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Why Co-ownership in London is the best practice for buying holiday home? Joe Ricotta Explains 

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Why Co-ownership in London is the best practice for buying holiday home? Joe Ricotta Explains 

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High-end second houses are becoming more accessible to those who aren't as rich thanks to a new tech-powered co-ownership concept.

It's difficult to resist the allure of the vacation house. The idea of owning a special location in a different country, a house your family can visit frequently, become friends with, and establish roots in, has a certain allure, says Joe Ricotta. Nevertheless, for many individuals, the cost is difficult to justify: why purchase a home if you only intend to be there a few weeks out of the year? In the past, timeshare was a solution to the issue of vacant vacation houses for a large portion of the year, but the concept has a poor image for valid reasons. A problematic system that gives neither flexibility nor return on investment, timeshare properties are frequently at the lower end of the market.

Co-ownership enables prospective second homeowners to purchase an eighth to a half of a property, which they can use for an equivalent number of days each year, as opposed to the rigid timeshare model, asserts Joe Ricotta, which requires customers to purchase the right to visit an apartment during a specific time of year without owning a stake in the property.

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Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer
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Details for Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer in The Avenue,, Palm Street,, London,, London, United Kingdom, WC57 0IJ - Mirror

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Details for Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer in The Avenue,, Palm Street,, London,, London, United Kingdom, WC57 0IJ

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Why you need buy property in London in 2023: Joe Ricotta Explains

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Why you need buy property in London in 2023: Joe Ricotta Explains

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The cost of repaying a mortgage in London has already surpassed the cost of paying rent, despite rising interest rates, the cost-of-living issue, and growing recessionary anxieties asserts Joe Ricotta.

Notwithstanding the fact that home prices have begun to decline, Homes & Property has obtained unique data showing that, contrary to the conventional dynamic, mortgage payments now cost £832 more per month than rent in the capital.

Many first-time purchasers won't be able to afford homeownership due to the growing cost difference between owning and renting, which will reduce the number of sales in 2023. House values in the city would decline as much as 12.5% as a result, according to analysts.

The base rate (which determines mortgage rates) was increased by the Bank of England by 0.5% in December, bringing it to 3.5%, the highest level since the financial crisis. As some fixed-rate agreements reached highs of 6% in October, economists predict a further climb to 4% in the first quarter of the year, further driving up mortgage rates.

Due to London's higher than average home values, the increasing expense of mortgage servicing is made worse. As a consequence, according to new data from Hamptons, the affordability gap between owning and renting has never been as wide in the city.

According to Joe Ricotta, a real estate developer, "Ever since interest rates started to climb in earnest, it has been cheaper on a monthly basis to rent than purchase a property with a 10% deposit." This disparity reached £832 in October, setting an 11-year high. The analysis reveals that in October 2020, paying rent was £49 more expensive per month than servicing a mortgage.

While it marginally decreased in November, Ricotta continues, "for the foreseeable future we believe it to be cheaper to rent than buy."

House prices will experience a sharp decline as a result, reversing the surge saw during the epidemic era and the 2020 stamp duty holiday.

The experts suggest buying a property "sooner rather than later" if you are currently renting but are financially prepared to do so.

Although mortgage rates are greater than they once were, they are beginning to decline, and it is often preferable to begin paying off your own mortgage rather than your landlord's.

"Each person has a distinct financial status, and the cost-of-living problem has had varied effects on each person. Before making such a significant investment, it is important to get financial counsel, Joe Ricotta continued"

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Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer
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What Do Near-Death Experiences Mean, and Why Do They Fascinate Us?

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What Do Near-Death Experiences Mean, and Why Do They Fascinate Us?

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W hen Gregg Nome was 24 years old, he slipped into the churn beneath a waterfall and began to drown, his body pummelled against the sandy riverbed. What he saw there surprised him. Suddenly, his vision filled with crystal-clear scenes from his childhood, events he had mostly forgotten, and then moments from early adulthood. The memories, if that's what they were, were vivid and crisp. Was he reliving them? Not quite. They came at high speed, almost all at once, in a wave. And yet he could process each one individually. In fact, he was able to perceive everything around him: the rush of the water, the sandy bed, all of it brilliantly distinct. He could "hear and see as never before," he recalled later. And, despite being trapped underwater, he felt calm and at ease. He remembered thinking that prior to this moment his senses must have been dulled somehow, because only now could he fully understand the world, perhaps even the true meaning of the universe. Eventually, the imagery faded. Next, "There was only darkness," he said, "and a feeling of a short pause, like something was about to happen."

Nome recounted this story at a support group in Connecticut, in 1985, four years after the experience. He had survived, but now he hoped to understand why, during a moment of extreme mortal crisis, his mind had behaved the way it did. The meeting had been organised by Bruce Greyson, now a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Virginia. (Some of the group's members had responded to an ad Greyson placed in a local newspaper.) As Nome spoke, Greyson sat in a circle of 30 or so others, as if at an AA meeting, listening intently, nodding along.

Greyson had been hearing of events like these for years. A month into his psychiatric training, in the 1960s, he had been "confronted by a patient who claimed to have left her body" while unconscious on a hospital bed, and who later provided an accurate description of events that had taken place "in a different room". This made no sense to him. "I was raised in a scientific household," he says, over Zoom. "My father was a chemist. Growing up, the physical world was all there was." He felt certain someone had slipped the patient the information. He also thought, "What does that even mean, to leave your body?"

For years, he tried to put the account behind him, but repeatedly he faced heady stories of people experiencing other-worldly events, either when they had been pronounced clinically dead or thought they were close to it, before being wrestled back to life. In the 1975 best seller Life After Life, the psychiatrist Raymond Moody, once a colleague of Greyson's, labelled these episodes "near-death experiences", or NDEs, a term that stuck. "It occurred to me for the first time that this wasn't just one patient," Greyson says. "It was a common phenomenon." He became fascinated by the qualities of the episodes and the questions they raised, including perhaps the biggest of all: what actually happens when we die? "I plunged in," he says. "And here I am, 50 years later, trying to understand."

Greyson is 74 as of the time of this writing. When we talk, he is at home in Charlottesville, Virginia, waiting out the pandemic in a pressed shirt and tie, kind and affable. Over the years, he has collected hundreds of near-death experiences, he says, either from people who, aware of his research, have volunteered their stories, or from patients who happened to have episodes in hospital. In those cases, Greyson's process is nearly always the same: he sidles up to the bedside and gently withdraws information. "I ask: 'What's the last thing you remember before you blacked out?'" he says. "Then: 'What's the next thing you remember after that?' And finally: 'And what do you remember between those times?'" Not everyone reacts well to the questions; most people stare at him blankly. "But around one in five will say, 'Well, you know, I thought I saw my father, who died 20 years ago,' and I say, 'Tell me about that' - and I let them go..."

Greyson presents his research in a book, After, which is bound by a series of case studies. The accounts are mystical, like those we know from TV and books, but there are common themes. After a bad reaction to anaesthesia, one patient recalled: "I found myself in a meadow, mind cleared, identity intact." The meadow, she went on, was "lit with this glorious, radiant light, like no light we've ever seen," and "a gentle, inner glow shone from each and every plant." Most episodes involve similar feelings of wonder, mental clarity and bliss, Greyson says. Some people recall out-of-body experiences, or report travelling through a long tunnel; others meet entities they think of as God or Allah or long-dead family members; some feel time bend and warp, as though it were elastic. Once, a policeman who almost died during surgery asked Greyson: "How do you describe a state of timelessness, where there's nothing progressing from one point to another, where it's just all there, and you're totally immersed in it?" Another person recalled: "The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria."

It has been Greyson's role as a psychiatrist to provide a space in which "experiencers" feel comfortable retelling often incomprehensible stories - though even when patients discover the courage to try, they can struggle to find the right language. "When I talk to near-death experiencers, one of the first things they say is: 'I can't put it into words. There's no way to express this.'" A frustrated experiencer once told him that when he tried to recall events, "I always fall short." Another explained it would be difficult to describe her experience because we live in three dimensions, and what she saw on the border between living and dying seemed bigger somehow. Greyson has found that sometimes people turn to painting or music to recall events, as if true meaning can be shared non-verbally. But even that's insufficient. A subject once told Greyson that recalling his near-death experience was like trying "to draw an odour with crayons", which is to say, basically impossible.

Given that near-death experiences happen with limited warning, they are almost impossible to test. "We're dealing with a very short space of time," Greyson says. A swimmer is trapped underwater, a roofer falls from a ladder, a bystander, peering down at their phone, is struck by a car. In After, Greyson points out that his career has coincided with advances in brain-imaging technology, including the emergence of fMRI scanners, which help neuroscientists observe thinking in action. But equipment like that requires compliance: an appointment is made, a patient agrees to sit still. What happens when an experience occurs randomly, nowhere near a hospital? How do you capture a moment as fleeting and unannounced as the point of near-death?

When I ask Greyson why he decided to publish After now, after all these years, he explains that "we had to wait until we had enough knowledge about near-death experiences to be able to understand what was going on," by which he means not that we know what NDEs are, but that advances in science have allowed us to rule out a heap of things they are not. "There are physiological hypotheses that seem plausible theoretically," he says, but none have stuck. Are feelgood chemicals, like endorphins, released into the body at the point of peril, creating euphoria? Does the brain become starved of oxygen, prompting real-seeming fantasies? Do various areas of the brain suddenly begin to work in concert to create strange, altered states? Nobody knows for sure. "We keep thinking, 'Oh it's got to be this,'" Greyson says. "No, the data doesn't show that. 'Oh, this then?' Well, nope, the data doesn't show that, either."

At the University of Kentucky, the neurologist Kevin Nelson, who, like Greyson, has spent years recording NDEs as a kind of academic side-gig, thinks of the experiences as "a blending of two states of consciousness - wakefulness and REM sleep - during a time of great physical or emotional danger," and argues that many NDEs are "dream-like", existing in a neurological "borderland". (Fainting, he added, might bring about similar experiences.) Other researchers, including the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, have thought of NDEs as "extremely complex" hallucinations, an idea that, if nothing else, seems culturally accepted.

When Greyson mentions his research to colleagues, he receives "a variety of reactions, from, 'Are you out of your mind?' to 'Oh, let me tell you about my near-death experience.'" To formalise NDE research in the 1980s, he developed a survey, the Greyson Scale, which has been translated into over 20 languages and is still in use. ( Did you suddenly seem to understand everything? Did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe?) And he has been published widely in respected medical journals. But he can have quirky ideas. In After, Greyson writes: "I take seriously the possibility that NDEs may be brought on by physical changes in the brain," though he also accepts that the mind might be able to function "independent" of it. There have been reports of people experiencing near-death episodes while their brains are inactive, he says, and "yet that's when they say they have the most vivid experience of their lives." This doesn't make sense to him. Partway though our conversation, he asks: "Are these the final moments of consciousness? Or the beginning moments of the afterlife?"

These kind of theories put Greyson on wobbly ground among neuroscientists, who mostly agree the mind to be a product of the brain. Of the afterlife, Nelson told me: "This claim is the most extraordinary in science, and there is no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, scientific evidence to support it." (He added: "These are matters of faith.") Sacks called claims like these "anti-science". Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist affiliated with the department of neurology at Copenhagen University Hospital, told me that if "people are able to describe and report their experiences, even many years later", then surely "they have been processed by the brain and stored in its memory centres." (Like Nelson, Kondziella believes NDEs are somehow related to REM sleep.)

Greyson knows that events in near-death experiences are impossible to corroborate. "We can't do research on a deity," he says, drily. But still, he finds it tough to dismiss wackier theories, even if the data isn't there. When I ask him what his current logical understanding is, he looks resigned. "It seems most likely to me that the mind is somehow separate to the brain," he says, "and, if that's true, maybe it can function when the brain dies." Then he adds, "But if the mind is not there in the brain, where is it? And what is it?"

Near-death experiences are not a new phenomenon. Socrates had one, according to Plato; Pliny the Elder recorded another (in the first century); history is filled with examples of mountaineers falling from cliffs and experiencing bliss rather than terror. But we seem as enthralled now by their meaning as ever, and they continue to be sprinkled liberally across popular culture.

In 2020, my four-year-old son and I watched Soul, the Disney film, which introduces the near-death experience to a new audience, very young people, and examines consciousness, the afterlife, and the imperceptible stuff that makes us us. (My son is convinced now that when we die we ride an ethereal, very cool-looking travelator toward a blinding light in the sky.) Often in these screen-based times, we are encouraged to celebrate narratives that promote living the "right" way, which tends to involve appreciating and accepting every moment for what it is, and mindfully placing experiences and relationships above the pursuit of power or prestige or material goods. (Broadly speaking, this is the plot of Soul.) Most of us do not live like that, not entirely, and yet we feel like we should, lest we waste our precious time on this planet. Which is why near-death narratives fascinate us, and why they persist as events of interest in the culture. They ask: "What would you do with your life, if you had another chance?"

To Greyson, the impact near-death experiences have on people's lives has been his most surprising discovery. "I make a living by trying to help people change their lives," he says. "It's not easy to do. But here I've found an experience that, sometimes in a matter of seconds, dramatically transforms people's attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours." Often, these changes persist over decades. In most instances, experiencers realise they are no longer afraid to die, which "has a profound impact on how they live their lives", because "you lose your fear of life as well - you're not afraid of taking chances." Greyson sometimes asks people to describe their partners before and after an event, "and they'll say, 'Yeah, this isn't the person I married; this is someone different.'" He adds, "They see a purpose in life they didn't see before. I don't know of anything else that powerful."

I ask for an example. "I've spoken to people who were policemen," he says, "or career military officers, who couldn't go back to their jobs, couldn't stand the idea of violence." I ask why. He says, "The idea of hurting someone becomes abhorrent to them." He shrugs. "They end up going into helping professions. They become teachers, or healthcare workers, or social workers."

I ask if Greyson's research has changed the way he thinks.

"I don't think it's changed me in terms of my relationships with other people," he says, "except it's made me more accepting, more open to unusual ideas." As a psychiatrist, he remains "aware of what it means to be psychotic", but, he says: "I'm more accepting of unusual thoughts that aren't crazy, and it's made me much more conscionable with the unknown.

"I grew up without any kind of a spiritual background," he continues. "And I'm still not sure I understand what spiritual means. I am convinced now, after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies. I recognise that there is a non-physical part of us. Is that spiritual? I'm not sure. Spirituality usually involves a search for something greater than yourself, for meaning and purpose in the universe. Well, I certainly have that."

Alex Moshakis is a commissioning editor for Observer Magazine.

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What Do Near-Death Experiences Mean, and Why Do They Fascinate Us?

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W hen Gregg Nome was 24 years old, he slipped into the churn beneath a waterfall and began to drown, his body pummelled against the sandy riverbed. What he saw there surprised him. Suddenly, his vision filled with crystal-clear scenes from his childhood, events he had mostly forgotten, and then moments from early adulthood.

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As Apple CEO, he has defied his sceptics and refashioned the world's most creative company on his own exacting terms. Now, in a frank conversation, he offers new insight into his leadership - explaining why he sees himself as an outsider, how he asserts Apple's values, and what he does to keep from staring at his iPhone all day

I. By now, nearing 9am at Apple Park, he's long since got up and absorbed himself in the morning rituals of the modern CEO: email and exercise. Tim Cook takes pride in not hiding his email address, which is readily available on the search engine of your choice. In fact, Cook says, he finds the avalanche of unsolicited emails helpful. He rises at around 5am and reads all of them. Customers tell him what they think and feel about Apple products, sometimes they tell him stories about their own lives, and this information becomes a source of inspiration. If you work for Cook, you will inevitably wake up one day, wherever you are, to find one of these emails forwarded to you.

And then, often before the sun has even risen, someone arrives to make him do what Cook describes as "things I would prefer not to do, that I could probably convince myself not to do." ( Weight training, mostly.) And then he heads here, to the corporate headquarters of the company Cook has led since 2011.

He is not a leader who is drawn to crisis or conflict, two climates his predecessor, Steve Jobs, seemed at times to thrive in. "I try not to let the urgent take over the day," Cook says. Regular meetings, different standing engagements with different parts of the company. He likes to ask questions. "I'm curious, and I'm curious about how things work," he says. He does this not to intimidate, though there is perhaps a standard, an expectation of those working for him, lurking there as well: "If something's really shallow, you find that people can't explain it very well." Like Jobs once did, he sometimes takes meetings on the move, walking around the campus. Most days, he leaves the office at 6.30 or 7pm. The overall sensation he attempts to impart is one of normalcy, of proportion, despite the fact that most days, Apple, which employs about 165,000 people, is the most valuable company in the world. (At the time of writing, it's worth more than £1.68 trillion; at one moment last year, that number was £2.5 trillion, a figure roughly equal to the gross domestic product of the UK.)

Apple's inventions - starting with 1976's Apple I and 1977's Apple II, and continuing through the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods - have arguably done more to change the basic way that humans go through their day than those of any other company in the past 50 years. For these achievements, Jobs, who cofounded Apple and spearheaded the development of most of its signature products, is worshipped like a god, and Jonathan Ive, Apple's erstwhile design head, is worshipped like a demigod. But it is Cook who has run the company since Jobs's death, in 2011, Cook who has presided over the astronomical growth in the value of the stock, and Cook who is shaping the future of Apple today. It is his responsibility to protect what the company has already built while presiding over Apple's next big thing. Lately, rumour has coalesced around that thing being a headset, perhaps called the Reality Pro, with capabilities for virtual and augmented reality. Rumour suggests this headset is imminent. (Cook will not, to be clear, confirm or deny the existence of such a thing to a journalist, though he will happily talk about the... potential... of such a device.) And yet Cook is, in the wealth of biographies and hagiography that has grown up around Apple since its founding, an enigma still. "He's very hard to read," says Eddy Cue, who has been at Apple since 1989 and now leads its services division. "If you're looking to make your decision or your beliefs based on reading his facial expressions, you're probably not going to be good at that. I always joke with him that he'd be a great poker player, because he'd have four aces and no one would know."

