dangerous nests

Have you heard the rumor that Stieg Larsson's estate has allowed a third-party writer to write a sequel to 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' and 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest'?
The working title is 'The Girl Who Messed With Something Dangerous Again'.

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Talking about hornets' nests, I would say one would have to be quite desperate to have sex with one. But he probably didn't predict that the act was actually suicidal! (Durn, it's even a Swedish man, one more brick in the seque.
... If you're like me and skip the links to other stories while reading one, it takes a while to discover that this story was actually a hoax. Dishonest journalism, I'd call that. Totally different from what I'm doing, for I actually didn't know it while writing the post.     :-)
Well, good to know nobody has yet been that stupid.

Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

[Thanks to Aniko]

I've been from the minority saying just this, since the nineties. But seldom has it been said so convincingly.




"Don't make people pay, let them pay."

Public Opinion

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
-- Bertrand Russell

More from Sony RX100

Congratulations to TCGirl for getting the Sony RX100!
This tiny camera continues to be one of my favorites. It's a real pocketcamera, breast-pocket-sized, but the speed and the quality, and the low-light results do not look like it. It's a dang good camera, not just a dang good compact-camera.
This is an indoor hand-held shot from it. What amazing quality.
If it would have been me, I'd have used auto-ISO or maybe ISO 800, but despite the low setting which gave a 1/10th second shutter speed, the anti-shake of the camera coped with it perfectly.
(Here's a full-sized file, direct from camera.)

The camera is priced according to the quality, about $650... you can get a very good compact for half that. But I consider it worth it.
Two of the "secrets" to its performance are the fast lens, and the large sensor, the largest in a camera of that size. It's even larger than the sensor in the Fuji X10, which has a considerably larger body.

It looks bigger here, "folded out", when "folded in" it's a true pocket camera, hardly bigger than the Canon S100, just a bit thicker.

British place names

I live near a town named Ramsbottom. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness

[Thanks to Aniko]

So many people have promised us Happiness, that one starts to ignore it, like promises of more hair or longer dicks. But this lecture has some very interesting points. Not the least the chart at the end.

Sunrise from above

Talking about the space station, here's a sunrise as seen from there. You don't often see the air space like that!
Full image.

Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model

"Image is powerful. But image is superficial." — Cameron Russell



"Models have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair, and they are probably the most physically insecure people on the planet." — Cameron Russell, supermodel

Space Oddity, from space

I guess no comments needed.



Except mayby Berts:

Chris Hadfield, the Canadian who has been commander of the International Space Station for the past several month passed command to a Russian astronaut yesterday in preparation for his return to Earth today, after 146 days in space.

Aside from all the usual "astronauty" biz, he has undoubtedly been the best communicator ever in the space circle. By the way, he's that guy who was wringing a wet towel in the video I sent you earlier. 750 000 Twitter followers got some 4900 messages relating his odyssey. Maintained an equally popular mission blog, and built an audience of 236 000 Facebook admirers. Plus many videos of quirky experiments requested by his fans!

But this last bit takes the cake, you have got to watch this! As a final farewell message, he managed to record a cover of Bowie's Space Oddity, in the most appropriate environment possible for that music clip, nothing less than the ISS! And it's really not that bad.

The guy wows me.
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Alannah Myles - Black Velvet (1994)

Sssssexy.




Funny, for me the song is centrally about the oddity of the tasteless commodification of a great singer (guess who). Posters of black velvet! But the great melody and her delivery makes it very different indeed!

===
I'm just finishing up re-reading one of Terry Pratchett's best books, Soul Music, which is funny and inventive, and is about the terrible, amazing, seductive power of rock music, or "music with rocks in" as it's called in the book, because the drummer is a troll banging on rocks... And I can well understand why people get addicted to that fantastic connection with a crowd that a good concert can create.

If it were me, I'd have called the book Music With Rocks In, it's so funny. And the book is not about soul music. But I guess it's called that for a sort-of pun, based on the fact that Death plays a large part in it. (As does Susan, Death's grand-daughter, a great character.)

