Category Archives: Immortality

Uggie has made his bid for Hollywood immortality.

The canine star of the Oscar-winning film The Artist became the first dog to put its paw prints in cement outside the famous Graumans Chinese Theatre.

The rambunctious Jack Russell terrier was celebrated at a treat-laden ceremony outside the landmark as Councilman Tom LaBonge declared it Uggie Day in Los Angeles.

The main message that Uggie would like to send to everybody out there is to please adopt, Uggies trainer, Omar Van Muller, told the crowd. Hes adopted. He made it. If you guys can adopt a dog, even if they dont make it on the big screen, theyll be big stars at your house.

The event also marked Uggies retirement from show business. Van Muller said Uggie, whose other film credits include Mr. Fix It and Water for Elephants, would no longer star in films but would appear at charity events and other functions.

Uggie, who arrived at Graumans Chinese Theatre in a fire truck, was bestowed with a golden bow-tie collar and given a cake in the shape of a fire hydrant after performing tricks for photographers and tourists lining a red carpet.

While Uggie is the first canine to be showcased at Graumans courtyard, three dogs Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Strongheart have stars on the nearby Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The Associated Press

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Uggie from ‘The Artist’ makes his mark

By Lori Kurtzman

The Columbus Dispatch Saturday June 23, 2012 5:45 AM

Jeffrey Justice, 29, is accused of exchanging nude photos with a teen he met on a vampire site.

Vampires are big right now. Big enough that a teen might jump online to talk fangs and immortality or who Bella should have ended up with in the Twilight series.

But its not just teens on those sites, as two central Ohio cases show, nor is it all innocent chatting.

Prosecutors say two men charged in separate sex crimes this week met their victims on vampire-themed social-networking sites.

The latest accusations involve a northeastern Ohio man charged with swapping nude photos with a Licking County teen. On Thursday, a grand jury indicted 29-year-old Jeffrey Justice of Chesterland on one count of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material and one count of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles.

The indictment, released yesterday, alleges that Justice and the 15-year-old Newark girl exchanged the pictures some time between Jan. 1 and June 1 after meeting on a vampire website. Workers at a local youth club alerted authorities, Licking County Prosecutor Ken Oswalt said. Justice is being held at the Licking County jail.Earlier this week, a North Side man was charged in federal court with forcing a 15-year-old to perform oral sex on him at least seven times in his home or car. Randall V. Roberts, 41, who is jailed in Franklin County, met the girl on vampirefreaks.com, according to the complaint. From 2006 to 2010, records show at least three other men nationwide have been charged in sex crimes against girls they met through the same site.

While FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said she hasnt heard of a trend of vampire site-related crimes, shes hardly surprised that potential sex offenders might search such forums for underage targets.

People who have those interests know where to go to find potential victims, she said.

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Vampire website leads to another sex-crimes case

Mary Midgley, the nonagenarian philosopher, believes that living forever is overrated: quality of life not quantity is more important

You've been speaking a lot lately about immortalism. What exactly is this? Immortalism is the idea that not only should life go on getting longer, but that it should go on forever - that medical technology will see to it that we simply don't die. It is a kind of ideology, almost a religion, and is much more prevalent in the US than in the UK. It is in part an overconfidence in technology from the 20th century, and has got mixed up with science fiction.

Why is the desire to live forever a problem? My charge against immortalism is that it is wasteful - the idealism that gets hooked onto it is going in a useless direction and needs to be deflected. There are too many people already, and you can't put up with an infinite number. Another difficulty is inequality. As things stand, the most privileged would live forever while everybody else would be dying at the normal rate.

What else are you unhappy about? Even at the pace our lifespan has been increasing, we are beginning to run into trouble. The indignation that people express at not getting their pensions until they're 67 shows that the idea of a life cycle is firmly rooted and may be fairly essential to human life. I'm talking about the degree of activity at different times of life, and that is not something which changes frequently, or that changes much from culture to culture.

What we respect has also changed: we have a high regard and respect for youth, which makes the situation harder for the old.

So even without immortalism, is the current lengthening of life problematic? Doctors have a habit of trying to make each individual live a bit longer. I think it runs very deep. They should be given a better idea of health that doesn't necessarily mean living longer.

How can we reinvent older age? We need to improve quality of life, not quantity. For example, the distribution of work is ridiculous. People in their middle years work far too long and are suddenly expected to stop. Part-time work is a good idea, but it hasn't been fitted into our society half enough. It is very important for women with children but also very important for the old.

When he found he was dying of cancer, Steve Jobs made this interesting remark, that it was the best thing that ever happened to him because it made his priorities clear. He said nobody wants to die but it is life's best invention, it is the mechanism of change. He had a point.

What about your life now you are in your 90s? We haven't recovered from the idea that growing old is an awful disaster, which must somehow be put off. I never bought that one. If nothing awful happens to you, you go on doing what you're doing and looking for more. I'm lucky to be in the sort of job I am in, where you can simply go on doing what you like and not be forcibly retired. I've got somewhat feeble and ailing but I haven't got seriously ill. It's the thought of a futile life that is the problem.

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The wasteful quest for immortality

As Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish seek cycling immortality on the roads of France next month, Geraint Thomas will be riding around in circles in Manchester. But the 26-year-old from Cardiff would have it no other way.

Thomas has proven himself to be a versatile and leading talent on the bike, including this season as team-mate Wiggins has won three stage races, with the Welshman providing support at Paris-Nice and the Tour de Romandie as the Londoner proved his credentials as a potential Tour de France champion.

Rather than support Wiggins in the mountains and Cavendish in the sprints when the Tour begins in Liege on June 30, Thomas will instead focus on fine-tuning preparations for success in the four-kilometre team pursuit at a second successive Olympics.