This suits him: at a moment dense with pathological tech founders who log on daily to pontificate about the collective future of humankind, Cook does not log on all that much. He does not move fast and break things. His even calmness stands as an implicit rebuke to the chaos agents - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on - who often get called to testify in Congress alongside Cook about the increasingly uncertain state of tech in the United States. In clubby Silicon Valley, where it appears at times like people are battling to be the first in line on the venture-capital-powered spaceship that will carry the Patagonia-clad elite away from the rest of us, Cook seems to side with the rest of us.

In conversation, he sometimes channels the kid from Robertsdale, Alabama, that he once was: slightly wide-eyed and a little surprised to find himself perhaps the world's most powerful businessman, wealthy and more influential than most actual presidents. During our time together, he will go on to talk about succeeding Jobs, he will defend his record as a creative leader in his own right, and he will elaborate on how he deals with his rivals and competitors in and outside Silicon Valley. He will coach me on how to keep my phone from destroying my mind and the mind of my child. He will talk freely about the future of Apple and the inventions it is said to have coming.

But his perception of himself, despite the position he has achieved in life, remains that of an outsider: "I've never been described as normal," he says. A gay man who grew up in the rural South, he has turned his comfort with discomfort into a superpower. "I always hate the word normal in a lot of ways, because what some people use to describe normal equals straight. Some people would use that word in that kind of way. I don't know - I've been described as a lot of things, but probably normal is not among those."

II. Apple Park is a place that looks like it came out of nowhere that cannot possibly have come out of nowhere. The building itself, four stories of curved glass and three underground levels that stretch for nearly a mile, has the look of a spaceship that was courteous enough to come down to Earth and land without disturbing the landscape. In the middle of the continuous loop, there is a courtyard where in the winter the orchards are skeletal but still: orchards! Vast stands of plum and apple trees. Plus thousands of oaks! Winding paths that change in elevation. California hills visible in the distance. Outside the ring are basketball courts, football pitches, volleyball courts, a fitness centre, little piles of communal bikes. When the weather is nice, you can open certain parts of the walls right up. The campus runs completely on renewable energy, powered by solar panels and biogas fuel cells, cost about £4.2 billion to build, and wears the fingerprints of each of Apple's saints: Jobs, of course, who conceived of the rough plans before his death; Ive, who realised Jobs's vision in collaboration with his own team at Apple and architects from Foster + Partners; and Cook himself, who was running the company by the time the thing was finished.

Apple Park is conspicuously inconspicuous; a monument to a company that purports to be sceptical of monuments. In the Apple way, it's designed to be both beautiful and useful and unlike other things - better, even - that people have designed for the same purpose. "There's very much an underappreciation of the power of the venue that people work in, I think," Cook says, gesturing around the third-floor cafe we're sitting in. "And it does lead the architecture to be these rectangular blocks " - emphasis here for the obvious distaste with which he says those two words - "on a campus. You know, we could all architect those fairly easily. You have to think at a deeper level to come up with something that promotes collaboration and openness and serenity."

His silver hair is neatly cropped; he's wearing a dark long-sleeve polo and slim anonymous jeans, the same general outfit in which he tends to do Apple public events. There is an Apple Watch visible on his wrist, but I never see him check it or otherwise stray from eye contact, which he maintains for the duration of our conversation. Cook is a person who uses your first name in conversation. When he walks into a public space on the Apple campus and sits down, no one scatters. Maybe over time there is a slight ebb, but that's it. When I point this out to Cook, he seems surprised that I'm surprised. "I think generally people feel comfortable approaching me," he says. When he speaks publicly, or to a journalist, he chooses his words carefully; rarely does his voice rise.

He has become, over time, more comfortable with the public-facing aspects of the job, which, given the size and influence of Apple, are many - another legacy of Jobs, who personally presented every new Apple product from various stages. "I clearly had to grow into it," Cook says. "I thought that the public focus on Apple was because of Steve. And so that was my mentality taking over the CEO role, particularly without him, after his death, I thought the fixation and so forth would go. And it didn't."

It is easier to forget now, but at the time Cook succeeded Jobs, much was made of their differences. Cook had already been with Apple for 13 years, but he'd worked in operations, where he'd been single-mindedly focused on the details of supply chains and factory management and procuring materials and squeezing every last ounce of efficiency out of the system that produced Apple's inventions. What he was not known for was being in the room when those inventions were discovered. In his later years at Apple, Jobs took multiple reported absences of sick leave, leaving Cook in charge each time. But, to many, Cook remained a systems expert, an operational tactician - an adult who could be trusted to keep things running until Jobs would come back. Then, suddenly, Jobs was not coming back, and Cook was being asked to replace him. If Steve Jobs was Walt Disney or Thomas Edison, who was Tim Cook? Even today, Cook is sometimes derided as "not a product guy" by the people who adore product guys, which describes much of Apple's customer base. (To take just one example of this argument, this is the title of the New York Times tech reporter Tripp Mickle's recent book about life at the company post-Jobs and Cook's tenure as leader: After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul.)

Cook has had practice talking about this, being asked about Jobs and how the two men differ, about what it was like to take over. "To answer your question," he says, "in the beginning of that life without Steve, which was six weeks after the CEO thing came up, I just felt totally gutted, totally empty." What he realised, very quickly, he says, was that "I knew I couldn't be Steve. I don't think anybody could be Steve. I think he was a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of individual, an original by any stretch of the imagination. And so what I had to do was to be the best version of myself."

But what version would that be? If pressed, Cook will disagree, politely, with the portrait painted by some that he is a spreadsheet guy, a suit running a company built by a man who disdained suits. "Steve saw this - one of the things I loved about him was he didn't expect innovation out of just one group in the company or creativity out of one group," Cook says. "He expected it everywhere in the company." Including in operations, where Cook worked: "When we were running operations, we tried to be innovative in operations and creative in operations, just like we were creative elsewhere. We fundamentally had to be in order to build the products that we were designing."

Even as Cook has reshaped Apple's business and grown the company into an even more fearsome juggernaut than it was in Jobs's day, he is reluctant to supply his own list of creative achievements, which include overseeing not just a decade's worth of improvements and refinements to the iPhone and the rest of Apple's existing product line, but also the Apple Watch, designed under Ive and launched during Cook's tenure, and the AirPods, a staple of pandemic and post-pandemic life. "We don't really look back very much at all in history," Cook says. "We're always focused on the future and trying to feel like we're very much sort of at that starting line where you can really dream and have big ideas that are not constrained by the past in some kind of way."

And the future is... complicated. Today, Apple is both the dominant tech company on the planet, having emerged from the pandemic not just relatively unscathed but more prosperous than ever, and also at a crossroads: perpetually on the brink of the discovery that will change our lives again, while at the same time fending off constant challenges to its existing business. In his tenure, Cook has helped pivot the company toward services, like Apple TV+, which have provided new revenue but also new competition. Regulators in several countries are scrutinising the company closely over how it manages its App Store. And all the time, there is a whole giant future out there - self-driving cars, virtual and augmented reality, one more thing after one more thing - as yet unconquered, and many contenders, some of them just miles from Apple Park, vying to get there before Apple does. To manage all this takes a type of inventiveness not usually associated with people of Cook's operations training.

He takes pride in tuning out sceptical assessments of his creative acumen. "With my background, I am used to people being critical in some ways. I'm used to the attack. I try very hard not to take things personally that I don't think are meant to be personal. Talking heads critiquing - this kind of stuff kind of goes through me. It has to, or I wouldn't be able to function." Though, I will notice, he has a keen recollection for slights and doubt: he can recount precisely what people said about the Apple Watch or the iPhone on release. "The [impact of] the watches has been profound, but you would never know that if you go back and read the press from the launch," he says. "By the same token, think about the iPhone. When the iPhone came out, people said, 'This isn't going to work. It doesn't have a physical keyboard. Everybody wants a physical keyboard.'" Et cetera. Cook's mildness of manner can sometimes conceal a person who is not particularly mild. "He is deceptive because he's not what politicians tend to be," says Lisa Jackson, the former head of the US's Environmental Protection Agency who is now Apple's vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. "He's not loud. He's not trying to suck up all the oxygen in the room. But there's never a question as to his leadership."

Over time, he has developed strategies to relax his mind and let things go through him. For instance, just look around. Cook says all the glass that surrounds us, here in the cafe we're talking in, makes him feel like he's outside, even when he's inside. "I always think about hiking and the things that really settle my mind when I'm here," he says. After leaving Alabama, he lived for a time in North Carolina, and then Colorado, and fell in love with nature. "The outdoors were always accessible there, other than some infrequent snowstorm or something," he says. Later, walking across the courtyard, the land around us restored to some approximation of pre-Silicon Valley splendour, he elaborates: "I started cycling and hiking, and then I moved to California and it's like, you can hike so many different places here. It's almost a sin not to go out and enjoy it." Being out in nature is a "palate cleanser for the mind." Actually, it's even more than that, Cook says, casting aside his measured nature for a moment. " It's better than any other thing you can possibly do!"

III. It's a remarkable story. Remarkable enough that if you'd sat down young Tim Cook and told it to him, he wouldn't have believed you. The reaction "would've been disbelief," he says. He was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1960, and grew up in Robertsdale, where his father worked in a shipyard. Robertsdale was far from everything. Something like Cook's current position - "the imagination wasn't big enough to dream it," Cook says. Robertsdale was the place that set the template for the way Cook still seems to see himself today, which is as fundamentally different. "When I was growing up," he says, "there was no internet, and therefore you didn't find a lot of people like you around."

He went to Auburn University, studied industrial engineering, fell in love with the football team and the Rolling Stones. Then he went to IBM and, in time, revolutionised its supply chain by doing what he'd later do at a company called Intelligent Electronics, and then at Compaq, and then at Apple itself - helping source materials from around the world and cutting the time each company kept parts before assembling them into computers.

The picture that emerges from these years is a monkish man who worked over Christmas, drove a Honda Accord, and lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, long after he became wealthy. The story of his recruitment to Apple has been told and retold, often by Cook himself. Newly installed as a vice president for corporate materials at Compaq in 1997, he got an invitation to meet Steve Jobs, who'd recently returned to Apple after an extended exile. "At the time, Apple was doing very poorly, on the verge of bankruptcy," Cook says. "Michael Dell had said something like, if he were the CEO of Apple, he would shut it down and give the remaining money to the shareholders. And he just had the courage to say what everybody thought." But Cook met Jobs anyway - out of curiosity, mostly - and "minutes into the conversation I'm thinking, I want to do this. "

Cook explains this decision by saying that he found himself compelled to go work for a creative genius once he realised that he was talking to one. "Most of the CEOs I had met were what I think of as 'cufflink CEOs,'" Cook says. "They're so divorced from and isolated from real people who are working and from the products of the company. And here was this guy who was so animated about the product." When I ask Cook why working for a creative genius was something that appealed to him, he brings up something that he'll return to several times in our conversation, which is that Jobs was the first person he met who "really wanted to change the world," he says. "And it wasn't a Silicon Valley magic kind of sprinkling the dust on you. This guy really wanted to change the world. And I'd never seen that in a CEO before."

It is now de rigueur for leaders of tech companies, even the ones that provide incredibly mundane services, like mattresses at discount prices, to talk endlessly about changing the world, but the notion that a computer company might actually do such a thing was still kind of radical in 1998, and Cook was sold. This was the era of the first coloured iMacs, and the job Cook was offered was to make those world-changing aspirations possible in a practical sense, by helping Apple ship products in a faster, more effective way that would not make Michael Dell want to sell the company off for parts. Within two years of coming aboard, Cook had cut Apple's unsold inventory on hand from a month's worth to two days', beginning his climb to what would ultimately be the top job.

He did this in a remarkably calm and frictionless way. Even the stories he and other people tell from this time have a kind of studied blankness to them. To take one: Cook is at work one day when an employee, Sabih Khan, informs him about an urgent operations problem in China. Half an hour later, Cook looks up, sees that Khan is still in the room. "Why are you still here?" he asks. And Khan goes straight to the airport, flies to China, and solves it.

We are walking around a lake they have on the Apple campus when I ask Cook what this story is supposed to mean. The more times I read it, I say, the less I'm sure I understand it.

"I don't... I think it's just, uh, something that occurred," he says. "I don't know if it's the view that I'm mean for doing it or not, but" - he laughs - "I didn't feel that way. I don't think he felt that way either. He's still here. He is running all of operations today."

Other CEOs would hammer this anecdote into their own, polish it up, perhaps append a lesson to it: in business, you need to get things done by any means necessary. But here is a fun truth about Cook: he genuinely doesn't care how he might appear. "I think people get a little bit - they're not sure, because if they can't see the emotion part of it, their assumption is, there's nothing there, or they're not getting it, or he's not that emotional," Cue says. "Which is far from the truth around it." But Cook is content to let you believe about him whatever you'd like to believe, even that he's mean, even if he's pretty sure he isn't. (The other thing Cue tells people about Cook is this: "You have to engage first. And so if you're sitting around, and you've never met him, and you're waiting for Tim to call you, you might wait a long time.")

Cook's general lack of interest in the stories other people tell about him has not just made him unusually impervious to criticism; it has also, on occasion, allowed him to deal with whoever he needs to deal with to get his job done. "I think he's incredibly human," Jackson says. "But I think he's also recognised that that doesn't need to be brought to every situation." When I ask Cook about a couple of notorious moments in his tenure - his dealings with then president Donald Trump, who described Cook as a "great executive, because he calls me and others don't," and then more recently, Cook's elegant handling of Elon Musk, who last year went from criticising Apple on Twitter to touring the campus with Cook in under a week - Cook returns to this idea, that he is comfortable being in places where others might worry about being seen. "The philosophy is engagement," Cook says. "I feel very strongly about engaging with people regardless of whether they agree with you or not. I actually think it's even more important to engage when there's disagreement."

Cook smiles. "I'm used to being in a [room] with someone who has a different view than I do," he says. "This is not a unique thing for me."

IV. On the very rare occasions where Cook has voluntarily revealed something about himself, he's done so reluctantly and usually because he judged that not doing so would cause actual harm. In 2014 he wrote about his sexuality, which had been long but quietly speculated about, for Bloomberg Businessweek. This was an uncharacteristic decision for a private man whose discomfort with talking about himself extends all the way to a reluctance to tell you what TV shows he's currently watching. And yet: "I was getting notes from kids who had read on the internet somewhere that I was gay," he says. "And they were at the end of their ropes. They were being pushed out by their families and sort of written out of life in a way. And I felt a responsibility to try to do something. Part of what they need to see is that life doesn't end. And so I made that trade-off with my own privacy."

There is only one real exception to Cook's general circumspection, his even keel, that I have noticed, and that is on the subject of what might broadly be called the evils of technology. This is a strange fight for the CEO of Apple to pick, but Cook has now been picking it for years. In a 2019 speech at Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, in front of a sea of aspiring incubators, venture capitalists and Steve Jobses, Cook said the following: "In an age of cynicism, this place still believes that the human capacity to solve problems is boundless. But so, it seems, is our potential to create them."

In his tenure as CEO, Cook has rarely missed an opportunity to decry, usually with a fair amount of heat in his voice, what he describes as the "data-industrial complex" - a complex built of companies who profit from the use and sale of their consumers' personal information and data. This practice, Cook said in another public moment, "degrades our fundamental right to privacy first, and our social fabric by consequence," and helps build an ecosystem full of "rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms."

If you ask Cook, a notoriously private person himself, why this subject is so important to him, he will pivot the conversation back to Apple. "It's personal for Apple in that we've been focused on it from the start of the company," he told me the first time we met, for an interview in 2021. During Cook's tenure, Apple has adopted a set of public values and practices that are particularly rigorous around privacy. "We feel privacy is a basic human right," Cook says. "And so we try to design our products to where we collect the minimum kind of data, and as important, that we put the user in the control chair, where it's the user's data and they're deciding what they want to do with it." Think of, for instance, the recently rolled-out prompt, the tool Apple calls App Tracking Transparency, that allows you to ask not to be tracked while you're using any given app. Companies like Meta and Google - fellow tech giants and Apple rivals - had been gathering data on their users, and monetising that data through advertising, for years. Apple has its own unique advertising business, too, and a partnership with Google that makes their search engine the default on Safari, Apple's web browser. But Cook nevertheless led Apple to give the company's customers this tool to prevent their data from being harvested and sold. (And in the process, just so happened to deal a blow to the business of its competitors.)

"We are a secretive company. But we've rewired ourselves on the values side. Think about the environment - we talk about what we're going to look like in 2030. We talk about our road maps to get there. We want those items to be stolen."

Under the banner of privacy, Apple has also forbidden companies who use their App Store to direct users out of the Apple ecosystem in order to collect money from them, even as Apple takes a commission on the transactions that occur within the store. Recently, Apple's prohibition on what is called "sideloading" has drawn scrutiny from governments all over the world, on the grounds that the practice is anticompetitive. Cook dismisses this critique. "The App Store we developed was about creating a trusted place where developers and users could come together in a two-sided transaction," Cook says. "And in order for that to happen, in order for the trust to be on the consumer side, we think privacy and security are vital. And otherwise, people don't come to a store if they begin to think that their credit cards can be ripped off, if they begin to think their data can be ripped off. And if you run a different play in a world which had sideloading, what we believe is that you wind up degrading the trust and confidence of users in a significant way. You begin having all these security and privacy issues."

Perhaps you think this is unconvincing; perhaps you believe every word. But Cook has been uncommonly successful at placing values - the idea that Apple is about more than products, more than share price - at the heart of the public image of the company. Three years ago, Apple announced its intention to be carbon neutral throughout its supply chain by 2030. This announcement, in itself, represented a fundamental change in Apple's DNA. "We are a secretive company," Cook says. "We like to hold what we do to ourselves until it's time to come out and talk about it. But we've rewired ourselves on the values side. And so now, think about the environment - we talk about what we're going to look like in 2030. We talk about our road maps to get there. We kind of want those items to be stolen." Cook does a lot of this work with Jackson. "I met a lot of CEOs in my day," Jackson says about her time heading the EPA. "And they all wanted to know what they had to do to make me go away. Occasionally, they wanted me to write a rule that would help them make more money. Or at least make them not lose money. And I respect all of that. But I think he's been incredible in bringing to this task this idea that this is an all-of-Apple endeavour to really figure out how to be, like he always says, a ripple in the pond."

