intuitions, asking them to take their reasoning farther than they’d normally take it. 

We all make claims to know things, for instance, and we all recognise that sometimes these claims are justified and sometimes not. 

But outside a philosophy class, we rarely press very hard on the question of what constitutes knowledge and how we might distinguish it from, say, a lucky guess. 

I invite students to press harder on this question by starting with their familiar intuitions about when they are and aren’t licensed to claim to know something. 

By contrast, although I confess I’ve never taken a class in electrical engineering, I’m pretty sure that the course doesn’t begin by teasing out the students’ intuitions about how electrical circuits work.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein compared language to an ancient city: a centre packed with a maze of streets and squares, with new buildings squeezed in against old ones, which gradually gives way to newer, planned suburbs with an ordered grid of streets and uniform houses. 

We could think of the field of human inquiry similarly. The sciences are like these well-regulated suburbs, rigorously ordered according to precise methodologies, and the humanities are like the chaotic centre, as messy as the human lives that buzz about in it. 

You take a trip out to different suburbs for specific purposes: you want to send a rocket into space, treat an aggressive cancer, or devise a proof for Goldbach’s conjecture. Most of us will never visit these suburbs, and no one will ever get deeply acquainted with all of them. But we all come together in the city centre. 

All human lives feature some deliberation over what matters to us, what we like and dislike and why, what’s meaningful, admirable or despicable, what’s to be hoped for, what’s to be feared. 

When we start asking these questions more deliberately and rigorously, we’re intensifying an activity that’s already familiar.


So how is philosophy useful? 

The response I’ve learned to counter with is that the question being asked is itself a philosophical question. 

One of the things we do in philosophy is precisely to ask what’s worth doing and why. 

For the most part, my questioners have already presupposed a fairly limited set of acceptable answers to the question of what’s worth doing – answers that generally bottom out in the material wellbeing of oneself and others. But those answers, innocuous as they might seem to the speaker, are philosophical answers to a philosophical question.


In other words, we’re all doing philosophy all the time. 

We can’t escape the question of what matters and why: the way we’re living is itself our implicit answer to that question. 

A large part of a philosophical training is to make those implicit answers explicit, and then to examine them rigorously. Philosophical reflection, once you get started in it, can seem endlessly demanding. But if we can’t avoid living philosophically, it seems sensible to learn to do it well.



Link: https://aeon.co/ideas/is-there-anything-especially-expert-about-being-a-philosopher

by David Egan 
-- a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at CUNY Hunter College in New York. 



**********************************************

STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. 


Education Values and beliefs Knowledge

06 December, 2019


REPUBLISH FOR FREE

Aeon is not-for-profit and free for everyone


Get Aeon straight to your inbox

Join our newsletter
 




Video/ History of ideas

From sky charts to atomic clocks, time is a mysterious story that humans keep inventing




Idea/ Language and linguistics

Why learning a new language is like an illicit love affair


Essay/Education

Pluck versus luck
Meritocracy emphasizes the power of the individual to overcome obstacles, but the real story is quite a different one


Video/

Human rights and justice

A spy thriller for an era in which the Holocaust risks being forgotten


Essay/Art

Ways of living
John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’ exploded a discipline. But his greatest legacy might be a quieter project of re-enchantment


Idea/Ethics

Is virtue signalling a perversion of morality?

https://aeon.co/ideas/is-there-anything-especially-expert-about-being-a-philosopher


Windmills


Image result for Tulips





. Tulips by Sylvia Plath



Image result for Tulips

Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.   
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.   
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.   
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses   
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff   
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,   
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.   
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,   
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;   
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat   
stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.   
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley   
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books   
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.   
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them   
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.   

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe   
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.   
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,   
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,   
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.   
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,   
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow   
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,   
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.   
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.   
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river   
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.   
They concentrate my attention, that was happy   
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;   
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,   
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
Sylvia Plath, “Tulips” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial matter copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Collected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1992






POEM SAMPLER

Sylvia Plath 101
BY BENJAMIN VOIGT
Tracing the poetics of a lyrical genius.
Tulips by Sylvia Plath | Poetry Foundation

https://www.poetryfoundation.org › Poems


Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly. As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. ... Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe. Lightly, through ...


Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Do one thing well, then another.



“He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a man who is alive.” – Seneca


“We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” — Carlos Castaneda



We achieve nothing when we try to do everything at once.

Multitaskers make errors that single taskers don’t.

Stop. Prioritize. Choose. Execute.

Do one thing well, then another.


