Every so often my friend Patrick Crozier and I get together to have a recorded conversation and we did one a while back on the subject of President Trump. You can now listen to this, by going here.
Scroll down here, to get all our recent conversations.
For further thoughts from me about what a microphone can achieve and what it mostly does not achieve, try this posting here.
Indeed:
Here.
She also wrote that NYT letter about white privilege, concerning which she Tweets:
Do not deny my lived experience.
Absolutely not.
An osprey dives for a fish near Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Says Peter Schramm:
… hier hat es im richtigen Moment Klick gemacht …
Which sounds about richtigen.
Thank you Mike Fagan.
In the Twittered version of this photo, the claws of the Osprey at the bottom of the photo are chopped off. The result looks like some kind of medieval sculpted gargoyle with big ears and sunken.
Chris Martin, in this:
… I’m Christ Martin. …
Just under the subheading “Transcript”.
But then again, why not? In the Hispano- and Portugo-(?) spheres, they have lots of people called Jesus.
Here. Video, lasting just over twenty minutes. Just watched it. Good.
Particularly interested by what he says about how, without cheap paper, the revolutionary changes ushered in by the printing press could not have happened. Mass produced printed material printed on animal skins not economically doable.
Harford ends on what he thinks is a depressing note, about a woman who supplies the final bit of muscle to a huge warehouse system, by receiving verbal orders from an all-powerful robot, which she simply obeys, second by second. Go here, get this, this number, take it here, …
Well, it’s a job.
Personally, I think that having to think all the time about your work, when you are at work, is hugely overrated. Whenever I have had a “job”, I liked it when my job was my job, but my thoughts were my own. Best job? Driving a van, delivering number plates. Drove on autopilot most of the time. Thought my own thoughts. Didn’t “buy into the company vision”. Not “committed”. Wasn’t “invested” in the work. Just did it, mostly without having to think about it. Bliss.
It continues to be hot, and so the quota photos continue. At least this one is relatively recent.
I walked to Parliament Square last Friday morning, and caught the fag end of the anti-Trump demo. What the demo had consisted of at its height, I don’t know, so my impressions of what went on in Parliament Square, just after the Trump blimp had been brought down to earth, and just before it was deflated by its minders and put in a van and driven away, don’t necessarily mean much. But for what it’s worth, it all seemed pretty feeble to me. There were lots of placards saying how much the holders of the placards hated Trump and wanted him to go home, drop dead, fuck off, etc. But they didn’t seem to want any particular policy to change. They just hated Trump. And his tweeting.
The whole atmosphere was strangely relaxed. It made me think I wasn’t the only non-sympathiser present, attracted to the demo by the Trump blimp, and by the general desire to see what all the fuss consisted of.
When the weather cools down, I might manage some more thoughts about all this anti-Trumpery, for Samizdata, but I promise nothing.
In my photo, it looks to me like Trump owns them, rather than the demoers doing anything to him that he need worry about. But then, I don’t sympathise.
I remember when there was no way to learn about interesting and admirable conductors, other than just listen to their performances and gawp at their photos on record sleeves. Now there is Twitter.
E-PS’s thoughts about leaving New York, as reported by the New York Times, can be read here.
And here is a photo taken by E-PS as (or perhaps just with which) he said Bye to New York, on June 15th. From a ship? An airport? A motorway service station? His Hew York home? A friend’s home? A friend’s boat? Here’s a horizontal slice of that photo:
Click on Bye above, and get to the original photo, as tweeted. It’s nothing special. Not super-high-definition. Not professional. Taken with his smartphone would be my guess. But so often, amateur photos like this can be amazingly evocative. They give you a sense of what the place is really like, when what the pros show is is what they want it to have been like.
The tallest tower is presumably the replacement for the Twin Towers. Which I miss, even though I’ve never been anywhere near them. Only seen them in movies.
Here is a recent Scott Adams Dilbert cartoon, although Dilbert himself is not involved in this particular one:
I’ve always thought that one of the many things that won the Cold War for Civilisation and doomed Bolshevik Barbarism to defeat was stealth stuff. By its nature, stealth stuff is undetectable, and the better it is, the more impossibly undetectable it is. So, if you cannot detect it at all, it could still be there, and really really good at being stealthy. Hell, it could be anywhere. It could be right outside the Politburo’s front window.
