wrightak

We Are the Not Dead

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:16:40 +0900

Photographer Lalage Snow, who is currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan, embarked on an 8-month-long project titled We Are The Not Dead featuring portraits of British soldiers before, during, and after their deployment in Afghanistan.

Punking the CEO

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:53:21 +0900

A worker in the gaming industry pulls an interesting prank on her CEO.

I stood in the entryway, dizzy with joy. It was glorious. There Brosie stood, proud, nipples testing the air like young gophers in springtime, the post-apocalyptic breeze gently swaying his banana hammock. Brosie said, loud and proud: “Get ready, world! I am here to lubricate your joints and tighten your socket.”

It’s also worth clicking on the links later on. I hadn’t heard of the Bechdel Test. It’s very interesting to see some of the stats related to it.

Conflicts of Interest

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:17:00 +0900

George Monbiot:

Over the past few days I have asked the Shell professor of earth sciences at Oxford, the university itself and the umbrella body Universities UK to explain the ethical difference between taking tobacco money for cancer research and taking fossil fuel money for energy research. None of these great heads, despite my repeated attempts to engage them, were prepared even to attempt an answer.

So humans can survive 214 metres under the sea

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:29:00 +0900

Jet-lagged from my recent trip overseas and unable to sleep, I decided to watch a DVD that a colleague had sold to me during a clear-out of his apartment last month. The last time I watched Le Grand Bleu was when I was sixteen on an exchange trip to Toulouse in France. At the time, I had been shown the film in French and since then I had either forgotten or not realised that it was actually filmed in English. I therefore set the soundtrack to French and added English subtitles. It wasn’t until a wide-mouthed American appeared on the scene about 15 minutes into the film that I realised the French was dubbed. Is my foggy brain to blame or were the voice actors really good?

Anyway, cutting to the chase, I decided to look up free diving on wikipedia (something I couldn’t have done when I was sixteen). It turns out that free diving is a serious competitive sport, and perhaps the only one where competitors mustn’t breathe. There are eight disciplines, ranging from “How long can you hold your breath?” to “How deep can you swim while holding your breath?” Looking at the records, I was led to the wikipedia page of Herbert Nitsch, who has held world records in every discipline. One of the most famous is in the “no-limits apnea” category. In this category, the athlete can basically use any means necessary to dive as deep as possible. The diver portrayed in Le Grand Bleu, Jacques Mayol, achieved a depth of around 100 metres at his best. Absolutely insane. The current world record, held by Nitsch, is 214 metres!

He achieved this result in a dive off the coast of Spetses, Greece in 2007. He describes the achievement in this TED talk:

Here are some highlights:

He starts by doing an exercise that over-pressurizes his lungs, which can add an extra 5 litres of capacity. In Nitsch’s case, this brings the total to 15 litres.
He stops at a depth of 20 metres and exhales all of this air into a 2 litre plastic coke bottle (at a depth of 20 metres, the air has compressed substantially.)
He uses the air in the coke bottle to equalize on the descent. Equalizing involves filling the air pockets in your sinuses and ears with air at the correct pressure. This balances the pressure of the water around you.
He descends at 3 metres per second using a fire extinguisher filled with concrete, tied to his feet.
On the ascent, he has to wait at a depth of about 20-30 metres for a minute or two to prevent the onset of the bends.
He wears glasses that allow him to see underwater. These are not goggles since there is no air pocket between them and the eyes (which would be disastrous). His eyes touch the water.

An Excel Error? Seriously?

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:46:27 +0900

This blog post seems to have sparked a near-riot, criticizing the Reinhart-Rogoff paper that concludes that debt levels above 90% of GDP harm economic growth. This passage caught my eye:

If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.

These are smart people. What the hell is going on?

Ang Lee, the Uncertainty of Success, and Persistence

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:23:00 +0900

A thought-provoking piece about how long it took Ang Lee to get his break in film making; six years in his case.

Put yourself in his shoes. Imagine starting something now, this year, that you felt you were pretty good at, having won some student awards, devoting yourself to it full time… and then getting rejected over and over until 2019. That’s the middle of the term of the next President of the United States. Can you imagine working that long, not knowing if anything would come of it? Facing the inevitable “So how’s that film thing going?” question for the fifth consecutive Thanksgiving dinner; explaining for the umpteeth time this time it’s different to parents that had hoped that film study meant you wanted to be a professor of film at a university.

The first film I watched by Ang Lee was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which I saw during my university days. It’s still one of my favourite films. Not long after that, I went to study in America and had my first, and so far last, experience at a drive-in theater, watching Hulk. Absolutely awful. It’s hard to believe the same man made both.

My wife and I listened to an audio book of Life of Pi during a road trip from Edinburgh to London. It turns out that’s plenty of time to have an entire novel read to you. I enjoyed it but for whatever reason I have no great desire to see the film. It was good to see Ang Lee do well at the Oscars, though, and reading this piece makes it even more pleasing.

