Eolake-South-Park

Some years ago on a web site I made myself as a South Park character.
My pal Dave (Educational Fontware) apparently thought I was too hard on myself and made an alternative one.

Quadrocopter Pole Acrobatics

Bert found this astounding video.
Didn't see that coming very soon!

The Story of a Horder

[Thanks to Ken]

An extraordinary article, on many levels.

The Living Bridge

[Thanks to Mark F]

This is fantastic. Bridges built from living roots, constructed and cultivated over a century. And some of them are already centuries old. The are necessary because of the extreme river behavior in monsoon season.




And by the way, a beautiful example of how real long-term thinking can be powerful.

The Truth About Size Zero

Beautiful and curvy Louise Redknapp, to prove a point (that extreme dieting is bad for you), crash-diets over four weeks down to a size zero. The point is proven, she very much took her life and health into her own hands. Scary shit. Both her physical and her mental health was seriously affected, and she clearly felt the lure of anorexia grabbing at her.
Watch the show, if you have the stomach for it, here. (Embedding was not allowed.)

Louise Redknapp, singer

Before and after crash-diet

... You think, how can the fashion designers and companies live with themselves, continuing to make clothes only walking skeletons can fit into?
I think we underestimate how subjective reality is, not just for mentally skewed people, but for normal people, for all of us. They simply live in a world where the normal and healthy body shape is fat. It's what they see, it's how it is.

Phrases

Fun phrase from UK TV show Rev.:

"I'm experiencing large amounts of ontological despair." 

Another one I heard from tech guru Joe Kissell, when he'd made a mistake:

"I had a cognitive breakdown." 

The Real Problem with the Big Banks

The Real Problem with the Big Banks, New Yorker article.
The fundamental problem with the banks isn’t that they look (and act) more and more like hedge funds. The fundamental problem with banks is what it’s always been: they’re in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

As he proposes, it could be a lot less so if banks were simply required to have more equity for the money they lend.

But it lends perspective to the old adage: "as safe as money in the bank". In a world where every generation has its bank failures, I wonder how such a saying even comes about?

For the minority these days (though still a sizable one) who are savers, it is recommended to not have all your money in the bank, and certainly not in one bank. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is a smart counter-idea to the one above.

Explosive rock?

... That Russian meteor: how can a rock just explode like that? That was a huge explosion! Seems weird to me.
[Ray points to this.]

By the way, it silhouettes how rare this is. Meaning: how little space humans take up on Earth. Earth is hit by meteors and satellite debris all the time, and when do they ever hit anybody, or even a building? Virtually never. I don't really get how this planet is supposedly "overpopulated". It may be under-fed, but that's not the same thing, that's because a very tiny percentage of the land is developed, and what food there is, is very poorly distributed.

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I was thinking the same as Jon Stewart when I watched the video: why is the driver not reacting? Is he on tranquillisers? Does this happen every day in his city? And I think that was not even the same vid.

Ch-ch-changes

The Cost of Being Disorganized

The Cost of Being Disorganized, post.

• Typical US worker is interrupted by communications technology every 10 minutes (Institute for Future and Gallup)
• 80% of papers and information that we keep, we never use (Agency Sales Magazine)
• The Wall Street Journal reports that the average U.S. executive wastes six weeks per year retrieving misplaced information from messy desks and files.
• If you rent self-storage space to store your excess belongings, you’re contributing to a $154 billion industry.  That’s bigger than the Hollywood film business!

The last item is amazing!
A more inclusive list is here.

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TTL referred to:

Dusk in Lancashire

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iPhone 4S, with HDR* on. HDR really helped bring out the sky. But there's been no post-production, no cropping even, only a slight sharpening which wasn't very necessary or visible. I'm a bit surprised at the nice light here, in reality it was quite dark and dull, it seemed to me. 
(One has to be careful with holding the phone still in such dull light, since it doesn't have shake-reduction.) 

*High Dynamic Range. To combine more exposures to help detail in highlight and shadow, in high-contrast situations. It's a poor situation that phone cameras have this now, while many real cameras still don't. (The great compact Sony RX100 does have it, but the otherwise very advanced system camera Olympus OM-D does not.)

PS: it was pointed out to me that this was more likely twilight than dusk, even though the sun seemed to have set. (And even though it seemed darker at the time than the pictures tell. As you may know, cameras tend to make everything equally middle-grey, so snow is grey, often, and coal is not black.) 

These Lego minifigs are going to Jupiter

These Lego minifigs are going to Jupiter, article.

Some realms of nerddom are beyond even my ken. Like LEGO. (Which should shame me, since it's Danish.) I mean, it's a kool toy, but it's a toy. Sorry guys. (Maybe Pascal and Alex can explain, or just thumb me over the noggin.)

I'm not sure why they spent 15 grand on carving these in aluminium. Plastic is not harmless enough? Unless it's simply that they wanted them to be unique, and this was cheaper that making the usual molds to make plastic figures. (I do know that's a very costly affair.)

Stooopid search engines!

How come most search engines, in apps and such, are not only 100 times slower, but also so much stupider than Google? I mean, even years ago I was looking for a recipe in a second language (Swedish), and I spelt both of the two words badly wrong, and Google still found the recipe for me, top hit!

In contrast, look at this organic waste from the iTunes store:

How brain dead is that?

Normally it takes just a year or two for the industry to catch up to the inventor of something better. But after 15 years we are still waiting for search systems to catch up to Google. What's up?
Sure, I know that google has hardware which is colossal and mind-blowing, but on the other hand, they search an index of the whole friggin web! The billing company for my business, when their admin site/server searches for a customer, it normally takes like 20-30 seconds, as opposed to Google's 0.30 seconds, and they just have a few thousand customer numbers to search through. The contrast is absurd.