Hollyhock
In our garden yesterday evening. I always think of them as quintessentially English flowers.
Quote of the Day
”Will people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you just rattle your jewellery.”
- John Lennon, at a Royal Variety Performance, 15 November, 1963
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Handel | Let The Bright Seraphim | Rowan Pierce, soprano | David Blackadder, trumpet | Academy of Ancient Music
Complete with animated score!
Long Read of the Day
What the **** is the metaverse?
Good question. Here’s Dave Birch doing some thinking aloud about it.
I’ve seen so many different descriptions of the new cyberspace for work, rest and play over the last few months that it’s really unclear to me what most people actually mean by “metaverse”. In fact, despite Gartner’s prediction that by 2026, a quarter of the population will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse “for work, shopping, education, social and/or entertainment”, I doubt that many in the financial services industry can give a cogent and concise description of what that metaverse itself will be, other than it will be a bit like “Call of Duty” with Mark Zuckerberg dressed as a skeleton in it and there will be a tiger wandering around in a JP Morgan branch in Minecraft…
My commonplace booklet
John Lanchester, writing in the LRB:
“Richard Feynman was once asked what he would pass on if the whole edifice of modern scientific knowledge had been lost, and all he could give to posterity was a single sentence. What axiom would convey the maximum amount of scientific information in the fewest possible words? His candidate was ‘all things are made of atoms.’ In a similar spirit, if the whole ramshackle structure of contemporary macroeconomics vanished into thin air and the field had to be reconstructed from scratch, the sentence which packs as much of the discipline into the fewest possible words might be ‘governments are not households.’ “
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