And Cook's natural scepticism of technology and sincere love of the natural world make him a credible messenger for a values-led company that, for instance, Steve Jobs, caustic to the core, could never have been. At one point in our conversation, for instance, I raise the prosaic but common concern that my iPhone might be gently breaking my brain. Cook, in moments like these, is happy to play therapist, and somehow - I can now say this from experience - he is a believable one, despite the part of his day job that is consumed with putting into the world as many new iPhones as possible.

"We try to get people tools in order to help them put the phone down," Cook says, gently. "Because my philosophy is, if you're looking at the phone more than you're looking in somebody's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing. So we do things like Screen Time. I don't know about you, but I pretty religiously look at my report."

I have a young child who is, perhaps predictably, obsessed with my phone - he chases it around the room. When I share this with Cook, he nods with something between recognition and reproach. "Kids are born digital, they're digital kids now," Cook says. "And it is, I think, really important to set some hard rails around it. We make technology to empower people to be able to do things they couldn't do, to create things they couldn't create, to learn things they couldn't learn. And I mean, that's really what drives us. We don't want people using our phones too much. We're not incentivised for that. We don't want that. We provide tools so people don't do that.

V. It is an odd condition of leading a company like Apple that you are supposed to upend the basic way we all live every few years or so. One low-key way Cook has been going about this is through the growth of the company's services business, a category that includes Apple News, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and Apple TV+. This division just set a new revenue record at Apple, bringing in £17.5 billion in its last reported quarter ending in December. "If you look back in time, a decade ago, services were a very small piece of the company," Cook says. Today, he says, they represent slightly less than 20 per cent of Apple's business. Last year, CODA, a film Apple bought at Sundance for £21 million, won an Oscar. "We're in our rookie season," Cook says. "And we've already won an Academy Award for best picture." Recently, the company paid Timothée Chalamet to cut a series of ads for Apple TV+ in which he mused about various roles in its burgeoning screen universe that he would've loved to take on for himself. Cook personally signed off on the project. "I love that ad," Cook says, grinning.

But there is still the feeling, in some quarters, that he is one transformative product away from history. What that product is, in the Apple way, is endlessly speculated about - speculation that has condensed, over time, into the expectation that at some point relatively soon, Apple will launch something in the augmented and virtual reality space (like, say, the aforementioned mixed-reality headset), and then maybe, down the line, something in the automotive space. Longtime followers of Apple will not be shocked to learn that Cook did not choose to announce any of these theoretical products in my presence. But he was willing to explain why Apple might - hypothetically - be interested in something in the world of AR/VR.

"If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people's communication, people's connection," Cook says. "It could empower people to achieve things they couldn't achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it. And so it's the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world - to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world. And so this is exciting. If it could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do things that you do all day long and you didn't really think about doing them in a different way."

Cook gestures at a glass pane nearby. We could measure it, he says, if we wanted to. We could put some art up on the wall, take a look at it right now. These were some of the very first AR uses people dreamed up, Cook says - imagine, in other words, what else might be possible, what else might already be invented and underway.

Years ago, when asked about the possibility of Apple manufacturing glasses, in the mould of Google Glass, an early AR product, Cook told The New Yorker 's Ian Parker that he was sceptical of the enterprise: "We always thought that glasses were not a smart move, from a point of view that people would not really want to wear them. They were intrusive, instead of pushing technology to the background, as we've always believed." He said then: "We always thought it would flop, and, you know, so far it has."

When I raise this with Cook, he laughs. "My thinking always evolves. Steve taught me well: never to get married to your convictions of yesterday. To always, if presented with something new that says you were wrong, admit it and go forward instead of continuing to hunker down and say why you're right."

I ask Cook if the fact that neither Google Glass nor, more recently, Meta's Quest have made much of a dent in the marketplace might make him wary of attempting to try to manufacture something in that same space. He pauses, and then steers the conversation back to Apple's own history of success in areas where people might have doubted its chances. "Pretty much everything we've ever done, there were loads of sceptics with it," Cook says. "If you do something that's on the edge, it will always have sceptics." Cook says when Apple decides to enter a market, he asks himself the following questions: "Can we make a significant contribution, in some kind of way, something that other people are not doing? Can we own the primary technology? I'm not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else's stuff. Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that's how you innovate."

VI. In January, Apple announced that Cook, at his own request, would be taking just over a 40 per cent pay cut, to £41 million. Over time, Apple has made Cook very wealthy (Forbes estimates his net worth at around £1.5 billion; in 2015, he said he intends to donate his fortune - minus whatever it takes to pay for his nephew's college education - to charity). But in a murky economic climate, Cook says, he thought it best to make a little less for the moment. "It's a combination of leading by example in the environment that we're in - uh, not that we are in, but the world is in - and just feeling like it was the right thing to do. And so I did suggest it. It's those couple things. There's no mystery behind it." Apple is still hiring despite the uncertain environment, Cook says, but maybe less so for the moment. Still investing, but ditto. Mostly, Cook says, "we are very much focused on the long term."

And the long term has been good to this place: all you have to do is look outside to see that. Cook offers a walk across campus. I ask him if I need the badge that I'd been given on entering. He laughs - "They might stop both of us," he says, raising an eyebrow.

Down two floors and outside, a sort of oscillating net of polite communications people leading the way, Cook exchanges neutral hellos with whomever we pass. He says he does this walk daily, more or less - "If you have something like this at your disposal, and you can walk and talk about things, it's not like you're playing hooky or something." On the Apple campus, there are some golf carts available. "And I always like to walk," he says, pointedly. "I'm not a cart person."

The sun is out. Behind glass, in the building that encircles this inner courtyard, you can see groups of people in twos and threes, drawing Apple-ish curves on whiteboards. By the lake, Cook is intercepted, gently separated from me, and guided to his next meeting. He waves goodbye, leaving me to a perfect day here in Cupertino, the weather region that my iPhone has always defaulted to.

Zach Baron is US GQ' s senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April/May 2023 issue of British GQ with the title "Tim Cook Thinks Different " PRODUCTION CREDITS: FASHION CREDITS:
From top: (1.) Jacket by Tom Ford. Shirt by Brioni. Jeans by Levi's. Glasses (throughout) his own. Watch, Apple Watch Ultra. (2.) Shirt by Kiton. (3.) Shirt by Kiton. (4.) Shirt by Kiton. Pants by Paige. Belt by Nordstrom. Boots by Berluti. Watch, Apple Watch Series 8.
Photographs by Mark Mahaney
Styled by Marcus Allen
Photographed on location at Apple Park

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As Apple CEO, he has defied his sceptics and refashioned the world's most creative company on his own exacting terms. Now, in a frank conversation, he offers new insight into his leadership - explaining why he sees himself as an outsider, how he asserts Apple's values, and what he does to keep from staring at his iPhone all day I.

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What Does It Take to Make the Criterion Collection of Video Games?

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What Does It Take to Make the Criterion Collection of Video Games?

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If you want to watch the famously bad 1956 Sci-Fi film Plan 9 from Outer Space, you have several options on both free and paid streaming services. The film has been archived, restored, and documented by people who care about the history of cinema. The same can't be said about the similarly horrible 1993 Atari Jaguar game Cybermorph (does " where did you learn to fly?" ring any bells?). For years, experiencing that curious piece of gaming history required buying an aging Jaguar or emulating it. But while Plan 9 has a wealth of scholarship about its history, few have tried to give Cybermorph its historical due.

Well, few except for Digital Eclipse, a game developer that works to document, emulate, and enhance classic video games. The team has spent the last few years creating some of the most lauded pieces of classic gaming collections. The company produced anthologies for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other venerable IPs like Capcom's Street Fighter and Mega Man games and the Samurai Shodown series on the NeoGeo. Their latest release, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, featuring over 100 classic game emulations plus supporting material and interviews, might be the most comparable thing games have ever come to creating a documentary of their own medium.

Mike Mika, Digital Eclipse's longtime president, told Gizmodo in an interview that if you want to show what things were like in the past, you have to find a balance between making things playable, and showing off what made these products special in the first place, warts and all.

"We're trying to simulate and emulate those flaws in that kind of hardware to allow these games to run like they did before," he said. But more than that, they need to decide just how much old jank is worth including. For Mika, it's most important that those holding the controller can "play [these games] in a way that it's the game they remember, and less than the game that it was."

Atari 50 is more than just a modern emulator of major Atari releases from the 2600 up through the beleaguered Atari Lynx handheld and the poor, poor Jaguar. Through design documents and video interviews with the games' original developers, Digital Eclipse wanted to show that more than the games are worth preserving. The very ideas, art, and struggles that went into making classic games remain the same as other mediums, even if the scale of game development is magnitudes bigger than before.

Chris Kohler, Digital Eclipse's editorial director, said that in today's environment, anybody with a real inclination to play a game from an arcade or Nintendo NES can go online, download an emulator or ROM, and enjoy. You can probably find some old design documents floating around the internet, but what it all lacks is context.

"The term that we've landed on to differentiate our work-it's like an interactive documentary," Kohler said. So instead of just giving people a game and some loose bits of game trivia, the team wants to offer a kind of timeline for users to understand what it takes to create these works. In Atari 50, the game selection might include a developer interview along with an arcade flier, all providing more information on why and how the game is what it is. In some cases, the company even included an image of a game's original code, such as the incredibly short codebase for the entirety of the Atari 2600 version of Combat.

"Nostalgia only carries you so far," Mika said. "What all of this extra material does is paint a picture and shows people who might not be familiar with the property or the franchise or the company why these sorts of games are important."

"There's great books about the history of video games," Kohler added. "There's films, there's documentaries in which people sit down and tell the real story. But video games are this great storytelling medium. Why can't video games be the medium through which we tell the stories about the history of video games?"

What kind of tech lets you preserve older games?

Digital Eclipse, was first founded as a studio in 1992 and focused on emulating arcade games from the '70s and '80s. Later in the decade, the team specialized in making arcade emulations for the Game Boy Color. After a few splits and mergers at the company, some former Eclipse employees formed Other Ocean Interactive which later revitalized the Digital Eclipse brand.

In the years since it was formed, game emulation has changed dramatically. It's harder to emulate a more recent console than it is an older one, especially when they start to use multi-core processors.

Take the Atari Jaguar for example. It came to North America in 1993 and was marketed as the first 64-bit home system thanks to its twin 32-bit processors. Unfortunately for both the company and consumers, it was notoriously error-prone and even when you could get games to run, they were notoriously awkward to control and buggy. Mika said it's difficult to emulate the platform, but there are still fondly-remembered titles like Tempest 2000 that deserve to be recognized.

"Because it was the early days ... there was no concept of bitmaps or anything like that," Mika said. Despite its size, a Gameboy Color released in '98 can be more complex than a SNES released in 1991 because of the increased complexity of the built-in display."

But more importantly for a developer like Digital Eclipse, there are very, very few games that still have the original source code lying around. Without that, the team needs to start an "archeological process" of trying to find anything the team could have for reference. Building an emulation usually requires looking at the ROM, or read-only memory found on the games themselves. This is where the term "emulation" comes from, developers try to recreate the game logic and present it in a way that is close to or "better" than the original.

The company uses its own proprietary tools it called the Eclipse Engine to recreate these old pieces of software. The ROM is just the start, as the devs need to disassemble the games and understand the logic behind the original design. The engine can give the developers a rundown of everything that's happening at the moment in the game's emulation, but Mika said it also allows them to go in and make modifications on the fly. Their system can "draw in" enemies and objects into the world. It can interleave sound effects and music, all to see what best matches the game developers' original intent.

"Without source or with source only as reference, we had to go and figure out how to hack these games," Mika said. "By the end of this process, we came up with a list of features that are like this is what the product is about. Then we spend a large amount of time trying to understand how we can push these games and add features to them in a way that's very natural."

But then the task becomes modifying it and making it compatible with modern consoles and televisions without changing things dramatically. The Eclipse Engine can spit out builds that would be compatible with a PlayStation 5, a Nintendo Switch, and the PC separately, though the developers still need to see if the game plays fine when 12 FPS is bumped up to 30 or 60 or if the game is at all compatible on a widescreen format. For Tempest 2000, the company allows users to run it at 60 frames per second.

In terms of visuals, things get even more complicated as old CRT televisions tended to blend the lines of images. What we think of "pixel art" is more of how these pixelated images are represented by more modern television screens. Sometimes, old-school designers created colors knowing that a CRT would blend certain pixels together. Digital Eclipse needs to go in and either add a filter or otherwise make the pixels match the color the developer originally intended.

There are times Digital Eclipse has actually added cut content to games, especially if they manage to get their hands on the source code. The company's 2021 Disney Classic Games Collection included levels that were originally cut from the 1993 Sega Genesis game Aladdin that the team was able to reconstruct. The Blizzard Arcade Collection included artwork that one developer told the team was originally removed because it would have caused the game's age rating to go up. In interviews with devs for the Samurai Shodown NeoGeo Collection, the Eclipse team learned there was an entire version of the game, finished, but never released.

"It's a lot," Kohler said. "We're a small, scrappy team of developers that tries to punch above our weight. It's difficult to do that level of detail for every single game in a collection. It's just something we are constantly thinking about."

What can both designers and regular folks learn from older games?

The company's former Head of Restoration Frank Cifaldi said back in 2019 that the company's goal was to become the "Criterion Collection" for video games. Just like Criterion's work restoring and redistributing classic films, revitalizing old games is for the sake of scholarship as much as enjoyment.

Just 30 years ago, when graphical detail wasn't the name of the game, video games needed both strong art direction and even stronger gameplay to stand out, Mika said. But beyond the simple pleasure of classic arcade titles or even sophisticated CRPGs, the extra material included in Digital Eclipse titles paints a more severe picture of game development. Labor disputes, developers not given credit for games, designers fighting back against publishers' whims-all things developers are still regularly tackling today.

"Nothing ever changes," Kohler said. "You literally have people sitting down from the very beginnings of the video game industry telling stories from the early 1970s about conflicts between management and labor, about design versus business and art, and it's all just the same fights and the same problems that we have today."

Jason Cirillo, one of Digital Eclipse's software engineers, told Gizmodo that he knows making games has always been very hard. But still, even as a kid, and later a young man, he never had to think about how the games were made. Instead, to any young person growing up with them, these games were just "pure magic." Then you learn about who may have been smoking weed at work or getting into it with the publisher over their game, and then you "finally put a face to the person that actually created hours and hours of your own childhood fun."

IP rights are still a major hurdle for emulation

Even in Atari 50, there were several big or important games missing because of who owned the intellectual property. The classic arcade game Star Wars or the infamous 2600 flop that was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial are important moments in Atari's history, but neither made the cut even if they are mentioned in some of the insider interviews.

"One of the hardest aspects of what we do outside of the development of the work is dealing with licensing," said Stephen Frost, Digital Eclipse's head of production. "Unless we can prove that somebody owns every aspect of a game, we can't actually publish it or develop it."

Frost said back in the '70s and '80s, few publishers thought their games would have any kind of long shelf life. IPs end up falling into a rabbit hole of ownership. Sometimes contracts will grant rights to now-defunct companies or individuals who passed away, and then nobody has any clue who still has ownership.

Though Cifaldi has since moved on to the nonprofit Video Game History Foundation, in previous talks at the Game Developers Conference, the historian said that some game publishers have been incredibly hostile to the idea of game emulation. Nintendo in particular has been antagonized by anybody simulating its classic game lineup. In 2018, the company called emulators and ROMs "the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers" in a copyright lawsuit against several ROM sites. At the same time, Nintendo and the Sonic franchise have been particularly reliant on emulators in order to re-release old classics.

Opinions on emulators have changed to some degree. It may be getting easier to convince companies to re-release games, especially as we're now three years into the 30-year nostalgia cycle. The Digital Eclipse team's other recent release, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, revamps 13 TMNT games, including several of the franchise's fondly-remembered '90s beat-em-ups. That was done in collaboration with publisher Konami and Nickelodeon. Those IP holders were jumping in front of other major TMNT releases for this year, so they had an incentive to collaborate, but these are all separate companies looking to hold onto the rights of their old work. Will publishers ever loosen up enough to allow collections that focus on whole consoles at once? What about a collection that analyzes the evolution of first-person shooters?

Thanks to companies like , copyright has extended far past the first 1790 copyright law's terms. Current U.S. copyright law says that works receive protection for the life of the original author plus an additional 70 years or 95 years for a corporate copyright. Super Mario Brothers was first copyrighted in 1985, meaning it won't be until the 2090s before the first edition of Nintendo's flagship franchise enters the public domain. In that way, changes to copyright law may be the best way to expand artistic preservation.

"And I think, as a company, ourselves, we're actively trying to break down barriers to allow [more game preservation] to happen-to focus on broader topics that involve multiple companies, and multiple IPs," Mika said. "The dream is, 10 years from now, we do something that's more broadly themed, that involves a myriad of different companies, and they're all okay with working with each other."

"You know, that's at least the hope," he added.

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What Does It Take to Make the Criterion Collection of Video Games?

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If you want to watch the famously bad 1956 Sci-Fi film Plan 9 from Outer Space, you have several options on both free and paid streaming services. The film has been archived, restored, and documented by people who care about the history of cinema.

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A long-dormant lake has reappeared in California, bringing havoc along with it

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A long-dormant lake has reappeared in California, bringing havoc along with it

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A long-dormant lake has reappeared in California, bringing havoc along with it

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Months of atmospheric river storms have pummeled the area, which is home to crucial farmland. A historic snowpack in the mountains above the basin will make things worse.

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11 Very Short Stories You Must Read Immediately

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11 Very Short Stories You Must Read Immediately

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Lydia Davis is a crowned master of the very short story, not to mention a preeminent translator of classic French literature. Davis didn't invent flash fiction, but she is certainly its most famous-and perhaps its best-practitioner. Her work is always where I start when I get into a flash fiction reading jag, but of course, it's not usually where I finish, else what kind of jag would it be? Perhaps it's time to remind ourselves what very short stories can do. Here are eleven very short stories that you must-and can, thanks to the magic of the internet-read at your earliest opportunity. NB: this list should by no means be taken to reflect the "best of all time," merely "my own personal favorites," and is only a taste of what's out there-so do us all a favor and point us to your own beloved micro-fictions in the comments.