"I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate,” Hirono said at a rally earlier in the campaign. “I’m a..."

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:49:56 +0900

““I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate,” Hirono said at a rally earlier in the campaign. “I’m a woman. I’ll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I am an immigrant. I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, ‘Yes, but are you gay?’ and I said, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’””

- Hawaii sends nation’s first Asian American woman to Senate (San Jose Mercury News)

Michael Lewis' Profile of Obama

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 14:38:00 +0900

Michael Lewis, one of the best long-form journalists around, has scooped an incredible story this time. He contacted the White House, asking to write a story that puts the reader in President Obama’s shoes. To do this, he needed to follow the President around, play basketball with him, attend meetings, etc. Incredibly, they said yes.

If you haven’t heard of Lewis before, you may want to check out his other Vanity Fair articles on Iceland and Ireland, which I also liked.

"I was one of 13 children, although only eight of us made it past infancy. We were all crammed..."

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 09:40:55 +0900

“I was one of 13 children, although only eight of us made it past infancy. We were all crammed together in a one-room flat infested with rats, sharing an outside toilet with the rest of the tenement. But everyone lived that way. We didn’t know we were poor until other people told us.”

- Last of the Gorbals boys died in 2003

Twitter Should Have an App Store

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:41:55 +0900

Looks like some big changes are coming to Twitter in the next few months.

I can’t believe that Twitter would be so stupid as to cut off all third party clients that do no more than replicate the core Twitter experience. That wouldn’t be shooting yourself in the foot, it would be shooting yourself in the gut.

I can understand that they want tighter control over the experience and that they need to make sure that clients don’t implement ad-blocking functionality. Why don’t they just do what Apple does with its App Store? Third parties would need to pay for access to the API and their applications would need to be approved by Twitter. Payment could be upfront or it could be a revenue sharing deal with the proceeds from ads split between Twitter and the third party.

This would give them the control they need, generate more revenue, and piss off a much smaller number of people.

"Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we..."

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 09:21:56 +0900

“Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’ I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

- The Kranz Dictum by Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris in the Apollo 13 film).

From a speech that he made in a meeting of his branch and flight control team on the Monday morning following the Apollo 1 disaster that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

"Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow..."

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:29:43 +0900

“

Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That’s not simple.

The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental.

”

- Jonathan Ive: simplicity isn’t simple

Facebook iOS App to Go Native

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:08:09 +0900

Facebook iOS App to Go Native:

Maybe this came up when Apple and Facebook were discussing integration.

The much improved Google+ app might have been an influence too.

St. Paul’s Cathedral (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:26:30 +0900

St. Paul’s Cathedral (Taken with instagram)

Bows and flows of angel hairIce cream castles in the airFeather...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:22:00 +0900

Bows and flows of angel hair
Ice cream castles in the air
Feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

From “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell

"The U.S. didn’t ratify the Kyoto accords, of course, because Al Gore and I left office, and the next..."

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:34:34 +0900

“The U.S. didn’t ratify the Kyoto accords, of course, because Al Gore and I left office, and the next government wasn’t for it. They were all wrong. Before the financial meltdown, the four countries that will meet their Kyoto greenhouse-gas emission targets were outperforming America with lower unemployment, more new business formation, and less income inequality.”

- Bill Clinton with some good ideas about how to stimulate the U.S. economy.

Films I've made a note to watch

Thu, 19 May 2011 10:20:19 +0900

I’ve been making a note every time I come across a film that sounds interesting. This is the list so far:

Perestroika
Cherry tree lane
London to Brighton - seen it. Really good. Recommend it.
World’s Greatest Dad - seen it. Awful. Don’t touch it.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Of Gods and Men
Cool Hand Luke
Once upon a time in the west
Ballast
Confessions of a dangerous mind
You can count on me
All the presidents men
Taxi driver
44 inch chest
Blue Valentine
Inside Job
Cave of forgotten dreams
Aguirre, the wrath of god
Memories of murder
First ascent
Le Gamin au Velo
Rosetta
L’enfant
Fire in Babylon

"On August 18, 2007, on Fox News Channel’s Cavuto on Business, Stein appeared with other..."

Wed, 18 May 2011 09:39:03 +0900

“On August 18, 2007, on Fox News Channel’s Cavuto on Business, Stein appeared with other financial experts dismissing worries of a coming credit crunch. The lone dissenter was Peter Schiff, who predicted that the mortgage sector would create a crisis leading to massive recession, a view that produced laughter from the other experts.”

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Stein

The moon and a plane in the evening sky (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 17 May 2011 16:15:08 +0900

The moon and a plane in the evening sky (Taken with instagram)

Mt. Fuji wreathed in cloud by Lake Kawaguchiko (Taken with...

Fri, 06 May 2011 07:02:30 +0900

Mt. Fuji wreathed in cloud by Lake Kawaguchiko (Taken with instagram)