Category: Travel

  • Phil Smith Studio

    MOUNTING & FRAMING YOUR PAINTING

    My name is Phil Smith.

    I’ve been steeped in the visual arts all my life – burrowing in my father’s art library at home, as a research student in the psychology of vision, as a photographer and as a painter.

    I work mainly with acrylic spray paint on paper, card, canvas, plastic and metal.

    I paint what I feel, not what I see. I am inspired by the forces of nature and the heavens above us. I love the way the paint moves under pressure, how it changes and transforms quiet surfaces into radical landscapes – sometimes serene, sometimes dangerous, always fascinating.

    I create images that are full of motion and power. My paintings are an expression of my own passion and drive – carefully crafted, but free and unpredictable.

    My aim is to evoke some of the same feelings in you…

    Source: ABOUT

  • Food & Wine’s Best Instant Pot Recipes | Food & Wine

    interactive wine search
    interactive wine search

    These days, an Instant Pot is as common a kitchen appliance as a slow cooker—but it can do so much more. The multi-cooker does indeed master slow-cooked classics, as shown in these Instant Pot recipes for red wine-bolstered beef stew and short ribs with mashed potatoes. It’s also a tremendous timesaver when you use the pressure cooker setting for recipes like cookbook author Andrea Nguyen’s Leftover Roast Turkey and Chinese Egg Noodle Soup, or her Instant Pot Viet Beef Stew with Star Anise and Lemongrass, Ann Taylor Pittman’s Instant Pot Beef Ragù with Pappardelle, or even an ultra-quick and grill-free baba ganoush. Read on for more ways to coax the most from your Instant Pot.

    Source: Food & Wine’s Best Instant Pot Recipes | Food & Wine

  • Want to save the Earth? Then don’t buy that shiny new iPhone | John Naughton

    On Tuesday, Apple released its latest phone – the iPhone 13. Naturally, it was presented with the customary breathless excitement. It has a smaller notch (eh?), a redesigned camera, Apple’s latest A15 “bionic” chipset and a brighter, sharper screen. And, since we’re surfing the superlative wave, the A15 has nearly 15bn transistors and a “six-core CPU design with two high-performance and four high-efficiency cores”.

    Wow! But just one question: why would I buy this Wundermaschine? After all, two years ago I got an iPhone 11, which has been more than adequate for my purposes. That replaced the iPhone 6 I bought in 2014 and that replaced the iPhone 4 I got in 2010. And all of those phones are still working fine. The oldest one serves as a family backup in case someone loses or breaks a phone, the iPhone 6 has become a hardworking video camera and my present phone may well see me out.

    That’s three phones in 11.5 years, so my “upgrade cycle” is roughly one iPhone every four years. From the viewpoint of the smartphone industry, which until now has worked on a cycle of two-yearly upgrades, I’m a dead loss. Which is strange, given that these phones don’t wear out, a fact that may be getting through to users. At any rate, they seem to be holding on to their phones for longer. And yet the manufacturers are still, like Apple, annually releasing new models that are generally just an incremental improvement on what went before rather than a great leap forward. Why?

    Source: Want to save the Earth? Then don’t buy that shiny new iPhone | John Naughton

  • RG Richardson Restaurant Wine Guides Worldwide

    • RG Richardson interactive wine guides now included in restaurant guides (barbecue, buffet, bistro, cafeteria, fast food, take out, fine dining, pub, ethnic restaurants etc.) searches.
    • Wine Guides now included in updated guides.
    • Sit in the coffee shop and start searching away on their WiFi and start using our interactive city search guides with multiple languages!
    • Dozens of links to open the doors to the best, the coolest, the weirdest, the most inspiring culinary experiences a city can have.
    • Interactive restaurant guides are exactly what we want to have at your fingertips when in a city. Never out of date and constantly updated!
    • Tapas at the bar in Barcelona, perfect roast goose in Hong Kong, dinner in a vineyard outside Melbourne, and brunch on a terrace in São Paulo. — when we travel now, we travel to eat.
    • Restaurants and bars are an opportunity to slip into daily life and experience a city’s unique rhythm.
    • Due to Covid see what’s open first before you go or better still order take out!
    • Buy Now
    • Wine guides are rolling out in updated City and Restauarant guides.

  • Quantum computing hits the desktop, no cryo-cooling required

    An Australian/German company is developing powerful quantum accelerators the size of graphics cards. They work at room temperature, undercutting and outperforming today’s huge, cryo-cooled quantum supercomputers, and soon they’ll be small enough for mobile devices.Superconducting quantum computers are huge and incredibly finicky machines at this point. They need to be isolated from anything that might knock an electron’s spin off and ruin a calculation. That includes mechanical isolation, in extreme vacuum chambers, where only a few molecules might remain in a cubic meter or two of space. It includes electromagnetic forces – IBM, for example, surrounds its precious quantum bits, or qubits, with mu metals to absorb all magnetic fields.