Keyprop

Thanks to Bert for finding the smallest and simplest smart-phone stand ever.

Bike lanes led to 49% increase in retail sales

Bike lanes led to 49% increase in retail sales, post.

Also 35-58% decrease in injuries, but apparently that was less important.     :-)

When I moved from Denmark, where bikes are everywhere, to UK where you may not see one for days, it was a bitch because there are no bike lanes here. You have to fight for space with big metal beasties, and you're seriously out-gunned.

Print your own gun (updated!)

A 3D printed gun?
Wow, this opens a big can of worms, not to say a hornet's nest! Do you think this will be controversial??!!


Kelly T put in a long and interesting comment, small quote:
At the end of it, the Frenchman said something about how he agreed with Clarkson and how he couldn't understand why we Americans left stuff in the open in the back of our pickups. Then one of the corporate jet drivers said that somebody just walking up to your truck while you were in it and stealing a bunch of crap out of it was something that just wouldn't happen here, unless you were in the bad parts of Detroit, Kansas City, or New Orleans or LA. The French guy gave him a puzzled look and asked 'why not?' and the whole group, almost in unison, replied ' because you might get shot!' 

Kelly also supplied some photos, from the workshop which made that beautiful airplane and canoe I showed not long ago.

(It's funny how something with such an ugly or primitive function can be beautiful.)

Unlike the originals, which were cast with low-grade iron in the 1700s, this one is machined with a CNC milling machine from a 200 lb ingot of stainless steel. All the parts are also stainless. It shoots a one pound ball of lead. I think it is a one-half scale of the original (a five foot long ingot of stainless wouldn't fit in any of his CNC machines).

The Top 100 ‘Pictures of the Day’ for 2012

More.

Focus, durnit!

Article about the limitations of phone cameras.

He is talking about it sort of from a web-journalist's point of view. And I think the new chimera of good cameras with small android tablets will be just the thing for that. They will be able to take pro-quality images and videos under most conditions, and can immediately process and post/send the results.

Something like the Sony RX100 (a shirt-pocket-sized camera with big results even in low light) with a bigger screen and Android (or even iOS, dare to dream) would be exceedingly useful for many.
(Not for me though, I should add. Well it might be, but I like the shirt-pocket size of the RX100, and I prefer to more carefully edit photos on a real computer before posting them.)

back online after a year without the internet

...back online after a year without the internet, article.

We're seeing the conclusion of the Great Experiment of the Verge journalist who took a year off from the Internet. At first it seems a huge success, he really bloomed. But in the long run, things started to look very different.
A thought-provoking essay.

I couldn't have all my interactions on Twitter anymore; I had to find them in real life. My sister, who has dealt with the frustration of trying to talk to me while I'm half listening, half computing for her entire life, loves the way I talk to her now. She says I'm less detached emotionally, more concerned with her well-being — less of a jerk, basically.
[...]


As it turned out, a dozen letters a week could prove to be as overwhelming as a hundred emails a day. And that was the way it went in most aspects of my life. A good book took motivation to read, whether I had the internet as an alternative or not. Leaving the house to hang out with people took just as much courage as it ever did.

By late 2012, I'd learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.
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4 Sisters Take Their Photo Every Year For 36 Years

[Thanks to Grant]

4 Sisters Take Their Photo Every Year For 36 Years, article/photo post.

1975:

1993:

etc.

Gawd, bureaucracy!

My bank has decided that I can no longer use the savings account for Standing Payments.
To set up a Current account, I need to thoroughly prove my identity, even though I've been a customer for 13 years!
Oh, good news: they can transfer all standing orders and such to the new account! ... No, wait, this is only if I come from *another* bank, not their own!
It's f***ing nuts.

A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

[Thanks to Lars]

First movie made with atom manipulation.
Making-of movies.

Hong Kong's towers

These photos are allegedly only barely doctored.
They are pretty amazing. Clearly taken with a long telephoto (or telezoom) lens, which compresses apparent perspective. It must be quite a lot of work to get into all the right positions.