It's hard to pick a favorite from Davis's massive body of work (" Break it Down " and "The Center of the Story" are two more that I love, though they're a bit long for this list), but on the flip side, pretty much everything she writes is good. I like "The Outing" because it's the skeleton of a story, poking fun at the notion of "what happens"-and yet still creates a powerful sense of what indeed happened. How does she do it?

When I first heard Deb Olin Unferth read, I was so desperate to write down what she'd said that I scribbled her phrases on my own pants in eyeliner. This piece, originally published in NOON, is one of my favorites of hers, and a very fine commentary on the plight of the "unlikeable" woman.

This story slays me. Saunders builds meaning out of nothing, slowly, it seems-although in a story this short there's hardly room for slowness-and then rips it all away from you in the end, leaving you gutted and empty, which is just the sort of abject cruelty you really want from a writer.

This is my favorite story from Corin's collection of (mostly) flash fictions, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. (My second-favorite story, just to be maximalist about it, is " Witches.") The creepy presence of one mother and absence of another, the glossed-over apocalypse, the temporal swerve-all of these make the story echo for a long time.

I'm sorry, but Amelia Gray doesn't get enough credit for being fucking hilarious. This story makes me laugh every time I read it, and also has taught me several facts about swans.

Every sentence here is a story in itself-and then there's the actual story, of a huntress (or two). I'm always impressed by the way Samatar conjures an sustains mood; this piece would poke a a wet black hole in any shining day.

I encountered this story-which is about Taylor Swift clones-when it won the Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize a couple of years ago. The judge was Steve Almond, who wrote, "I tried quite hard to resist choosing "Taylor Swift" as the winner of this year's Barthelme Award. Why? Because all the stories I received were worthy and many were more technically ambitious when it came to language and form, by which I guess I mean experimental. . . . But what the hell. In the end, I just wanted to read this thing again and again." Which is exactly right. Whatever you think of the actual Taylor Swift, this story is just plain fun.

It's one of the most widely-anthologized short stories for a reason: rhythmic and lyric, a triumph of voice and immediacy. I think of it as a ribbon that unwinds and unwinds, revealing a relationship, a way of life, and of course, a girl.

Just about any of the pieces in Ninety-nine Stories of God would do here, honestly, but I love the firm wink of "Aubade," only the third story in the book.

This is the shortest story on this list-a few words shorter than Lydia Davis's, even-but packs a lot of drama into that single sentence. It's one of those that I read long ago but has stuck in my mind permanently-particularly the beat of that French film, French film.

I just read this for the first time, and loved it: a glut of words to luxuriate in, and then leave behind. Jonathan Lethem's " Elevator Pitches," the first in The New Yorker 's summer flash series, is also great, and very different.

Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.

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11 Very Short Stories You Must Read Immediately

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Lydia Davis is a crowned master of the very short story, not to mention a preeminent translator of classic French literature. Davis didn't invent flash fiction, but she is certainly its most famous-and perhaps its best-practitioner.

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Joe Ricotta - Yoga is very good for health..

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Joe Ricotta - Yoga is very good for health..

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Joe Ricotta - Regular yoga practice may reduce levels of stress and body-wide inflammation, contributing to healthier hearts. Several of the factors contributing to heart disease, including high blood pressure and excess weight, can also be addressed through yoga.

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Start now as it's never too late to take up yoga

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Children can start at age five and some will enjoy it so much they continue through adulthood, and then as senior citizens for as long as their bodies and health permit. But what about those no longer...

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Lunar astronauts will need to synchronize their watches on future missions. But on a rock that rotates much slower than Earth, time gets weird fast.

In 2025, astronauts will begin returning to the moon, eventually building bases and space stations, putting robotic landers and rovers to work, and mining for resources. In this bustling new era of lunar activity, they'll need to synchronize with each other. But so far there is no agreed-upon time system or zones, and there's neither GPS nor internet on the moon.

Setting those up will require developing new technologies on Earth to be deployed 239,000 miles away. Javier Ventura-Traveset, an engineer at the European Space Agency, is leading this work with a project called Moonlight, which aims to design satellites for astronauts and robotic explorers. Moonlight and its US counterpart, the Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems, will support NASA's Artemis program, and the work is raising questions about whether the moon should have a single time zone-and how that would work.

NASA's Apollo missions didn't need all this stuff. A few astronauts visited, completed their work, and then flew home. But space agencies' plans for the 21st century call for a permanent human presence on the moon, potentially with people from Europe, the US, Japan, China, and Canada there at the same time. "Up to now, when you have a mission on the moon, you would always synchronize with a time zone on the Earth. But we'll have many missions in the future, and having a common reference time is really needed," Ventura-Traveset says.

That poses logistical and engineering challenges and gives rise to significant political and philosophical ones. What is time on the moon?

Pretty much everyone agrees on the definition of a second. (It's 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave radiation emitted by a cesium atom, if you're curious.) But that's not really helpful when it comes to navigating everyday life. People need larger chunks of time to do things like set a clock or run a computer or know when to go to work or how long it takes to get from point A to point B. On Earth, we use a 24-hour day, based on the planet's rotation and cycles of light and dark, to which our circadian rhythms are tuned.

But our lunar neighbor rotates much more slowly-every 29.5 Earth days. This means a particular side of the moon stays illuminated or pointed away from the sun for long periods. (On Earth, we don't notice this lunar rotation because the moon is tidally locked with us. It takes as long to revolve along its axis as it does to rotate around the planet, so the same side of the moon always faces us.) People like Ventura-Traveset need to define what time means in a place where many of the cues we use on Earth-sunrise, sunset, rush hour, prime time-are no longer there to guide us.

Whether space agencies adopt a single time zone or several hasn't been decided yet, Ventura-Traveset says. Given the moon's slow rotation, he thinks it makes sense to have fewer than Earth's 24 zones. To him, one zone would be the most practical and natural: We'd reproduce something like Coordinated Universal Time so astronauts could follow a 24-hour cycle as they do on the International Space Station. Sure, each day will be out of sync with the moon's light and dark periods, but he doesn't think it makes sense to have a weeks-long "day" followed by a weeks-long "night."

But he does note one counterargument: A 24-zone system would make it easier for astronauts from different countries to communicate with people in their home regions. After all, syncing between heavenly bodies has been a constant challenge for operators of missions to Mars. The Martian day, or Sol, is 24 hours and 39 minutes. That's 3 percent longer than an Earth day, and it has made things difficult for the operators of NASA's Mars rovers, who have to spend their work lives on Martian time and their personal lives on Earth time. "If the experience of continuously changing local time every day sounds like it could feel like relentless jet lag, you are correct," Zara Mirmalek, a social scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and author of Making Time on Mars, wrote in an email to WIRED. Working remotely can have its drawbacks.

Erika Nesvold, space ethicist and author of the book Off-Earth, also asks: Who gets to decide what time it is on the moon? These decisions are often politically fraught on Earth, and they could prove to be so on other worlds. Consider the confusing wiggly lines of our planet's time zones: Some vast countries like China operate on a single time. Others, like Iran, are offset from their neighbors. And of course there's that perennial dispute about daylight saving time, which this year gave rise to two rival time zones in Lebanon. If it looks like space agencies in Europe and the US are imposing lunar time zones, she says, other nations could consider it a step toward colonialism on the moon.

The current effort isn't completely limited to Western nations, Ventura-Traveset argues. For these time-related decisions, his team is working with an interagency organization that includes Chinese observers. The ESA and NASA groups are also planning to provide recommendations that could be discussed at the International Astronomical Union, whose national members include every spacefaring nation, wrote Joshua Finch, a NASA spokesperson, in an email to WIRED.

The project of setting the time on the moon is wrapped up in navigation and communication systems, which depend on precise timekeeping. After all, astronauts will need to know exactly where they are, when they are, and how to coordinate with others. On Earth, we rely on rubidium atomic clocks aboard the US' GPS or Europe's Galileo satellite systems. The signal from a satellite tells you both the time and exactly where you're located.

"If your clock is off, you'll make an error," says Biju Patla, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, whose cesium atomic clock serves as the US' time and frequency standard. A few nanoseconds off time-wise can mean a whole meter off distance-wise. That might not matter for a pedestrian looking at a map on their phone, but it would be a big deal for a lunar rover operator trying to steer around a boulder or a crater, he says.

This is where Moonlight will come in. The system may involve three navigation satellites in lunar orbit plus one dedicated to communication. That way, multiple satellites can ping Earth at any given time, and the system would be resilient if a single orbiter fails. (Because the moon lacks an atmosphere, the satellites would be more vulnerable to solar storms and other space weather than the GPS or Galileo systems.)

Most of the technologies needed for Moonlight are already available, since the ESA and NASA already have satellites orbiting Earth. But the moon project comes with its own challenges. For example, if one were to place an atomic clock on the moon and compare it to an identical one on the Earth, the lunar device would gain 56 microseconds every 24 hours. That would add up, eventually messing with the precision of navigation systems.

This misalignment happens because of general relativity, thanks to the moon's lower gravitational pull, says Patla. Technically, the ideal measure of time would come from an atomic clock in the vacuum of space, where there's essentially no gravity. Atomic clocks on Earth are affected by the planet's gravity, but they're a known standard. Lunar time would be affected by a different gravitational pull that would contribute to the additional microseconds. Still, it's not a huge problem: The lunar time offset is predictable and can be corrected.

There's also the question of what orbital path those satellites should take. Most satellites around Earth have circular orbits, and that's useful for a population that's sparse at the planet's poles and spread throughout the middle latitudes. But realistically, most astronauts in the next decade or two will be stationed near the lunar south pole because it hosts water ice that people want to mine. The ESA is looking into deploying the satellites on elliptical orbits so that they'll have more time within range of polar regions. Later, the agency and its partners could add satellites on different orbits to better cover other areas, and ground stations for additional accuracy.

The satellites will use a different frequency (S-band, at around 2 to 2.5 megahertz) than their terrestrial counterparts (L-band, at about 1 to 1.6 MHz) so that their signals don't interfere with Earth-based communications or disrupt future radio telescopes on the far side of the moon.

The ESA is planning to launch a technology-testing satellite called Lunar Pathfinder by the end of 2025, and then have Moonlight's "initial operational capability" ready by the end of 2027, with a dedicated satellite providing limited communication services and a first navigation ranging signal. The full constellation of-most likely-four satellites would be operational by the end of 2030.

And Moonlight won't be alone. NASA's developing its own analogous system, working on a similar schedule. The Chinese space agency is planning its satellite constellation as well, and some of those spacecraft could launch by the end of 2024, with the initial goal of supporting Chang'e 6, a lunar sample return mission. The Japanese space agency has one in the works too, with a demonstration mission scheduled for 2028.

These initiatives will play a fundamental role in the future of space travel, Ventura-Traveset says. New generations of spacecraft, including commercial ones, won't need complex, expensive antennas or landing systems; they can simply tap into these. "There are more than 250 missions over the next 10 years intending to go to the moon," he says. "We need to have this infrastructure. It will be an accelerator for the moon economy."

On a philosophical level, these programs represent a profound shift in the concept of timekeeping, says Nesvold. "Throughout most of human history, we have used space to tell time by, including the plants and stars and phases of the moon," she says. "It's only relatively recently that we have come up with this idea of clock technology, which lets us coordinate with each other without having to depend on space. And now we're implementing this technology on the moon itself."

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Lunar astronauts will need to synchronize their watches on future missions. But on a rock that rotates much slower than Earth, time gets weird fast. In 2025, astronauts will begin returning to the moon, eventually building bases and space stations, putting robotic landers and rovers to work, and mining for resources.

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The Idea That Everything From Spoons to Stones is Conscious is Gaining Academic Credibility

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The Idea That Everything From Spoons to Stones is Conscious is Gaining Academic Credibility

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Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it's the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.

This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the "panpsychist" view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.

"Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?" says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. "Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive reaction isn't necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality."

David Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the " hard problem of consciousness " in 1995, demonstrating that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness. Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have provided a framework for solving this problem. Both lead to seemingly intractable complications.

The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It's unclear, though, exactly how this could work. "It's very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness," says Chalmers. "Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there's a gap: Consciousness." Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter-but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world.

Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an "unimaginably simple" form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans' subjective experiences. This isn't meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there's some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.

Panpsychism doesn't necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious. "Panpsychists usually don't take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as a whole," writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York University's Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email. "Rather, the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their own very simple form of consciousness."

But, then again, panpsychism could very well imply that conscious tables exist: One interpretation of the theory holds that "any system is conscious," says Chalmers. "Rocks will be conscious, spoons will be conscious, the Earth will be conscious. Any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness."

Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers' "hard problem" paper. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and popular articles taking panpsychism seriously.

One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism. Tononi argues that something will have a form of "consciousness" if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently "integrated," or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because it applies to all structures-not just the human brain-Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.

Goff, who has written an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the "hard problem" and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.

"Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume," says Goff. "Eddington"-the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity in the early 20th century-"argued there's a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap."

In Eddington's view, Goff writes in an email, it's ""silly" to suppose that that underlying nature has nothing to do with consciousness and then to wonder where consciousness comes from." Stephen Hawking has previously asked: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" Goff adds: "The Russell-Eddington proposal is that it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations."

The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the "combination problem": Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn't answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.

Any theory that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which complex systems-from inanimate objects to plants to ants-count as conscious.

An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn't the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it's more like seeing it as a "cosmic mess." Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement-the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they're separated by such immense distances there can't be a causal signal between them-suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.

Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness. "The more I think about [any theory], the less plausible it becomes," says Chalmers. "One starts as a materialist, then turns into a dualist, then a panpsychist, then an idealist," he adds, echoing his paper on the subject. Idealism holds that physical matter does not exist at all and conscious experience is the only thing there is. From that perspective, panpsychism is quite moderate.

Chalmers quotes his colleague, the philosopher John Perry, who says: "If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administration."

Olivia was a science reporter at Quartz from 2015 to Oct. 2020, most recently covering the healthcare industry and psychedelic research. She previously reported on philosophy and psychology, and was part of a Quartz investigative team focused on online political propaganda. Olivia was a 2020 Livingston Award finalist for her work on misuse of data to fuel propaganda in Brazil. Before Quartz, she was a reporter and features writer at The Daily Telegraph in the UK.

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The Idea That Everything From Spoons to Stones is Conscious is Gaining Academic Credibility

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Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it's the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter. This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the "panpsychist" view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.

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How to Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career

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How to Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career

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When I graduated from college in 1995, the last thing I imagined being was a manager in UX design, which was a relatively young field where we ensured the customers and users of our websites, apps, and software could easily use and enjoy these services. My dream was to be a professional musician - a rock star - and I pursued that goal for several years.

I landed a six-month internship at Soundtrack Studios in New York City, and I quickly found out that interns basically did whatever everyone else didn't want to do. I was working 50 hours a week and getting paid $150 a week for my time. As I learned more about the music production business, I found out that the career path was brutal, job opportunities were scarce, and the pay was miniscule. Assistant engineers - who had been in the business for years - were making only $6 an hour at the time. That felt unsustainable to me. So, I decided to leave my professional music dream behind and find a new career path.

I got a job with a company called iXL doing front-end development and graphic design. Front-end development in 1999, at the height of the dot-com craze, was basically being able to spell "HTML." As that job evolved, I started reading some very transformational books. One book in particular, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, absolutely changed my life. I'm grateful to have met and gotten to know both of the book's authors over the years. This book put me on track to become a UX designer and an interaction designer, and my career began to move forward in this new direction.

I bounced around several jobs during the dotcom bubble - they were turbulent times, but I was very lucky. I came from a middle-class home in the New Jersey suburbs, had supportive parents and a good education. I always managed to land the next gig. I worked at AOL for a few years, and I learned a lot there about being a designer. I progressed to building a design team with a company on the West Coast called Webtrends, which at the time was the leader of web analytics providers. And then I found my way to New York City where I landed a job leading and building a design team at TheLadders, an online executive job search firm.

But as I faced my 35th birthday, I found myself panicking. I was struggling to envision what the second half of my career would look like when it came to seniority, salary, fulfillment, you name it. Where do I go from here? After all, the farther up the ladder you go, the fewer positions there are - it's just the nature of the corporate beast. There are very few C-level, chief design officer jobs.

This got me thinking about how we ensure that our efforts, career paths, and viability as valuable members of organizations, communities and disciplines continues throughout our career. The answer I found was relatively simple. The work to get there, less so. It's a concept I call forever employable (also the name of my book) and it is the continuous sharing and re-purposing of your experience, passion, and expertise to create a platform of thought leadership around yourself. By becoming a recognized expert in your chosen domain or discipline you reverse the flow of jobs leads and opportunities. Instead of you having to chase them down, they come to you.

Becoming forever employable doesn't mean quitting your job necessarily. It is equally applicable for those of you intent on staying employed in-house for the long-term as it is for those with the desire to consult or become self-employed.

There are five core concepts I see as crucial to keep in mind as you think about the second half of your career and building this platform:

Entrepreneurialism. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. You probably don't think of yourself that way either. But eventually I had to make a transition that required me to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset and proactively put myself and my ideas out in the open in an effort to attract opportunities, land them, and turn them into successful ventures. This is your life, your business, your employment. And so, you've got to think about this challenge like an entrepreneur. Who is my target audience? What problems can I help them solve? What's the most effective way for me to provide my service to them? These questions start you down the path of building a "startup" centered around yourself.

Self-confidence. Sharing your expertise can be daunting. Hasn't everything already been said about management, marketing, sales, digital transformation? It can feel like it but there's one story that hasn't been told yet: yours. Your unique life experiences, diverse paths to your current position and obstacles overcome are the core of your newfound expertise platform. No one else has that. Remember to tap into the deep vein of skills and expertise that is unique to you. When you're standing at a crossroads in your life, know that you bring something unique to the table - something that no one else has. Embrace it, own it, be it. Your experience has value, your knowledge has value, and you have something valuable to add to the conversation. No one has your story. Be confident in what you know and build on that knowledge as you take on new projects.

