japanimfokus has added a photo to the pool:
The two-week event celebrates the creativity of the Yorkshire Dales village and has gone from strength to strength since beginning as a fundraiser for the local primary school in 1994
Continue reading...Musician and record producer who reignited Madonna’s career with his work on her 1998 album Ray of Light
The career highlights of William Orbit, who has died aged 69, would run to several pages, featuring collaborations with Robbie Williams, All Saints, Prince, Kraftwerk, Britney Spears, Beth Orton and U2, but one of the most celebrated was his partnership with Madonna on her 1998 album Ray of Light.
Coming at a point when Madonna had starred in the movie of Evita and had her first child, Lourdes, and her music career seemed to be waning, Ray of Light marked a decisive step into a new world of techno and ambient music. Orbit, who had previously made remixes of Madonna’s Justify My Love and Erotica, proved to be the perfect production partner, and Ray of Light’s blend of styles and textures made it one of Madonna’s most admired achievements, with 16 million copies of the album sold worldwide.
Continue reading...Seventy years after CP Snow warned of estrangement between the sciences and arts, breadth in education should be encouraged
After the playwright Tom Stoppard died last year, one of the most striking tributes to his work came from a clinical scientist. Michael Baum explained in the British Medical Journal how, in the interval of a 1993 performance of Arcadia, he experienced an epiphany. Thomasina Coverly’s attempt to plot the equation for a rose prompted him to realise that chaos theory was the best way to explain breast cancer’s pattern of recurrence. It was, he wrote, “the bond that links the arts and the sciences as one enterprise rather than the contents of two silos”.
Mr Baum was not the first person to celebrate the bridging of this gap. CP Snow famously criticised the incuriosity of “literary intellectuals” about technology in his essay The Two Cultures (later turned into a lecture and a book). Whether or not this was justified at the time, many literary intellectuals besides Stoppard have since taken a close interest in science; Richard Holmes’s latest book, about the influence of evolutionary theory on Tennyson, is just one example. But the split between the humanities and sciences remains pronounced, and will be evident when this year’s A-level results are released on Thursday.
Continue reading...The Guardian view on India’s green growth gamble: it will need more than private finance | Editorial
The world’s most populous country needs state-generated demand to industrialise, decarbonise and avoid China’s overcapacity trap
India is attempting to do something the world has never seen before. So claimed Niti Aayog, the government of India’s policy thinktank, earlier this year. It said that no major economy has tried to expand GDP nearly eightfold within a generation while simultaneously redirecting its energy and industrial systems to reach net zero within two generations. Hence its detailed report’s claim that there is “no historical precedent”.
There is something to this. China industrialised at vast scale, but not on a sustainable net zero path. Korea, Japan and Europe became wealthy by industrialising before decarbonising. Today, rich nations have already satisfied the basic demands of their people and created the infrastructure and high per-capita energy use that India is still trying to build. The world’s most populous country has to do this while also reducing emissions.
Continue reading...Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
The SNL UK star’s romantic failures and house-share humiliations make for a fun hour of downbeat yet twinkling comedy
A recent star of Saturday Night Live UK, Paddy Young is enjoying a moment of life-changing fulfilment and success. But “I’ve brought the worst plus-one to the party,” he says – by which he means himself. If ever the truism that money can’t buy you happiness needed demonstration, look no further than Young’s new show, Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? It finds the 35-year-old lamenting (as ever) the circularity of his domestic life, a luckless perma-bachelor doomed for ever to watch on as his housemates graduate to more grown-up, loved-up lives elsewhere.
Young has cultivated the perfect persona to sell this sorry tale: a plangent northerner, half-turned away from the audience and side-eyeing us coyly with this or that tale of hapless manboyishness. Is it an act? Well, no, it’s an exaggeration, and part of the fun is to work out how sincere sad-sack Paddy really is, halfway through his three score years and 10, stuck in a house share with “three PS2s and not a lamp in sight”. He’s bothered not that his flatmate is having sex too noisily, but that it’s not audible enough (“Let me in!”). Ghosted by a recent date, he has resorted to stalking his first teenage kiss on Facebook, then all the way to Copenhagen, fantasising about inserting himself into her wholesome family life.
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Toen haar donkergetinte broertje een enorme ‘huidkleurige’ beige pleister op zijn bloedende voorhoofd geplakt kreeg, durfde hij er nauwelijks mee naar buiten. De Rotterdamse Jeanine Dorrestein richtte daarom een eigen bedrijf op, met pleisters en andere wondverzorgingsproducten in meerdere huidtinten. “Iedereen moet kunnen herstellen zonder dat het opvalt.”
Vrij hallucinant (en opvallend feitenarm opgeschreven, maar ja Coen Verbaak is nu eenmaal van de mens achter de waarheid, niet van de waarheid zelf) stukje aan het einde van het interview in de Volkskrant met Neelie Kroes, de oud-eurocommissaris die niet mocht lobbyen voor Uber en toch lobbyde voor Uber. Daar zegt ze zelf over: "Want ik héb niet gelobbyd voor Uber. Ik heb geprobeerd de nieuwe ontwikkelingen die aan de orde waren voor digitale technologie over het voetlicht te brengen." Dat is een beetje alsof je zegt dat je niet naar de McDonald's bent geweest maar wel een Big Mac en twee grote friet en een McFlurry hebt gegeten. Maar ja, de Europese Commissie vond een briefje met opheldering van mevrouw Kroes goed genoeg. Glas, plas, door de coalitie geblokkeerd debat en alles blees zoals het was.
