The Beatles Store

Following the 9.9.09 debut of the digitally re-mastered catalogue on CD, Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music have announced the worldwide release of a limited edition of 30,000 Beatles Stereo USB apples on December 8th.

This unique, apple-shaped USB drive is loaded with the re-mastered audio for The Beatles' 14 stereo titles, as well as all of the re-mastered CDs' visual elements, including 13 mini-documentary films about the studio albums, replicated original UK art, rare photos and expanded liner notes.

Philanthropy is not a life style choice for most of Australia's rich and famous.
But Australian science, especially the federal Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO )got a major financial boost due to a 10 year struggle fighting with HP, Apple, Dell et al. over the invention of WiFi; that was settled back in April.

However, Australian politics and science remain closely related, and casting aspersions on the ruling parties attitude to global emissions is not kosher.

The Observer Debate.uk has some columnists pondering the middle east, racism, Pakistan , the environment and reality.

Observer.UK

It is a vast device the size of London's Circle Line but is engineered to a billionth of a metre accuracy. Ensuring that no flaws arise at scales and dimensions like these pushes engineering to its absolute limits.

Cern almost succeeded last year. Now it is convinced that it has got it right this time. "All I can say is that the LHC is a much safer, much better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Myers.

Most physicists believe he is right. "If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history," said one. "If not, we will have assembled the world's most expensive piece of modern art."

goods.

@ Hitchens recently down under

many of those who put their faith in revelation and prophecy and prayer are feeling the need to give an account of themselves. This is a wholly good development, and it is part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

political correctness rears its ugly head again... abc.net.au

A children's literature expert says changes made to the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty are part of a worrying trend in society.

In the United Kingdom, the BBC is under fire for rewriting Humpty Dumpty to give it a happy ending on the CBeebies children's programam Something Special.

Instead of the last line saying "couldn't put Humpty together again", the new version claimed all the King's horses and all the King's men "made Humpty happy again".

Nobel laureate Jose Saramago:

The Bible is a manual of bad morals (which) has a powerful influence on our culture and even our way of life. Without the Bible we would be different, and probably better people

at the at the launch of his new book Cain - an ironic retelling of the Bible story of Cain, Adam and Eve's elder son who kills his brother Abel. AP

WSJ
Marketing a film like “Precious,” which is being released by Lionsgate on November 6th, would present a challenge to any film studio, regardless of its backing by Oprah and Tyler Perry and the advance buzz the movie is getting.

The film’s 26 year-old star, Gabourey Sidibe, is a virtual unknown, while the subject matter is what sales execs would call a downer. Sidibe plays Clareece “Precious” Jones, an obese, illiterate teenager in 1980s Harlem who lives with an abusive mother and has been impregnated by her father, twice.

How do you advertise that plot on a billboard? In fact, the film’s print campaign features some of the most visually compelling poster art in recent memory.

Despite a supporting role by Mariah Carey, Lionsgate has forsaken the typical “big face” approach of trading on a star’s head shot to sell a movie. Instead, the posters use bold color and sophisticated graphics to create an evocative tone

A Brazilian ad agency—DDB Brasil—tried to win the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)'s business with this ad concept:

"An image of lower Manhattan showing many, many planes aiming at Manhattan—and they even include the Towers. The text urges us to protect the planet; it also reads: "The Tsunami Killed 100 Times More People Than 9/11."

WWF have totally dis-associated themselves with the poster, but the poster is a wild meme on the netz.

big poster here

<--!break-->

Content thieves, be warned: The AP isn’t sitting idly and taking your shit anymore.

While the 'protect, point and pay' new registry will make it easier to target blogs that distribute content through automated systems, it will not alert the AP when others manually rewrite stories or excerpt passages.

Agonistas can rest easy:

Who's Better Informed, Newspaper Readers or Web Surfers?

Slate's Emily Yoffe and Seth Stevenson are reading only the Web for an hour each day, while ink-stained wretches Timothy Egan (of the New York Times) and Sam Howe Verhovek (formerly of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times) are reading only newspapers. Their catchup with each other and the "latest" news here.

Black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. is accusing a Massachusetts police department of racism after being arrested while trying to get into his locked home near Harvard University. It was a teachable moment on race and class for Gates, 58, who directs the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard.

There is some dissonance in the reports. There is no doubt that Gates was tired after flying from China, and overreacted to the police presence, calling the officer a racist. Gates' best friend Lawrence Bobo, also at WEB asks What Do You Call a Black Man with a Ph.D.?

Of more import perhaps: James Taranto

Gates and his supporters might consider whether their actions in this matter help ease or compound this burden for younger black males who are still forming their ideas of what it is to be a black man in America.

On July 15, the Fiji Times headline was METHODISTS IN DEFIANCE. STATE FIRM ON CHURCH. At issue is the annual conference organised by the Methodist Church that was going to have several past political figures as speakers. The government banned the August conference. Over the past 24 hours matters have come to a head. The paramount lady chief Ro Teimumu Kepa of the Suva region is in detention, as are five or six Methodist Ministers, all allegedly held for questioning. Tribal and church tensions rise with warnings of civil unrest.