Continuous learning. Everything is changing all the time. The only way to keep up - or even better, stay ahead - is to keep learning. You learn continuously by reading blog posts and books, and listening to podcasts and audiobooks, created by people who can help illuminate your path forward. You do this by talking with people who can explain what they did to achieve the success they wanted in their lives. You do this by building communities of expertise and practice around yourself. You do this by constantly experimenting and trying new things. Sometimes your experiments will succeed, and sometimes they won't. But as long as you learn something from every experiment, you haven't truly failed. Stay curious. Keep your mind open to the possibilities laid out before you. Experiment constantly, learn from your results, and try again. Like my old ski instructor used to say, "If you're not falling, you're not learning."

Continuous improvement. If you're learning continuously, and you're applying the outcomes of your experiments to your platform, then you're always going to improve and get better at whatever it is that you have chosen to do to become forever employable. In his popular TED Talk, Astro Teller, captain of Moonshots at X (Google's innovation laboratory), explains that you should be enthusiastically skeptical of everything that you're doing. In other words, you should always want to figure out a better way to do something. "Enthusiastic skepticism is not the enemy of boundless optimism," he says. In fact, it's the perfect partner. No matter how good you believe you are at your chosen profession, being enthusiastically skeptical means you're always searching for a better way to do your job. In fact, you're excited to find it. What can you learn from others in your field who have been successful? What about leaders in other fields? What did they do to build their platforms and what can you apply to yours?

Reinvention. Ultimately, becoming forever employable is all about reinventing yourself. I was a designer, and then I was a design manager, and I was going be a super duper design manager - or at least that's where I was headed. But, because of the expertise I was sharing, other opportunities walked into my life. With the help and support of my family I was ready to seize them. Since then, I've reinvented myself on an ongoing basis. Nothing stands still, and the pace of change today is faster than ever. Almost a decade ago, Amazon was updating its codebase every 11.6 seconds - they were essentially reinventing the way that they serve their customers five times a minute. By 2015, Amazon got faster - way faster - pushing code to production every second. Imagine what that figure is today. In 2018, Google revealed that it runs over 500 million tests a day, equating to more than 4 million relaunches of existing and new systems each and every day. That's the modern pace of change. If you want to stay forever employable, then you've got to be ready to reinvent yourself with the times. And that is coming in shorter and shorter cycles.

Re-orgs happen regularly. So do layoffs. Covid-19 has laid waste to entire industries. Technological disruptions automate us out of jobs annually. This doesn't mean we're done being useful, successful and viable in the job marketplace. However, being forever employable means you've got to be intentional about where you're going, and you've got to be prepared to act - immediately and without hesitation - when the right opportunity presents itself. With a foundation in your expertise, a thorough and current understanding of your domain and an ever-growing network to lean on you can guarantee the next job will find you.
This was lightly adapted from my book Forever Employable. Jeff Gothelf helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning bookLean UX and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond. He works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centered design. His latest book,Forever Employable, was published in June 2020.

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How to Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career

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When I graduated from college in 1995, the last thing I imagined being was a manager in UX design, which was a relatively young field where we ensured the customers and users of our websites, apps, and software could easily use and enjoy these services.

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Joe Ricotta -  Yoga can fix your Bad Body Posture at home | Euroweekly

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Joe Ricotta -  Yoga can fix your Bad Body Posture at home | Euroweekly

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We are all guilty of neglecting our posture when concentrating on our cellphones or working long hours. Poor posture and slouching pose major health risks. And by addressing your posture concerns, they can be prevented.

"Young people reporting back, shoulder, and neck discomfort are becoming more prevalent every day. It's critical to unwind these stressed-out muscles, according to Joe Ricotta. Yoga may be used to rectify certain postures:

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Start now as it's never too late to take up yoga

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Children can start at age five and some will enjoy it so much they continue through adulthood, and then as senior citizens for as long as their bodies and health permit. But what about those no longer...

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kpop and korean entertainment discussions

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Dumbbells are a popular and effective tool for strength training and exercise. They're versatile, easy to use, and come in various weights and sizes, making them suitable for people of all ages and fitness levels.

You can get a full-body workout with a set of dumbbells or use them as I do: as an accessory to the main barbell lifts. I love doing Arnold shoulder presses and bicep curls with dumbbells.

But while doing some of those curls the other day, I got to wondering: "Why are dumbbells called dumbbells?"

I mean, it's kind of a weird name when you think about it.

I decided to investigate.

The Ur-Dumbbell: The Ancient Greek Haltere

Not only did the ancient Greeks give us democracy and virtue ethics, but they also bequeathed us the forerunner of what would become the modern dumbbell. Soldiers and athletes would train with various weighted implements to get stronger. One of these strength-training tools was the

The haltere varied in shape throughout antiquity but most commonly took the form of a semicircle with a hole in it; users would place their fingers through the hole to grip this piece of handheld exercise equipment. Halteres were typically constructed from stone and metal but were also made with wood and wax; athletes would add lead to these wooden and waxen halteres to increase their weight.

Halteres were used similarly to how we use modern dumbbells. Athletes would hold the weights while performing curls, lunges, and deadlifts. They'd also swing them around the way you would an Indian club.

Halteres were used for training in the long jump as well. Athletes would hold the weights in their hands and jump with them to build up power and strength in their legs. They'd also use halteres to jump further. As they jumped, they'd swing the halteres forward to help propel their momentum and then swing the weights backward, letting them go just before landing.

The Romans copied the Greeks and used halteres to train their athletes and warriors. The Greek physician Galen recommended soldiers utilize halteres to get stronger.

During the Renaissance, ancient Greek and Roman training methods saw a revitalization. Health books of the period forwarded Galen's recommendations for using weighted implements for exercise, and the haltere found its way back into Western culture. The most important Renaissance book that promoted strength training with halteres was Mercurialis' De Arte Gymnastica Aput Ancientes. Along with training regimens inspired by Hellenistic culture, the book contains elaborate illustrations of jacked Greeks and Romans hoisting things, including halteres to get stronger. But the halteres that Mercurialis depicted looked different from the oblong semicircles that actual Greeks and Romans used. Instead, they looked like two cones stuck together at their heads, forming a rod in the middle you could grasp.

They looked like modern-day dumbbells.

Dumbbells Become Dumbbells

Thanks to Mercurialis' De Arte Gymnastica, by the 18th century, training with handheld weights became a common and accepted form of physical exercise. But when did the haltere start being called a dumbbell, and why was it called that?

Jan Todd, a professor of exercise history, has scoured the historical record on these questions and couldn't come to a definitive answer.

But what she uncovered offers clues about how the haltere became the dumbbell.

In 1711, the British poet and essayist Joseph Addison wrote this in his popular magazine, The Spectator :

When I was some years younger than I am at present, I used to employ myself in a more laborious diversion...it is there called...the fighting with a man's own shadow; and consists in the brandishing of two short sticks, grasped in each hand, and loaded with plugs of lead at either end. This opens the chest, exercises the limbs and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing, without the blows.

It sounds like Addison was shadowboxing using handheld weights that resemble what we know as dumbbells. But in that essay, he never used "dumbbell" to refer to his hand weights.

However, when describing another of his exercise routines in a different essay in the same issue of the magazine, he does use the phrase "dumb bell":

For my own part, when I am in town, I exercise myself an hour every morning upon a dumb bell that is placed in a corner of my room, and [it] pleases me the more because it does everything I require of it in most profound silence. My landlady and her daughters are so well acquainted with my hours of exercise, that they never come into my room to disturb me whilst I am ringing.

When Addison says he was exercising himself upon a "dumb bell," he was likely referring to a piece of equipment that included four arms with lead balls on their ends. The apparatus was installed a level above the one on which it would be used. A rope attached to the device ran through the floor to where the user stood below. He would pull the rope up and down, turning the apparatus' weighted arms like a flywheel. This rope-pulling movement resembled that used to ring a big bell (like a church bell), though this "ringing" did not, of course, result in any sound. Hence, the device was called a "dumb bell" - "dumb" as in "doesn't make a noise."

So why did the name "dumb bell" get transferred from this piece of 18th-century exercise equipment to haltere-esque handheld weights?

Perhaps it was because the arms on the dumb-bell apparatus kind of resemble the dumbbells we know today.

Or maybe readers of Addison's magazine conflated the two articles he wrote together and started thinking of the handheld weights he referenced as "dumb bells" too.

The world may never know.

While there isn't a definitive answer as to when and why handheld weights became known as dumbbells, it's clear that by the end of the 18th century, they were regularly being called such (the term "barbell" wouldn't arrive on the scene for another century).

It's also clear that dumbbells have a health-enhancing, strength-improving track record that stretches from antiquity through the present day.

Long may they continue to be hoisted.

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Dumbbells are a popular and effective tool for strength training and exercise. They're versatile, easy to use, and come in various weights and sizes, making them suitable for people of all ages and fitness levels. You can get a full-body workout with a set of dumbbells or use them as I do: as an accessory [...]

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No One Cares About Your Dreams—Unless You’re a Famous Writer

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No One Cares About Your Dreams—Unless You’re a Famous Writer

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It's true: no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams. It's unfair, of course, because pretty much everyone loves to describe their dreams-even if they're too polite to do so most of the time. (Is this a flaw of evolution?) That said, it's certainly fair to say that the dreams of some are more interesting than the dreams of others, and the dreams of artists (in this case writers, because hey, look around) fall into that former camp. After stumbling upon Katherine Mansfield describing the dream she had about a "very shabby" Oscar Wilde, I wondered what else my favorite authors spent their sleeping hours dreaming about. Some of them chronicled their dreams in journals-others, less polite, wrote about them at length in letters to their friends.

Katherine Mansfield dreams of Oscar Wilde:

In a café, Gertler met me. "Katherine you must come to my table. I've got Oscar Wilde there. He's the most marvelous man I ever met. He's splendid!" Gertler was flushed. When he spoke of Wilde he began to cry-tears hung on his lashes but he smiled.

Oscar Wilde was very shabby. He wore a green overcoat. He kept tossing & tossing back his long greasy hair with the whitest hand. When he met me he said, "Oh Katherine!"-very affected. But I did find him a fascinating talker. So much so I asked him to come to my home. He said would 12.30 tonight do? When I arrived home it seemed madness to have asked him. Father & Mother were in bed. What if Father came down & found that chap Wilde in one of the chintz armchairs? Too late now. I waited by the door. He came with Lady Ottoline. I saw he was disgustingly pleased to have brought her. Dear Lady Ottoline & Ottoline in a red hat on her rust hair " hounyhming" along. He said "Katherine's hand-the same gentle hand!" as he took mine. But again when we sat down-I couldn't help it. He was attractive-as a curiosity. He was fatuous & brilliant!

"You know Katherine when I was in that dreadful place I was haunted by the memory of a cake. It used to float in the air before me-a little delicate thing stuffed with cream and with the cream there was something scarlet. It was made of pastry and I used to call it my little Arabian Nights cake. But I couldn't remember it by name. Oh, Katherine it was torture. It used to hang in the air and smile at me, and every time I resolved that next time they let some one come and see me I would ask them to tell me what it was but every time, Katherine, I was ashamed. Even now ... "

I said "milles feuilles à la creme?" At that he turned round in the armchair and began to sob, and Ottoline who carried a parasol opened it and put it over him . . .

From a November 1920 letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, published in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield and reprinted in The Paris Review.

Vladimir Nabokov dreams of seeking butterflies with a spoon:

23 NOV 1964, 6:45 A.M.: End of a long "butterfly" dream which started after I had fallen asleep following upon a sterile awakening at 6:15 A.M. Have arrived (by funicular?) at a collecting ground of timberland (in Switzerland? in Spain?), but in order to get to it have to cross the hall of a large gay hotel. Very spry and thin, dressed in white, skip down the steps on the other side and find myself on the marshy border of a lake. Lots of bog flowers, rich soil, colorful, sunny, but not one single butterfly (familiar sensation in dream). Instead of a net, am carrying a huge spoon-cannot understand how I managed to forget my net and bring this thing-wonder how I shall catch anything with it. Notice a kind of letter box open on the right side, full of butterflies somebody has collected and left there. One is alive-a marvelous aberration of the Green Fritillary, with unusually elongated wings, the green all fused together and the brown of an extraordinary variegated hue. It eyes me in conscious agony as I try to kill it by pinching its thick thorax-very tenacious of life. Finally slip it into a morocco case-old, red, zippered. Then realize that all the time a man camouflaged in some way is seated next to me, to the left, in front of the receptacle in which the butterflies are, and prepares a slide for the microscope. We converse in English. He is the owner of the butterflies. I am very much embarrassed. Offer to return to the Fritillary. He declines with polite halfheartedness.

From Vladimir Nabokov's private papers, as published in The New Yorker.

Ernest Hemingway dreams of war:

I have bad dreams every night about this retreat. Really awful ones in the greatest detail. It is strange because I never had any ever in Spain about anything that happened. Only the always recurring one about getting out of the trucks and having to attack without knowing where the objectives were and no one to explain the positions. Last night I was caught in this retreat again in the goddamndest detail. I really must have a hell of an imagination. That's why should always make up stories- not try to remember what happened.

From a 1936 letter to Max Perkins, published in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961.

I usually dream about whatever am doing at the time or what I have read in the paper; i.e. run into grizzly with wrong caliber shells for rifle; trigger spring sometimes broken, etc. when shooting; sometimes shoot very large animal of some kind I've never seen; or very detailed fighting around Madrid, house to house fighting, etc., after the paper; or even find myself in bed with Mrs. S . . . (not too good). Have had lovely experiences with Miss Dietrich, Miss Garbo and others in dreams too, they always being awfully nice (in dreams).

From a 1938 letter to Eugene Jolas, published in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961.

Sylvia Plath dreams of matching children:

Dreamed last night of being a matron with seven daughters, like dolls, whom I was to dress in party dresses all graded rose-colors, yet I found blue and purple dresses among the yellow and pink. Great confusion. Have they their gloves, their pocketmoney in their pocketbooks. One daughter was large, blond, freckled, Adren Tapley, only how changed from her innocent youth. Dreamt also George Starbuck had a book of poems published by Houghton Mifflin, a spectacular book, full of fat substantial poems I hadn't seen, called "Music Man." The endpapers were decorated as in a children's book, ducks, colored Jack Horners, etc. He also send an envelope full of profound jottings on scraps of paper: To my dear friends. Zany epigrams and the like.

From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, in an entry dated May 18th.

. . . and of being published in The New Yorker:

Dreamt one dream I remember, as apposite and ironical to this morning's mail. Read J.D. Salinger's long "Seymour: An Introduction" last night and today, put off at first by the rant at the beginning about Kafka, Kierkegaard, etc., but increasingly enchanted. Dreamed, oh how amusedly, that I picked up a New Yorker, opened to about the third story (not in the back, this was important, but with a whole front page, on the right, to itself) and read "This Earth - - - That House, That Hospital" in the deeply endearing New Yorker-heading type, rather like painstakingly inked hand-lettering. Felt a heart palpitation (my sleep becomes such a reasonable facsimile of my waking life) and thought "That's my title, or a corruption of it." And of course, it is: an alteration of "This Earth Our Hospital" and either a very good or an abominable variation of it. Read on: my own prose: only it was the "Sweetie Pie" story, the back-yard tale, with the would-be Salinger child in it. Beuscher congratulating me. Mother turning away, saying: "I don't know, I just can't seem to feel anything about it at all." Which shows, I think, that RB has become my mother. Felt radiant, a New Yorker glow lighting my face. Precisely analogous to that young British Society girl Susan who, after being deflowered in a canoe house, asks her handsome young deflowerer: Don't I look Different? Oh, I looked different. A pale, affluent numbus emanating from my generally podgy and dough-colored face.

From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, in an entry dated June 6th.
Saul Bellow dreams of Tolstoy (and also his own penis, of course):
Dream I: I identify Tolstoy as the driver of a beat-up white van on the expressway. I ask the old guy at the wheel of this crumbling van what he can do to keep his flapping door from banging against the finish of my car. When he leans over to the right I see that he is none other than Leo Tolstoy, beard and all. He invites me to follow him off the expressway to a tavern and he says, "I want you to have this jar of pickled herring." He adds, "I knew your bother." At the mention of my late brother I burst into tears.

Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc.

Dream III: I find myself in a library filled with unknown masterpieces by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and others. Titles I have never seen mentioned anywhere. In shock and joy I open a volume by Conrad and read several pages sentence after sentence after sentence in the old boy's best style, more brilliant than ever. "WHy in hell was I never told about this?" I ask. Certain parties have been holding out on us. I am indignant.

From a letter to Martin Amis, dated December 30th, 1990.
Kurt Vonnegut dreams of murder:
So I am embarrassed about the failure of my first marriage. I am embarrassed by my older relatives' responses to my books. But I was embarrassed before I was married or had written a book. A bad dream I have dreamed for as long as I can remember may hold a clue. In that dream, I know that I have murdered an old woman a long time ago. I have led an exemplary life ever since. But now the police have come to get me, with incontrovertible evidence of my crime. This is more or less the plot of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, of course. By coincidence, Dostoevsky and I have the same birthday, too.

From "Embarrassment," as published in Vonnegut's Palm Sunday.
Emily Dickinson dreams of bees:
Happiness is haleness. I dreamed last night I heard bees fight for pond-lily stamens, and waked with a fly in my room.

From a letter to "the Misses" (her cousins), 1864.
Anaïs Nin dreams of perfect sensual and emotional harmony:
Dream: I am helping someone with her manuscript. The pages are in disorder, and she is distracted and confused. I finally organize them. I give them to her and say: "Now they are organized. There is a continuity." She takes the manuscript and runs into the open country. She is playfully wrestling with a man, and the pages are scattered. I feel that she is happy and that it does not matter, but when we begin to look for the manuscript, we can't find it. I am on a bicycle. She and the man are waiting for a bus. I am afraid I won't find my way back. The man gives me directions. I was also about to teach school. I was nervous and unprepared. I finally decided I didn't want to be tied down. The man (principal) was very well equipped. The mood of dream was of fogginess and effort to clarify. I was nursing someone. The same woman whose manuscript I worked on. Everything was gray.

Dream last night: The son of Gonzalo comes and we are in a perfect sensual and emotional harmony. I feel joy and fulfillment. We are one. But when I mention Gonzalo he is hostile and says: "My father was a slob." I am shocked. I have the same feeling as when I defend the hippies, a guitar player a welfare woman called a bum at the Rank Society meeting.

