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What is the connection (I hear you shout) between the pioneering Solar Impulse flight, Tintin, opera, Star Trek and Goldfrapp?
One of the people behind Solar Impulse is Bernard Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist and self-described explorer. It turns out he didn’t just take up flying about the world in various craft to overcome the tedium of psychiatry. In fact, there’s a family history of this sort of thing. His father, Jacques, is known for his undersea adventures including his 1960 US Navy funded, 5 hour descent in his bathyscaphe to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Pathé newsreel about Auguste’s 1932 ascent
Bernard’s grandfather, Auguste, was a physicist who in 1931 visited the stratosphere by balloon and made measurements of cosmic radiation. He was also a professor of physics at the Université libre de Bruxelles and it was in Brussels that a certain Hergé noticed this unusually tall man who had to be scaled down to become the dotty Professor Calculus in The Adventures of Tintin.
Gene Roddenberry named his Star Trek character, Jean-Luc Picard, after Auguste and his twin brother, Jean Félix, a chemist, engineer and high-altitude balloonist who migrated to the United States, but it’s unclear whether Jean-Luc was supposed to be a member of the family.
In 2011 the BBC Concert Orchestra commissioned an opera based on Auguste Piccard’s flight called Piccard in Space. The composer was Will Gregory, the other half of electro-duo Goldfrapp. It was not well received.
“A few catchy hooks get subsumed here by canons and fugues and even the much-publicised Moog Ensemble is afforded little more than sub-Doctor Who warblings. Thin? It’s pretty much transparent.” —The Independent “If the libretto is amateurish and lacking in drama, the music has a sort of high-spirited vacuousness. It strenuously goes through the operatic motions, but it has no tunes, no character, and very little colour.” —The Financial Times “But it kept reminding me of water pouring out of a tap straight down a plughole. There’s nothing holding it together: no backbone, no dramatic impetus, no larger musical purpose. It just rolls aimlessly on, to no ultimate effect whatsoever.” —The Telegraph |
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The University of Cambridge Library has recently digitized this fragile book, reputed to be the world’s oldest example of multicolour printing. Perversely the image I’ve chosen is monochrome, but hey I like sparrows!
Dating from 1633, the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (十竹齋書畫譜 Shízhúzhāi Shūhuàpǔ) contains around 320 prints by 30 artists including the printer himself, Hu Zhengyan (胡正言 Hú Zhèngyán) and was intended as a showcase as well as a primer.
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Fifty years ago today (well yesterday) French women gained the amazing rights to get a job and open a bank account…without their husband’s permission!
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Yann Arthus-Bertrand , photographer, journalist, environmentalist and film-maker, known for his book (& later 8 hour TV documentary) of aerial photography, Earth from Above (2004) , and the film Home (2009) , has been working on another grand project for the past two years. Human , which will be released in September, returns to Earth (Arthus-Bertrand has been nicknamed a ‘helicologist’ for his extensive use of helicopters) to interview 2,000 people from all around the world. Once again, the project is supposedly free of copyright and is financed by a large foundation (Fondation Bettencourt Schueller) which is undoubtedly philanthropic, but whose sources of income could be questioned by the more right-on (e.g. Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt and her Nazi collaborating fascist husband).
Looks like it might be interesting though—a clip on the French News included a woman having a rant at us first-worlders. I was pleased to see someone saying “Goidé mar atá tú?” in this promo “Hello World” video too.
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So, I ended up installing Windows 10 instead of 7 and it did a much better job of detecting hardware. It even downloaded NVIDIA drivers (not the latest) and set a sensible resolution.
To get SLI working though I had to open Task Manager & kill the shell Explorer process, otherwise NVIDIA Control Panel just complained about things which you can’t shut down needing to be shut down. Tedious and took quite a bit of fiddling about with Services before I realised it was mainly Explorer.
There have been a few spectacular crashes, by which I mean a sustained whine through the speakers and a completely black screen requiring a hard reboot, but on the whole it’s OK. Definitely some rough edges and I do wonder if it will really be ready for release in a month’s time, but it could be worse!
Apparently Windows Update will use something like Bittorrent to distribute updates, so if other computers on your network already have the update it won’t have to be downloaded again. Very sensible idea which will save bandwidth, but I’ll bet they over-complicate it.
The most striking thing about Windows 10 is its almost brutalist pursuit of a plain, flat look. After years of pursuing ever more elaborate 3D illusion, it seems flat is where it’s at. Flatness has had its devotees in the Linux world for a while (Exhibit A: Libra GTK 3 theme, Exhibit B: Super flat remix icon theme), so maybe this is another case of Windows trying to grab some geek chic?
