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Oliver Sacks, apprenant qu’il est lui-même dans la phase terminale d’un cancer.

J’apprends que Oliver Sacks, l’auteur du très beau livre : « l’homme qui prenait sa femme pour un chapeau ». Ou ce neurologue tentent de nous faire comprendre a travers des présentations de quelques uns de ces patients, les difficultés radicales que peut poser par exemple, la perte de la proprioception (que son corps lui appartient), le fait d’avoir une mémoire très courte et tout en se pensant dans les années 50 etc...

Oliver Sacks donc, qui a passé sa vie a soigner, comprendre et écouter ses patients, et tenter de nous faire comprendre ce qu’ils ressentaient, s’est découvert un cancer avec de multiple métastases.
Âgé de 81 ans, il laisse un émouvant message, que je préfère conserver en anglais afin de le préserver de mes mauvaises traductions (bien qu’il soit clair) :

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/02/19/opinion/19sacks/19sacks-blog427.jpg

▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html?_r=3

The cost of a decline in #unions
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-cost-of-a-decline-in-unions.html #syndicats #syndicalisme #industrie #inégalités
“To understand the rising #inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the #labor movement”

Reading a journalist who admits he was wrong and changes his mind is nice too.

Photoshop at 25: A Thriving Chameleon Adapts to an Instagram World - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/technology/personaltech/photoshop-at-25-a-thriving-chameleon-adapts-to-an-instagram-world.html?emc=

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/02/19/technology/19state-illo/19state-illo-facebookJumbo.jpg

“When I took over the business in 2010, I realized that the growth in our business did not match what was happening all around us,” said David Wadhwani, the executive in charge of Adobe’s creative software. “Visual expression was on the rise everywhere. Our business was a solid business, but it was not growing at the pace that we felt it should.”

So Adobe is taking a big risk and reinventing Photoshop and, the company hopes, making it less acutely dependent on sales to a small group of professional customers.

The aggressive reinvention of Photoshop, if successful, could serve as a model for other companies, particularly Microsoft, that risk losing business to more nimble app makers. It also suggests a path to mobile devices for software that over the years grew fatter as PCs grew more powerful: Slice it up, cut the price, and you could end up attracting a far wider audience.

Or at least make sure your current audience doesn’t abandon you.
State of the Art

Adobe’s new plan for Photoshop actually started in 2011. Rather than selling licensed copies of Photoshop and its other high-end creative applications for hundreds of dollars each (Photoshop used to sell for $700 a copy), Adobe began offering monthly access for as little as $10 a month.

“But we were always watching the trends to see exactly what features were required as the market evolved,” Thomas Knoll said. Each time some new opportunity came along — from the web to inkjet printers to digital cameras — Adobe quickly tuned Photoshop to the new technology. Each time, Photoshop grew.

In a way, then, Adobe’s turn to cloud-based subscriptions and mobile apps is similar: The business of software has changed, and Adobe is again shifting with it. Adobe now offers some of Photoshop’s best features to outside developers, who can add advanced image-editing capabilities to their apps at no cost. Adobe is also building a suite of apps that offer specific cuts of Photoshop and other programs to a wider range of users.

“When I see all this happening, I’m down with what they’re doing,” said Mr. Maeda, who is now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “I think the younger generation of designers is looking for new tools, and they don’t care what device it’s on.”