Join me and help save #birds. Learn more about @audubonsociety's work to protect the habitat that supports us all: http://audubon.org


Gibbon baby 
https://www.joelsartore.com/assets/2019/09/180717_Indonesia_Silvery_Gibbon_001_Pass_9_WEBSITE-HEADER.mp4









Daily Stoic

@dailystoic



How should a Stoic respond to a loss? With humor, determination, and perspective. In your life, there will be wins and losses – how you respond to the losses shapes who you are.






You Win Some, You Lose Some
Politics, like all contests, involves winners and losers. Cato lost elections, such as his first run for praetorship in 55 BCE and his run for consul in 51 BCE. Cicero lost some as well. James...
dailystoic.com



“If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone.” – Marcus Aurelius



 "Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage."

- Thucydides


Humans can’t control anything—except our own happiness by John Sellars #Stoicism

Stoicism holds that the key to a good, happy life is the cultivation of an excellent mental state.
qz.com




Jonathan Yagel
@jwby
·
Jan 10
“Habits are algorithms operating in the background that power our lives.” Especially relevant during Resolution Season: Set your goals, then create habits to reach them.

Great stuff from
@farnamstreet
:
Habits vs. Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life
The power of habits comes from their automaticity. This is why they are more powerful than goals. Read this article to harness the power of habits.
fs.blog 



Thursday, January 9, 2020

The Lawrence Welk accordion ashtray


    Image


The Daily Show

@TheDailyShow



@michaelkosta calls for unnecessary escalation in Iran, 

Trevor highlights laws taking effect in 2020, and
 "CBS Sunday Morning" correspondent
@MoRocca discusses "Mobituaries.” 

Listen and subscribe: https://on.cc.com/36AYb3z   


Maurice Alberto Rocca is an American humorist, journalist, and actor. He is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, the host and creator of My Grandmother's Ravioli on the Cooking Channel, and also the host of The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation on CBS. Wikipedia
Mo Rocca
Season 2 available now. Order the MOBITUARIES book and audiobook (read by me!) http://bit.ly/MobituariesBook
Image
Related image
Image
The Lawrence Welk accordion ashtray 

"Mobituaries" episode dedicated to Lawrence Welk 

Related image







Image result for totinos pizza rolls memes





Tuesday, January 7, 2020

ENVIRONMENTAL TRAGEDY IN AUSTRALIA



Image
Otter Relaxing



Australia burning is the Tragic Outcome of Climate Crisis





I'm the queen of Gibraltar


I'm the queen of Gibraltar and will never get a traffic ticket... just two of the things anyone could have written into country's laws.


Run sqlmap, edit online statutes, gain immunity for life?
By Gareth Corfield



A macaque monkey. Pic: Shutterstock
Monkeying around with SQL could have had comedy consequences for Gibraltar
Exclusive A SQL injection vulnerability on the Government of Gibraltar's website paved the way for any old Joe to rewrite official web versions of the British Overseas Territory's laws.
Security researcher Ax Sharma spotted the vuln while poring over the Gibraltar government's visa rules, which he accessed from the Gibraltar Borders and Coastguard Agency website.
A malicious person using the information exposed by the government website could have deleted and uploaded PDF files to the official online repository of Gibraltar's laws.

See the "modify" and "delete" links at the bottom of the page? All you needed to make those work were the site login details - and protections around those were trivial to bypass
Such people, using a freely downloadable software suite, could have abused the vulnerability to alter online versions of laws. In the digital era, laws published on government websites are treated by the wider world as official and binding even though their master versions tend to be hard copies stored in parliaments.

Although the Gibraltar Government has pulled the affected webpages offline, the incident will be a timely reminder to sysadmins that basic SQL hygiene and security practices remains as important as ever.

Until last Friday, the link on the left (in the above picture) to the Immigration Act led to another page with a search form. That form did not sanitise user inputs to prevent the execution of code – and a single ' character input as a search term (an error-based injection) returned an error page confirming that fact, as well as links titled "modify/delete" presented on public-facing webpages for each individual law.

Using open-source penetrating testing tool sqlmap, Sharma was able to view all the tables and database information powering the law-hosting site. One such table,
named giblaws_giblaws.user immediately caught his eye.
He told El Reg: "The table contained names of staff members, usernames and password digests, etc," adding: "sqlmap's in-built digest-cracking tool easily cracked one of the passwords in <1 second!"

