THE MAN IN THE ARENA

Excerpt from the speech "Citizenship In A Republic
delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910
                                       

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. 

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.


http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

Pecha Kucha

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

•     What is PechaKucha 20x20?

    PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images.

•     Who invented the format?

    The presentation format was devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture. The first PechaKucha Night was held in Tokyo in their gallery/lounge/bar/club/creative kitchen, SuperDeluxe, in February, 2003. Klein Dytham architecture still organize and support the global PechaKucha Night network and organize PechaKucha Night Tokyo.

•     Why invent this format?

    Because architects talk too much! Give a microphone and some images to an architect -- or most creative people for that matter -- and they'll go on forever! Give PowerPoint to anyone else and they have the same problem.

•     What are PechaKucha Nights?

    PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps -- just about anything, really -- in the PechaKucha 20x20 format. Every PechaKucha Night city is hosted by a local organiser, who has an annual Handshake Agreement with PechaKucha HQ to run their event series. This ensures that each PechaKucha Night is relevant to their city- and can create a unique platform to uncover that city's creativity.

•     Why have PechaKucha Nights gone viral globally?

    With PechaKucha Nights now happening in over 900 cities around the world, we have discovered that most cities -- not just Tokyo -- have virtually no public spaces where people can show and share their work in a relaxed way. If you have just graduated from college and finished your first project in the real world, where can you show it? It probably won't get into a magazine, and you don't have enough photos for a gallery show or a lecture, but PechaKucha is the perfect platform to show and share your work.

•     Where are PechaKucha Nights held?

    PechaKucha Nights are mostly held in fun spaces with a bar, similar to the home of PechaKucha Night, SuperDeluxe, which is a space for “thinking and drinking.” To date, PechaKucha Nights have been held in bars, restaurants, clubs, beer gardens, homes, studios, universities, churches, prisons (disused), beaches, swimming pools, even a quarry!

•     Who can present?

    Anyone can present -- this is the beauty of PechaKucha Nights. Astrid's daughter presented when she was 5 (about her artwork) and Mark's mother presented when she was 69 (about her elaborate wedding cake creations).

•     What can people present?

    The key to a great presentation is to present something you love. Most people use PechaKucha Night to present their latest creative projects or work. Some people share their passion and show their prized collection of Nana Mouskouri records, while others share photos of their latest visit to a construction site or their recent holiday snaps. We always recommend people go and see a PechaKucha Night before they ask to present to get a good feel for what it's all about.

•     What makes a good PechaKucha?

    Good PechaKucha presentations are the ones that uncover the unexpected -- unexpected talent, unexpected ideas. Some PechaKuchas tell great stories about a project or a trip. Some are incredibly personal, some are incredibly funny, but all are very different, and they turn each PechaKucha Night into “a box of chocolates.”

•     What if I'm not able to attend a PechaKucha Night?

    If you're in an area with no regular PechaKucha Night series, or if you’d just like to get a feel for what people are presenting around the world, then you can go to the Presentations section of this site, and watch presentation from PKNs worldwide.

•     Who runs PechaKucha Nights?

    Each PechaKucha Night is run by a city organizer. They are more like stewards, who look after the PechaKucha spirit in each city. All PKN organizers must have a regular day job and they run PechaKucha Nights only for the inspiration, love, and fun of it. They mostly come from the creative fields. The PKN organizer is usually supported by a big team of volunteers -- when it comes to putting on a PechaKucha Night, the more helping hands the better. The global PechaKucha network is organized and supported by Klein Dytham architecture.

•     How can I run a PechaKucha Night?

    We have never asked anyone to run a PechaKucha Night, people ask us. We only planned this as a one-off event, but then people asked us to run it again -- and again - and we were 3 years and 30 events into it, just in Tokyo, before people started thinking it would be cool to have one in their city. Check to see if there is one in your city first. If not, and you think you have what it takes to run one in your city, you can get in touch for more details.

