Everything Feels Like the End of the World by Else Fitzgerald
8 August 2022
Everything Feels Like the End of the World (published by Allen & Unwin, 2 August 2022), by Mornington Peninsula based Australian writer Else Fitzgerald, seems like a book title for the times some days.
Winner of the 2019 Richell Prize for emerging writers, Fitzgerald written a collection of short stories, exploring a number of chilling dystopian futures for Australia, set both in the near and distant future:
Each story is anchored, at its heart, in what it means to be human: grief, loss, pain and love. A young woman is faced with a difficult choice about her pregnancy in a community ravaged by doubt. An engineer working on a solar shield protecting the Earth shares memories of their lover with an AI companion. Two archivists must decide what is worth saving when the world is flooded by rising sea levels. In a heavily policed state that preferences the human and punishes the different, a mother gives herself up to save her transgenic child.
Nanci Nott, writing for Artshub, describes Everything Feels Like the End of the World as an engaging collection of speculative short fictions:
Each tale is intensely personal, vibrant with specificity, and written with precision. Characters don’t just exist within their settings; entire worlds inhabit these characters. A master of minutiae and memory, Fitzgerald creates an intricate universe of befores-and-afters, sacrifices and consequences, mundane joys and darkest days.
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Publisher to profit from sale of used textbooks sold as NFTs
8 August 2022
Publishers may soon see more return from the sale of second-hand electronic books, if a proposal by British educational and textbook publisher Pearson to sell their titles as NTFs is successful.
Educational books are often sold more than once, since students sell study resources they no longer require. Publishers have not previously been able to make any money from secondhand sales, but the rise of digital textbooks has created an opportunity for companies to benefit.
NFTs confer ownership of a unique digital item by recording it on a decentralised digital register known as a blockchain. Typically these items are images or videos, but the technology allows for just about anything to be sold and owned in this way.
At the moment few digital books are sold as NFTs, with the exception of some self-published novels, though this may change in the wake of Pearson’s proposal.
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The people we spend time with changes throughout our life
8 August 2022
A breakdown of the time we spend with the people in our lives: parents, siblings, friends, partners, colleagues… and ourselves, put together by Our World in Data. The findings are based on surveys conducted between 2009 and 2019 in the United States.
- As you age you tend to spend more time alone. This does not necessarily mean you’d be lonely though
- Once you leave home the time spent with parents and siblings plummets
- Once settled in a career, time spent with friends also decreases
- In fact the only person you spend more time with, excluding children if you have any, is your partner
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data, lifestyle, psychology, science
Vale Judith Durham, lead singer of the Seekers
8 August 2022
Judith Durham, lead singer of Australian folk/pop band the Seekers died last Friday, 5 August 2022, aged 79. Formed in 1962, the Seekers, along with Durham, who joined the group a year later, were among the first Australian music acts to achieve international success.
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Australian music, Judith Durham, music
Michael Spitzer: 40000 years of music history in 8 minutes
6 August 2022
Because music is so accessible today we’re drowning in it, says Michael Spitzer, professor of music at the University of Liverpool. That’s a far cry from a few hundred years ago when people attended, at best, two recitals in their lifetime, and music went unrecorded until 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
But the arrival of the phonograph is only a small part in the story of music. Changes in the way music was performed, and the instruments created to make that possible, evolved as we moved away from our hunter-gatherer roots, and eventually began living in towns. Spitzer’s recounting of forty-thousand years of musical development, in the space of eight minutes, is fascinating.
If you’re looking at the broad picture of the evolution of sapiens, then the epochs are hunter-gatherer, farming community, and then the founding of cities and city-states. Each of these epochs is associated with mentalities. So, hunter-gatherers tended to be nomadic. And if you’re essentially journeying through a landscape, what you don’t do is carry heavy instruments. Music has to be portable, ideally, just a voice or if not, a very light flute or a small percussive instrument. And if you look at the music that is played by the Cameroon Pygmies, every time they play a piece, it sounds different. It’s very much music of the moment.
Now, what changes when you invent farming? You settle down. And your whole mindset becomes fixed on the circle of the seasons, the circle of life. And you invent repeatable work. And the structure of the work becomes as cyclical as life itself. You invent a circle in music, invent musical rituals. And once music migrates from the farm to the town, certain changes happen. Instruments can become heavy because you start to set quite permanent roots into the town. You create heavy instruments like bells and gongs, but also very delicate ones like harps and lutes which would be damaged over a journey.
