In case you missed it … 12 things I’ve recently shared elsewhere.
(1) Gordon Brown arguing that we need to be shown ‘the benefits of cooperation’: a majority ‘now see life as a zero-sum game. … In every major European country, the results are dramatic: 59% of British respondents believe they can only enhance their personal wealth if others do badly, and just 17% disregarded this notion.’
(2) Gender-distressed children ‘need reassurance, not scaremongering’. Helpful new factsheet from Sex Matters on Gender-distressed youth and suicide risk and blog post on Dispelling the suicide myth.
(3) Better Off Dead? Worth watching this documentary on assisted suicide by actor and disability rights activist Liz Carr. ‘In a society where disabled people are often told they are “better off dead” than disabled, Liz asks: “Should we really be giving more power to end that group of people’s lives?”’
(4) What is politics? Podcast interview with Luke Bretherton. Faced with ‘enemies’, you can kill them, coerce them, or cause them to flee. Or ‘you can do politics: you can negotiate some form of shared life’. Much more than ‘statecraft’. From the Re-enchanting podcast of Seen & Unseen (listen from 5:50).
(5) While watching a video on a desktop (laptop) browser, right click on the video twice to get a magic secret hidden menu, which allows you to launch Picture-in-Picture mode, and the video will always be on top even when you switch to a different application. Who’d have thought! Amazing! (Works for YouTube on a Mac with Safari and Chrome.)
(6) Interesting (to some, perhaps)…
A vestry was a committee for the local secular and ecclesiastical government of a parish in England, Wales and some English colonies, which originally met in the vestry or sacristy of the parish church, and consequently became known colloquially as the ‘vestry’. …
During the 19th century, their secular functions were gradually eroded, and finally in 1894 the secular and ecclesiastical aspects of the vestries were separated in local government reforms by the creation of civil parishes. The vestry’s remaining secular duties were transferred to newly created parish councils. Their ecclesiastical duties remained with the Church of England, until they were abolished and replaced by parochial church councils (PCCs) in 1921. …
The only aspect of the original vestry remaining in current use is the annual meeting of parishioners, which may be attended by anyone on the local civil register of electors and which has the power to appoint churchwardens.
(7) Here we go … Scientists find humans age dramatically in two bursts – at 44, then 60 … ‘a sudden accumulation of wrinkles, aches and pains or a general sensation of having grown older almost overnight’.
(8) If you choose hymns and songs for your church … I’m experimenting with a simple spreadsheet that makes it easy to keep track of what has or hasn’t been sung recently … to try it out: File > Make a copy
(9) Enjoying watching and listening to a few of the Proms (as in, ‘the world’s greatest classical music festival’, that kind of ‘Prom’!). Two particularly good ones to watch, with conductor Nicholas Collon…
- One is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played by heart, and preceded by a “musical and dramatic exploration” of the work. Beethoven was deaf, and 139 of his notebooks survive, containing (usually) the other person’s half of a conversation involving Beethoven. We hear extracts from these notebooks, along with an introduction to the piece, involving instrumentalists and singers.
- The other is Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony, which is quite simply extraordinary in every possible way.
(10) Web forwarding with SSL/HTTPS … domain provider was going to charge £35 per year to add SSL … is there a free service out there? … Yes! redirect.pizza
(11) Helpful statement about assisted suicide from the Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s not making an explicitly “religious” case (sanctity of life), simply that legalising assisted suicide would inevitably lead to many people feeling that they ought to end their lives early (in order to avoid being a burden), and that good palliative care is where we should be investing our energy.
(12) Have you ever found WhatsApp is suddenly recording a video of you when you were least expecting it? I’ve finally figured it out. All you need to do is swipe up from the bottom of the screen (as if you were simply scrolling through the chat), briefly making contact with the video icon on the way. Then, hey presto, WhatsApp starts recording a video of you, ready to send to everyone in the chat! It’s a ‘feature’ called ‘video notes’.