•     What’s a PechaKucha Night handshake agreement?

    We have a very simple “handshake” agreement with each city, mostly to ensure there is only one event series per city and that people are not treading on one another's toes or pulling the rug out from under their feet. PechaKucha Nights take quite a bit of organizing, and the more networks the better so we think it is better for cities to focus on one event. We run an event every month in Tokyo, and believe us, it is quite an undertaking! The “handshake” agreements are free, and renewed each year. Cities must organize a minimum of 4 events a year to qualify as an active city.

•     Why is PechaKucha Night trademarked?

    PechaKucha Night is trademarked to protect all the effort and hard work of our PKN city organizers and network. PechaKucha Night is for CONTENT and not profit.

•     Who pays to support the network?

    PechaKucha was devised and shared by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, and their office Klein Dytham architecture has supported the movement and global network for the past 9 years, covering all costs for staff and web development. We are currently looking at different ways to keep the project sustainable and viable going forward as the network expands.

•     Can I use the PechaKucha 20x20 format at school or in the office?

    Yes, it is a great format for project reviews and presentations in the classroom or for internal meetings in offices. In these private situations, you are free to use the format. However, if you want to use the PechaKucha 20x20 name or format in the context of something that is open to the public or publicized, we ask that you get in touch for more details.

•     Is PechaKucha Night like TED?

    Many people have said, “Oh, so you're like a local TED!” This is a very nice compliment, but not quite right. TED is brilliant, but very different from PechaKucha. TED is top down, PechaKucha is bottom up! Deanne the hooper, Astrid’s husband, or Mark’s young son might have had a tough time getting into the presentation lineup at TED, but they had some wonderful stories to share at PechaKucha Night.

•     Was PechaKucha the first format like this?

    That's a good question. We have all heard of elevator pitches, a presentation so short you could pitch it to someone in an elevator. 20 seconds x 20 images is a bit longer than that, but the idea is the same: short, concise presentations. As far as we know, PechaKucha was the first to put a limit on the number of images and number of seconds -- and the all important auto-forward. There’s no “next slide” or “go back one, please” at PechaKucha Nights.

•     Is PechaKucha Night a social network?

    We believe there is nothing social about online social networks, so get out from behind your screen and get to a live event, with real people, real communication, real beer, and real creative fun. So in a sense, we are in fact a “real” social network.

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From: http://www.pechakucha.org/faq

What is Oath?

So Verizon owns AOL and now it bought Yahoo!

And now Verizon is selling it all to Apollo!

https://www.cnbc.com News

 

Verizon recently completed its $4.4 billion acquisition of Internet pioneer AOL. The deal comes 15 years after the company joined forces with Time Warner in 2000, which is widely considered one of the biggest business flops in U.S. corporate history.

According to Fortune, Verizon is a telecom giant.  It is at #15 on the Fortune 500.

Verizon has 108.6 billion mobile connections.

While AOL may be most known for its dial-up services and growing content empire —which includes The Huffington Post, Engadget and TechCrunch—it also has put together a sophisticated suite of advertising technologies for online and traditional media that no other company (aside from Google and Facebook) can match.

AOL’s platform is particularly strong in video advertising—which CommScore says reaches more than 50% of the U.S. population. The Internet company's successful digital platform will also coincidentally assist Verizon's plans to launch its own Internet TV service, which it announced this year after buying Intel’s media assets in 2014 and video delivery network EdgeCast in 2013.


 After Verizon scoops up Yahoo's Internet assets, what remains of Yahoo -- mostly investment holdings in Alibaba (BABA, Tech30) -- will be renamed Altaba. Mayer will step down from the board of that company once the sale is complete.

Yahoo as we know it may be done. But at least we'll always have Oath and Altaba. 

