Jing-reed's Musings from Thailand

Richard and Adam singing 'The Impossible Dream'

Richard and Adam Johnson, the talented Welsh brothers,  singing 'The Impossible Dream'.  A bit of drama at the end of their performance when a disgruntled former contestant began pelting Simon Cowell with eggs.

Richard and Adam  were awarded  third place  in the 2013 Britain's Got Talent contest but were certainly the most outstanding in my personal opinion.

 

Richard and Adam singing 'The Impossible Dream'

The brothers and welsh duo of Richard and Adam Johnson do Nan proud. Sandwich shop workers Richard and Adam brought their biggest fan, their nan, along for support. Watch them wow the Judges and bring a tear to her eye with their rendition of The Impossible Dream.

 

 

xx

The Virtual Revolution

The Virtual Revolution is a British television documentary series presented by Dr. Aleks Krotoski, which began airing on BBC Two on 30 January 2010. A co-production between the BBC and the Open University, the series looks at the impact the World Wide Web has had since its inception 20 years ago. The series took a different approach to BBC documentary making by encouraging an open and collaborative production.

Par1 1  "The Great Levelling?"

"The first programme examines the idea of the World Wide Web as a "great leveller", and how this has shaped the development of the web.

Looking at the web as an empowering tool and the access provided to knowledge, Krotoski visits Einar Kvaran, contributor to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. To understand how the web gave rise to Wikipedia, she looks at early online community The WELL, which flourished from the counter-culture and libertarianism of the 1960s, speaking to founder Stewart Brand and John Perry Barlow, who spoke up for online freedom.

Al Gore speaks about blogs and expressing ideas, and Krotoski visits Ory Okolloh, founder of Ushahidi, which gave people a voice following the unrest after the 2007 Kenyan elections.

She then talks with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about inventing the World Wide Web while he was at CERN in the 1980s. Kenyan farmer Kudjo Agbevi discusses empowerment, and Berners-Lee, Barlow and Andrew Keen speak about the lack of a controlling authority and hierarchy. ,,,,,"



    The Virtual Revolution    Part 1 of 4

.

The Story of Science

For thousands of years we have wrestled with the great questions of existence. Who are we? What is the world made of? How did we get here? The quest to answer these is the story of science.

Medical journalist Michael Mosley traces the often unpredictable path we have taken. From recreating a famous alchemist’s experiment, to following in Galileo’s footsteps, and putting himself in the hands of a hypnotist, Michael unpicks how science has changed the way we see ourselves, and the way we see our world.

It is a tale of courage and of fear, of hope and disaster, of persistence and success. It interweaves great forces of history – revolutions, voyages of discovery and artistic movements – with practical, ingenious inventions and the dogged determination of experimenters and scientists.

This is the story of how history made science and how science made history, and how the ideas which emerged made the modern world.


      Part 1 of 6

 

      1. What Is Out There? How we came to understand our planet was not at the center of everything in the cosmos.

     2. What Is The World Made Of? How atomic theories and concepts of quantum physics underpin modern technology.

    3. How Did We Get Here? Michael Mosley tells how scientists came to explain the diversity of life on earth.

    4. Can We Have Unlimited Power? The story of how power has been harnessed from wind, steam and from inside the atom.

    5. What is the Secret of Life? Michael Moseley tells the story of how the secret of life has been unraveled through the prism of the most complex organism known – the human body.

    6. Who Are We? The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires.

Mad But Glad

Is there really such a thing as the mad genius? Can an illness be both a blessing and a curse?

At seven years old, Nick van Bloss started shaking his head, grinding his teeth and making wild whooping noises. Nick had Tourette's syndrome. No medical intervention helped him. But one activity stopped it all...

The moment Nick placed his hands on the piano keys his symptoms vanished. By the age of 20, he was an award winning international pianist. He felt sure that his illness had made him the success he was.

But there is a catch. The brain state necessary for his genius can also be dangerously close to mental chaos. Nick's personal journey reveals how close he came to the edge and how determined he is to triumph.

Mad But Glad [BBC Horizon]

.

 

Nick van Bloss Bach Goldberg Variations

.

Criminal Penguins

The BBC film crew, filming for the documentary Frozen Planet, spent four months with the Adelie penguin colony on Ross Island, Antarctica.  The footage they captured shows a male penguin stealing stones from its neighbour's nest.

The birds build their stone nests to elevate and protect their eggs from run-off when the Antarctic ice melts.  Males with the best nests are more likely to attract a mate, so, in a colony of half a million penguins, the best stones are highly prized. . . . . .

"Adelies are like festival-goers that have had too much caffeine," he said. "They're aggressive and hyperactive."

Despite this, the film crew managed to capture a remarkable sequence, with one penguin repeatedly returning to its nest to add stones, apparently unaware of the fact that his neighbour would steal a stone every time his nest was unattended.

.

Herodotus, the 'Father' of History

Two very important people in my life considered the Histories of Herodotus as an invaluable aid to the comprehension of life.  The first was my father, a professor of history at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia.  The second was Gregorio Bartoni. himself Greek-Italian, and the love of my life.  Unfortunately both of them succumbed to an early death, but both had left me with a legacy: that of the legendary Herodotus.

