Ordinary Sunday Brunch
Music Links
[Mu1] “Those who claim radio is on its way out will second-guess themselves after SiriusXM’s latest earnings report. For the third quarter of 2018, the satellite radio company posted revenue of $1.5 billion — a quarterly record for the company — and got nearly 300,000 new subscribers, bringing its total subscriber count to around 33.7 million. How’s the car-centric subscription radio service doing so well at a time when music is widely available for free listening elsewhere?”
[Mu2] “Music and artists are the backbone(s) of culture. They frame fashion, drive social media conversation, invent dance moves and memes and are a loss-leader lynchpin of the first trillion-dollar company. We’ve watched brands like Kanye West’s Yeezy and Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty turn entire categories on their head and generate millions in profit as a result.”
[Mu3] “The naming of a genre of music is an inexact science. Often a term that’s well-known will be applied to a particular sound because of a geographical association, like disco – short for discotheque – or the music evokes certain feelings, like rave.
Sometimes an archaic term is plundered, and the musical form it is named after goes on to become so universal that the original term dies on the vine, bereft of its original context. But one thing a good deal of popular music’s most iconic genre names share is that they come from vulgar terms describing the grittier side of life, whether that is sex, or drugs or, y’know… rock ‘n’ roll.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EKi2E9dVY8&w=560&h=315]
Art Links
[Ar1] The art of pumpkin carving.
[Ar2] Vanished Art Recalled and Reinterpreted: In this exhibition contemporary artworks are paired with works that have been destroyed or lost to the annals of art history.
[Ar3] “Will blockchain revolutionize the art market? The growing number of art-tech startups aiming to bring greater transparency and transactional security to the industry as well as the adoption of the technology among the top players definitely indicates so! In order to best understand what blockchain can bring to the art market, let’s take a look at the main ways that it can be utilized, as well as the opportunities and challenges that they present.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDRWdNn_nLk&w=560&h=315]
History Links
[Hi1] The Medievalist Who Fought Nazis With History
[Hi2] Hitler Almost Got Nukes. This WWII Hero Helped Stop Him: Joachim Ronneberg was humble about the almost suicidal operation he led at age 23.
[Hi3] The Hidden History of African-American Burial Sites in the Antebellum South: Enslaved people used codes to mark graves on plantation grounds.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSSa0-oAnIo&w=560&h=315]
Food Links
[Fo1] The truth about organic food and cancer: Your wallet might have more of an effect than your shopping cart.
[Fo2] The more money you make, the more fast food you eat: A new CDC brief suggests it’s not people below the poverty line doing the buying — it’s people well above it.
[Fo3] A German court has sentenced a man to 12 1/2 years in prison on charges of attempted murder and attempted extortion for poisoning jars of baby food and leaving them on store shelves.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5i2lnJIbh4&w=560&h=315]
Mu1: A whole bunch of truck drivers for one thing. I realize this is anecdata but I personally can’t stand commercial am/fm radio and even if I find a station I can tolerate it’s gone 50 miles down the road at best. $10/mo or so really isn’t much to pay for a gazillion commercial-free channels that work everywhere when you consider how many hours I spend driving in a month.
Edited to add: And as to Spotify et al: two words, data caps. It’s not really an option without all you can eat internet.Report
Good point. Report
Yep. When my husband was on the road driving truck back and forth from Washington to California we considered getting it because you don’t want to drive through Eastern Oregon at 4:30 am with no radio reception. It felt like almost a necessity if he wanted to keep going at the job. He decided to quit and get a local trucking job instead but it would have been a no-brainer otherwise.Report
When I was working I was driving so much it was a worthwhile investment for me, not only for dead spots you mentioned but also just as one less thing to worry about on long road trips.Report
Ar3: Blockchain just strikes me as a solution desperately in search of a problem. I suppose the digital art market may be the exception but I would need an explanation re details. Otherwise there always seems to be another, already established, solution that works just fine and is cheaper and easier to understand. Get back to me when people actually start using cryptocurrencies as, you know, currency, instead of fly-by-night, over-hyped investments.Report
I dont disagree with that. I am intrigued by the technology but far too many seem to think blockchain is this be all end all when in fact it’s most obvious applications are far more narrowReport
Shipping companies have been playing with for speeding up contracts.Report
Speeding up contract, or maybe streamlining is a better word, yes there is great application potential. Where blockchain proponents start getting sideways is when (some) get into “this will replace all contract negotiation and tort law!!” The issue with shipping and transportation contracts isnt the agreements themselves, it’s when things go wrong and you start arguing over the particulars “what is the definition of is” kind of things. Blockchain can “secure” a contract but it cannot solve interpretation disputes. Report
H1: Marc Bloc also fought the Nazis in more conventional manner as a member of the French Resistance. He was a badass bookworm as TvTropes described him. Its amazing that a biopic wasn’t made of him by France or Hollywood. French Jew historian fights Nazis.
F1: My mom is a certified member of the organic cult. I keep trying to tell her the term is meaningless but she isn’t buying it.
F3: Good for the German court.Report
Far from meaningless, the term means I pay more for little discernable value. I go out of my way to get true organic product from local farmers, purveyors, and people who make things the right ways. Report
http://www.vulture.com/2018/10/how-does-the-art-world-live-with-itself.html?fbclid=IwAR0ZwVqYSlK4rR0gSFkk-1Ltvd7SmDUPZ8Ty9jRpwpfjqpGk4ZILFtOVNSo
An art critic asks how does the art world live with itselfReport
On vast piles of money surrounded by attractive members of their preferred gender.Report
There are dozens of stories about things in WW2 that supposedly prevented Hitler from having nukes.
The reality was that Hitler was no where remotely close to getting nukes and any counterfactual where he gets them is exceedingly improbable. Realistically, only the United States had the ability to see that project to its usable conclusion while at the same time fighting an industrial total war. That’s why the British, who were considerably further along and better placed than the Germans to run a nuke project handed everything they had over to the States.
There are a whole bunch of good stories in this genre, but none of them actually prevented a cataclysm.Report
But the reason that Hitler wasn’t far along is because almost all the theoretical physicists except Heisenberg were whole or partially Jewish. Britain and the U.S. took Germany’s best and the brightest.Report
Having the scientists didn’t matter nearly so much as the industrial capacity. As it stood, Germany still had plenty of qualified non-German physicists to throw at the problem if they thought it was feasible. Mid-war German leadership solicited Heisenberg’s opinion on the matter, he quite rightly told them it couldn’t be done with the resources available in the time frame that would make any difference to the war.
With 1940s technological and industrial base, a nuclear weapon is an even bigger industrial problem than scientific. Operating on a wing and a prayer as the Nazi military-industrial complex did throughout the war, they don’t have the spare $20 billion in resources, many of which are cutting edge and particularly scarce, to devote to seeing the thing to completion.
Hitler not getting nuclear weapons is hugely over-determined, to many things have to break his way in an unlikely fashion to change that.Report