Alienation and Exclusion

     The campaign of 2016 was an education in the deep problems facing the country.  Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have faculty lounge views.
      Alienation breeds a hysterical public conversation.  Its public intellectuals are addicted to overstatement, sloppiness, pessimism, and despair.  They are self-indulgent and self-lionizing prophets of doom who use formulations like “the Flight 93 election” — who speak of every problem as if it were the apocalypse.  Alienation also breeds a zero-sum mind-set — it’s us or them — and with it a tribal clannishness and desire for exclusion.  As Levin notes, on the right alienation can foster a desire for purity — to exclude the foreign — and on the left it can foster a desire for conformity — to squelch differing speakers and faiths.
      But going forward we need a better establishment, one attuned to Trump voters, those whose alienation grows out of genuine suffering.   The first task for this better establishment is to not make the political chasm worse . As the impeachment investigation proceeds, it’ll be important for us Trump critics to not set our hair on fire every day, to evaluate the evidence as if it were against a president we ourselves voted for.  Would we really throw our own candidate out of office for this?
       Over the longer term, it will be necessary to fight alienation with participation, to reform and devolve the welfare state so that recipients are not treated like passive wards of the state, but take an active role in their own self-government.
       It’ll be necessary to revive a living elite patriotism.  That means conducting oneself in office as if nation is more important than party; not using executive orders, filibusters and the nuclear option to grab what you can while you happen to be in the majority.
       It means setting up weekly encounters to help you respect and understand the fellow Americans who reside across the social chasms.
       Finally, it’ll be necessary to fight alienation with moral realism, with a mature mind-set that says that, yes, people are always flawed, the country always faces problems, but that is no reason for lazy cynicism or self-righteous despair. If you start with an awareness of human foibles, then you can proceed with what Levin calls pessimistic hopefulness — grateful for the institutions our ancestors left us, and filled with cheerful confidence that they can be reformed to solve present needs.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/

Light Pollution

The Problems of Light Pollution -- Overview

Light pollution: Any adverse effect of artificial light including sky glow, glare, light trespass, light clutter, decreased visibility at night, and energy waste. Light pollution is not only a hinderance to astronomy, but it also impacts us directly.
Light pollution:
    is a risk factor for cancer to people
    is a disturbance to animals
    is a waste of energy, resources, and money
    is a security risk to your property
    and obscures our view of the wondrous night sky.

Urban sky glow - the brightening of the night sky over inhabited areas. It is the "glow" effect that can be seen over distant populated areas. This light that escapes up into the sky is created by the combination of all light reflected off of what is being illuminated, from all of the badly directed light in that area, and from that light that is scattered (redirected) by the atmosphere itself from reaching the ground. This scattering is very strongly related to the wavelength of the light when the air is very clear (with very little aerosols). Rayleigh scattering dominates in such clear air, making the sky appear blue in the daytime.
http://cescos.fau.edu/observatory/lightpol.html

Sci-fi books and movies

Carl Sagan, Contact (1985)

The film version of Carl Sagan’s science fiction novel, Contact (1997), seems to divide people into “love it” and “hate it” camps.  Personally, I love it: it’s elegant, has an imaginative story and, of course, stars Jodie Foster as Dr Eleanor Arroway, so I was looking forward to reading the novel on which it was based.
 From: https://purpleprosearchive.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/carl-sagan-contact-1985/


After all, the two authors who led me most strongly into my deep and abiding love of sci fi were Anne McCaffrey (and The Ship Who Sang) in particular, and everything by Ursula Le Guin.
Also:
Emma Bull. She writes both fantasy and science fiction, and is one of my favorite writers ever.
And just for fun, check out Shadow Unit. (Shadowunit.org). The website is an ongoing story by several writers-most female-and resembles a paranormal CSI. Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Evizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Amanda Downum, and others.
From:  https://godardsletterboxes.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/100-sci-fi-women-63-dr-eleanor-arroway/

Sugar Snakes

Nice scientific explanation:

https://melscience.com/en/experiments/sugar-snake/