I have over the years had various copies of 'The Histories of Herodotus' in my possession, with passages underlined, and notes written in the margins, and then in my nomadic travels and changes of location, left them for someone else to enjoy and benefit from their wisdom.  Recently felt the desire/need to once again have Heredotus by my side, and through the magic of the Internet downloaded yet another version for my Kindle Reader. 

A new kind of literature, that of written history, was created by Herodotus. And it was through his efforts that many of the most famous accounts of antiquity have been preserved for us, such as the heroic stand of King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.  It doesn't take much imagination to realize that 'The Lonely Planet', and all the other contemporary travel guides, had their beginning based on the fact that Herodotus was the first of the travel writers. His was an ability to collect and share accounts of his own travels, as well as the passing on of tales gathered from his fellow travelers.  And yes, Count Almasy, also known as 'The English Patient', carried The Histories of Herodotus with him on all his travels.


Dr. Daniel Robinson, Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University / Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University in a lecture on Herodotus.

     Herodotus and the Lamp of History - Part 1

.

 

     Herodotus and the Lamp of History - Part 2

.

 

.

And I could not help but bring 'The Histories of Herodotus' into the 21st century with the creation of a fractal image which stylistically portrays but a representation  of his many scrolls and and an inkpot used in the writing of his manuscrips all enveloped in the swirling mists of time.

[software used, Ultrafractal and Apophysis]

      [click image to enlarge]

The Satanic Verses Affair [BBC]

Twenty years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was a wanted man with a million pound bounty on his head. His novel, The Satanic Verses, had sparked riots across the Muslim world. The ailing religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had invoked a little-known religious opinion - a fatwa - and effectively sentenced Rushdie to death. Never before had a novel created an international diplomatic crisis on such a scale, and never before had a foreign Government publicly called for the killing of a private citizen of another country.

This film looks back on the extraordinary events which followed the publication of the book and the ten year campaign to get the fatwa lifted. Interviews with Rushdie's friends and family and testimony from leaders of Britain's Muslim community and the Government reveal the inside story of the affair. Rushdie himself was forced into hiding for nearly ten years. Arguably this was the moment when religious identities, in Britain and abroad, became more important than ethnic and cultural belonging.

"Freedom of expression is the cornerstone of democracy" — unless of course you happen to be a religious fanatic.

In nine parts.

>

PARALLEL UNIVERSES

Michio Kaku, Mr. Parallel Universe

"Imagine you could find an explanation for everything in the universe. From the smallest events possible to the biggest. This is the dream witch has captivated the most brilliant scientists since Einstein. Now they think they may have found it. The theory is breath taking but it has an extraordinary conclusion that the universe we live in is not the only one. Everything you are about to hear is true, at least in this universe it is."

In the "Seth" books (channeled material by Jane Roberts from the 60s & 70s), it is said that every thought of a probable scenario already creates one probable reality. This overtaxes my imagination since there must be gazillions of realities created in every second (the number of minds multplied with the number of thoughts; and then the same equation applied again in each possible alternate reality).

Which of these realities is actually played out would largely be based on our individual decisions and preferences.

As we follow through the topic regarding parallel universes, Seth contended that the creation of universes isn't simply an incidental/accidental splitting of the fiber of space and time but a conscious, deliberate creation, or seeding, if you might accept it, of another universe! An idea, or a thought is enough to seed a universe. This way, each one may be able to experience any event A and follow it through to an infinity of consequences. To truly experience event A, it is not enough just to see through it in varying degrees and intensities, but to travel through it in all of its ramifications and probabilities; thus infinite, thus 'a gazillions universe' is just another speck of dust. Do we create exact replicas of the current universe we are aware of? Maybe yes, maybe no? What's important is that we are freeing possibilities in every idea or thought that springs from every action, and they are meterialized in physical form, over which we react and seed more universes as new ideas diverge. Would this mean that we create our own universe? That seems to be what Seth contends . .  . . . 

Parallel Universes - in 5 episodes  [playlist]

I, CLAUDIUS

I shall always remember the year of 1976 in that it was when Roman history came alive on my televsion with the BBC production of "I, Claudius".  I was raised with history in my veins in that my father was a professor of history at Bratislava's Comenius University in our native Slovakia.  

Fortunately my childhood was filled with people, dates and places of the past.  The history of Rome was a part of that process, but "I, Claudius" made it real.   It traced the lives of the last of the Roman emperors, in an epic of ruthless ambition, shocking debauchery and murderous intrigue set in one of history's most fascinating eras. Bearing witness to the saga is Claudius, whose stutter and limp have marked him a fool--yet whom prophecies foretold that he would one day rule Rome. Staring Derek Jacobi, Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, and John Hurt.

I, Cladius [in 3 parts]

General review and interviews to the cast and crew of the legendary series "I, Claudius" (1976),  BBC.

I, Claudius

Interviews with the cast and crew.   In eight parts