Hoera het is vandaag Wereldmilieudag. Maar wij dopen deze dag: Donald Polsdag. Want zeg je milieu, dan zeg je Donald Pols. Die twee zijn zo onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden als Zuid-Afrika en de apartheid. Donald Pols kende een inktzwart verleden maar werd een witte ridder die ons niet alleen milieubewuster maakte, maar ons ook leerde dat je alle kansen met betrekking tot centjes moet grijpen, dat over je verleden zwijgen als het graf helemaal niet erg is tenzij het uitkomt en dat een tropenhoed dragen als je niet in de tropen bent niet iets is om je voor te schamen. Gaat het toch een keer mis, dan schiet het linkse milieu gelukkig snel te hulp. En stel je toch eens voor dat Donald Pols nooit in aanraking was gekomen met het Nederlandse milieu. Dan had Nelson Mandela misschien nog steeds vastgezeten op Robbeneiland en had Tata Steel nog geen hele dag een goede directeur communicatie gehad. Dus wat zeuren de mensen nou eigenlijk? Veeleer is het tijd om iedereen en z'n ongure verleden die het viert te feliciteren met Donald Polsdag, de man aan wie het milieu, in het bijzonder een zeer vervuild milieu, zoveel danken heeft.
Twee Donalds bijna even leuk als Donald Pols
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Driver died four years after founding McLaren but his legacy lives through his inspirational tenacity and team’s roll call of champions
As the streets of Monaco echo to the roar of engines, history too will resonate long and loud in Monte Carlo this weekend. Allegiance be damned, it would take a heart of stone not to recognise McLaren’s achievement and contribution to the sport when the team that made their debut here in 1966 contest their 1000th grand prix.
Bruce McLaren, the team’s founder, had brought his first F1 car, the M2B, to Monaco in 1966. On Thursday it was on the track once again, driven by their double world champion Mika Häkkinen to mark the team’s milestone race, having taken 203 victories, 13 drivers’ titles and 10 constructors’ championships.
Continue reading...Modern Art, London
The mathematically named new works of Along the River are disorienting, illusive and seem to offer a flash of the secret sequences that underpin the physical world
Why do we find things beautiful? More precisely, why do some paintings of coloured dots in rippling patterns inspire in me something like revelation? The idea that beauty is the feeling you get when encountering truth is unfashionable in the arts, but lingers in the sciences. The physicist Paul Dirac once proposed that it is more important that a formula is beautiful than that it can be proven: when a perfectly beautiful theory produces results that cannot be real, he argued, then we should not discard the theory but reconsider what is real.
Since the 1970s, Terry Winters has been rebuilding that bridge between art and science. Taking inspiration from disciplines including botany – his early paintings, particularly, evoke sprouting pods and tangled roots – engineering, computer modelling and cybernetics, his paintings might be understood as diagrammatic approximations of the patterns that govern everything from the division of cells to the constellation of stars. If every era has to renew its standards of beauty to reflect new understandings of how the world is constructed, then Winters comes as close to providing that model as any living painter.
Continue reading...Attacks on police in Southampton, Russian strikes in Kyiv, the Ebola outbreak and PSG win the Champions League – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing
Continue reading...For football fans in Canada, the initial prospect of the World Cup coming to town was thrilling – but hundreds of tickets remain unsold
As far back as he can remember, football has long been a part of Lawrence Yee’s life. Growing up in a Canadian town where hockey was the dominant sport, he found community and passion in the game. The sport – and the full, at times devastating, spectrum of emotion that comes with fandom – has remained braided into adulthood. Nearly four years ago, when Fifa announced Toronto and Vancouver would join 14 other cities in hosting the World Cup, Yee was ecstatic.
“Hearing the biggest stage, the highest competition, the biggest tournament in the world was coming into Toronto? I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime for someone like me. Being able to live in the city and cycle to the venue? I knew I’d be the first in line for tickets.”
Continue reading...LONDEN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Facebook-moederbedrijf Meta Platforms overweegt een aandelenverkoop van tientallen miljarden dollars om verder te kunnen investeren in kunstmatige intelligentie (AI). Dat meldt de Britse zakenkrant Financial Times. Volgens bronnen van de krant zijn er gesprekken bij Meta over die aandelenverkoop.
Daarmee zou Meta het voorbeeld volgen van Google-moederbedrijf Alphabet, dat deze week bekendmaakte 85 miljard dollar aan vers kapitaal te willen ophalen met een aandelenverkoop om nog meer investeringen in AI te kunnen doen. Meta heeft gezegd dit jaar tot wel 145 miljard dollar te willen steken in AI-infrastructuur zoals datacenters. Volgend jaar zou dan nog meer geld in AI gestoken moeten worden.
De gesprekken over een aandelenverkoop worden geleid door financieel directeur Susan Li van Meta, dat ook eigenaar is van WhatsApp en Instagram. Ook Meta-president Dina Powell McCormick is nauw betrokken bij die gesprekken, aldus Financial Times.
Valve says its long-awaited Steam Machine and Steam Frame are both "shipping this summer." The company is also expanding its Verified program beyond Steam Deck to cover the new hardware. "Steam Verified is a developer-focused program where game makers ensure that their titles are capable of running on the Deck (meaning they'll run fine under Linux), that the UI elements and text are readable at standard resolutions, and that sensible default graphics settings are used," notes Tom's Hardware. From the report: The news should ease the worries of many an expecting gamer, given today's constant worries about AI servers slurping every RAM and NAND chip on the face of the earth, as well as Valve's own statements about component scarcity delaying the release. Plus, the company always works on its own schedule, so much so that Valve Time is a term.
The release of the Machine has been taking flak, given that while Valve was initially hoping for an estimated $600 to $800 price -- in the ballpark of the higher-end consoles -- the rumored pricing is climbing around or over $1000. This fact is somewhat corroborated by a February statement from a Valve executive who, like most anyone in the world, stated the price revision was due to the AI-driven component shortage.
The release of the Machine has been taking flak, given that while Valve was initially hoping for an estimated $600 to $800 price -- in the ballpark of the higher-end consoles -- the rumored pricing is climbing around or over $1000. This fact is somewhat corroborated by a February statement from a Valve executive who, like most anyone in the world, stated the price revision was due to the AI-driven component shortage.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
