Sara Duchovnay is a wonderful young coloratura soprano who for some time shared the same voice teacher as I, the lovely Suzanne DuPlantis. Sara just built a nice website for herself: check it out at http://saraduchovnay.com.
Categories
Categories
Chromebooks
Fresh from Google’s IO conference comes today the news that notebooks that run the Chrome operating system will be available June 15 and they will be quite cheap (less than $500 for one with a 12 inch screen; I saw diverging reports on its price, $429 and $499). They will also be rentable, $20 a month for education use, $28 a month for business use. They will have Verizon WiFi (not sure what Verizon will ask for data access and what usage limits it will slap on). This could be big. I can see having one of these for all travel. Maybe I will not ever get an iPad or a MacBook Air, like I have been tempted many times to do.
UPDATE: more information in this post.
I thought of commemorating the event but Crooked Timber has already done an excellent job of it, so I decided I would just link to it.
Categories
2011 Webby Awards
You will find them here and you will probably marvel along with me that this is their 15th year already.
Random intriguing site among the (many) winners: the99percent.com with this sample article to whet your appetite.
Hat tip to David Pescovitz on Boing Boing.
From The Economist:
WHEN people took to the streets of Tunis, France offered to help President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s security forces. When they filled the squares of Cairo, Italy praised Hosni Mubarak as the wisest of men. And when they were slaughtered in Tripoli, the Czech Republic said catastrophe would follow the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, Malta defended Libya’s sovereignty and Italy predicted that the protests would lead to an Islamic emirate.
With every new Arab uprising, some European country has placed itself on the wrong side of history. So it is no surprise that the European Union has been slow to tell regimes to listen to demands for democracy and to condemn violent suppression.
…
Remember 1989
The end of communism in the east was a great blessing for Europe. The fall of dictators in the south could be too, though the transition is bound to be more uncertain. In 1989 western Europe’s communist foes collapsed; the people rose up against the resented Soviet occupier and were attracted by the West. In the Arab world it is the West’s awkward allies that are falling, and the people there have long resented Western overlordship.
So far the revolts of 2011 have been strikingly free of Islamist, anti-imperial and even anti-Israeli ideology. Such sentiments could yet be stirred if Europe appears to be colluding with hated rulers. The uprisings have removed Europe’s dilemma over pursing stability or democracy—its interests against its values. Stability is gone; interests and values are the same. The only answer is to embrace, help and protect those who want democracy.
Categories
Update on owning a Kindle DX
I like the bigger screen, even as the device is correspondingly heavier than the 6-inch Kindle. Naturally, I suppose, having a Kindle has done nothing to correct my tendency to start reading too many books almost at the same time. I am currenttly reading a novel and three non-fiction books on the Kindle… I am incorrigible.
As of yesterday, I have a Kindle DX; my choice of (slightly early) birthday present. Yes, I gave up waiting for the new iPad, or a really good Android tablet, at least for e-reading. Today I bought and read a Kindle single, as they call them, from the newly launched series TEDbooks, which are short books, 5,000–30,000 word length, which in the case of TEDbooks are written by authors who have given TED talks.
My first reading was Homo Evolutis, by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans. At the price of $2.99 it was an easy impulse purchase. I read it in about an hour and a half, not so much because it is short, which it is, but because it is written in a very jumpy style that made me think I was reading the text dump from a computer slide presentation. The style made the book feel overly energetic, hectic even, but the authors do provide more than 100 endnotes with links to literature that supports their claims. They also promise a longer version, in hardback, and have a website at www.homoevolutis.com.
Let others discuss the elegance or not of the “home evolutis” neologism. The main impression I got was that of a couple of frantically hyperactive salesmen selling me, with considerable urgency, the idea that humans are still evolving. Many species of humans may coexist right now, they claim. It helps this claim that the definition of “species”, as the authors point out, is fluid and not universally agreed upon. We evolve, they claim, because of all the changes in our environment, such as the huge populations of bacteria we carry in our bodies, but also because of our own actions, botox injections included, as well as many human-improving (at least so intended) medical interventions. I am glad I read this booklet, since it had interesting tidbits and was entertaining. I am also glad that it taught me that I can avoid the time investment needed to read their hardback version, if and when it appears.
So that you don’t think I called the authors frantically hyperactive salesmen out of sheer jealousy for their engaging writing ability, I finally note that they co-founded Excel Venture Management and are clearly in the hunt for untold riches. Gullans has a more academic pedigree, with a Ph.D., and served as a professor of Harvard Medical School for 18 years, so there is this bit of information to suggest that Homo Evolutis, the breathless tract, actually does convey some scientifically sound ideas.
Categories
Joan Sutherland, “la stupenda” RIP
Let’s spend a quite moment remembering the fabulous Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, who just died. Hat tip to Joyce DiDonato on Twitter (@JoyceDiDonato) who brought this to my attention and also posted this link to a fantastic performance by Dame Joan of Sempre Libera. Oh wait, that’s not a “quiet” moment, but it certainly is appropriate.
UPDATE: and here is a link to the same aria as performed in 1965. The tenor in the background is one Luciano Pavarotti.
Sebastian Thrun, Distinguished Software Engineer at Google, has a fascinating post on the Official Google Blog today. An excerpt:
What we’re driving at
10/09/2010 12:00:00 PM
Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.
So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.
I want a car like this yesterday. Even more, I want every one else on the road to have a car like this the day before yesterday. Most people drive in ways that prove they do not deserve the privilege of controlling their own cars.
“The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.” (page 151) Boy, does that capture how I felt when my book was published. Not that the world was amazed by it, mind you.