Howard Jacobson on Mariam Mirzakhani

Howard Jacobson on the death of Mariam Mirzakhani:

It is a sad story for other reasons, too, not least the intensity of Mirzakhani's expression in the photograph most of the papers used. There is a beauty that can only be described as that of the mind's migration to the face, the transfiguring beauty of exceptional intelligence. So it's a double loss: the premature loss of a person and the premature loss of her genius.

RGBA

RGBA color values are an extension of RGB color values with an alpha channel - which specifies the opacity of the object.

An RGBA color value is specified with: rgba(red, green, blue, alpha). The alpha parameter is a number between 0.0 (fully transparent) and 1.0 (fully opaque).

Example:
 webkit-box-shadow: 0 4px 0 0 rgba(65,156,192,1);
 moz-box-shadow: 0 4px 0 0 rgba(65,156,192,1);
 box-shadow: 0 4px 0 0 rgba(65,156,192,1);

Gmail content will not be used or scanned

G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.

Quote from Google's blog today, June 23rd, 2017

When is later this year?

Will Not Be

Gmail content will not be used or scanned
The revolution will not be televised.

When I Was Younger

When I was younger I thought that 'the revolution will not be televised (Gill Scott Heron - here are the lyrics ) was about as raw as lyrics got.

EU Sues Member States Over Asylum Seekers

The Atlantic reports:

The European Union has launched a formal “infringement procedure” against three of its member nations—the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland—for failing to comply with a 2015 agreement to harbor asylum-seekers.

Jim Bouton | Terry Lennox | The Long Goodbye

Looking at a clip of The Long Goodbye and noticing the name of the actor who played Terry Lennox.

Decided to look him up because I don't recall ever seeing him in anything else.

Here's Wikipedia on Jim Bouton, who played Terry Lennox:

James Alan 'Jim' Bouton (born March 8, 1939) is an American retired professional baseball player. Bouton played in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a pitcher for the New York Yankees, Seattle Pilots, Houston Astros, and Atlanta Braves between 1962 and 1978. He has also been a best-selling author, actor, activist, sportscaster and one of the creators of Big League Chew.

Bouton retired midway through the 1970 season, shortly after the Astros sent him down to the minor leagues. After a handful of unsatisfactory appearances, Bouton left baseball to become a local sports anchor for New York station WABC-TV, as part of Eyewitness News; he later held the same job for WCBS-TV. Bouton also became an actor, playing the part of Terry Lennox in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), plus the lead role of Jim Barton in the 1976 CBS television series Ball Four, which was loosely adapted from the book and was canceled after five episodes. Decades later, Bouton would also have a brief one-line cameo as a pitching coach in the James L. Brooks film How Do You Know.

Who would have guessed?

Macron Wins But So Does Le Pen

Macron won the second round of the presidential election in France, as expected. Of course, with the upset over Brexit and the US presidential race, ‘expected’ has taken on a meaning tinged with an understanding that nothing is expected to definitely be ‘as expected’ any longer.

A lot of voters entered a null vote, indicating that they didn’t like either candidate. That is not an invalid vote as in UK elections, but a positive vote indicating a preference.

That aside, Marine Le Pen got 10,644,118 votes (33.9% of the vote) against Macron’s 20,753,797 votes (66.1% of the vote).

In the 2002 election, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front took 4,804,713 votes in the first round.

In the run-off Jacques Chirac took 25,537,956 votes, representing 82.21% of the votes cast and Jean-Marie Le Pen took 5,525,032 votes, representing 17.79% of the votes.

So Marine Le Pen has doubled the votes and the percentage. Well yes, she might have gained a lower percentage if those null votes had gone to Macron.

But the raw numbers would still show that between 2002 and today, Le Pen the daughter – leader of the National Front – got twice as many votes as her father did fifteen years ago.

And that is a bad result for France and for the world.

Originally posted on No More Pencils under the same title Macron Wins But So Does Le Pen

What they really mean about Obama’s Wall Street speech

What they really mean about Obama’s Wall Street speech is that it is tainted by the suspicion of an agreement that when he resigned, certain people would pay to hear him speak in return for favours given.

You can’t bribe a president in office or before he gets into office. You can’t bribe a prime minister, or a first minister, or any leader in a relatively open society. You can’t because sooner or later they will be found out. The money can be paid to an offshore account behind a wall of secrecy – but sooner or later it will be found out.

Or if it isn’t found out, then the tension of worrying that it might be found out will drain all the joy out of the money.

There is a simpler way. Just promise that when the president or the prime minister, etc., resigns – that he or she can give speeches at $10,000 a plate or whatever. And the speech can be deadly dull and not worth the cost of attending. But those who promised to attend will attend – and the money will be paid and nothing can be proved – and that is how people get away with it.

Not that anyone thinks Obama has done this – the problem is that he is tainted by the whiff of suspicion on those who wouldn’t think twice and perhaps haven’t thought twice about doing it.

This article originally posted on No More Pencils under the same title