The only concession to graphic processing power is a drop-shadow around the window. Even the window corners are square and somehow make me think of paper cuts. It’s all teetering on the edge of cleverly understated and downright ugly.
Microsoft Edge (still badged as Project Spartan in the preview—see pic above) is a nice attempt at a simpler browser to fit in with this aesthetic, but as a Firefox user it offers me nothing compelling.
Another thing that sticks out is that familiar Microsoft feel of yet another bolted on layer. Windows is an accretion of software over many years now and it makes for a sometimes less than consistent whole. It’s particularly obvious coming from 6 months of using only Ubuntu. Now Linux (& Unix) is entirely made up of bits, but because a lot of those bits have to work with other bits that can be interchanged, these days you end up with a pretty consistent look and feel whether it’s in the Ubuntu Unity, GNOME or KDE desktops. But Microsoft often have a problem getting their older components to look consistent with newer styles.
This was very apparent when I tried using the scaling slider (something GNOME has had for some time) in Display Settings. Incidentally, this is another example of inconsistency—there is now a Settings ‘app’ as well as the plethora of Control Panels, so you have two places to look for settings. The default text size is pretty small on my 1920×1200 monitor, so I bumped it up to the next available (125%). The text in new apps looked deliciously crisp, but in old apps (e.g. Device Manager) the text was bloated, black and blobby. It seems the Windows family has its favourite children.
In trying to make some screenshots for this post, I encountered another small oddity which is either suggestive of the minds behind this kind of design or a sign of the general dumbing down that convergence (writing software for desktop & mobile) brings. I thought I’d set a background colour that showed up the window drop shadow and went to Display Settings. Unfortunately you can only choose from ‘Standard Colors’ and though I vaguely remember there being a customisation options in the old Personalization Control Panel (i.e Themes), that’s now been disappeared. So the only ways to choose a simple coloured background of your choice is to create an image that colour and set it as a background or edit the registry with the RGB colour value.
Ah Microsoft, the more you change the more you stay the same!
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Huppé is not a word I have much trouble remembering since it’s a little odd, but it occurred to me today that I had no idea where it came from. You usually find it used to mean “posh” or “upper crust” but it’s original meaning “crested” or “having a huppe” (just like a huppe) points to its origin.
Huppe derives from upupa, the Latin name of the hoopoe, the English name unsurprisingly coming from the French. A lot of its European names seem to be in imitation of its call (see below). Though the Ancient Greeks heard it as ἔποψ (epops), these days it’s a τσαλαπετεινός (tsalapeteinós).
The French word huppe can refer to a bird’s crest or the hoopoe itself and its parallel descendant houppe covers a variety of more or less crest-like things, especially if they’re on the head or a hat, e.g. crests, tufts, tassels (especially as a sign of authority as on a cardinal’s galero hat), flakes, fleece, Tintin’s coif.
The connection with the noble avian art of shameless display makes perfect sense.
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A fine example of Australian road culture exported to the world at large. Jason Wells, master butcher and one of the visionaries behind the small Brew café chain in the UK, here demonstrates his fine command of the English language and British road rules.
Richmond and Twickenham Times reports that police are investigating the incident.
“A 50-year-old man voluntarily attended a south London police station where he was interviewed in connection with the incident. The man was not arrested,” a Metropolitan Police spokesman said.
A spokesman for Samphire Communications — the PR company which represents Brew — has so far declined to comment on the incident.
Father-of-two Jason Wells, 50, who lives with his family in a £3million house near Richmond Park in south-west London, is being investigated by police over the four-letter tirade.
Cycle-cam footage of the Melbourne-born entrepreneur calling the cyclist a “f***ing idiot” and threatening to “eat you for breakfast” has been watched more than 60,000 times since it was posted on YouTube by the rider at the weekend.
Hundreds of cyclists took to social media calling for a boycott on Wells’ coffee chain Brew, which has branches in Clapham, Putney, Wimbledon and Wandsworth. The company has held cycle workshops promising to “fix up your bike while you enjoy a coffee.”
Mr Wells, who trained as a master butcher, said today: “I would like to apologise for any offence caused. My behaviour was unacceptable and regardless of the situation, I shouldn’t react like that.
“I fully appreciate that cyclists have as much right to the road as any other road users.”
Mr Wells declined to comment further when approached by the Evening Standard about the incident.
Dressed in a dark suit, he sprinted out of his three-storey house in Richmond this morning saying: “I don’t have any comment darling, I don’t have any comment.”
He then ran up the hill outside his house.
There were three cars parked outside the house — including the Land Rover — and a bicycle.
Brew Café on Facebook (to read some feedback)
Responses on Twitter
Priory Lane (Google Maps)
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