Shuttle Launch as seen from a plane
Some video of a shuttle Launch as seen from an Air Canada flight. Turn off sound, it’s better without.
I was in the graduating class of 2000 with 99 other students representing more than one hundred countries. As an individual I already have three nationalities and four identities. I am British, Italian, Polish and a foreigner living near Geneva, Switzerland. As a result of this mixture I said, when I was in Tanzania in 1999 that I was European because that was the simplest way to describe my identity. When I first heard about the Brexit Referendum months ago I thought that this was so stupid that I thought it was not a serious project. It did become a serious thing, especially in a post-fact Britain.
Because these narratives typically involve a selective use of facts and lenient dealings with matters of truth, they have given rise to symptoms of a post-factual democracy. A democracy is in a post-factual state when truth and evidence are replaced by robust narratives, opportune political agendas, and impracticable political promises to maximize voter support. source
For months I saw that The Guardian and other newspapers were heavily critical of the European Union. You couldn’t read an article from their website without getting the feeling that Europe was a terrible place. This bias, this message encouraged me to switch to French language media to get a less biased, less anti-European narrative. The Guardian is relatively open compared to the British tabloid press. The British tabloid press lied and misled its readership. Twice The Sun lied about the Queen supporting Brexit. Twice it suffered no consequences.
It is well known that Murdoch is anti-European. Few men have done more to fuel anti-European frenzy than the Australian-American media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, owner of several newspapers and the UK’s most important private television news channel. In his book How Britain Will Leave Europe, former Minister for Europe Denis MacShane describes how former Prime Minister Tony Blair considered holding a referendum on adopting the euro, only to renounce the plan for fear that the “shadowy figure of Rupert Murdoch†would use his media empire to campaign against it. Source
When you control the media it is easy to push your agenda forward. Conspiracy theories are always about how our privacy is being invaded and about how our phone conversations, e-mails and other communications but few of them address the problems of indoctrination or brainwashing. They rarely look at the message that we are being given on a daily message. We have to ask “What is the root message that we are getting?” In the United Kingdom the root message was “Europe is bad”. Imagine if the BBC, The Guardian and other news sources had provided both sides.
The website notes that as an EU tier 1 area, “companies can benefit from the highest level of grant aid in the UKâ€. Earlier this year the sports car company TVR announced it would build a factory and create 150 jobs there. Will it still come? Will the Circuit of Wales, a multimillion-pound motor racing circuit a private company has been proposing to build on the town’s outskirts creating 6,000 jobs? Will the £1.8bn of EU cash promised to Wales for projects until 2020 still arrive? source
Imagine if the Fourth Estate in the United Kingdom had been used to provide people with clear examples of how the EU was investing in the UK. Imagine if instead of focusing on getting people to vote Leave the British media had provided a complete and unbiased view of the European Union. Wales voted against the EU and yet this article shows that they had a lot to gain by remaining within the EU. Between 2014–2020, Wales will benefit from around £1.8bn European Structural Funds investment. Source .Â
In his first public comments since last week’s historic referendum vote, the owner of newspapers including the Times, Sun and Wall Street Journal said leaving the EU was like a “prison break … we’re out  Source
There was a period when we could read about the imbalance in wealth and investment between Rural England and London. This imbalance was making people uncomfortable and one of the reasons for which the BBC decided to become decentralised was to address this concern. It is interesting that for a number of months the BREXIT campaign has focused all of that dissatisfaction at the EU rather than London. In a 2010 article by the BBC we find this sentence: But even fans of London admit it is too expensive, too dirty and too crowded. And its critics say that it sucks talent, money and opportunities out of the rest of the country. source. Brexit has not resolved this issue. Could this explain why around 7 percent of the British population have emigrated from Great Britain?
According this this article 4.9 million brits emigrated from the United Kingdom to live as migrants in other countries. This figure is from the UN population division. In theory I am British migrant as I live outside the United Kingdom. Brexiters (I will not play their game and call them brexiteers) made such a big song and dance about migrants coming to the UK and yet  British people are the single most mobile population in Europe. In Switzerland you can’t go a day without meeting Brits. Can you imagine the backlash if Europe decided to behave like England did?
