“The last song on River of Dreams is “Famous Last Words.“ “

Vulture:
In Conversation: Billy Joel. “The superstar on his songwriting silence, the country today, and his ideal farewell.” By David Marchese, 23 July 2018.

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“You’ve said you’ll do the Garden residency until demand slows down or you start playing at a level you’re not happy with. What clues would signal the latter?
If I can’t sing as well as I should. I’m already struggling. I wrote most of the songs that I’m doing when I was in my 20s and 30s and it ain’t easy to hit those notes in my 60s. We’ve dropped the keys of some songs already. Hopefully it’s not that noticeable. If I’m having a tough time hitting notes — I call it throwing junk pitches. Instead of having a fastball you throw off-speed. If I’ve got to throw too much junk, I’m going to consider stopping.”

“If you want to be successful, you have to be fast. But you also have to be first.”

Quanta Magazine: Three Major Physics Discoveries and Counting. “Sau Lan Wu spent decades working to establish the Standard Model of particle physics. Now she’s searching for what lies beyond it.”

“In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.

Wu was an integral member of one of the two groups that observed the J/psi particle, which heralded the existence of a fourth kind of quark, now called the charm. […] Later in the 1970s, Wu did much of the math and analysis to discern the three “jets“ of energy flying away from particle collisions that signaled the existence of gluons — particles that mediate the strong force holding protons and neutrons together. […] Wu later became one of the group leaders for the ATLAS experiment, one of the two collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, filling in the final piece of the Standard Model.”

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“Verbale Aggressivität” und “hohe Affinität zu Waffen”

Deutsche Welle: Immer mehr “Reichsbürger” unter Beobachtung. “Der Verfassungsschutzbericht ist wegen des Asylstreits liegen geblieben. Jetzt werden die neuen Zahlen offiziell vorgestellt – zusammen mit alarmierenden Bewertungen.”

“Viele “Reichsbürger” behaupten, das Deutsche Reich existiere in den Grenzen von 1937 fort. Beide Gruppen erkennen die Bundesrepublik Deutschland nicht als Staat an, lehnen deren Rechtssystem ab und weigern sich oftmals, Steuern oder Bußgelder zu zahlen. Die Mitglieder der Szene werden daher vom Verfassungsschutz aktuell als “staatsfeindlich und extremistisch” eingestuft.”

“A frontal attack on the EU and European values”

Deutsche Welle: German politicians allied against Steve Bannon. “Steve Bannon plans to build a right-wing populist think tank in Europe. German lawmakers called the plans by the former adviser to the US president to influence the 2019 European elections “a frontal attack on the EU.””

Michael Roth, a center-left Social Democratic (SPD) lawmaker and minister of state for Europe: Europe should not “be afraid of nationalist campaigns with which Mr. Bannon would like to force Europe to its knees…our values are stronger than his hate and his lies.”

See also: Steve Bannon plans Brussels-based foundation ‘The Movement’ for EU far-right. “Donald Trump’s ex-strategist, Steve Bannon, told the Daily Beast he hopes the foundation will fuel the spread of right-wing populism across Europe. He wants to offer a right-wing alternative to George Soros’s foundation.”

Live from the International Space Station ISS

ESA: Good evening, Kraftwerk / Guten Abend Kraftwerk, guten Abend Stuttgart! (YouTube, 11:48min)

“On 20 July 2018 around 21:50 local time, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst welcomed the legendary electronic band Kraftwerk and 7500 visitors to the Jazz Open Festival on Stuttgart’s Schlossplatz – live from the International Space Station, where he will live and work until mid-December 2018. During the call with space, Kraftwerk founding member Ralf Hütter and Alexander played a special duet version of the track Spacelab, for which Alexander had a tablet computer configured with virtual synthesizers on board.”

Alexander Gerst’s Horizon Blog: Good evening, Kraftwerk!

““Here in the European Columbus laboratory, the successor to the Spacelab, the European Space Agency ESA is researching things that will improve daily life on Earth. More than 100 different nations work together peacefully here and achieve things that a single nation could never achieve. We are developing technologies on board the ISS to grow beyond our current horizons and prepare to take further steps into space, to the Moon and Mars,“ Alexander said.

However, as Kraftwerk founding member Ralf Hütter emphasised, Alexander’s appearance was not only about greeting Kraftwerk and the audience in Stuttgart but also about “music as the universal language of the world“ . After addressing the crowd, he and Alexander played a special duet version of the track Spacelab, for which Alexander had a tablet computer configured with virtual synthesizers on board.”

Alexander Gersts Horizon Blog: Guten Abend Kraftwerk!

“Nachdem Alexander Gerst sich mit einem „Good Night Earth“ vom Publikum verabschiedet hatte, fuhren Kraftwerk mit ihrem fulminanten Set fort, während die Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauer sich wohl noch ein paar Mal verblüfft fragten, ob das, was sie da gerade gesehen und gehört hatten, auch wirklich live und real war. Wir können sagen: Das war es.”