The Fiji Daily Post is 'ignoring' the story, but is reporting that "the Prime Minister has defended his local government’s media censorship at a conference of Asia-Pacific broadcasters in his country. Commodore Frank Bainimarama told guests at the conference that the regulations were achieving its desired impact in inspiring positive changes in the local media industry and the community. " Positive change meaning no letters to the editor I guess.

Blogs updates: sympathetic to the Methodist position and hardline support for Bainimarama.

Back to the wet cold Canberra winter, the week of 72-82F is rapidly fading.
First photo upload here

AFP - The Mahatma Gandhi prize was on Monday handed over to a representative of Burma's imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, an AFP correspondent said.

The Durban-based committee behind the International Award for Peace and Reconciliation handed over the prize to Aung San Suu Kyi's cousin, the head of Burma's self-proclaimed government-in-exile, Sein Win, as the country's rights icon awaits trial on

NYT - The role of gay sex in the transmission of the virus that causes AIDS in Africa has been long ignored, say the authors of a new study in the medical journal Lancet.

NYT - A Storyteller Even as a Teacher.

celebrity cafe - Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Angela’s Ashes,” died Sunday at 78 years old. Reuters reports that the cause of death was metastatic melanoma. “Angela’s Ashes” tells the true story of McCourt’s poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland. The memoir was turned into a film in 1999 starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle.

His later memoirs, “‘Tis” and “Teacher Man,” told the story of his adult life in the United States where he joined the Army and eventually became a teacher of English and creative writing in several New York public schools, where, according to the L.A. Times, he advised his students to write about their own lives.

The Pogue informs us @ NYT that

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

July 17 |Warsaw | Gareth Jones, editing by Ralph Boulton
Reuters Leading Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who turned against his Marxist beliefs, went into exile and then branded his old doctrine "the greatest fantasy of the 20th century," died on Friday aged 81.

Kolakowski, who won international renown with his monumental "Main Currents of Marxism," died in hospital in Oxford, the PAP state news agency said. Kolakowski had lived and taught mainly at Oxford since leaving communist Poland as a dissident in 1968.

A fast-tracked report published on Monday in the journal Nature by an international team of researchers led by a professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, have provided a detailed examination of the pathogenic qualities of H1N1.

The new study conducted with samples of H1N1 obtained from patients in California, Wisconsin, the Netherlands and Japan showed that virus has a propensity for infecting cells deep in the lungs leading to pneumonia and at worst death, a trait shared with the 1918 virus.
_{The pandemic H1N1 flu virus (red) has been shown to be more virulent than scientists previously believed. The filamentous shape of the virus, which in this image have recently budded from infected cells, is also unusual.Image: courtesy Yoshihiro Kawaoka}

Michael Schwartz @ Asia Times has an interesting read on the US activity in Iraq.

The US Embassy in Iraq, built by the Bush administration to the tune of $740 million, is by far the largest in the world. It is now populated by more than 1,000 administrators, technicians, and professionals - diplomatic, military, intelligence, and otherwise - though all are regularly, if euphemistically, referred to as "diplomats" in official statements and in the media. This level of staffing - 1,000 administrators for a country of perhaps 30 million - is well above the classic norm for imperial control. Back in the early 20th century, for instance, Great Britain utilized fewer officials to rule a population of 300 million in its Indian Raj.

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S son Omar first realized the depth of his father's evil when his beloved dogs were taken away and gassed in a chemical warfare experiment, he says in a new memoir { Growing Up Bin Laden. }

Omar also confirms what U.S. officials have long believed - that his father was tipped off to a 1998 U.S. attempt to kill him.

He writes that Bin Laden got a secret communication and fled his Afghan camp two hours before cruise missiles struck it.

He does not identify the source of the tip, which the U.S. suspects was Pakistani intelligence.

Omar's book, "Growing Up Bin Laden," written with his mother, Najwa - the Al Qaeda leader's first wife - describes the ultimate dysfunctional family.

The Bin Ladens lived austerely as their father staked his horrific claim as the world's most wanted man. His son eventually concluded Bin Laden hated his enemies more than he loved his family

Read more: nydailynews

related: OSAMA IN AMERICA: THE FINAL ANSWER - New Yorker

Sean-Paul has an interesting post up on christianity and the movies.
He finishes with a loaded comment:

Give me drunkards, sinners and hopeless fools before you give me saints. I never learned anything from a saint, except guilt

Over the past twenty years I have read much on theological aesthetics, of which an appreciation of the relevance of art, including movies and music is examined. Han urs Von Balthasar is probably the most famous writer in the field, with lengthy series of tomes which are slow reading. At a more accessible level Richard Leonard's Movies that matter; Roy Ankers, Catching Light and Peter Malones Can Movies be a Moral Compass are worth the read. There is a sub-genre of books about movies that are not fundamentalist or cringe inducing, both in the books and the movies examined. Oxford University Press and Eerdmans publishing are two good sources.