I believe that people spent so much time worrying about privacy that they forgot to think about the prominent message in the media. They were groomed to see Europe in a negative light and voted accordingly. By choosing to provide people with the message that they wanted to hear the Leave campaign won. In a Post-fact Britain the checks and balances to hold brexiters to account failed. A campaign was won on lies and instability has resulted. The silver lining for other nations is that pro-european sentiment has risen. They have seen what a farce anti-European movements are.
The Tiny House Movement and travel combine well together. In this video a Czech couple bought a fan and transformed it into a self contained home to live in for a year. They chose it because they wanted room for the surfboards, wet suits and more. It has space for cooking lamb shanks, socialising and sleeping. You can enter the van both from the front and the back.
I really like the idea of this van. It would be fun to travel for a few months from place to place, do what there is to do, see what there is to see and then move on. This would adapt well to hiking, climbing, via ferrata and other sports. It allows you to live comfortably without spending money on hotels, villas or other places.
The project cost them around 10,000 dollars to build so if you work and save up for a few months you could easily take a gap year and afford to do such a project. Working on such a project does require some skills in wood working. He said that it took hundreds, if not thousands of hours to prepare the van. If you’re travelling then a few steps a day for a few weeks would get to this final result.
At one moment they speak about the herb garden that they have in the glove box. As they had the space they planted some mint and other herbs for cooking. As a result of this herb garden they said that when driving on rough roads the Mint plant gets shaken about and in the process the van smells of mint. It’s a natural air freshener.
In a month they will move on and sell the van to continue travelling. If I was travelling to New Zealand I’d like to try living in a van like this and use it as a base to go hiking, climbing and enjoying other sports. This seems like a pleasant way of travelling.
“If you were young and healthy and if they needed labour then you were selected as slave labour. You would have suffered a slow death rather than a fast one”. This soundbite is 13 minutes in.
In this documentary a concentration camp survivor takes two girls who are the age she was when she arrived through the camp and tells them about her experiences.
We owe it to future generations to keep re-sharing these accounts and documentaries to prevent such actions from ever happening again.
I have just finished watching the documentary and I feel almost shell shocked. I have been to the camp and I have read about the topic. I have also watched a number of topics on this topic. What makes this the most poignant documentary is that this woman, this grandmother of eight is making sure that future generations are aware of what Auschwitz life was like. She tells us about survival.
I’m online from 10-15hrs a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.
From a young age I had quite a choice of channels. Some were French, some were Italian and others were German. That’s because it’s Geneva and you get the French tv channels as well as the Swiss national channels. That’s access to about 7 channels over the air in analog form. With Sky digital the number of channels increased from 10-30 and finally to several thousand. Recently Sky started to broadcast a greater range of international content.
The next move was the PVR. The ability to record up to three hundred hours of program content to disk from two receivers at once. If you allow for a backlog to develop then you’ve got a fake video on demand on service. That’s great. It means that when you know which programs you want to watch the machine will take care of it.
A cheap version of this is available online through platforms such as Itunes where it’s powered by RSS feeds. At the beginning you’ve got very little content as you learn more about the technology but over time you end up with over four hundred podcasts in the back catalog. That’s quite a bit of choice.
Youtube, Revver, Myspace, Dailymotion are true video-on-demand services in browser form. Each of these websites allows you to download and watch thousands of short video clips without a dedicated time. That’s great. A housemate wanted to watch some comedy so we went to youtube, downloaded, and watched a selection of programs on demand.
Of course, the next step is Joost like platforms. It’s like a television channel but you can select when it’s convenient to watch the program rather than setting your life around the program.
There are two reasons for this. The first is an increase in capacity. The second is progress in technology. We went from having four channels to 10 times that number with Freeview and with satellite broadcasting we’ve gone from 20 channels to several thousand. We’ve also gone from one user interface, the television set with five channels to the computer, and unlimited choice. That’s why media content that is not on-demand is almost dead to me.