From an entry in The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 7 marked Winter 1972-1973.
Susan Sontag dreams of bad husbands and bad students:
Two dreams last night

-a man (my husband-mad?) trying to kill himself-opening the pipes-flooding the house (concrete blocks)-I escape with the child to the hill above-he follows, tricks me, takes the child down where they both die.

-a student denounces me (about [ blank], etc.) in class. (Mr. Mall Wall?) I can't understand why he hates me so. No one in the class supports me. It starts when he is playing the harmonica (very beautifully)-I begin talking, tell him to stop, but he doesn't. I get angry + go + take it away from him. Return to front of the class. He takes out another harmonica. I tell him I will fail him. Then he speaks.

In the other class (C[olumbia] C[ollege]) there is a riot, too. I'm saying something mildly critical about America-suddenly all the students take out small square sheets of paper + set fire to them. (It's a small auditorium.) There is perfect silence. I stop. Then I realize it's a declaration, a signal, a hex. They're all (four-fifths, I say later) members of a student fascist organization. I'm condemned.

Rest of the dream spent waiting in offices to see a dean, to explain. I find Friess. Then he turns into an old woman-he's (she's) busy, has to go home, but accompanies me, while I wait. I explain how surprised I am. In all the years I've been teaching nothing like this has ever happened-then two on the same day. I decide I will admit to ---when I was 16, but nothing more.

From Sontag's Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, in an entry dated March 26, 1963.
Zora Neale Hurston dreams of the actual future:
Last night, I had something between a dream and a vision in which you were with me and you were very playful, happy and affectionate as you were in our salad days. The dread prohibition to love you was removed, and I was excruciating happy as I used to be whenever you came in sight. This last sentence brings me to a matter which I do not think I have ever mentioned to you. That is, that I am the subject of the as yet unexplainable to psychiatrists, recurrent dreams. I keep mum about it because I fear people might look on me as being "tetched in the head." However, science knows about this phenomena, but has found no explanation, since no basis can be found in past experience, memory, etc. but evolves on future happenings which never fail to come. They usually begin in early childhood, and cease when the thing dreamed of comes to pass, often far into adulthood.

Mine, a series of about a dozen scenes began when I was around six or seven, and all have come and passed except the last where I see myself approaching a huge building in two parts. I am expected, and there are a great many people about. There appear to be shops on the first floor of one part of the building, which is of stone. A series of rooms upstairs that might be classrooms or offices with many people in them. A dining room. There is a sort of passage with stairs that lead to the other building, and that I cannot see as yet. I keep trying to find the way there, where some pleasant experience waits for me, but somehow I get mixed up about the stairs and the passage. There is a railroad with a junction somewhere near at hand. The entire scene indicates that I am reaching some much-desired goal. But on the way to this big establishment, there is a body of water, not very large, and lying in a deep basin like a lagoon. I walk around it and come to the railroad, and in some mysterious way I am at the building. [in left margin:] I was not allowed to see details of the first building until recently.

Now, in last night's dream, for the first time, you met me near the water, and we ran up the hill playing and very happy. Then you lifted me and carried me part of the way to the building where all the people were and we mingled with them. Then you said that you had a pain in your side low down as in your pelvic region and we walked along hand in hand and very happy.
From a letter to Herbert Sheen, dated January 7, 1955.
Iris Murdoch dreams her friends are philosophers:
PS I had a dream last nigh in which you were Socrates. I've never made this identification before, but it seems a good one. (Of course you are much handsomer.) In the dream you looked like yourself except for having white hair. You made a very good Socrates.

From a 1966 letter to Elisa Canetti, published in Living on Paper.
Charles Simic dreams of high notes and low behavior:
As for me, in a lifetime of unexceptional and forgettable dreams, a few stand out. For example, many years ago I dreamt that I was on stage during the performance of the opera Aida about to sing the famous aria "Celeste Aida" in which Radames, the young Egyptian warrior, voices his hope for victory in a coming battle and proclaims his love for Aida, the Ethiopian slave. I wear some kind of helmet that is about to slide down and cover my eyes, hold a lance in my hand, and worry about what will happen next, because although I know the melody, I can remember only the opening words and figure that I'll have to fake the rest by making up words that sound Italian. I do that, but I now have another fear, a high note that awaits me toward the end of the aria that I'm sure I won't be able to hit-so to avoid it, I sing the opening over and over again like an old LP record that's skipping. Thankfully, I awoke and in due course became aware that I was lying in bed in a motel just outside Buffalo, New York.

In another dream, one that remains vivid to me down to its every detail, I'm Stalin's secretary, or more likely some kind of foot servant, who walks behind him in the Kremlin with adoring countenance as the dictator goes around meeting various officials, perfectly aware that he is a man who has already killed millions and striving with my every expression and gesture to avoid their fate. Even in the dream my slavish behavior appalled me. I woke up thoroughly ashamed of myself. Is this some kind of prophecy? I found myself worrying. As my fellow Serbs say, inside each one of us lurks a turd. Had I been reading a book about Stalin and Soviet Russia at the time? Not that I remember. What made the dream so odd that I even wrote down the date is that both its setting and my behavior didn't seem to have an immediate cause.

From "Dreams I've Had (And Some I Haven't)," originally published in the NYR Daily.
Philip K. Dick dreams of mysterious books that call to him:
July 5, 1974

Dear Claudia,

Since I last wrote you . . . I have continued to have the same dream again and again which I mentioned: a vast and important book held up before me which I should read. Yesterday, for example, since Tessa and Christopher had gone off on a picnic, I took several naps and had four dreams in which printed matter appeared, two of them involving books.

For three months, virtually every night, I've had these dreams involving written material. And within the last few days it became obvious that a specific book was indicated. That the ultimate purpose of these dreams was to call my attention to an actual book somewhere in the real world, which I was to find, then take down and read.

The first dream on July 4 was much more explicit than any before; I took down my copy of Robert Heinlein's I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, a large blue hardback U.K. edition, for two men to look at. Both men said this was not a book (or the book) they were interested in. However, it was clear that the book wanted was large and blue and hardback.

In a dream a month ago I managed to see part of the title; it ended with the word "Grove." At the time I thought it might be Proust's WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, but it was not; however, there was a long word similar to "Budding" before "Grove."

So I knew by the first part of the day yesterday that I was looking for a large blue hardback book -very large and long, according to some dreams, endlessly long, in fact- with the final word of the title being "Grove" and a word before it like "Budding."

In the last of the four dreams yesterday I caught sight of the copyright date on the book and another look at the typestyle. It was dated either 1966 or possibly 1968 (the latter proved to be the case). So I began studying all the books in my library which might fit these qualifications. I had the keen intuition that when I at last found it I would have in my hands a mystic or occult or religious book of wisdom which would be a doorway to the absolute reality behind the whole universe.

Of course the possibility existed that I didn't have the book in my library, that I would have to go out and buy it. In several dreams I was in a bookstore doing just that. One time the book was help open before me with its pages singed by fire on all sides. By that I took it to be an extremely sacred book, perhaps the one seen in the Book of Daniel.

Anyhow today I looked all day around the house, since Tessa has been sick with a sunburn, and all at once I found the book. The three month search is at last over.

As soon as I took down the volume I knew it was to be the right one. I had seen it again and again, with ever increasing clarity, until it could not be mistaken.

The book is called THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE, hardback and blue, running just under 700 huge long pages of tiny type. It was published in 1968. It is the dullest book in the world; I tried to read it when the Book Find Book Club sent it to me but couldn't.

It is a biography of Warren G. Harding.

Cordially,

Phil Dick

P.S. This is on a level, and it goes to show you that you should never take your dreams too seriously. Or else it shows that the unconscious or the universe or God or whatever can put you on. A three-month gag. (If you want to read the book I'll mail it to you. Postage should be enormous. You got three years ahead in which you have nothing planned?)

From a letter to Claudia Bush, as published in Letters of Note.

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No One Cares About Your Dreams-Unless You're a Famous Writer

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It's true: no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams. It's unfair, of course, because pretty much everyone loves to describe their dreams-even if they're too polite to do so most of the time. (Is this a flaw of evolution?)

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Highest-Paid Athletes of All Time: Michael Jordan Leads Star-Studded List

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Highest-Paid Athletes of All Time: Michael Jordan Leads Star-Studded List

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Last month, LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA's all-time leading scorer. It marked another notch in his resume in the ongoing debate on whether he or Michael Jordan is the league's G.O.A.T.

But on the financial scoreboard, MJ is still the clear champ-and the gap is growing.

Since he was drafted in 1984, Jordan has earned an estimated $3.3 billion when adjusted for inflation, more than any other athlete in the history of sports; the tally is $2.37 billion unadjusted. James ranks sixth overall at $1.53 billion after factoring inflation-he is fourth on a nominal level at $1.23 billion, by Sportico's count. (Click here for the full list of 50.)

James was the world's highest-paid athlete in 2022 after bringing in $127 million, but that list only reflects active athletes. Jordan out-earned all of them with an estimated $180 million, almost entirely from Nike.

The Nike-Jordan partnership was born in 1984 and helped turn the Swoosh from a barely profitable enterprise with $920 million in revenue, to a $49 billion sportswear giant with a market value of $187 billion. Jordan has grossed roughly $1.8 billion from Nike, not factoring inflation, since that first contract, negotiated by David Falk for $500,000 a year plus royalties. It represents 75% of MJ's career earnings, and the annual check has ballooned with the growth of the brand over the past decade. Jordan also has maintained endorsement relationships in retirement with Gatorade, Hanes, Upper Deck and 2K Sports.

Interest in the Nike-Jordan origin story is such that four decades later-and 20 years after Jordan put away his high tops for good-it has been retold in a feature-length film called that will reach theaters in April. Ben Affleck stars as Nike co-founder Phil Knight, while Matt Damon is Sonny Vaccaro, a legend in the basketball sneaker game and the person who recruited a reluctant MJ to Nike.

"The deal was a gamechanger for Nike and sports in general," Henry Schafer, an executive at the Q Scores Company, said in a phone interview. "It opened up doors for athletes to generate significant income and brought to life the value of celebrity endorsers. Jordan was a trendsetter."

Schafer's polling shows 20% of Americans six and older still tab MJ as one of their favorite personalities, producing a Q Score of 26, tied for No. 1 among all athletes. Only Tiger Woods has a higher awareness level than Jordan's 77%, but Woods' negative ratings push his Q Score to a below-average 10.

The Jordan Brand is a separate division of Nike and generated $5.1 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending May 2022. It was a 7% increase compared to 2021, versus 1% growth for the company overall. Jordan sales are up 79% over the past four years.

Jordan is the only former player to become the majority owner of an NBA franchise, a path that James and Kevin Durant have both said they want to follow. In addition to the Hornets, MJ has also built up his equity portfolio with stakes in his 23XI Racing team, Cincoro tequila, eponymous steak houses and companies such as DraftKings, Sportradar and Dapper Labs. Jordan's net worth is $1.7 billion, according to Forbes.

Like Jordan, LeBron has maximized his off-court game to join the three-comma club. James has made roughly $415 million in player salary over 20 NBA seasons, but he has been the league's highest-paid player only once during that time. Jordan had the top salary only twice and made a combined $90 million during 15 seasons. His NBA salaries represent 4% of his career earnings.

James shills for a deep roster of companies, including Nike, AT&T, GMC and PepsiCo, but his net worth has also soared with his investments. He and longtime business manager Maverick Carter built SpringHill Company-which includes production company SpringHill Entertainment, media platform Uninterrupted and brand consultancy Robot-into a thriving business that enticed a consortium led by RedBird Capital Partners to buy a minority stake in 2021 at a $725 million valuation. The four-time NBA MVP holds stakes in Calm, Blaze Pizza, Ladder/Openfit, Lobos 1707 tequila and Fenway Sports Group.

Jordan and James lead a group of 13 NBA players in the top 50 earners of all time, more than any sport. Basketball players benefit from skyrocketing salaries and rich sneaker deals that dwarf what an NFL or MLB player can earn.

Eight golfers landed in the top 50, including the three athletes ranked directly behind Jordan: Woods ($2.5 billion inflation-adjusted), Arnold Palmer ($1.7 billion) and Jack Nicklaus ($1.63 billion). Golfers benefit from decades-long careers, and the sport's biggest stars remain popular pitchmen long after their biggest victories. Palmer was earning nearly $40 million a year from endorsements and licensing his name when he died in 2016 at 87 years old. It was 43 years after his last PGA Tour winand 28 years from his final title on the PGA Tour Champions, formerly Senior PGA Tour.

Another advantage for elite golfers: diverse revenue streams, including prize money, endorsements, appearance fees and course design work. Nicklaus Design has been the architect for 425 courses around the world.

Boxing landed seven entries, thanks to the massive pay-per-view scores for the sport's biggest attractions. Floyd Mayweather ($1.41 billion) claimed the top spot for boxers in large part because he kept a bigger slice of the pie as both promotor and fighter for his bouts during the second half of his career. Racing-including F1, NASCAR, and MotoGP-landed six athletes, led by Michael Schumacher at No. 11 with $1.31 billion.

All together, the Top 50 have earned a combined $45.9 billion when adjusted for inflation and $33.2 billion on a nominal basis. They represent nine different sports and 17 countries. Americans make up 62% of the list.

Fifteen athletes have reached $1 billion on an inflation-adjusted basis, with Greg Norman at $1 billion even. The Shark's business empire involved apparel, wine, restaurants, turf, course design and more, before he became CEO of LIV Golf. Eight athletes earned 10-figures without adjusting for inflation. The latest is Phil Mickelson, who hit the mark after his reported $200 million signing bonus for joining LIV.

Serena Williams is the only woman to make the cut, coming in at No. 38 and $600 million in 2023 dollars. The recently retired 23-time Grand Slam champion is the WTA's all-time prize money leader with $95 million but has earned the bulk of her income off the court through dozens of endorsements deals, including those with Nike, AT&T, Beats, Ford Motor, Gatorade and Subway. Not included in the estimate are earnings from Serena Ventures, which she founded in 2014 and which has made more than 60 investments. Williams ranked second among the world's highest-paid female athletes last year at $35 million, behind Naomi Osaka ($53 million).

Methodology

Our earnings estimates are based on conversations with industry insiders, Sportico research and historical estimates in media outlets, such as Forbes and Sports Illustrated.

Earnings include salaries, bonuses, prize money, purses, endorsements, licensing, royalties, memorabilia, book deals, media, appearances and golf course design fees. We included cash earned from equity stakes in sponsor companies, like James' stake in Beats Electronics, Durant's share of Postmates and James Harden's piece of BodyArmor. We did not factor in traditional investment income.

Sportico included earnings during playing careers and retirement through 2022 and adjusted them for inflation. Earnings are calculated up until the time of death for Palmer and Kobe Bryant. All earnings are pre-tax and before any fees for agents and lawyers.

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Highest-Paid Athletes of All Time: Michael Jordan Leads Star-Studded List

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Last month, LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA's all-time leading scorer. It marked another notch in his resume in the ongoing debate on whether he or Michael Jordan is the league's G.O.A.T. But on the financial scoreboard, MJ is still the clear champ-and the gap is growing.

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Talking about the real estate developer in London. One cannot ignore the name of “Joe Ricotta”. He is a Real Estate Developer deals in properties based in London, UK. He has numerous clients across the nation who have dealt with him in buying or selling properties along with satisfactory work.

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Talking about the real estate developer in London. One cannot ignore the name of "Joe Ricotta". He is a Real Estate Developer deals in properties based in London, UK. He has numerous clients across the nation who have dealt with him in buying or selling properties along with satisfactory work. Read Here :

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"Joe Ricotta" - Talking about the real estate developer in London. One cannot ignore the name of "Joe Ricotta". He is a Real Estate Developer deals in properties based in London, UK. He has numerous clients across the nation who have dealt with him in buying or selling properties along with satisfactory work.

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e27 - Connecting you to Asia's Startup and Tech Ecosystem

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 Is this normal? California is facing its 12th atmospheric river this winter following a historic drought 

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 Is this normal? California is facing its 12th atmospheric river this winter following a historic drought 

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Is this normal? California is facing its 12th atmospheric river this winter following a historic drought | CNN

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California is bracing for yet another powerful, atmospheric river storm this week, continuing the onslaught of major weather whiplash after a yearslong, historic megadrought. Many welcomed this winter's heavy rain and snow since it was so desperately needed to replenish the state's severely drained reservoirs and depleted groundwater.

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At light speed, Einstein’s equations break down and nothing makes sense

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At light speed, Einstein’s equations break down and nothing makes sense

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At light speed, Einstein's equations break down and nothing makes sense

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Einstein's theory of special relativity predicts some crazy phenomena, none more nonintuitive than the idea that moving clocks tick more slowly than stationary ones. As clocks approach the speed of light, they tick ever more slowly, getting closer and closer to not ticking at all.

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"Joe Ricotta" in the UK. By establishing buildings and other structures and dividing land into sections, he produces real estate for sale. Joe Ricotta undoubtedly is aware of the requirements that must be fulfilled in full before beginning a project, as do all developers.

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"Joe Ricotta" - Mirror by James Dwell on The Dots.

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All the types of stars in the universe, explained

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All the types of stars in the universe, explained

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On a clear, moonless night, you might be able to see thousands of stars sparkling like jewels above. But a keen eye will notice that they don't all look alike. Some glow brighter than others, and some display warm red hues.

In the beginning...

All stars form from a cloud of dust and gas when turbulence pushes enough of that material together, pressed into one body by gravity. As that clump collapses in on itself, it starts to spin. The material in the middle heats up, forming a dense core known as a protostar. Gravity draws even more material toward the developing star as it spins, making it bigger and bigger. Some of that stuff may eventually form planets, asteroids, and comets in orbit around the new star.

The stellar body remains in the protostar phase as long as material still collapses inward and the object can grow. This process can take hundreds of thousands of years.

The amount of mass that is gathered during that stellar formation process determines the ultimate trajectory of the star's life-and what types of stars it will become throughout its existence.

Protostars, baby stars-and failures

As a protostar amasses more and more gas and dust, its spinning core gets hotter and hotter. Once it accumulates enough mass and reaches millions of degrees, nuclear fusion begins in the core. A star is born.

