A Meditation on the Loss of His Voice & 'Living Dyingly': Christopher Hitchens: Unspoken Truths

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Excerpt from Christopher Hitchens' essay in Vanity Fair, June 2011:

"I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.

On a much-too-regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day, or a flavor of the month. It might be random sores and ulcers, on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy, involving numb and chilly feet? Daily existence becomes a babyish thing, measured out not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in tiny doses of nourishment, accompanied by heartening noises from onlookers, or solemn discussions of the operations of the digestive system, conducted with motherly strangers. On the less good days, I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so ... considerate.

Most despond-inducing and alarming of all, so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. And at times it threatened, and now threatens daily, to disappear altogether. I had just returned from giving a couple of speeches in California, where with the help of morphine and adrenaline I could still successfully “project” my utterances, when I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home—and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow. I used to be able to stop a New York cab at 30 paces. I could also, without the help of a microphone, reach the back row and gallery of a crowded debating hall. And it may be nothing to boast about, but people tell me that if their radio or television was on, even in the next room, they could always pick out my tones and know that I was “on,” too.

Like health itself, the loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs. In common with everybody else, I have played versions of the youthful “Which would you rather?” game, in which most usually it’s debated whether blindness or deafness would be the most oppressive. But I don’t ever recall speculating much about being struck dumb. (In the American vernacular, to say “I’d really hate to be dumb” might in any case draw another snicker.) Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to...."

Coffee Time - First Stop-Motion Animation for Wan-Tzu - Amazing

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"Every cup of coffee contains its own soul, extracted from your feeling today.every cup of coffee is like a magic show containing different journey and bringing the unending imagination and surprises.With a sip of coffee, you not only taste your own story, but also change your perspective of the world."

Attention Grabbing: People Who Took This Facebook Class At Stanford in 2007 are Making Millions

by Kwame Opam

People Who Took This Facebook Class At Stanford in 2007 are Making Millions

People Who Took This Facebook Class At Stanford in 2007 are Making Millions

Anyone who's seen "The Social Network" knows that, by the middle of the last decade, the leaders in tech were skewing younger and making money faster. In one notable instance at Stanford, the secret of success was this: cut corners!

That is, cut corners that you can fix while making simple apps people can really get behind. That was the surprise discovery students—as well as educators and businesspeople—made in the Facebook Class back in 2007. The class, a sort of microcosm of Silicon Valley, was developed by Dr. B.J. Fogg, director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford, as a way of exploring technology and psychology. The end result was many of his students making more money than they knew what to do with:

...by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. For many, the long trek from idea to product to company has turned into a sprint.

Start-ups once required a lot of money, time and people. But over the past decade, free, open-source software and "cloud" services have brought costs down, while ad networks help bring in revenue quickly.

Of course, following this method isn't so easy anymore. After all, 2007 was a long time ago and the business landscape has changed considerably to reveal a few new giants (ie. Zynga). It's just amazing to see you could spend 5 hours on an app back then and suddenly start making $5,000 a day. [NYT]

Send an email to Kwame Opam, the author of this post, at kopam@gizmodo.com.

 

 

Whoa! CERN traps 309 antimatter atoms for 16 minutes (Wired UK article)

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"A team of particle physicists at CERN's Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) have trapped 309 atoms of antimatter for more than a quarter of an hour.

When CERN first created and trapped antimatter, back in November 2010, researchers held onto the fleeting antihydrogen atoms for just 170 milliseconds, or a tenth of a second.

Antihydrogen atoms have a super short life span. As soon as they come into contact with normal hydrogen atoms the antimatter is annihilated. The team at ALPHA figured out how to isolate the atoms and hold a cloud of them in a magnetic field, but it released the antimatter after a confinement time of just 172 ms...."

Very interesting read: MAP competition shortlists digital media game-changers (Wired UK)

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Excerpt from Olivia Solon's original article. Read the interviews on wired.co.uk:

"Some 11 companies have been shortlisted for the Media Accelerator Program (MAP), a competition to uncover the emerging digital businesses that will transform the media industry over the coming years.

Among the shortlisted companies are Privowny, a personal identity management platform that allows consumers to manage the information that appears about them online. UK-based Loccit provide cloud space for personal online journals as well as a collective history wiki for a more personal take on the past. Also shortlisted is sharing platform ShareThis and social advertising companies SocialVibe and BrandBoost...

Bernhard Glock comments: "For me, what is at stake with MAP is the future of media. I was looking for people, ideas, approaches that can change the way we do media in the future. And I was pleased to see exactly that: a diverse range of great new emerging companies that are approaching media from very different angles and that all have the potential to improve and in fact completely change the name of the game in media.".

Wired.co.uk tracked down four of the finalists to find out more...

Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis

ShareThis is a plugin that allows users to share content through email and 50+ social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Google Buzz

Hervé Le Jouan, Founder & CEO Privowny, Inc.

Privowny allows people to discover and track what is happening with their personal data online and provide you with increased personal security and transparency

Jay Samit, Chief Executive, Social Vibe

SocialVibe is an advertising platform that sits alongside games and other premium content within social media. SocialVibe's promotional units are integrated into the content and reward the consumer for clicking on them

Flemming Madsen, Executive Chairman and Founder, Onalytica

Onalytica helps companies work out how they are perceived and talked about online. It provides real-time insight using online conversations about their brands, products, services and related topics..."

This is SOOO AWESOME: Miniature Architectural Projection Mapping | The Creators Project

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From thecreatorsproject.com:

"Taking an architectural scale model as their canvas, Zurich-based art collective PROJEKTIL use five projectors to create an augmented reality installation that demonstrates you don’t need large buildings to make an impressive projection mapped display. In fact, it’s turned the projection mapping trend on its head and, in a neat reversal of the trajectory, has used the opposite of a finished building—the genesis of it—by projecting on a showroom model..."

more pics & deets in the original post