    Source: Quantum computing hits the desktop, no cryo-cooling required

  • Take Me Out to the Ball Game

    Take Me Out to the Ball Game: OCTOBER 6, 1934

    NW-MIT-BALLGAME-SONG-1005
    Sheet music for ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’, Albert Von Tilzer, composer; Jack Norworth, lyricist (New York: The New York Music Co., c. 1908). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
    Take Me Out to the Ball Game debuts at Major League Baseball game
    In a salute to snacks and America’s national pastime, on a Saturday at St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park on this day in 1934, Take Me Out to the Ball Game was played before the fourth game of the World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the hometown Cardinals. The Tin Pan Alley number with a slow-rolling melody and lyrics about a day at the ballpark was a hit record in 1908, and although the sing-along is routinely heard today at baseball games during 7th-inning intermissions, the playing of it by the Cardinals’ band 87 years ago marked its first usage at a Major League contest. The song might have been the best part of the afternoon for Cardinals fans. Star St. Louis pitcher Dizzy Dean was being used as a pinch-runner when he was knocked out cold by a thrown ball. His teammate and brother Paul Dean took him out of the ball game, carrying him to the clubhouse fireman’s style. And while the Cardinal fans undoubtedly did “root, root, root for the home team,” their boys were routed 10-4. It really was a shame. Brad Wheeler

  • Imagine

    John Lennon releases Imagine in the U.K.
    NW-MIT-IMAGINE-1007
    Cover of John Lennon’s Imagine, released in 1971. MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
    John Lennon wasn’t trying to write a timeless global peace anthem when he penned Imagine, the title track of his second post-Beatles studio album, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year: He only wanted to make a pop song that would, as he later explained, “last longer than a couple of years.” A deceptively simple, singalong-ready lullaby that Lennon conceived as “a song for children,” the tune packs a revolutionary message, urging people to imagine a world with no religion, no countries, no possessions. It was inspired, in part, by a book about “positive prayer” given to Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, by the comedian and activist Dick Gregory. “If you can imagine a world of peace,” Lennon said, “if you can imagine the possibility, then it can be true.” But like many such once-radical expressions whose rough edges have been sanded down by time and corporate co-opting and repetition – hundreds of bands have recorded cover versions over the past half-century – Lennon’s song became both universally embraced and neutered of its initial power, a banal call for generic unity. But hey, it lasted longer than a couple of years. Simon Houpt

  • RG Richardson Interactive Wine Guides Worldwide

    • RG Richardson interactive wine guides now included in restaurant guides (barbecue, buffet, bistro, cafeteria, fast food, take out, fine dining, pub, ethnic restaurants etc.) searches.
    • Wine Guides now included in updated guides.
    • Sit in the coffee shop and start searching away on their WiFi and start using our interactive city search guides with multiple languages!
    • Dozens of links to open the doors to the best, the coolest, the weirdest, the most inspiring culinary experiences a city can have.
    • Interactive restaurant guides are exactly what we want to have at your fingertips when in a city. Never out of date and constantly updated!
    • Tapas at the bar in Barcelona, perfect roast goose in Hong Kong, dinner in a vineyard outside Melbourne, and brunch on a terrace in São Paulo. — when we travel now, we travel to eat.
    • Restaurants and bars are an opportunity to slip into daily life and experience a city’s unique rhythm.
    • Due to Covid see what’s open first before you go or better still order take out!
    • Buy Now
    • Wine guides are rolling out in updated City and Restauarant guides.

  • China to End International Coal Financing after ‘Profoundly Important’ UN Statement – The Energy Mix

    A single phrase in a recorded address to the United Nations General Assembly sent waves through the international climate policy community this week as President Xi Jinping pledged China will stop building and funding coal-fired power plants in other countries.Xi’s statement that “China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy, and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad” had some analysts expressing suspicions or anxious for details. But the announcement was still “profoundly important,” coming from the country that is the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas and coal, accounting for more than half of global coal and steel production, said Tim Buckley, Director of Energy Finance Studies, Australia/South Asia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.“When China moves, the world changes, dramatically,” he added. “And when the Chinese President speaks, China acts.”

    Source: China to End International Coal Financing after ‘Profoundly Important’ UN Statement – The Energy Mix

  • Race to the bottom: the disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea | Deep-sea mining | The Guardian

    Ashort bureaucratic note from a brutally degraded microstate in the South Pacific to a little-known institution in the Caribbean is about to change the world. Few people are aware of its potential consequences, but the impacts are certain to be far-reaching. The only question is whether that change will be to the detriment of the global environment or the benefit of international governance.In late June, the island republic of Nauru informed the International Seabed Authority (ISA) based in Kingston, Jamaica of its intention to start mining the seabed in two years’ time via a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, The Metals Company (TMC, until recently known as DeepGreen). Innocuous as it sounds, this note was a starting gun for a resource race on the planet’s last vast frontier: the abyssal plains that stretch between continental shelves deep below the oceans.In the three months since it was fired, the sound of that shot has reverberated through government offices, conservation movements and scientific academies, and is now starting to reach a wider public, who are asking how the fate of the greatest of global commons can be decided by a sponsorship deal between a tiny island and a multinational mining corporation.The risks are enormous. Oversight is almost impossible. Regulators admit humanity knows more about deep space than the deep ocean. The technology is unproven. Scientists are not even sure what lives in those profound ecosystems. State governments have yet to agree on a rulebook on how deep oceans can be exploited. No national ballot has ever included a vote on excavating the seabed. Conservationists, including David Attenborough and Chris Packham, argue it is reckless to go ahead with so much uncertainty and such potential devastation ahead.

    Source: Race to the bottom: the disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea | Deep-sea mining | The Guardian