For this to occur, a protostar has to accumulate more than 0.08 times the mass of our sun. Anything less and there won't be enough gravitational pressure on the protostar to trigger nuclear fusion.

Those failed stars are called brown dwarfs, and they remain in that state for their lifetime, progressively cooling down without nuclear fusion to help release new energy. Despite their name, brown dwarfs can be orange, red, or black due to their cool temperatures. They tend to be slightly larger than Jupiter, but are much more dense.

Protostars that do acquire enough mass to become a star sometimes go through an interim phase. During a roughly 10 million-year period, these young stars collapse under the pressure of gravity, which heats up their cores and sets off nuclear fusion.

In this stage, a star can fall into two categories: If it has a mass two times that of our sun, it is considered a T Tauri star. If it has two to eight solar masses, it's a Herbig Ae/Be star. The most massive stars skip this early stage, because they contract too quickly.

Once a sufficiently massive star begins to undergo nuclear fusion, a balancing act begins. Gravity still exerts an inward force on the newborn star, but nuclear fusion releases outward energy. For as long as those forces balance each other out, the star exists in its main sequence stage.

Fueling main sequence stars

Main sequence stars, which can last for millions to billions of years, are the vast majority of stars in the universe-and what we can see unaided on dark, clear nights. These stars burn hydrogen gas as fuel for nuclear fusion. Under the super-hot conditions in the core of a star, colliding hydrogen fuses, generating energy. This process produces the chemical ingredients for a reaction that makes helium.

Mass dictates what type of star an object will be during the main sequence stage. The more mass a star has, the stronger the force of gravity pushing inward on the core and therefore the hotter the star gets. With more heat, there is faster fusion and that generates more outward pressure against the inward gravitational force. That makes the star appear brighter, bigger, hotter, and bluer.
[Related: The Milky Way's oldest star is a white-hot pyre of dead planets]
Many main sequence stars are also often referred to as "dwarf" stars. They can range greatly in luminosity, color, and size, from a tenth to 200 times the sun's mass. The biggest stars are blue stars, and they are particularly hot and bright. In the middle are yellow stars, which includes our sun. Somewhat smaller are orange stars, and the smallest, coolest stars are red stars.

The hottest stars are O stars, with surface temperatures over 25,000 Kelvin. Then there are B stars (10,000 to 25,000K), A stars (7,500 to 10,000K), F stars (6,000 to 7,500K), G stars (5,000 to 6,000K-our sun, with a surface temperature around 5,800K is one of these), K stars (3,500 to 5,000K), and M stars (less than 3,500K).

Upsetting the balance to grow a giant star

As a star runs out of fuel, its core contracts and heats up even more. This makes the remaining hydrogen fuse even faster: It produces extra energy, which radiates outward and pushes more forcefully against the inward force of gravity, causing the outer layers of the star to expand.

As those layers spread out, they cool down, and that makes the star appear redder. The result is either a red giant or a red supergiant, depending on if it's a low mass star (less than 8 solar masses) or a high mass star (greater than 8 solar masses). This phase typically lasts up to around a billion years.

Appearing more orange than red, some red giants are visible to the naked eye, such as Gamma Crucis in the southern constellation Crux (aka the Southern Cross).

The death and afterlife of a low-mass star

Stars die in remarkably different ways, depending on their masses. For a low-mass star, once all the hydrogen is nearly gone, the core contracts even more, getting even hotter. It becomes so scorching that the star can even fuse helium-which, because it's an element heavier than hydrogen, requires more heat and pressure for nuclear fusion.

As a red giant burns through its helium, producing carbon and other elements, it becomes unstable and begins to pulsate. Its outer layers are ejected and blow away into the interstellar medium. Eventually, when all of these layers have been shed, all that remains is the small, hot, dense core. That bare remnant is called a white dwarf.
[Related: Wiggly space waves show neutron stars on the edge of becoming black holes]
About the size of Earth, though hundreds of thousands of times more massive, a white dwarf no longer produces new heat of its own. It gradually cools over billions of years, emitting light that appears anywhere from blue white to red. These dense stellar remnants are too dim to see with a naked eye, but some are visible with a telescope in the southern constellation Musca. Van Maanen's star, in the northern constellation Pisces, is also a white dwarf.

The explosive stellar death of a high-mass star

Stars with mass eight times that of our sun typically follow a similar pattern, at least in the beginning of this phase. As the star runs low on helium, it contracts and heats up, which allows it to convert the resulting carbon into oxygen. That process repeats itself with the oxygen, converting it to neon, then the neon into silicon, and finally into iron. When no fuel remains for this fusion sequence, and energy is no longer being released outward from those reactions, the inward force of gravity quickly wins.

Within a second, the outer layers of the star collapse inward. The core collapses and then rebounds, sending a shock wave through the rest of the star: a supernova.

Life after a supernova for a star takes one of two paths. If the star had between eight and 20 times the sun's mass during its main sequence stage, it will leave behind a superdense core called a neutron star. Neutron stars are even smaller in diameter than white dwarfs, at about the size of New York City's length, and contain more mass than our sun.

But for the most massive stars, that remnant core will continue collapsing under the pressure of its own gravity. The result is a black hole, which can be as small as an atom but contain the mass of a supermassive star.

One such example is a star in a binary or multi-star system that accretes mass from a companion. With all that extra mass to burn, it can seem younger than its true age, appearing bluer and brighter. That, Gosnell says, is called a blue straggler star, because it seems to be "straggling behind its expected evolution."

Another odd type of star is sub-subgiant, Gosnell says. These stars also are found in binary systems, and are transitioning from the main sequence to the red giant branch, though they stay dimmer. This kind of subgiant star has "really active magnetic fields with lots of star spots on the surface," she says. "And so you have these really magnetically active, visually dynamic stars as the star spots rotate in and out of view."

The ongoing ESA mission, she adds, is reviewing stars with a "much finer-toothed comb"-which may reveal the true variety and complexity of stars that have existed all along. As such missions "peel back the layers," Gosnell says, "We start to see really interesting stories come out that challenge the edges of these categories."

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Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths

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On a clear, moonless night, you might be able to see thousands of stars sparkling like jewels above. But a keen eye will notice that they don't all look alike. Some glow brighter than others, and some display warm red hues.

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Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer (UK/London) Joe Ricotta is Real Estate Developer, We deals in properties based in UK. For all type of properties buy/sell requirements please reach us at Joe Ricotta Real Estate Developer.
https://directory.mirror.co.uk/company/249547b0b5395a389ba77695ecb1358a

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Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer (UK/London) Joe Ricotta is Real Estate Developer, We deals in properties based in UK. For all type of properties buy/sell requirements please reach us at Joe Ricotta Real Estate Developer. https://directory.mirror.co.uk/company/249547b0b5395a389ba77695ecb1358a

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Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer (UK/London) Joe Ricotta is Real Estate Developer, We deals in properties based in UK. For all type of properties buy/sell requirements please reach us at Joe Ricotta Real Estate Developer.

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The Mysterious Deep Time Movements of Snails

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The Mysterious Deep Time Movements of Snails

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The Mysterious Deep Time Movements of Snails

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How do organisms that are so sedentary end up being so incredibly widely dispersed?

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 In Search of Lost Timeby Tom VanderbiltThe science of the perfect second 

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 In Search of Lost Timeby Tom VanderbiltThe science of the perfect second 

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When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the "time lady"-an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out-who would announce, with prim authority "at the tone," the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time. I would stare, transfixed, at the Foucault pendulum at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry as it swept slow traces through its day; or gawp at the patinaed green clock, topped by a scythe and hourglass-carrying temporal patriarch and marked with a single word-time-that adorned the Jewelers Building on East Wacker Drive. But nothing felt so immediate, so curiously satisfying, as having the exact time delivered through the intimacy of the phone's earpiece. Yet it left me with a gnawing inquiry: How does she know what time it is? I imagined that time emanated, like the Emergency Alert System, from some secure government facility, possibly underground.

I wasn't entirely wrong. This summer, after five decades of wondering what drove clock time, I found myself at the nation's temple of timekeeping: the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado. JILA (it rhymes with Willa) is a research institute operated by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a large and relatively little-known federal agency that plays a significant, if quiet, role in our everyday lives.

The night before my visit, I'd opened time.gov, the very official-looking page-headlined official u.s. time-run by NIST and the U.S. Naval Observatory. The site features a map of the United States, divided into time zones, as well as a variety of subsidiary clock displays (Chamorro Standard Time, Aleutian Standard Time) that ticked, at the second level, in seeming synchrony. I noticed that my own watch-the Garmin Forerunner 935, a "premium running watch," which generally gets its time from four of the thirty-one operational GPS satellites encircling the globe-looked to be a second behind. Why?

This was one of the first questions I put to Judah Levine, an eighty-two-year-old JILA physicist and one of "America's timekeepers." "The handheld guys are typically wrong by a second or a half-second," Levine said. "That's because the device's display is not fast enough." He said this with weary resignation. White-haired, with gold-rimmed glasses, wearing a blue flannel shirt, gray work pants, and sturdy black shoes, Levine reminded me of one of those somewhat cantankerous master craftsmen you still find in certain old quarters of Brooklyn. The shelves of his office were lined with physics textbooks, and an Oregon Scientific clock-which gets a radio signal from NIST-displayed the time in blocky liquid-crystal numbers.

In fairness to my watch, Levine explained that time.gov (which had informed me that the laptop I was using had strayed "+0.012 s") was itself off by a noticeable amount. "It takes a while for the signal to transfer across the network, which we don't control," he explained. The actual correct time was on display in a laboratory adjacent to Levine's office. It appeared as a string of red digits on a device that looked like a high-end stereo amplifier. This was a display of the official time, which is kept by a series of cesium fountain atomic clocks a few miles away, at NIST's Boulder campus, and sent via satellite to JILA. Here was the seat of temporal power, the nation's pulsing metronome. I watched the red LED seconds tick away, bathing in their implacable authority. It was then, however, that Levine introduced another complication. The time we were looking at might actually, a month from now, be deemed incorrect.

The official time of the United States is subordinate to what's known as UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, which, since the early Sixties, has been the world's official time standard. Realized and disseminated by the French Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), UTC is an aggregate of times gathered from the atomic clocks maintained by more than eighty national agencies across the globe. "UTC," noted Levine, "is calculated after the fact." This is done partly because it would be too costly, and too logistically complex, to keep the world's clocks ticking as one. But there was another reason, he continued: "Clocks often have misbehavior." Free-running clocks, those that are not frequently recalibrated, begin to subtly "drift," which can be hard to detect in real time. The advantage of having a "retrospective time scale," as Levine calls it, is being able to "look back and detect things that you could never detect in real time."

Levine was awaiting the official time data from the previous month, which comes to NIST and similar institutions via a BIPM publication called Circular T. When Levine and his colleagues receive the report, they discuss its implications, and they do not always agree. After a recent dispute-owing, Levine said, to statistical noise, or what he calls "jiggly wigglies"-they chose to recalibrate what's called UTC (NIST) so it would match where UTC was the previous month (or, more precisely, where it should have been in the present). Someone was dispatched to NIST room 2051, the clock room, to enter the correction.

When I suggested that Levine and his colleagues are not so much telling time as forecasting it, he nodded excitedly. "It is exactly forecasting!" This is particularly true given the emergence, a few years ago, of so-called rapid UTC, a weekly provisional dissemination of the world's official time (considered in retrospect) from the authorities in France. NIST, like other laboratories, uses that provisional time to make predictions of where the time will be in the future, but like any forecast, it comes with the risk of being imprecise. If I'd gone to Boulder expecting to find some unassailable master clock, surrounded by druidic time lords reverently conveying its results-the sacred source that had so captured my childhood imagination-what I found instead was rather disconcerting: Time, it would seem, is quite often out of joint.

In addition to keeping the national time, NIST helps maintain the International System of Units-meters, kilograms, and the like. Its headquarters occupies a sprawling sylvan campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland (as the story goes, it was moved from Washington in the Sixties to avoid being destroyed in a nuclear strike). The agency is difficult to categorize. Its workforce is filled with experimental and theoretical physicists, but it is technically part of the Department of Commerce. It is a purely advisory, not regulatory, body, and the standards it works on are not those you might imagine: NIST does not tell industry groups what the strength or the tolerance of their materials should be, it determines how the strength or tolerance of those materials should be measured. The agency's job, according to Katrice Lippa, the chief of NIST's Office of Weights and Measures, is to "publish the standard of how the inspectors are supposed to test devices." In other words, it orchestrates the metastandards.

NIST conducts metrology, the science of measurement. Scientists there measure everything from the blockchain to cloth face masks at a variety of scales. They possess both the world's smallest ruler-a silicon chip used in X-ray diffraction that is accurate to 0.000000000000001 meters-and the world's largest deadweight machine-a towering stack of fifty-thousand-pound stainless steel discs capable of generating up to a million pounds of force. If you need to know how granite holds up after a century you can go to the monumental wall at NIST, which is composed of 2,352 stones taken mostly from a nineteenth-century collection of quarry samples. Care to gawk at one of the world's last surviving original radium standards, a glass ampoule filled with 20.28 milligrams of radium chloride prepared by Marie Curie in 1913? NIST has it in the basement, encased in a steel bathtub, buried under lead bricks.

NIST is a sort of acropolis of the average, a Parnassus of the prototypical. Nowhere is this more evident than in its Standard Reference Materials (SRM) division. Picture a low-lit warehouse whose metal shelves are stocked with thousands of small jars whose sober labels announce contents like "New Jersey Soil Organics and Trace Elements," "Oyster Tissue," and "Domestic Sludge." Every measurable attribute of these materials has been endlessly scrutinized and calibrated, providing benchmarks for the testing of other things. Steven Choquette, the director of the Office of Reference Materials, calls them "truth in a bottle," a sample of which can fetch up to four hundred thousand dollars. Lately, Choquette says, the division has been focusing on biopharmaceuticals, and working on NIST's first SRM for a living material: a Chinese hamster ovary cell line. It is also busily developing "Human Whole Stool" (it's powdered).

For all these painstakingly curated artifacts, some of the most involved work at NIST goes into standardizing and calibrating things that are no longer things: the units of measurement themselves. The International System of Units-ultimately overseen by BIPM-consists of seven "base units." These are: the meter, the kilogram, the ampere, the candela, the mole, the kelvin, and the second. Until relatively recently, one of the most familiar of these units, the kilogram, was calibrated with reference to a physical object. For more than a century, the kilogram was realized by the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK), a platinum-iridium cylinder, nearly four centimeters tall, housed in a vault in France. For years, NIST researchers would carry kilogram prototypes overseas to compare them with the IPK. But transporting the kilogram to and fro risked wear and tear that could compromise its mass. In 2019, the kilogram became defined in terms of Planck's constant-a hard value derived from quantum mechanics-making it the last of the base units to surrender its physical artifact.

"We've dematerialized all of our units," said Leon Chao, a NIST researcher. "Now all of our measurements are derived from universal constants." During the dematerialization process, standards were democratized-there was no "one kilogram" in a vault in Paris-but the measurement devices themselves lost their intuitive connection to the things they were measuring. Kevin Chesnutwood, a mechanical engineer with NIST's Mass and Force Group who oversees the deadweight machine, told me that he used to tell schoolchildren on field trips, "Hey, we have this kilogram, and we take it to Paris every few years and compare it against the master." The dematerialized system is much more difficult for the students to grasp, so he tries not to focus on it. "I mean, hell, we can't even understand half of it," he joked.

Of all the units that NIST metrologists work on, only one has never had a physical artifact: the second. Listening to NIST scientists, one gets the sense that the second has also stood apart in other ways. Theoretically, "the physicists could argue there is only one fundamental unit," Chao told me, with a hint of tentativeness in his voice. "And I think that's time, or frequency."

Frequency, whose base unit is the hertz, could be understood to support all the other standards. "It's very fundamental," Darine El Haddad, a researcher in NIST's Quantum Measurement Division, said. "If you want to measure everything precisely, you have to measure in terms of frequency." The exact measurement of mass is aided by frequency but not vice versa. And there was one final thing, El Haddad told me: "It's the unit you can measure most precisely." There are clocks functioning at an uncertainty level that metrologists working with other units could only dream of.

In this world of metrology, which has left behind the dusty archives of physical things in favor of fundamental properties of the universe, it seems a kind of cosmic joke that this intangible, evanescent unit is the one that is understood most accurately. Even so, there is something amiss in the world of the second, the world of time. In a world of staggering exactitude, there are new timepieces on the horizon, capable of even more accuracy, clocks that are moving beyond mere measurement and opening new inquiries into time, into the universe itself. These machines have helped to drive a creeping suspicion that the second-that fundamental base unit upon which our temporal kingdom is built-despite all the synchronous activity of the world, despite the advent of clocks whose fidelity could theoretically outlast human civilization itself, is not being realized as exactly as it could be. Having come in search of the origin of time, I was learning that the very thing that drives it-the standard second-is flawed.

What makes a second a second? To the mind, a second is fleeting-by the time we pay attention to it, it's already gone. We know it tautologically: a second is a second because our clocks tell us it is (or, perhaps, like children, we count "one, one thousand," at a speed we inexactly deem to be second-like). If pressed, we intuit that it derives from some astronomical interval, which, indeed, it used to. For much of the twentieth century, the second was based on a nineteenth-century standard derived from astronomical calculations: 1/86,400 of a mean solar day. This may sound reassuringly simple and authoritative, but it's built on artifice. Because of Earth's tilt and elliptical orbit, the movement of the sun through the sky produces days of varying lengths. The mean solar day, to smooth out inconsistencies, is derived from the movement of an idealized, hypothetical sun. But this model is not optimal on account of the daily fluctuations in Earth's rotation.

In 1960, a new standard-the ephemeris second-was created, derived from Earth's annual orbit in the tropical year 1900. A tropical year is the length of time it takes Earth to orbit around the sun. Confusingly (like many things in the world of time), it is slightly longer than a calendar year. And if the year 1900 seems an odd choice for a standard made in 1960, it turns out that it's the first year charted in the influential 1898 book Tables of the Motion of the Earth on Its Axis and Around the Sun, written by the Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb.

