Art in modern life

We're about to enter a golden age of art and culture

At the Joslyn Art Museum here in Omaha there is a sign next to a Gauguin explaining that the stock market crash of 1882 resulted in Paul Gauguin's unemployment from the investment bank where he was earning a comfortable bourgeois salary.  Gauguin's family life suffered when his wife left and took the kids with her back to her parents' house in Copenhagen but his art improved.

Consider all of the creative people who were lured into tech-oriented careers during the 1990s.  Most of them aren't hardcore nerds at heart so now they're back doing creative things again.  100 years from now art museums will have signs reading "the turn-of-the-century tech crash enabled Jane Frobenius to stop writing press releases and go back to her video art".

[Philip Greenspun Weblog]

Well, on the one hand I've been spending a fair amount of time photographing things of late. But neither do I expect to leave computing. So I'm not quite sure what to say about this.

Photos

sporechan at Disneyland

sporechan dyed her hair pink and insisted that I take photos of it--apparently all previous efforts had failed to capture the true pinkness of it. Gold 100 is pretty good at saturated colors, although I'm surprised at how gracefully it handled the skin tones.

Looking out a cave

This one was from a cave on Tom Sawyer's Island where I hid during the hide-and-seek variation we were playing. Everyone else playing overlooked the nook, because it was clearly far too small for a big huge guy like me to fit. Hehehe.

Oh, for the love of god

pixie sticks are part of a balanced diet

Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO

The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday. The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby. [...]

The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar. [...]

The Sugar Association objects to the new report having been published in draft on the WHO's website for consultation purposes, without what it considers "a broad external peer-review process". It wants a full economic analysis of the impact of the recommendations on all 192 member countries. [...]

The report, Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases, has already been heavily criticised by the soft drinks industry, whose members sell virtually everywhere in the world, including developing countries where malnutrition is beginning to coexist with the obesity common in affluent countries.

The industry does not accept the WHO report's conclusion that sweetened soft drinks contribute to the obesity pandemic. The Washington-based National Soft Drink Association said the report's "recommendation on added sugars is too restrictive".
[jwz]

Once upon a time I thought that I couldn't actually get more cynical.