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Days getting shorter, Earth spinning faster these days
6 August 2022
Scientists are perplexed by a slight increase in the speed of the Earth’s rotation in recent years. It’s all the more puzzling because as time has passed, Earth’s spin has been ever so gradually slowing down. This has required leap seconds to be added to clocks from time to time, which are separate to the leap day that needs to be added to the calendar every four years.
Since the first leap second was added in 1972, scientists have added leap seconds every few years. They’re added irregularly because Earth’s rotation is erratic, with intermittent periods of speeding up and slowing down that interrupt the planet’s millions-of-years-long gradual slowdown.
“The rotation rate of Earth is a complicated business. It has to do with exchange of angular momentum between Earth and the atmosphere and the effects of the ocean and the effect of the moon,” Levine says. “You’re not able to predict what’s going to happen very far in the future.”
But in the past decade or so, Earth’s rotational slowdown has … well, slowed down. There hasn’t been a leap second added since 2016, and our planet is currently spinning faster than it has in half a century. Scientists aren’t sure why.
While the speed increase is barely noticeable, the shortest day since the advent of atomic clocks was recorded on Wednesday 29 June 2022, when the day was 1.59 milliseconds shorter than the usual twenty-four hours.
A millisecond or so is small fry though. In the distant past, Earth’s years were made up of four-hundred-and-twenty days, considerably more that the three-hundred-and-sixty-five we’re accustomed to. But it could be worse. If say the Earth spun twice as fast as it presently does, life would be quite different.
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Jeremy Eden wins Archibald Prize people’s choice award
4 August 2022
Sydney based Australian artist Jeremy Eden has won the 2022 Archibald Prize people’s choice award, with his portrait of Australian actor Samuel Johnson.
If you’re going to be in or near Sydney in August, you still have a chance to see the Archibald, Wynne, and Sulman Prizes exhibition, before it closes on Sunday 28 August 2022.
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Archibald Prize, art, Australian art, Jeremy Eden, Samuel Johnson
Super clear photos of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe
3 August 2022
Image courtesy of NASA/Juno spacecraft.
A selection of some of the clearest photos taken so far, of Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. This stunning image dates from 2019. Juno has been photographing the gas giant since 2016, on a mission originally expected to last five years. NASA is hopeful however the probe will remain operational until 2025.
More of Juno’s photos can be seen here.
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astronomy, Jupiter, photography, science
Who are the famous people who make your town notable
3 August 2022
Finnish map designer and geographer Topi Tjukanov has created Notable people, a global map showing the birth places of well-known and famous people. Use your mouse to drag the globe to the desired location, and the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most “notable people” around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.
The nearest listed notable person born close to my present location is Australian film and TV actor Steve Bisley, who starred in the original Mad Max movie in 1979.
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Somerton Man identified as Carl ‘Charles’ Webb
3 August 2022
Derek Abbott, a professor at the University of Adelaide, claimed last week to have identified the so-called Somerton Man, perhaps bringing a close to one of the most intriguing, and lingering, Australian mysteries of the twentieth century.
In December 1948, the body of a man thought to be about forty, was found at Somerton beach in Adelaide, capital of South Australia. His body showed no sign of trauma. He was not carrying any identification, nor were there missing person reports for anyone matching his description.
In the months following his death, a suitcase containing some of his possessions was located, but offered no clues as to who he was. A scrap of paper, bearing the words tamam shud, was found concealed in clothing the man owned. The fragment was later found to have been torn from a page of a book of poems titled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, originally written in the twelfth century.
It was all enough to send the rumour mill into overdrive. People variously believed Somerton Man to be a spy, a displaced war veteran who’d made his way to Australia, or a jilted lover who’d presumably somehow taken his own life at the beach one night.
South Australian police exhumed Somerton Man’s body in May 2021, to further their investigation, but Abbott had been making progress separately. Working with Colleen Fitzpatrick, an American genealogist, he concluded the man to be Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne.
While mystery still surrounds the circumstances of his death, Abbott believes Webb may have travelled to Adelaide to see his ex-wife, who moved there after the pair separated several years prior.
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