The ephemeris second was less prone to variation, but it had one huge limitation: it could not be seen in action. "From the standpoint of practical metrology, it was a disaster," said Levine. "Okay, the second is defined based on the length of the year 1900-what am I supposed to do with that?" In 1967, at the thirteenth Conférence générale des poids et mesures, it was declared "inadequate for the present needs of metrology."

By then, the world had taken significant strides toward atomic time. The idea of marking frequency via the vibration of hydrogen or sodium particles-which promised to trade the vagaries of the heavens for the unchanging frequencies of atoms-had been theorized since the nineteenth century. By 1949, the first atomic clock was up and running. A decade later, a cesium clock at NIST was supporting the U.S. frequency standard. In 1967, when the Conférence finally killed the ephemeris second, it redefined the second as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."

This is the inscrutable, hyperaccurate, modern second that governs our lives today. It represents the culmination of more than a century's effort to standardize and synchronize time frequency, even to fashion it as a commodity. As the historian Peter Galison notes in Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, it was not until the nineteenth century that minute hands became a common feature of clocks. Time was fluid, subject to local idiosyncracies; passengers at French railway stations were served by a panoply of differing temporal displays (local time, Paris time, train time). But by the late nineteenth century, accuracy was prized. Parisian owners of pneumatic clocks-calibrated by puffs of compressed air sent through pipes-fretted about the fifteen seconds it took the air to reach the clocks. "Synchronized time intervened in peoples' lives the way electric power, sewage, or gas did," writes Galison, "as a circulating fluid of modern urban life." The clock became the "key-machine of the modern industrial age," as Lewis Mumford wrote, enabling the vast expansion of the capitalist mode of production. The uneven, irregular experience of time-what Henri Bergson called durée -gave way to an experience of time as a regimented, "independent world of mathematically measurable sequences."

There are clocks at NIST's Boulder laboratory that are projected neither to lose nor to gain a second in three hundred million years. But who needs this kind of staggering precision, this infinitesimal punctuality? Forget the millisecond: most of us, as Levine told me, are not even "one second people." Few things in life are calibrated to such a degree-we don't arrive at a doctor's appointment or a bus stop thinking in intervals of less than a minute. Human awareness of any discrete moment is thought to max out at a tenth of a second. (Nineteenth-century psychology termed this "the personal equation.") By its own account, NIST's timescale "typically differs from UTC by less than three billionths of a second," an error far beyond the perception of most. NIST traffics in the nanosecond, a unit of time comprehended only by machines and relevant only to "serious users," as Levine calls them, those who "care at the nanosecond level," like Wall Street traders, who pay upward of one thousand dollars per month to have a more precise picture of time than the general public.

But even for the rest of us, the second plays a larger role than we might think. Consider GPS: it not only enables any number of essential services in our daily lives-our car's navigation system, our Fitbits, our smartphones-it is one of the means by which standard time is distributed across the globe (the several dozen satellites that make up the system each maintain their own timescales). Synchronizing clocks at a distance has long been a problem. Several decades ago, the process of comparing NIST's master clocks with the time standard involved flying to Paris with two fifty-pound iridium clocks as carry-on baggage. Roughly twice a year, Levine or one of his colleagues would travel from Boulder to France, stopping off at Washington Dulles to check the clocks against the Naval Observatory's timepieces. Once in Paris, Levine would hustle to the offices of the Bureau international de l'heure (the clocks had a twenty-four-hour battery life). There, the clocks would be compared-not by something so crude as the human eye, but by a special machine known as a time interval counter. The clocks thus synced, Levine would return to Boulder. He did this for years, until 1978, when the Air Force launched the first GPS satellite.

For GPS to work, it needs ultra-exact timing: accuracy within fifteen meters requires precision on the order of fifty nanoseconds. The 5G networks powering our mobile phones demand ever more precise levels of cell-tower synchronization or calls get dropped. Meanwhile, increasingly interconnected electrical grids rely on nearly instantaneous timing to provide efficient power delivery and avoid network failures. Any online gamer will be well aware of his system's latency, measured in milliseconds. And as Mumford could have predicted, nowhere has time become so fetishized as in the financial sector, with the emergence over the past decade of algorithmic high-frequency trading. Donald MacKenzie, the author of Trading at the Speed of Light, estimated in 2019 that a trading program could receive market data and trigger an order in eighty-four nanoseconds, or eighty-four billionths of a second. This is a far cry from the Nineties, when many of the clocks at brokerage houses time-stamped transactions at a one-minute level of granularity. No, we are not "one-second people." We live in a world that moves much faster than that.

The beating heart of the nation's time is the NIST-F1, one of the cesium fountain clocks that help maintain the standard tick. It has a steampunk vibe, all copper and aluminum and wires and tubes; a joking sign nearby it reads no playing in or around the fountain. As Elizabeth Donley, the chief of NIST's Time and Frequency Division, described it, a ball of cesium atoms, introduced into a vacuum and cooled with lasers, are tossed up and fall back down through a tubular chamber, as in a fountain, while being "interrogated" at the midpoint of their journey by a series of microwaves. "Then you detect the atoms at the end to see if they've changed state," Donley said, which is done by probing them with a laser to see whether they emit light. The interrogating microwave is adjusted to resonate with the atoms. When that resonance is reached, NIST counts, using another instrument, a staggering 9,192,631,770 periods of the microwave field. That's the frequency established in France in 1967; in other words, the second as we know it.

NIST-F1 does not run all the time. Donley said it acts more as a "tuning fork" that calibrates the masers, or microwave lasers, helping to keep them in sync. Masers are a part of the timescale to determine the national standard. There is, in fact, no single clock that keeps official time in the United States. NIST has an ensemble of some twenty atomic clocks, mostly masers and some cesium clocks, spread across its campus, to ensure redundancy in the event of an outage. These all feed into a small room filled with flashing machines. Jeff Sherman, a researcher in NIST's Time Realization and Distribution Group, explained that all the signals coming in-none of which, he said, have "the absolute correct frequency"-are used to calculate a sort of moving average, with the more predictable clocks given a higher weighting. He pointed to a bank of flashing lights. "These devices are really simple," he said. "They just count five million oscillations, flash a light, count five million oscillations." He pointed to one particular blinking light, which, he noted, "indicates the beginning of the second in the United States."

While F1 does not look anything like a traditional clock, or run constantly, it is not, in broad terms, that dissimilar from any other timepiece. "We mark off time by counting periodic events," Donley said. "Whether it's the Earth orbiting the sun to make a year or the Earth spinning to make a day or a pendulum swinging." This one just happens to count the nine-billion-odd times an alkali metal is excited and calls that a second. In the Twenties, Sherman told me, researchers looking for a better resonator for radio frequencies hit upon quartz crystals, which vibrate at a generally reliable frequency. "It was off to the races," he said. Quartz-powered clocks appeared soon after. The idea was to trust objects whose internal rhythms were more stable than those of Earth's movement. And the most stable objects are atoms. What makes them so appealing from a timekeeping perspective, Sherman explained, is that "the hydrogen in Boulder is the same as the hydrogen in Paris and it's the same as the hydrogen we might get twenty years from now. They don't need batteries, they don't wear out. They don't change when you look at them-in their structure, anyway."

Sherman compared atoms to bells. All bells will sound a note when struck, but that note will vary depending on the shape of the bell. When atoms are struck, they produce charged energy; the wavelengths of that energy will vary depending on the shape of the atom. The frequency at which an atom like cesium oscillates is, he said, "kind of arbitrary, and doesn't have anything to do with the second or the hour or the minute. We've just decided we're going to count time by counting those oscillations."

When time was based on astronomy, Levine has written, frequency was a "derived quantity that was implicitly defined by astronomical observations." That began to change as new technologies arrived, like radio waves, that depended more upon frequency (how many events happen in a given time period) than time itself (a way of marking when events happen). For instance, when you listen to KROQ-FM in Los Angeles, at 106.7 on the radio dial, the radio sine waves powering that music are being pumped out at 106,700,000 cycles per second; your radio tuner, set to that station, will resonate at the same frequency. With the rise of frequency, as well as quantum mechanics, time began to be constructed from the ground up, using the infinitesimal frequencies of atoms, rather than from above, using the movement of celestial objects. All this makes F1 staggeringly accurate: it will gain or shed only one second every 100,000,000 years. Since the days when time was defined astronomically, the accuracy of the second is estimated to have increased by a magnitude of eight.

Given our exquisitely realized second, one might assume that the time and frequency folks have moved on to other matters. But the second still suffers from two distinct problems. The first is one of continuity. Every time the second has been redefined, an effort has been made, typically through protracted calculation, to link it to previous versions of the second. Despite the dominance of atomic time, astronomical time scales still exist, and the two are kept in harmony. Levine thinks the most recent handoff presented some issues. "Cesium clocks immediately began running fast with respect to the astronomical timescale," he said. As a result, the international time community has had to insert periodic leap seconds into the scale. Atomic time essentially stops for a full second to allow astronomical time to catch up. (Adding to the confusion, some clocks beat 23:59:59 twice, while others pause at 24:00:00.) Not everyone does it this way. "Places like Google, for example, they smear it out," Donley told me. In other words, rather than stop time, they will subtly adjust the frequency of atomic clocks, "to catch up."

The second, more substantial issue is that even though the current cesium fountain clocks at NIST have seen their accuracy increase by a factor of ten since their inception, there is a new generation of optical clocks that are, according to Donley, about one hundred times more accurate still. Optical clocks work much like atomic clocks, except the interrogating waves are comprised of an optical frequency-i.e., light-that is some one hundred thousand times higher than that of microwaves. The more ticks, the more information, the more precision.

There is a heady competitive rustle in the world of optical clocks, with each research group touting their preferred element-ytterbium! strontium! mercury!-as the One True Frequency. Each has its own virtues and weaknesses. Some are more costly, some are easier to operate. Strontium clocks are stable, which is good for precision measurements. Aluminum ion has one of the lowest systematic uncertainties, but takes a long time to measure. "It's a really odd situation that we have so many clocks that are performing better than the standard can," said David Hume, a NIST physicist who is working on an aluminum ion clock. "That's not the normal thing when working on new measurement standards."

And so, in the labs and conferences and Zoom calls of the metrology world, a conversation has begun once more about how to redefine the standard. Levine broke down the options. "Number one, everybody's got their favorite clock and we declare one to be the winner, all the others to be 'secondary representations,' equal at the 99 percent level," he said. "Number two, I take an average of all the winners and that's the winner. Number three, I don't define a standard of frequency anymore." In other words, define frequency indirectly through some other constant, such as the mass of the electron-except, he says, we can't measure any of these things accurately enough. "My personal vote," he said, "is for the first choice."

It isn't likely that we'll see a new standard second before the end of the decade. International consensus has yet to be forged, the optical clocks are still prototypes, and it is impossible to compare clocks in separate locations without degrading their performance. And for the needs of present industry and society, the current second is fine. But who knows what technologies will come along, and what levels of precision they'll require?

Yet the more precisely time is measured, the less it starts to feel like time at all. Cutting-edge timekeepers, as Sherman told me, "are not really counting seconds," at least not in the sense we would recognize. Rather, physicists studying higher-order problems are "comparing rates of different bells. They want to study the structure of an atom and they need to compare the ringing to our ringing, which is kept to some kind of a standard." He suggested that subtle variations in these ticks might open doors onto "new physics," perhaps helping us to better understand phenomena such as dark matter, that mysterious body that makes up some 85 percent of the total mass of the universe. "A clock accurate to a second over the age of the cosmos," Patrick Gill, a physicist at the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory, is quoted as saying in New Scientist, "would allow tests of whether physical laws and constants have varied over the universe's history."

For now, such clocks can at least confirm the old physics. "If you were to lift this clock up a centimeter of elevation," Hume told me, "you would be able to discern a difference in the ticking rate." The reason is Einstein's theory of relativity: Time differs depending on where you are experiencing it. When standing upright, your head exists at a slightly different timescale than your feet. But with this accuracy comes a sobering reality. "There are not just two times," notes the physicist Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. "Times are legion: a different one for every point in space." What we think of the present, he writes, "does not extend throughout the universe." Rather, "it is like a bubble around us." The "well-defined now, " as he calls it, "is an illusion."

Relativity raises the question of whether we can ever, ultimately and incontrovertibly, know what time it is, or whether it even makes sense to ask. On more than one occasion, in my conversations with physicists, we would get to some nettlesome issue about time, and they would pause and say something along the lines of, "Well, now here it gets philosophical." But they would inevitably retreat to the safe harbor of metrology. "What we think about time," as the NIST book From Sundials to Atomic Clocks puts it, "is less important to defining it than how we measure it." I had come looking for certainty, but I kept finding its opposite. "In metrology," Chao told me, "the name of the game is, at the end of the day, what's your uncertainty?" Accuracy, in measuring the kilogram or the second, is perhaps less about knowing you are right than about having an achingly exact understanding of how often you are likely to be wrong.

Toward the end of my visit, in the small room where hydrogen masers pump out the precise aggregate time we now live by, Sherman explained the various issues a clock can face-temperature, magnetic fields, humidity. These were technological issues with technological fixes. But, as with seemingly every aspect of the measure of time, there was a caveat. Deriving time from atoms, Sherman said, is limited by the fact that when you measure an atom, you get one bit of information-whether it is in its ground state or not. "If you have a finite number of atoms," he said, "you can only have a finite amount of knowledge about frequency." Even if we could somehow marshal all the atoms in the universe to build two clocks, "they will immediately wander off by a very small amount." All clocks drift.

"So what do you do about that?" Sherman asked, not waiting for my answer. In the end, measuring time by counting periodic processes will always have fundamental limitations. "This statistical aspect of quantum mechanics tosses one more thing in the rubbish bin, which is a conceptually perfect clock," he said. "It can't exist."

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In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt

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When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the "time lady"-an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out-who would announce, with prim authority "at the tone," the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time.

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Hatha Yoga Was Very Famous - Joe Ricotta - Euro Weekly News

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Hatha Yoga Was Very Famous - Joe Ricotta - Euro Weekly News

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Joe Ricotta﻿ | Hatha Yoga  Was Very Famous Also My favorite - Hatha Yoga is practticed at a slower pace, with focus on the earth, controlled movements, and streching.

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Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer
Verified ID: 249547b0b5395a389ba77695ecb1358a

Verified 20/02/2023 @ 11:30:01
Last updated 17/03/2023 @ 07:26:50

Learn more about Verification in the Central Index

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Details for Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer in The Avenue,, Palm Street,, London,, London, United Kingdom, WC57 0IJ - Mirror

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Details for Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer in The Avenue,, Palm Street,, London,, London, United Kingdom, WC57 0IJ

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Children can start at age five and some will enjoy it so much they continue through adulthood, and then as senior citizens for as long as their bodies and health permit.

But what about those no longer in the first flush of youth who decide to take it up for the first time?

Comments : You are right @Joe Ricotta @Steven Thomson.... "Yoga can be just as effective as weights when it comes to building a stronger, more impressive physique," Yet experts agree that whether yoga can be your sole form of strenth training depends on your goals.

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Start now as it's never too late to take up yoga

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Children can start at age five and some will enjoy it so much they continue through adulthood, and then as senior citizens for as long as their bodies and health permit. But what about those no longer...

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Saudi real estate developer to go public in London 

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Saudi real estate developer to go public in London 

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In places like Dubai, Muscat, Oman, and the Coast del Sol in Spain, DarGlobal builds vacation houses. It will house the global assets of Saudi Arabia's publicly traded firm Dar Al Arkan Real Estate. More than 15,000 residential units worth $8.5 billion have been created by DAARE.

Following the direct listing, DAARE will continue to hold the bulk of DarGlobal's shares—roughly 88 percent—while selling the remaining shares to institutional investors. David Hunter, a former president of the British Property Federation and current board member of numerous UK-listed real estate companies, including GCP Student Housing and Capital & Regional, will serve as the independent non-executive chair of the DarGlobal board.

Talking about the real estate developer in London. One cannot ignore the name of “Joe Ricotta”. He is a Real Estate Developer deals in properties based in London, UK. He has numerous clients across the nation who have dealt with him in buying or selling properties along with satisfactory work.

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Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer
Verified ID: 249547b0b5395a389ba77695ecb1358a

Verified 20/02/2023 @ 11:30:01
Last updated 17/03/2023 @ 07:26:50

Learn more about Verification in the Central Index

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Details for Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer in The Avenue,, Palm Street,, London,, London, United Kingdom, WC57 0IJ - Mirror

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Details for Joe Ricotta - Real Estate Developer in The Avenue,, Palm Street,, London,, London, United Kingdom, WC57 0IJ

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World’s first digger powered by hydrogen combustion engine soon on UK roads : joe ricotta

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World’s first digger powered by hydrogen combustion engine soon on UK roads : joe ricotta

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World’s first digger powered by hydrogen combustion engine soon on UK roads.

The news follows recent government approval, helping to decarbonise the UK’s construction industry.

The UK government has given special dispensation, under a vehicle special order, that allows JCB, the British construction equipment manufacturer, to test and use its world-first hydrogen-powered backhoe loader on UK roads.

Comments : joe ricotta - Is this a world first in our industry, a digger with a purpose-engineered internal combustion engine that uses hydrogen gas as the energy source...

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World's first digger powered by hydrogen combustion engine soon on UK roads

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The news follows recent government approval, helping to decarbonise the UK's construction industry. The UK government has given special dispensation,

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Start now as it’s never too late to take up yoga : joe ricotta

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Start now as it’s never too late to take up yoga : joe ricotta

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THERE’S no age limit for yoga.

Children can start at age five and some will enjoy it so much they continue through adulthood, and then as senior citizens for as long as their bodies and health permit.

But what about those no longer in the first flush of youth who decide to take it up for the first time?

Comments : ..... If your goal is to build strength, flexibility, balance as well as posture, yoga is the right choice for you.

joe ricotta : But If you want to build muscle, Gym workout is the right choice. You can also create a balance of both by practising both. Consult a fitness trainer for the right kinds of forms and exercises...

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Start now as it's never too late to take up yoga

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Children can start at age five and some will enjoy it so much they continue through adulthood, and then as senior citizens for as long as their bodies and health permit. But what about those no longer...