cloudsoup

Need to get serious with my development environment again and script Git commits and pushes for all the projects I'm working on across to my NAS. Something to get sorted this week. Should do something similar at work, really.

Piano tuner round again

It's a few years now since I started the @cdarwin Twitter stream – http://twitter.com/cdarwin – tweeting snippets from the diary Darwin wrote as he travelled around the world on HMS Beagle. In Beagle time it's now February 1836 and this year he returns to England, first to London and then to Down House (now a public museum), never to set foot outside the country again.

Carefully reading his diary to select excerpts to tweet, or choosing snatches from contemporaneous letters for those times when he wasn't pouring observations into his diary, has been the closest I've ever come to a historic figure. Three things strike me about him when he was so young, just in his mid-twenties: his careful observation; his thoughtfulness about what he had observed; and his temperance.

He didn't idly notice things and let them pass by and he didn't make assertions without evidence and reason. He recorded the geology, the fauna and flora, the people, the climate; and then he pondered them to arrive at conclusions.

And his temperance. A cardinal virtue, temperance; moderation and restraint in both thought and feeling. Darwin was an equable chap, almost always controlled and calm. You could do worse than take him as a model.
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The Low Anthem – "Charlie Darwin" – SXSW 2010 Showcasing Artist

The Low Anthem combines folk and blues arrangements with the elegance of chamber music and the fervo

The great BBC R4's In Our Time this week is on the Kama Sutra. My parents, when i was a child, owned only two books that might loosely be described as classics – the Kama Sutra and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Slightly odd.

From what I remember, the Kama Sutra was far and away the more interesting and better written of the two. Never liked Lawrence since.

In 1978 [Chinese per capita GDP] was $978. So we’ve a 6 or 7 times improvement … in the time between my sitting my O levels and my writing now… the UK was at $974 in 1600 AD: we didn’t get to $6700 odd until 1948. What took us 450 years in economic development has taken China some 45

Someone, somewhere, is doing the right thing in terms of improving Chinese life, aren’t they? Might actually be something to this don’t have Maoist stupidity and embrace neoliberal global capitalism maybe?

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Apple exploiting the Chinese? Foxconn cruelly exploiting their workers? Splendid article by Tim Worstall?

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Village of Dent, the Lake District, Cumbria, UK

Aelvi Cem ritual

3m and 24s into this clip from a BBC series on religion is a song of the Aelvi Cem ritual. I think it's fantastic. Could anyone tell me more about it and is there any way it might be possible to get a version by these particular performers?

Anyone know?

Turkish Alevi – Cem ritual.mp4

This is a clip from 'Around the world in 80 faiths' that I found inspiring – as I also use d

Tractors in Nebraska

The (National Treasure) Sir David Attenborough is on Desert Island Disks and he's chosen And the Glory of the Lord from The Messiah performed by Neville Marriner & the Chorus of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

My favorite bit, I suppose, has to be For Unto Us A Child Is Born, because I once sang it on stage…not quite as well as this.

Messiah – Handel ( 2 )

Some of my preferred parts of " Messiah ' – Handel ( 2 )
Sylvia McNair, Anne Sofie von Ott