Of course, it probably isn’t this clever. But, how would you be sure?
This was why, when the Americans had got these contraptions working reasonably well, they revealed their existence. They took lots of spooky photos of these spooky things, and made sure the whole world could see them. Where, at any particular moment, they were, for you to photo, they did not reveal.
How can you defeat an enemy like that?
Same with Star Wars. Shooting down all incoming nuclear missiles with all-powerful death rays. Bollocks, right? But, again, how could you be sure?
I find signs to be an endless source of fun and revelation, and I frequently photo them. So I was much entertained by this New York Times story, about a sign that went wandering. Across the Atlantic Ocean.
Hurricane Sandy grabbed this sign from the town of Brielle, on the eastern coast of the USA, in October 2012. But, on or around May 14th 2018:
A man walking along the Plage du Pin Sec, near Bordeaux, spotted it. The faded sign was missing a chunk, but he could still read the legend “Diane Turton Realtors 732-292-1400.”
“It was curious,” the man, Hannes Frank, 64, a semiretired software consultant who lives in Brussels, said by phone on Thursday. “I looked at it and found it quaint.”
And he got in touch with the enterprise advertised on the sign. By their nature, signs can be very informative.
The NYT says that its preferred expert on flotsametrics reckons that, given how long this sign took to make its way to France, it may well have crossed the Atlantic not once, but three times.
Flotsametrics is the study of things that float. Now that the Lefties – like the Lefties who own, run and write for the NYT – are giving up on the claim that capitalism is ruining the planet by ruining the weather, they are back to bitching about how capitalism squirts out lots of rubbish, and they have become particular obsessed with rubbish that hangs about in the sea, especially if it floats. So this story is actually part of The Narrative, even though it is presumably also a genuine and a genuinely good story.
Once the capitalists work out how to transform all the world’s rubbish into – oh, I don’t know – something like gunk for 3D printers to turn into replacement body parts, the lefties will have to think of some other insult to throw at capitalism. But for now, this rubbish thing is getting back to being their biggest complaint. Again.
But just clearing the rubbish up is no good. Oh no. The rubbish must be stopped at source by stamping out capitalism, starting with plastic drinking straws. The actual source of this oceanic rubbish is mostly rivers in poor countries. But that’s a mere fact. The Narrative is what matters.
This has been a spontaneous rant, which is why I am keeping it here, rather than switching it to there.
Next Friday, my good friend Adriana Lukas will be giving a talk at my home entitled Personal Recollections of Life Under Communism. While concocting some biographical information for my email list members, I took a closer look than I have before at her Twitter feed.
Way back in 2015, Adriana retweeted this remarkable image:
It looks like some ancient oil painting, rather than the latest-thing highest-of-high-tech imagery, which of course is what it is.
GE Healthcare’s 3D-printing software works seamlessly with GE Advantage Workstation systems already working inside hospitals around the world. After a scan, the anatomy is rendered as a 3D image using GE’s Volume Viewer software, a 3D-imaging platform that combines data from sources like CT but also MRI and X-ray. The software then converts the image file generated by the Volume Viewer and within seconds translates it into a file format that can be interpreted by a 3D printer.
“In the past, it would take several days to get the images back” from an outside 3D software processor, Cury says. “The advantage of the new software is it’s in the same workstation where the technologists already do work on 3D images. The steps are a lot quicker and easier.”
More than 100 hospitals around the world have already ordered GE’s 3D organ printing software, which can be used for any type of organ as well as models of bones and muscles. GE says that as more hospitals use the software, it will be easier and quicker for doctors like Cury to share files with each other and have 3D models to use for planning and education prior to procedures.
The most impressive 3D printing stories often feature hopelessly old-school businesses, like GE. This is because 3D printing is the ultimate non-disruptive technology. It attaches itself to existing businesses and makes them better. If you know only about 3D printing, and are not willing to cooperate with a regular business, forget about it.
All those stupid 3D printers that they tried to sell in Currys PC World a few years back were just ridiculous junk for making further even more ridiculous junk.