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Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Spoken by Tudor Rickards
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read...
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Chasing after moonbeams: The human quest for knowledge of the future
The search for emerging trends is as old as the human quest to understand and influence the future. As civilisations arose, so did men and women were whose views were treated with respect and who were regarded as having mystic powers.
Perhaps the most famous,even to the present day, was the Oracle at Delphi. The myth emerged that at the sacred temple, the high priestess would reveal the future to visitors wealthy enough to seek her advice.
One of her most famous predictions was to King Croesus, noted for his great wealth. Here we have an indication of the wiliness of the guardian of the sacred shrine. Did I mention, by the way she was believed to assume the form of a python?
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Another humorous collection of posts, but some also marking the tragic Washington DC air crash in the last days of the month.
@ShoebMolvi
After the storm, Dave’s worried about the caravan in his front garden, as he didn't have one yesterday👀
@gardnerstewart39
Morrisons have run out of haggises. It's a bit late to be rushing to Scotland to catch one in the wild. I thought the plural of Haggis was Haggi, apparently not.
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January 31, 2020 was the day the UK formally left the EU. It was celebrated by the victorious Leave voters celebrated 'freedom day' with a grand party and Big Ben ringing out the joyous news.
It was also a day when the first victims of what was going to become the COVID pandemic were hospitalised.
This is a summary of my notes at the time, concluding my five year diary since the Referendum in 2016.
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When the water drops and refreezes’: Where do new ideas come from?
‘ That happens when the water drops from the guttering, and refreezes’ I said to myself.
The ice had formed in an unexpected way and I had arrived at an explanation for my observation.
‘When the water drops and refreezes’ stayed in my consciousness as a promising first line for a poem.
I could easily have become involved in the process of creating a few more lines of poetry in some form or other. (I did mention my habit of introducing creativity into conversations).
Instead, I became aware of the possibility of a line of thought that would link with a longer term preoccupation, namely the production of material for a chapter on creativity for the new addition of dilemmas of leadership.
In one classical stage model of creativity, I had moved from preparation for the book to incubation, The period where I am not consciously thinking about the book, and then insight, the aha or Eureka moment, of conscious realisation of the implications of the new idea.
As I ‘speak, I am trying to capture the idea for its further progression in which might also be called the implementation or actualisation stage.
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Did Donald Trump contribute to the crash in share prices in his first week?
As Donald Trump’s first week of his second term as President came to an end, the Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek sent the stock markets plunging with claims of matching leading chatbots with substantially lower computer chip costs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/business/us-stock-market-deepseek-ai-sp500-nvidia.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The President’s reaction was robust: “The release of DeepSeek, AI from a Chinese company, should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/28/first-thing-donald-trump-calls-chinas-deepseek-ai-chatbot-a-wake-up-call
Influential AI reporter Karen Hao suggests a possible connection between Trump’s announcement and the Market reaction illustrating basic weaknesses in the current assumptions about AI development.
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Among the flurry of executive orders announced by President Trump arriving in office in January 20, 2025, was Executive Order 14171, directed at dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in government...
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At first sight, Chess and darts seem very different games. This week, several coincidences drew my attention to an unexpected similarity.
At Chess this week, I had watched the remarkable emergence of gifted young chess players taking apart their seniors during a local Chess league match. No real surprise there, as it mainly reinforced the trend of young Chess players out-performing the older generation, led by our new teenage world champion, Gulesh.
But then, the first coincidence. I noticed a young man being interviewed after a success in a darts tournament. He was fresh faced, blinking earnestly from behind a pair of spectacles. He was a larger version of the juniors who had performed so admirably at the Chess match the night before.
A more disturbing coincidence, he bore a passing resemblance to a younger version of our distinguished captain of our B team...
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A lengthier than usual audiopost. These posts included are heavily against President Trump and his actions. Also, one commentator, @Acyn has been particularly prolific. I will try harder to search for more posts supportive of the new President in future collections.
@Scaramucci
Launch of Melania coin is causing Trump coin to crash. Elon was right, we are living in a simulation. Which one of the kids coins will perform best? The day before inauguration as leader of free world and this is what Trump is focused on. Tells you everything you need to know.
@krassenstein
BREAKING: The Trump family just launched the $MELANIA Memecoin and see $30 Billion evaporate.
As soon as it debuted, investors dumped $Trump coin—released just two days ago—resulting in a staggering $30 billion loss in paper wealth for those who believed in it.
@urbanmyths
The last time Donald Trump had a stock chart that looked this bad he was in the casino business, and the collapse took months. The nearly 50% collapse in $Trump crypto took hours.
@BettinaSRoss1
Those movements of hate that sweep across countries, today dropping anchor in the US yet again, they're damaging & painful. But one day, they will end. They exhaust themselves. They always do. There will be an other side, & we will get to it. That, too, we learn from history
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Spoken and written by Tudor Rickards
Wednesday 22 January, 2025
Nearly 20 years ago, a friend asked me why I was thinking of putting things on the web.
I didn’t know, and said it all looked very interesting.
A few years later, another friend asked me why I wanted to play around with Twitter.
I said I wanted to try it out.
Fast forward another ten years or so, and yet another colleague warned me not to waste my time trying to learn podcasting...
From the publisher's feed