That password, said the security researcher, was six numeric digits: "perhaps a date of birth". Using those details, it would have been a trivial exercise to log in and use the account's privileges to edit the website's contents.
Although one would hope the Gibraltar Government maintains access and change controls as well as site content monitoring that would have allowed it to instantly spot such tomfoolery, El Reg can only speculate.
A Gibraltar government spokesman thanked Sharma for "pointing out the vulnerabilities" and said: "This matter has now been dealt with and the major vulnerabilities have been mitigated. However, within the next couple of days, this section of the website will, in any event, be relocated to an entirely new website."

Old URLs previously leading to pages of laws currently go to 404 "not found" pages. The spokesman continued: "It should also be noted that the Government of Gibraltar website is hosted outside our corporate network and therefore the earlier vulnerabilities posed no risk to the security of the government's communication systems."
It is worth noting that running sqlmap on someone else's machine without their permission could constitute an offence under the UK's Computer Misuse Act 1990.

Strangely, the spokesman did not comment on the possibility of anyone being able to edit laws at their leisure. Political custom is that such things normally involve politicians, brown envelopes and considerable amounts of time and effort.

Sharma's detailed findings are set out on his Medium blog




Link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/07/gibraltar_sql_vuln_allowed_law_editing/






Esmark's Brittle Star (Ophioplocus esmarki)

  
Esmark's Brittle Star (Ophioplocus esmarki)
 

There are many strange varieties of sea star, some huge some tiny some leather others rasp-rough and almost every color of the visible spectrum is distributed among their spineless kind. 

Esmark's brittle star (Ophioplocus esmarki) strikes me as being the most pre-historic in appearance and perhaps the most monstrous with their clumsy-looking simple arms edged in saw-fish-like toothy projections. 

Even its name seems archaic and mysterious. And for the life of me I can't find the individual "Esmark" whose eponym became the creature's own. Maybe in time I'll be able to track that down. 

Also featured in this brief yet still somewhat overstretched piece is a brilliant red proliferating anemone (Epiactis prolifera)  a Leopard Dorid 

The audio track is a slice of Märchenbilder, sometimes known in English as 'Fairy Tale Pictures', Op. 113, written by Robert Schumann in March 1851 

obtained from musopen.org and the only performance attribution I can find is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
https://musopen.org/



 

Monday, January 6, 2020

Wilson Pickett - Hey Jude (w/ Duane Allman)

  

Wilson Pickett - Hey Jude (w/ Duane Allman)



Before there was The Allman Brothers Band, Duane Allman was trying to attract any kind of attention and make a name for himself. The music business is hard you know. Though immortalized now as one of the greatest guitarist of all time, it was Gregg who was more sought out in the record business in the early days. So Duane made ends meet by being a session guitarist in studios while he decided what his next move would be.

It was in November of 1968, when Wilson Pickett - already a star - showed up at Rick Halls Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, AL wanting to record, but with no material or ideas. Duane, who was working for Rick but was not even the main, lead session guitarist, suggested that they cut "Hey Jude", which Rick thought was "the most preposterous thing" he had ever heard and Wilson agreed they would NOT do it. The Beatles had just recently released it and it was climbing the charts. But Duane somehow convinced them both it was a good idea because it "was" a Beatles song and it "would" be Number 1. And, as you hear, it was a GREAT idea. This song sparked the beginning of Duane's future nickname and the formation of ABB.

The story goes that Duane was already known as "Dog" because of his looks. As you might imagine, the hippie look that Duane sported was few and far between in late 1960's Alabama. When Wilson heard the way Duane played he started calling him "Sky Man". Not just for his "out of this world" playing but also for his "out of this world" state of mind he liked being in (recreational activities for those who still don't get it). From there the name somewhere morphed into "Skydog". Rick Hall was also so amazed that he phoned Jerry Wexler and put the phone up to the speakers on the playback so he could hear the song. Needless to say, he was also blown away by Duane's playing. And in Wilson's defense of this DA story, his vocals in this song are what they are in all his songs -- AWESOME.

Jerry Wexler was Wilson's main producer for Atlantic who wasn't able to be there and gave the reins to Hall. Wexler, along with Phil Walden, later in '69, started Capricorn Records in Macon, GA and we all know that story. Also, Phil Walden is also the man who introduced and brought in Jaimoe to play with Duane. They started jamming together before any of the other Brothers joined in.

Well anyway - this is for your listening pleasure and hope you enjoy it. If you want to know more of this story, I highly recommend pp. 80-88 of "Skydog: The Duane Allman Story" by Randy Poe. It is where this info came from and it is the best book ever if you are a Duane and/or ABB fan. And the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section...thank you...you helped change the world and the music for the better.