Robert Fripp

Author

Quantum computing: IBM lets anyone play

By Cade Metz | Wired | Business | 05.04.2016 ” Quantum computing is computing at its most esoteric. It’s an experimental, enormously complex, sometimes downright confusing technology that’s typically the domain of hardcore academics and organizations like Google and NASA. But that might be changing. IBM makes quantum computing available for free via the cloud ” Today, IBM unveiled … Read more

Supernova: the stuff of star-stuff

  We start in a perverse sort of way, considering we are dealing with a supernova. First, we drop  into a world of fiction based on fact, beginning with an excerpt from ‘Wessex Tales’ ~ ‘Musing on Damory Oak’: “In the thirteenth year of King Canute (1029), the year in which the acorn thrust its root down in moist earth … Read more

Designer Carl Strüwe Peered Into Microscopes

  Another page in this URL describes the work of German-American designer, Will Burtin. Burtin fled nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, Hilde Munk, in July 1938. Burtin shares with designer Carl Strüwe—also German—the characteristic of representing science visually.  Carl Strüwe was a designer who “pointed a camera at a microscope lens in 1926.  Wired.com describes a beautiful blend of science … Read more

TPP ‘worst trade deal ever’: Stiglitz

CBC News: Mar 31, 2016 8:45 PM ET, Last Updated: Apr 01 (Stiglitz on TPP) The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may be the ‘worst trade deal ever,’ says Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. The TPP should be revised to advance interests of citizens, not corporations, he says. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) … Read more

The Guardian discovers Canada. High time!

A vision of what a progressive Britain could be. It’s called Canada

By Gaby Hinsliff

Imagine a West Wing episode come to life, and that’s basically Justin Trudeau. Canada’s winsome prime minister blew up the internet again this week via an old photo of him larking about for the cameras, balancing his entire weight on his wrists on the edge of a desk in trademark manly-but-sensitive fashion. One more for a photo album that so far includes Trudeau cuddling pandas, Trudeau proudly proclaiming himself a feminist, Trudeau wearing a Barbie-pink sweatshirt in

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Norse settlement in Newfoundland

By Ralph Blumenthal, The New York Times | April 1, 2016 On a remote point in Newfoundland, satellite technology detects evidence of a second Norse settlement in the Americas. A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence … Read more

Climate change solutions: towards ‘Emily’

  In November, 2017, the world held a conference in Paris hoping to dress the global, seemingly chronic, wound of  climate change. Perhaps our post-industrial society will slowly point itself in the right direction. So far it has done so shamefacedly, with apology to the purely human artifice of demand and supply economics. Thus, forests are said to be … Read more

Truth or Rumour

  In Dark Sovereign, Truth introduces herself to her audience. She finds it difficult. Truth’s audience has already met her identical twin sister, Rumour. People cannot tell the women apart. So, are they listening to Truth, or to Rumour? The audience must decide. Having identified herself, Truth explains how the queen, Elizabeth Woodville, has caused many … Read more

Lord Hastings calms a mob

Drawn from ‘Dark Sovereign’, ACT 3, SCENE 7 ‘Lord Hastings calms a mob‘: When news spread that the dukes, Richard Gloucester and Harry Buckingham, had seized young Prince Richard, the heir to the throne, Londoners began to choose sides and take up arms. Mobs formed, weapons came out and men drank heavily to build up their courage. … Read more

Old Lights on Newish History

  It’s extraordinary the way things happen: Think of a set of events that occurred in the dark days of ancient history.  Then loose your mind to wander. Likely you will find parallels, not slight similarities, but actual parallels. Hence — Old Lights on Newish History! It has happened to me a few times. The best example I … Read more