John Brown's Notes and Essays

Below a comment by New York Times reader Caroline Miles on its January 31 article , "How Facebook Is Morphing Into Meta: Shifting a 68,000-person social networking company toward the theoretical metaverse has caused internal disruption and uncertainty." In my modest opinion, it is one of many thoughtful/interesting readers' comments on this piece on Zuck's Meta ... Caroline Miles  Winston-Salem, NC 2h ago I still suspect that "Meta" is an abbreviated version of " metastasis ." [jb-my link] Reply 21 Recommend Share  An image from the article: An attendee at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January using the Oculus headset, which has been rebranded Meta. Credit...Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 From The Wall Street Journal , January 31, 2022 image from article: former teacher  Shelby Ashworth and her daughter, at her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. Ms. Ashworth left teaching for graphic design.   JASON MYERS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

image (not from article) from --Words from Billionaire Leon Cooperman ; cited in Eli Saslow, "The moral calculations of a billionaire [:] After the best year in history to be among the super-rich, one of America’s 745 billionaires wonders: ‘ What’s enough? What’s the answer?' "   The Washington Post , yesterday [1/30] at 6:00 AM, EST image from article:  Leon Cooperman in his home office in Boca Raton, Fla. (Scott McIntyre for The Washington Post)  

How politics and the pandemic put schools in the line of fire  image from article By Laura Meckler, The Washington Post , Today [1/20/2022] at 6:00 a.m. EST [jb emphasis] T est scores are down, and   violence is up . Parents are screaming at   school boards , and children are crying on the couches of social workers. Anger is rising. Patience is falling. For public schools, the numbers are all going in the wrong direction. Enrollment is down. Absenteeism is up. There aren’t enough teachers, substitutes or bus drivers. Each phase of the pandemic brings new logistics to manage, and Republicans are planning political campaigns this year aimed squarely at failings of public schools. Public education is facing a crisis unlike anything in decades, and it reaches into almost everything that educators do: from teaching math, to counseling anxious children, to managing the building.   Political battles are now a central feature of education, leaving school boards, educators and students in the c

image from article Book review By Dwight Garner, The New York Times , Jan. 24, 2022 The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk [jb -- see ] was, in 2019, a youthful winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was 57, dreadlocked, mischievous of politics, a vegetarian. Her novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” had recently been turned, by Agnieszka Holland, into the film “Spoor,” a slice of existential and ecology-minded dread.  Tokarczuk (pronounced To-KAR-chook) was not among those laureates the Swedish Academy sometimes seems to prop up in the crypt for a final viewing. Her career was, and is, in full gallop.  Her novels — they are often both pensive and mythic in tone — are slowly making their way into English. In addition to “Drive Your Plow,” these include the philosophical and often dazzling “Flights,” about travel and being between stations. It won the 2018 Man Booker International prize.  Tokarczuk’s most ambitious novel — the Swedish Academy called it her “magnum opus”

image from article By Farhad Manjoo, Opinion Columnist, The New York Times , Jan. 26, 2022 Imagine that when your great-grandparents were teenagers, they got their hands on a groundbreaking new gadget, the world’s first fully immersive virtual-reality entertainment system. These weren’t those silly goggles you see everywhere now. This device was more Matrix-y — a stylish headband stuffed with electrodes that somehow tapped directly into the human brain’s perceptual system, replacing whatever a wearer saw, heard, felt, smelled and even tasted with new sensations ginned up by a machine.  The device was a blockbuster; magic headbands soon became an inescapable fact of people’s daily lives. Your great-grandparents, in fact, met each other in Headbandland, and their children, your grandparents, rarely encountered the world outside it. Later generations — your parents, you — never did.  Everything you have ever known, the entire universe you call reality, has been fed to you by a machine. T