AJHarmony

Observations on life

[ajharmony]

Audrey Kawasaki and Stella Im Hultberg display never-before-seen works at the Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles.

[laughingsquid]

A Brilliant Cello Mashup of Beethoven’s ‘Fifth Symphony’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’

[laughingsquid]

Mother Cat Nurses a Days-Old Pit Bull Puppy Right Next to Her Newborn Kittens, Accepting Him as Her Very Own

[ajharmony]

Really cute.

[laughingsquid]

French Musician Luc Arbogast Duets With Himself in Two Distinct Voices During Street Performance

[ajharmony]

He has an amazingly good soprano voice, in addition to his tenor voice.

[laughingsquid]

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, A Book About How to Make the Impossible a Reality by Chris Hadfield

[ajharmony]

Chris also gave an excellent interview on NPR.

[laughingsquid]

[ajharmony]

Plans, A Comic About Unexpected Life Obstacles by Doghouse Diaries

"Your Plans" vs. "The Universe"

[txchnologist]

by Charles Q. Choi

One of the greatest challenges the field of artificial intelligence faces is to simulate the workings of a human brain. Now an AI company reveals its software can solve the world’s most widely used test of a machine’s ability to act human, Google’s

[ajharmony]

Is the Singularity approaching?

[courtenaybird]

These 10 Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy 

Ever wonder why you can’t get a Coke at Taco Bell? It’s because Yum! Brands was created as a spin-off of Pepsi—and has a lifetime contract with the soda-maker. Unilever produces everything from Dove soap to Klondike bars. Nestle has a big stake in L’Oreal, which features everything from cosmetics to Diesel designer jeans. 

[ajharmony]

Consolidation in the retail consumer space: the illusion of choice.

[emergentfutures]

<nyt_headline version=”1.0” type=” “>To Catch Up, Walmart Moves to Amazon Turf

The country’s largest retailer, which for years didn’t blink at would-be competitors, is now under such a threat from Amazon that it is frantically playing catch-up by learning the technology business, including starting @WalmartLabs at Walmart Global E-Commerce, its dot-com division.

Full Story: NYT

[ajharmony]

An interesting story about Wallmart's effort to increase its online prowess.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Data is like Teenage Sex… by giladlotan on Flickr.

[ajharmony]

Ha ha! Good analogy about "Big Data"

[llbwwb]

Eagle Lake Milky Way - Acadia National Park (by Nate Levesque)

[ajharmony]

We don’t often get to see the Milky Way these days.

[laughingsquid]

Artist Turns 1988 Ford Fiesta Into Sculpture of a Squatting Transformer

[llbwwb]

Hello:) Snowball in Summer by Marion Vollborn

[laughingsquid]

Worldwide Woofs and Other Animal Sounds Illustrated in Different Languages

[ajharmony]

How to speak "dog" in many languages.

[llbwwb]

[ajharmony]

llbwwb:

Beautiful gray cat.

[futuramb]

kottke.org

CDC official: we’ve reached “the end of antibiotics” 

In an inter­view accom­pa­ny­ing a Front­line episode on drug-resistant bac­te­ria, an as­so­ciate direc­tor for the CDC, Dr. Arjun Srini­vasan, sa …

We’re here. We’re in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t.

This is especially interesting since the current trajectory of humanity leads to higher concentration of people in cities and during mega-events. Will this post-antibiotic era lead to restrictions on the level of concentration we can allow, will it cause us to change our behavior or will we be able to manage it by technology? Or will nature sort it out by itself??

[ajharmony]

Humanity will have to regain or evolve stronger immune systems in order to survive without anti-bacterial medicines.

[futuramb]

What’s happening to global incomes Alex Evans, globaldashboard.org

What’s happening to global incomes

Now here’s an interesting graph, courtesy of the World Bank’s resident inequality guru, Branko Milanovic. It shows change in real incomes over the period of 1988 to 2008 at different percentiles of globa…

Interesting! Note especially the increasing gap in the West which will most likely continue to increase the tension we are already starting to feel.

And that huge dip between the 75th and 85th percentiles? Why, that’s the squeezed middle in developed countries, plus a lot more people in Latin America and former Communist countries – watching their incomes stagnate while those just to the right of them hoover up globalisation’s winnings.

[ajharmony]

Data showing that the middle class is bearing the burden of the increasing debt and entitlement spending.