The Stumblng Tumblr

“ [N]early half of all [Australian] households use mobile phones instead of fixed-line phones as their main voice communication.

—

the quotation above’s from here
now, that’s not because a reliable fixed-line infrastructure doesn’t exist; as you’d expect in a country like Australia, generally speaking, it does
nor is it because households can’t afford to pay to access the fixed-line infrastructure; as you’d expect in a country like Australia, generally speaking, they can
it’s simply a case of people having the luxury of choice and exercising it in favour of mobile phones, no doubt because of their convenience
contrast the Australian situation with that in India, where, as you’d expect, a reliable fixed-line infrastructure is not as generally available
naturally, that fact of itself would tend to encourage the creation of a mobile phone infrastructure and it has: see here
but what about people’s ability to pay for access to, particularly, that mobile phone infrastructure?
well, at almost the same time as he saw the story about Australia from which he quoted above, he saw this interesting story dealing with, among other things, telecommunications in India
the story concentrates on Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai that’s the largest in Asia; it has over 1M people in a single square mile
according to the story:

Every street in Dharavi is home to an electronics dealer. The main business is used cell phones and prepaid SIM cards; India now has over 246 million cell phone subscribers, with the number growing at a scorching pace.

so the fact that used mobile telephones are bought and sold is a factor that helps to bring the cost of accessing the mobile phone infrastructure within the reach even of the residents of Dharavi
it seems, incidentally, that, in India, there’s a “huge demand” for used consumer durables of all kinds, not only mobile phones
however, it’s said that the market for used consumer durables other than mobile phones is “extremely inefficient”
the story refers to an attempt to leverage the high penetration of mobile phones into a mechanism for trading used consumer durables other than mobile phones
the story’s worth reading in its entirety
the image above of a woman using a candlestick phone in about 1910 is from here
(incidentally, do you think that if she held the receiver to her right ear, the hair on that side of her head would stand out similarly?)

——

"Is everybody happy now?"

look, the Stumblng Tumblr’s an expert neither in science nor in religion, but, as best he can understand it, a new theory’s just been advanced in an article in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano
apparently, it was evolution that led to the existence of the creatures just one step below humans, but at that point, evolution cut out; God took over from there
the story’s from here via this; the image of Darwin as an ape is from here

——

“Bossa nova: the coolest sound under the sun”
to go with the linked-to article, the Stumblng Tumblr picked from YouTube, almost at random, Elis Regina and Tom Jobim, singing the latter’s “Waters of March”

——

Greil Marcus here:

It’s clear now that the signal song of [1968], the song with which Bob Dylan has for years, to this day, closed his concerts, was “All Along the Watchtower” - a song which ended with words that, in any traditional ballad, would have opened it: “Two riders were approaching/ The wind began to howl.” …

…

… It would be 25 years before Neil Young took the song and made it clear, rewrote it, through an arrangement that made its apocalypse not a whisper but a desperate shout, a shout that made desperation thrilling, a new way of singing the song so undeniable that, as Young played, it rewrote the past and wrote the future in advance. Young taught the song to Dylan as he taught it to everyone else: from that night in 1993 when Young sang and played as if as an artist he had emerged from the song rather than addressed himself to it, Dylan himself has never played it any other way.

the video clip is of Neil Young, performing “All Along The Watchtower”

——

alerted by this, the Stumblng Tumblr found the book whose cover you see above for sale at Amazon
might be good for your mother if you haven’t already got her a Mothers’ Day present
Khukuri, who spotted the book in his Uni’s library, comments here: “man, you can write a book on anything”
——

alerted by this, the Stumblng Tumblr found the book whose cover you see above for sale at Amazon
might be good for your mother if you haven’t already got her a Mothers’ Day present
Khukuri, who spotted the book in his Uni’s library, comments here: “man, you can write a book on anything”

——

the image above is from here

it’s by way of introduction to this quotation from here:

During the Velvet revolution of 1989 I spied an improvised poster in a Prague shop window. It showed “68” spun through 180 degrees to make “89”, with arrows indicating the rotation.

the “68” was referring at least (but probably only) to the “Prague Spring” of 1968; more information about the Velvet Revolution of 1989 can be found here

the Stumblng Tumblr tries not to throw superlatives around carelessly, but, immediately on reading the above quotation, he thought that the poster’s idea was brilliant
he tried to find an image of it on the Web, but, alas, without success

——

the image above is from here
it’s by way of introduction to this quotation from here:

During the Velvet revolution of 1989 I spied an improvised poster in a Prague shop window. It showed “68” spun through 180 degrees to make “89”, with arrows indicating the rotation.

the “68” was referring at least (but probably only) to the “Prague Spring” of 1968; more information about the Velvet Revolution of 1989 can be found here
the Stumblng Tumblr tries not to throw superlatives around carelessly, but, immediately on reading the above quotation, he thought that the poster’s idea was brilliant
he tried to find an image of it on the Web, but, alas, without success

——

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Neal Hefti’s “Cute”, played by the Count Basie orchestra
via this

“ Mr Berlusconi kept his pre-election promise of including women in the cabinet.
The four [female] min[i]sters include …
He has also named former television showgirl Mara Carfagna minister for equal opportunities.