Beijing gold medal winner Thomas told Press Association Sport: Theres no doubt at all, but Id love to have been going to France to help them both out.

Its just unfortunate where the Olympics and Tour falls in the year.

I was always going to come back and ride the team pursuit. A home Olympics is massive and its my best chance of winning a gold medal. Its always been like that.

The team pursuit really excites me and its something I love doing. I just cant wait to get on those boards in London now and rip it up.

Thomas completed the Giro dItalia alongside Team Sky colleague Pete Kennaugh and the duo were both named in the Great Britain Olympic team earlier this month, with Ed Clancy, Steven Burke and Andy Tennant completing the team pursuit squad.

All five have been riding on the road in the last few weeks but recently returned to the track for the first time since winning the World Championships in Melbourne in April.

The British team set a world record of three minutes 53.295 seconds there, going faster than the Beijing-winning mark.

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Cycling: Geraint Thomas in pursuit of Olympic track gold

NetApp has announced a major minor release of its data ONTAP storage operating system, promising data immortality and infinity.

Data ONTAP is NetApp's operating system for its FAS arrays and provides a unified file (NFS, pNFS and CIFS/SMB) and block (iSCSI, FCoE and Fibre Channel) storage array architecture. NetApp customers have been waiting for the company to integrate its acquired Spinnaker clustering technology into ONTAP and this release represents another stage of this multi-year effort.

NetApp says Data ONTAP 8.1.1 provides:-

- Immortal operations through zero downtime. System upgrades and maintenance don't disrupt array operations. - Infinite scalability with a single volume that can grow to 20PB. Er, sorry NetApp but 20PB is not infinite. I know; we're being picky. - "Set it and forget it" data protection. - Virtual array with Data ONTAP Edge; a version of ONTAP running as a virtual machine in an ESX server, which is cheaper than a FAS array and suitable for remote/branch offices needing up to 5TB of capacity - Secure multi-tenancy jointly with Cisco and VMware. - Combining SSD and HDD inside a volume or aggregate in the array as a Flash Pool which provides Virtual Storage Tiering (VST), or tiers without tears and, indeed, without tiers either as the SSDs are used as a read and write cache. - Clustering of up to six ONTAP arrays with each node potentially configured for different work, such as FC SAN access and filer activity.

The company says ONTAP 8.1.1 also delivers performance improvements and has better manageability and supportability. The Flash Pool technology enables SAS disks to be replaced by SATA ones with SSDs providing I/O acceleration. NetApp is providing this technology across its product range.

Our understanding is that NetApp will extend its VST technology to cover flash caches in servers so as to remove most network latency from data access by apps in servers.

With ONTAP 8.1.1 NetApp can offer an enterprise content repository with NFSv3 access to a container that can scale to 20PB and 2 billion files by using a cluster of five FAS6280 high-availability pair arrays; ten nodes in other words. Snapshot copies and SnapMirror replication are available as us NFS-mounted tape backup.

Data ONTAP EDGE includes Snapshot, SnapRestore, SnapVault, FlexVol, FlexClone and deduplication technologies. It provides iSCSI, CIFS and NFS protocol access but not Fibre Channel.

NetApp has taken over a now-discarded HP marketing theme, saying this new version of ONTAP makes IT agile. Its concept if having a single and multi-purpose storage infrastructure with one set of management and data protection tools is relatively unchanged although it is being amended by the inclusion of the E-Series for applications needing more data access speed.

EMC's chief blogger Chuck Hollis got his ONTAP 8.1.1 riposte in before the launch. He blogs; "after spending a few days getting to know what's in this release, if I were a NetApp customer I'd start thinking about Plan B," and contrasts NetApp's use of flash as a cache with EMC's se of storage tiering. He also contrasts the Isilon scale-out clustering with NetApp, but a high-end Isilon customer isn't likely to want to use a traditional 2-controller array.

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Storage company promises INFINITE IMMORTALITY

19.06.2012 - (idw) University of Gothenburg

The immortality-through-art theme is explored in a number of decadent novels from the late 1800s. A new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg shows that the decadent theme is revised in well-known American 20th century novels such as The Great Gatsby, Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49. Decadence in art and literature refers to the cultural period in Europe that occurred in the late 1800s, also called fin de sicle. Decadent aesthetics originated in France and then spread to England and the rest of Europe, and eventually also to USA. The decadent novel is characterised by controversial themes such perversity, narcissism and agony often conveyed using an extremely poetic style. In her doctoral thesis in English, Tia Stajic Lfgren focuses on the typical decadent theme of immortality-through-art. Stajic Lfgren refers to the theme, which can be found in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and several other fin de sicle novels, as the metaphysics of art. The metaphysics of art represents a concrete expression of the 19th century doctrine of lart pour lart or art for art's sake, which holds art as superior to and exempt from moral principles, she says.

While this denial of mortality in the traditional fin de sicle novel is manifested in daring and perverse experimentation, both thematically and stylistically, mortality is gradually accepted in the 20th century novels explored in my thesis, and this completely changes their narrative structure, says Stajic Lfgren.

She concludes that although the 20th century novels are influenced by the decadent combination of the perverse and the aesthetical, these narratives evolve away from perversity to adopt a more human and also spiritual approach in terms of both themes and characters. The thesis has been successfully defended.

For more information please contact: Tia Stajic Lfgren Telephone: +46 (0)31 338 01 46 E-mail: tia.stajic.lofgren@sprak.gu.se jQuery(document).ready(function($) { $("fb_share").attr("share_url") = encodeURIComponent(window.location); }); Weitere Informationen: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/28715

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The decadent theme revised in 20th century novels