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GUARDIAN Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:48:22 GMT
At the RCA, where he was showing a film about his blockbuster show, David Hockney told me his views on tweeting, iPads and how things have changed since his student days
This afternoon I went down to the Royal College of Art in London, which is celebrating its 175th anniversary. David Hockney, who graduated 50 years ago, was there to show the students David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, a film made by Bruno Wollheim about his blockbuster Royal Academy show. (Incidentally, it only occurred to me when I was there that A Bigger Picture is a reference to A Bigger Splash – doh!)
In the main gallery, students were putting the finishing touches to their installations. There was a table, set as if for a banquet, with models of fantastical buildings behind the place settings and vegetation including a cauliflower "growing" down the middle. Another featured a selection of posters based on the "Keep calm and carry on" meme, with slogans including "Post-human has no privacy settings" and........
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GUARDIAN Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:02:00 GMT
Who can resist the temptations of our times? If you can you've got it made, say two books on willpower
So, I could write this review. Or then again, I could clean the kitchen cupboards, or not deal with my tax bill, or stare blankly into space. Or, you know, google some more. Because where, I ask, does one find the willpower to deal with not one but two new books on willpower?
It's a procrastinator's recipe for disaster. You wait forever for a book to tell you how to exercise more, and drink less, and develop an iron self-control and God-like levels of self-discipline, and then two come along at once. So how do you choose between them? Should you read Maximum Willpower by Kelly McGonigal, or Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney?
In McGonigal's corner is the fact that her book claims a can-do, change-your-life sort of attitude. But the fact that she styles herself "Kelly McGonigal PhD" is not overly promising.
Roy F Baumeister and...
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GUARDIAN Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:04:00 GMT
Alma, a super-sensitive radio telescope 5,000m above sea level in Chile, will detect a new galaxy every three minutes
Spend a few days with astronomers at the world's most sophisticated telescopes in the mountains of Chile, and your skin will begin to feel different. Cheeks become stretched a little tighter; hands and lips get chapped. It seems to make little difference how much water you drink. Spend a few weeks here and, the astronomers will tell you, the headaches and dizziness start. "You really feel it when you've been here a long time," says Jonathan Smoker, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at Mount Paranal in northern Chile. "Sometimes my hands start to bleed because it's so dry here."
The scientists and technicians who work here are not allowed to stay on the mountain for more than 14 days at a time. After that, they have to go down to sea level to recuperate. At 2,500m up in the northern Atacama desert, Paranal is no place for human beings to......
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GUARDIAN Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:05:01 GMT
At 2,500m up in the northern Atacama desert in Chile, Paranal is no place for human beings to live for long periods: dry, dusty and almost lifeless. But it is perfect for watching the skies. At night, the bone dry air means the Very Large Telescope (VLT) can track and measure stars, black holes and planets with exquisite precision using its four individual observatories.
In this podcast Alok Jha describes his visit to the nascent Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (Alma). When complete in 2013, this collection of 66 carbon-fibre radio antennae, each 12m wide, will open astronomers' eyes to the half of the universe that has, until now, been hidden to modern optical telescopes.
Alma will detect radiation similar to microwaves, around 1,000 times longer than the light we see with our eyes – but easily absorbed by water in the atmosphere.
The music for the show was composed by Iain Chambers.
Subscribe for free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is...
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GUARDIAN Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:17:50 GMT
EADS' Airbus business would not exist without European unity, and now it is competing for hegemony in the global market
The Airbus Military complex in Seville, part of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), is a small city of some 2,000 workers where it is quite normal to hear three or four languages being spoken. Among the giant planes being worked on is the A400M, the signature aircraft of the consortium's military division.
Even at a time of economic crisis, the division has a €503m (£418m) order book and profits at the close of 2011, before tax and costs, of over €1.1m. This is a multinational European business – one whose own bosses and workers acknowledge would never have existed without European unity. Now, it is competing for hegemony in the global aeronautics market.
Into the immense loading bay at the factory come the various components of the A400M, manufactured in the UK, Spain, Germany and France. With these come teams of experts who fit the.......
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GUARDIAN Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:07:00 GMT
Everyone got fed up with supermarket robots, science had wonders to share on Stargazing Live, and someone said the 'w' word on Countdown
Room 101 (BBC1) | iPlayer
The One Griff Rhys Jones (BBC1) | iPlayer
Richard Wilson on Hold (C4) | 4OD
Stargazing Live (BBC2) | iPlayer
Celebrity Big Brother (C5) | Demand 5
Countdown (C4) | 4OD
Serious TV can change things for the better, if a little less often than it might like to think, but can TV humour ever change anything? Can any humour change anything? I have on my shelves the recent Private Eye 50th anniversary issue, whose cover splash, headed "How Satire Makes a Difference", has head-shots of Harold Macmillan from 1961 and David Cameron from today. Under Macmillan's photo the text runs: "1961: Magazine pokes fun at Old Etonian prime minister surrounded by cronies making a hash of running the country"; the Cameron text runs "2011: Er…" And, famously, the more filthy wine-soaked walls of Berlin's maddest baddest suburbs wept with...
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