abqtommy
abqtommy's JournalFrom The BBC: Life in lockdown: The pandemic through our eyes
This is an informative photo essay featuring 3 different student photographers. View the pics and
stay to read the text. Enjoy, I know I have.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57530756
From The BBC: Valuable 350-year-old oil paintings found in 'skip' ('dumpster' for us Yanks)
This is very interesting and informative, especially when I had to search out just what a 'skip' is.
From article: 'German police have issued an appeal for information after two valuable 17th Century paintings were discovered dumped in a road-side skip.
The oil paintings are believed to be by Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten and Italian Pietro Bellotti, police said.
A man found the paintings at a motorway service station on the A7 south of Würzburg in Bavaria last month.
He handed them in to police in the city of Cologne. No one has yet claimed the artworks.'
More text and photos at link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57536940
From The BBC: Your pictures of Scotland 11 - 18 June (2021)
TGIF/Thank Goodness It's Friday and that means another fine photo collection of the flora and fauna
of Scotland. Enjoy!
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-57430804
The Good News Network: 80 years ago, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson was born in Brooklyn
on June 15.
His experimental work with pioneering overdubs in the 1970s, can be heard on Without You, One (is the Loneliest Number), and Everybody’s Talkin‘ from the film Midnight Cowboy.
John Lennon, who produced and played on Nilsson’s Pussy Cats LP, once was asked at a 1968 press conference to name his favorite American artist. He replied, “Nilsson”. Paul McCartney was also asked—and he said, “Nilsson”.
Nilsson’s multi-octave voice was never so full of life as it was on the Nilsson Schmilsson LP, which earned him a 1973 Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. Without You won the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. The musician tragically died of heart failure at age 52. WATCH a mini bio, Who Is Harry Nilsson—And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?… (1941)
Photos and video at link https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/events060615/
From The BBC: Your pictures of Scotland 4 June - 11 June (2021)
Finally my/our patience is rewarded. When I viewed The BBC webpage earlier this morning this
gallery wasn't available. But when I checked back here it was. Enjoy!
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-57357289
From The CBC*: Catching Tears, a photo essay concerning the discovery of the unmarked
graves of 215 Indigenous Children found at a former Kamloops Residential School and a pilgrimage
of people that came together to mourn and share their grief.
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/catching-tears-kamloops-indian-residential-school
* Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
From The Good News Network: Siri and Alexa Don't Support African Languages ...
... But This Nonprofit Swooped in to Offer 60 New Voices – Including Welsh
'Not Apple’s Siri, Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa, or any other speech platform can hear or respond to a single African language, but as speech interaction gradually takes over basic functions from typing to touch, the non-profit Mozilla—which created the free web browser Firefox—is working to bring voice-integrated technology to the continent.
Mozilla’s Common Voice platform, which receives support from the German and UK governments, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is an open-source initiative that’s already creating voice datasets for Kiswahili—a language spoken in Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Ugana, Tanzania, and South Sudan.
As Remy Muhire details for the Mozilla Foundation, most voice datasets used in voice-activated software are siloed, meaning they are contained within a very small number of companies, stifling innovation.
Common Voice wasn’t started exclusively to serve Africa, it merely wanted to create an open-source platform to enable voice-activation tech in any of the 7,100 “living” languages currently spoken. To date they’ve recorded more than 9,000 hours of audio from 160,000 different speakers of 60 different languages, including Welsh, which should help people looking for directions to “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”. '
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/siri-and-alexa-dont-support-african-languages-but-this-nonprofit-swooped-in-to-offer-60-new-voices-including-welsh/
I'm all in favor of whatever helps us all communicate in better/more productive ways.
From The Guardian: Rock'n'roll and the civil rights struggle: In Pictures from the '40s, '50s & '60s
African American life in the south. Ernest C Withers’ photographs take viewers to the record stores, picket lines and proms of the American south during the 1940s, 50s and 60s
This is a gallery of photos I don't remember ever seeing but better late than never. If we know where
we've been it's easier to tell where we are. We have come a long way and we do have a long way to
go.
My personal favorite pic is of BB King performing onstage wearing bermuda shorts in 1950, being
backed up by a musician playing an early Fender Precision bass guitar. You, of course, are
welcome to choose your own favorite or favorites.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/jun/09/ernest-c-withers-civil-rights-struggle-in-pictures
From The Good News Network: Good News in History, June 9 (Birthdate of Cole Porter)
"130 years ago today, composer and songwriter Cole Porter was born to a wealthy family in Peru, Indiana.
Although classically trained, he was attracted to musical theater, writing both music and lyrics for his songs, including for the Tony Award-winning show Kiss Me, Kate (Brush Up Your Shakespeare). He wrote more than 1,500 songs, including the popular standards Let’s Do It, I Get a Kick Out of You, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, You Do Something To Me, Night and Day, and In the Still of the Night.
By the time he was 33, he nearly gave up songwriting as a career due to its lack of success with the public—although Porter’s short ballet that year, entitled Within the Quota, was one of the earliest symphonic jazz-based compositions, predating George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue by four months, and was hailed by French and American critics. Then, 3 years later, he left a lavish lifestyle in Paris where he and a socialite got married (his homosexuality was still taboo). They moved to New York and finally won praise on Broadway.
Every year on the second weekend of June, his little hometown of Peru (80 miles north of Indianapolis) celebrates the brilliance of their most famous son, during the Cole Porter Festival, where Anything Goes amidst fine food, wine, and music."
Photos and video at link: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/events060609/
From Reuters: Social media, news websites hit by major internet outage
This is the first news item I've seen today concerning the problems I've had connecting to The BBC and The Guardian this morning. (These sites are now accessible.)
From article: "Multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe on Tuesday morning, with some reports pointing to a glitch at U.S.-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.
snip
Fastly said it was investigating "the potential impact to performance with our CDN services," according to its website.
Most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "Degraded Performance", the website showed."
more at link:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/finiancial-times-new-york-times-bloomberg-news-websites-down-2021-06-08/
My first thought was that hackers were at work.
Profile Information
Member since: Fri Sep 26, 2008, 10:10 PMNumber of posts: 14,118
