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Sunday, January 24, 2021

Awesome streaming Radio Garden, the birth of the web, cool etymologies, mid winter 2021

Radio Garden



A world map with radio stations streaming.


This is one of the most fantastic things I've seen/heard online. Wow. 

Apparently, it was created by TRE (Transnational Radio Encounters). It is so awesome to be able to travel around this amazing planet, see the geographic details on the map, listening to the languages, music, ambiance, news in so many countries, far flung corners of the world. Just like that. Boom. One moment listening to music in Bamako, Mali, Almaty, Kazakhstan, Bengaluru, India then swiveling the globe and listening to music in Chalcis, Greece.

I love the Stories part of this website too, in different accents. The History part too around the world, in different languages. Even the Jingles part is cool.

Looking at the globe is wonderful as well, connecting to parts of the world by their radio programs is an interesting sort of intimacy. I like targeting the littler dots in exotic places I've never heard of before.

What a great sound adventure this is.

The birth of the Web

The World Wide Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while working at CERN

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. In 2013, CERN launched a project to restore this first ever websiteinfo.cern.ch.

On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. These actions allowed the web to flourish.

Browse the world's first website

Lake Street Dive - "Don't Let Me Down"


For anyone who needs some blissfully calm videos, these are marvelous - Nature Relaxation Films - on YouTube.

Traditional Architecture Traditional House of Java












The Etymology Nerd on Twitter




Saturday, January 9, 2021

cool cyber places to explore, be entertained

Excellent Desert Island Discs podcasts from the BBC. Great listening.
This charming, vintage one, an interview with English author, Noel Streatfeild, is a delight.

Practical Dad advice for everyday tasks, so helpful!
Dad, how do I?

Noel Streatfeild on Wikipedia, she wrote the children's books with shoes in their title






Another charmer, the interview with Tallulah Bankhead. They're all so good! 

An AWESOME international folk music website, Folk Cloud, with a map to click on which country's folk music you want to hear. Great selections. A treasure trove.

Interesting. How the Buddha Got His Face

oooh, histories and mysteries
Are ghosts haunting the British Museum?

I love this child prodigy, Ryan Bradshaw's, facial expressions as he plays piano. No sheet music needed, amazingly.

Fascinating interview

Billionaire Mathematician - NumberphileJames Harris Simons





The classes cover contemporary to fashion to photography.


Live Journal is used by a LOT of Russian bloggers, who love art. Marvelous pages full of amazing photographs and images. Very worth exploring. 

For example: 
art history
interiors
jewelry
18th Century


Damned Interesting website, so much interesting stuff there

the awesome Museums Unlocked page via the marvelous Everlasting Blort


Varied and up to date site with cool enviro info from birds to icebergs and pictures.
Earth Wise

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

My Primary Care Physician sent me this today, when I wrote her asking when I might be able to get the new vaccine

 My Primary Care Physician sent me this today, when I wrote her asking when I might be able to get the new vaccine:

Currently we are in phase 1b for the vaccine - only health care personnel
You would qualify under phase 1c - no clear dates yet but I suspect possibly late jan early Feb - we will keep our patients posted with emails
Some information regarding the vaccine:

How do the vaccines work:

The Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine use synthetic mRNA that contains information about the coronavirus's signature spike protein. The vaccines essentially work by sneaking in instructions that direct the body to produce a small amount of the spike protein, against which our bodies develop the antibodies for immunity. Neither vaccine contains the full virus. It is unclear how long this immunity remains.

There are two available vaccines:

•BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine) is indicated for individuals aged 16 years or older.
•mRNA 1273 (Moderna COVID-19 vaccine) is indicated for individuals aged 18 years or older.

Dose and administration:

•BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine) is administered in two intramuscular doses of 0.3 mL each, given three weeks apart. If more than 21 days have elapsed after the first dose, the second dose can be given as soon as feasible without repeating the series.

•mRNA 1273 (Moderna COVID-19 vaccine) is administered in two intramuscular doses of 0.5 mL each, given one month apart. If more than 28 days have elapsed after the first dose, the second dose can be given as soon as feasible without repeating the series.
Study Data:
Pfizer:
In a large placebo-controlled phase III trial, this vaccine had 95 percent efficacy (95% CI 90.3-97.6) in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 at or after day 7 following the second dose
Moderna:
According to an FDA briefing document that described phase III results, mRNA-1273 had 94.1 percent vaccine efficacy (95% CI 89.3-96.8) in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 at or after 14 days following the second dose

Commonly seen side effects: fever, severe fatigue, headache, myalgias, and arthralgias, soreness at injection site

Contraindications
CDC considers a history of the following to be a contraindication to vaccination with both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna

COVID-19 vaccines:

Severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) after a previous dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine or any of its components

Immediate allergic reaction of any severity to a previous dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine or any of its components (including polyethylene glycol [PEG])*

Immediate allergic reaction of any severity to polysorbate (due to potential cross-reactive hypersensitivity with the vaccine ingredient PEG)*

Monday, January 4, 2021

COMFORTING THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD by Greta Christina

https://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/06/comforting_thou.html


COMFORTING THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD

I cite this piece a lot on my blog, so I decided I should post it here. It was originally published in the Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 29 #2 (March/April 2005).

HandSo here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

PeaceBut here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.



TimeHere's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

Willow_treeAnd inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

Waltzing1And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

IciclesAnd we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.



Whole_earthHere's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Timeline1Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

ParisIt does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

GalaxyAnd it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

Fetus_da_vinciI don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

Sunday, January 3, 2021

Gertrude Hermes 1901-1983


The River of God, Pilgrim's Progress, 1928

Undercurrents, 1938
Ring Net Fishers, 1955

THROUGH THE WINDSCREEN, 1926

GERTRUDE HERMES BRITISH, 1901-1983






























Saturday, January 2, 2021

A few contemporary Balinese artists I like



































I Nyoman Masriadi (Indonesian, b. 1973), The Old Master (Snapping Provocation of Samuro), 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 300 x 200 cm.
























Crosseyed




































Ni Gusti Agung Galuh

Born in Tabanan, Bali in 1968. Entered the world of painting with the help of the father of a famous painter. Impressed by the German painter Spies, she stayed in Cologne in 1995 as an invited student to study Western techniques.
The quietness of early dawn
Gathering flowers
Ni Gusti Agung Galuh


Keluarga Bumi”, 2017 (Earth Family)

Wayan Aris Sarmanta

Born in Kapar, Bali in 1970. He was taught painting by his father, who was a famous painter, and later studied under his uncle Grakaka. As a Spies-style painter, he has received the most attention with his sister Garoo. He likes to take up the scenery of rice terraces and depicts the momentary beauty of light and darkness caused by oblique light. He is a painter who represents Balinese painting in both name and reality, and is in the collection of works at major museums in Bali.
Bali Life 1995
Gembala
Suasana Pasar di Bali
Catching eels at dusk

                           I Gusti Agung Wiranata

Agus Putu Suyadnya


The Conqueror
Behind a Dialogue

Hanuman’s first day
This painting tells the story of the birth of the white monkey hero, Hanuman. As he gets hungry, he asks his mother Anjani for something to eat. “You should only consume the ripest fruits – bright red in color,” Anjani replied. At sunrise, he flew up to catch the sun which he mistook it for a ripe fruit. In this painting the baby Hanuman, is shown licking a radiant lollipop that represents the rising sun.