—

from here
the Stumblng Tumblr remembers posting something earlier about Ms Carfagna’s chances of Minsterial appointment under Mr Berlusconi, but hasn’t been able to locate it; however, you can refresh your memory of those qualifications for which Mr Berlusconi seems likely, given his form, to have selected her here

——

“ David Graddol’s English Next … [is] one of the most important discussions of English in the last 20 years….
Graddol’s study explores recent trends in the use of English, in order to develop a sense of how the language may change over the next two generations. Its main contention is that, contrary to popular belief, the current global position of English is far from unassailable. …
…
… English’s centre of gravity has moved. The language’s future seems likely to be shaped not so much in Britain or America as in China and India by a burgeoning middle class of urban workers.

—

the quotation above is from this interesting review via this of three books about English
the image above from here is of the first page of “Beowulf”

——

“

[The] phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call ‘multiples’—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians ‘invented’ decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

‘There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,’ Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:

The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the ‘exclusive’ discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.

—

the quotation above is from a typically interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell here, that’s mainly about a “patent nursery” (the Stumblng Tumblr’s term, not MG’s)
the image above from here is of Thomas Edison’s 1880 US patent for an incandescent light bulb
(incidentally, when did the image of a glowing light bulb over someone’s head become a symbol for a moment of invention? obviously, no earlier than about 1880; what, if anything, was used as such a symbol before then? someone crying “Eureka”?)

——

the image above is from here; it comes from a folio in the Codex Atlanticus; it’s a design for a parachute by Leonardo da Vinci, thought to be from around 1485
according to the first link:
Leonardo’s parachute consists of sealed linen cloth held open by a pyramid of wooden poles, about seven metres long. In his notebook he remarks that with such a device anyone can jump from any height without injury.
recently, a Swiss amateur parachutist has used Leonardo’s design to land on the ground successfully after jumping from a helicopter hovering at a height of 650 metres; the parachute itself opened at 600 metres
there were, however, two important differences between the design just used and the original: first, the design just used was made of modern parachute fabric; and, secondly, the wooden poles were omitted
one important similarity between the two designs is that, unlike modern parachutes, the da Vinci parachute and its descendant are not manoeuvrable
the parachutist prepared for his jump by launching scale models of the parachute from a remote controlled model helicopter; he also wore a modern-day parachute as a backup when he jumped
the story’s from here, where you can also see the parachute in operation during the jump
——

the image above is from here; it comes from a folio in the Codex Atlanticus; it’s a design for a parachute by Leonardo da Vinci, thought to be from around 1485
according to the first link:

Leonardo’s parachute consists of sealed linen cloth held open by a pyramid of wooden poles, about seven metres long. In his notebook he remarks that with such a device anyone can jump from any height without injury.

recently, a Swiss amateur parachutist has used Leonardo’s design to land on the ground successfully after jumping from a helicopter hovering at a height of 650 metres; the parachute itself opened at 600 metres
there were, however, two important differences between the design just used and the original: first, the design just used was made of modern parachute fabric; and, secondly, the wooden poles were omitted
one important similarity between the two designs is that, unlike modern parachutes, the da Vinci parachute and its descendant are not manoeuvrable
the parachutist prepared for his jump by launching scale models of the parachute from a remote controlled model helicopter; he also wore a modern-day parachute as a backup when he jumped
the story’s from here, where you can also see the parachute in operation during the jump

——

Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela is the head of the Spanish Episcopal Conference
his niece, Magdalena Rouco Hernandez, is dirty on him
according to this story, she says:

“My uncle does not stop repeating that the family is sacred, that you must respect it and fight for it, but then he scorns and abandons his own.”

By way of example, she said her uncle … turned down her request for financial help when her husband lost his job and did not call her family in the wake of her mother’s death.

She also accused the cardinal of lying about having a meeting with the late Pope John Paul II to justify not attending her father’s funeral seven years ago.

in short, she calls her uncle a hypocrite
now, if you wanted to expose a cleric’s hypocrisy, you’d think that words like those above would be the weapons to use
however, Magdalena, by some curious form of logic, seems to have got it into her head that she’d expose her uncle’s hypocrisy if she exposed herself literally, so she’s appearing topless in a bestselling Spanish soft porn magazine, including on its cover
the Stumblng Tumblr won’t link to the magazine itself, but he does provide this link to The Voice of Galicia, at which link you can get some idea of the cover of the magazine on which Magdalena appears
the Stumblng Tumblr feels sure that, by appearing topless in the magazine, Magdalena’s taught her uncle a very valuable lesson, but he just can’t put his finger on exactly what it is
the image above from here is not of the Cardinal, but of Tartuffe

——