Gulfstream: 2009

The Big Picture’s “decade in news photographs.”

How to write to Ministers. This basically amounts to: how to take up their time, but in a more or less sincere and serious way. Australian, but applicable elsewhere.

An alternative to Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that foreign airlines have a worse safety record than US airlines because of cultural issues: it’s because foreign pilots haven’t had as much practice. (Includes some slightly picky criticism of Gladwell’s aviation knowledge.)

Discussion from alt.usage.english in 1998 regarding the graffiti: “Chloe is a slut but she has big tits.” e.g. “Is the author implying that sluts normally have small tits?” and “should there be a comma after ‘slut’?”

Video of a $1.6m Bugatti Veyron being driven into a lake! The owner apparently claimed to have been distracted by a “low flying pelican,” but no such bird is to be seen...

U.S. map showing percentage of people who responded “Yes” to the question “Are you a genius?” on the dating site OK Cupid’s. (More information in their blog post.)

Freakonomics authors suggest investigating a geoengineering solution to global warming. (The post is apparently written in response to environmentalists who, they say, are mixing scientific and social/moral issues.)

A shape-shifting robot! Looks rather like a self-inflating soccer ball.

Electric fan from Dyson (vacuum cleaners, etc.) that someone manages to move air around without blades. Rather strange that the video showing people’s initial reactions to the fan show the purported blast not at all moving the hair on their heads.

Jamie Zawinski summarises what’s known about the thieves who stole from a Swedish money-storing facility: “Now this is how to rob a bank.” (Among other things, they planted a bag marked “bomb” outside the police heliport, so that they could not be purused by police helicopters.)

“The walking ghost phase of radiation poisoning is a period of apparent health, lasting for hours or days, following a dose of 50 sieverts of radiation. As its name would suggest, the walking ghost phase is followed by certain death.” This condition is mentioned as a potential disadvantage of the neutron bomb—troops surving the initial explosion, and in this phase “would likely be aware of their inevitable fate and react accordingly.”

“If there’s one thing Brooklyn’s petty thieves care about, it’s some rich bitch’s faith in humanity. Is she going for a naïve world record?” [Picture]

Nice overview on how the U.S. Air Force has changed: less fancy fighter, more UAVs. “From 1947 to 1982, all 10 generals who served as Air Force chief of staff were bomber pilots. From 1982 until last year, all nine generals who occupied that position were fighter pilots. In 2008, a new era in warfare was beginning, and Secretary Gates asked President Bush to appoint a different kind of chief of staff: Gen. Norton Schwartz. He came up through the ranks flying neither bombers nor fighters but C-130s, the bulky cargo planes that haul troops, weapons, and supplies from bases and supply depots to the battlefront.”

Teeny font with an x-height of 3 pixels. (Subpixel-tuned by hand!) (More.)

How having phones, or not having phones, has shaped the plots of novels and movies over time. “Novelists are now routinely obliged to explain why their detectives or victims don’t simply ring someone for help.”

“In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.”

Wikipedia, I love you. Also, one inventor so killed was a Thomas Midgley, Jr., who managed to invent both leaded petrol and CFCs. (Although the effects of CFCs on the atmosphere weren’t known until well after his death, he does seem to have been involved in suppressing information about how workers were harmed by working with lead.)

“Asserting your social status with your Facebook status.” e.g. one update is glossed as: “Your life is worthy of envy, but it is not perfect — otherwise everyone would hate you, and we can’t have that. And so the fabulous undershare must strike a counterbalance, and the results can be fantastic. This updater’s status, nominally a complaint about a nasty hangover, is really a subterranean boast that (a) the updater has a Dionysian appreciation for the high life, (b) has rather limitless supplies of Rose [sic] wine, and (c) is in Ibiza.”

“The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil.” The surprising story of an Iraqi who moved to Norway and apparently became instrumental in establishing the Norwegian oil industry, and especially the way in which it is regulated.

The real achievement, in other words, was not finding oil but coping with its discovery. Norway faced the same dilemma as every other new oil producer with no experience of the industry: if you rely too much on private foreign companies, too little of the oil wealth benefits the country in the form of government revenue or economic development; if you go too far in the other direction, you risk a bloated, politicised oil sector that evades both accountability to the people and competitive pressures to be efficient.

Since 1996, all state profits from oil have been put into a savings fund, which is now equivalent to a year’s GDP.

Not sure if this is anything to be proud of: but British fatalities in Afghanistan, on the increase since 2006, have actually decreased as a percentage of troops deployed. And Canadian forces have an astonishing 20% chance of being killed or seriously wounded.

David MacKay’s book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air features some helpful simplifications relating to energy use that make it easier to see the consequences of various energy choices such as wind power versus nuclear. In this article he compares the energy consumption per unit area of various countries (10 watts per square meter for Bahrain, 0.1 watts per square meter for South Africa, 0.01 for Botswana) to the amount of energy that different schemes can generate, per unit area (15-20 watts per square meter for solar, 11 watts for hydro, 2.5 for wind, 0.5 for energy crops) to make it easier to see how much land needs to be given over to energy production for each country to achieve energy self-sufficiency.

A literacy revolution? “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment.”

Annie Leibovitz owes $24m and is in a bunch of financial trouble. “There was only one man Leibovitz deemed qualified to work on anything involving air-conditioning or ductwork at either residence, and he lived in Vermont.”

Video of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller demonstrating how Sullivan taught Keller to speak.

The voter information gathering and fundraising software used by Obama, and other big political campaigns in the US.

There’s an emulator for the hardware used on the Apollo missions! This is the gentle introduction.

Positive review of Spotify, the free and legal music streaming service available in the UK and some other European countries. Note that according to the FAQ you can get access to Spotify from other countries provided you login from a country that has Spotify access every 14 days or so—or know someone who can do this for you... (Spotify worked for me when I was on holiday in Singapore and Melbourne, so I know this works.) Also, Spotify Premium, the $16.50/month version, does not have this restriction.

Dahlia Lithwick:

“So consider this: Republicans came into these hearings with nothing to lose. They were never going to block this nomination, but they could have used these days to make it clear they are not the party of Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber. They could have questioned Sotomayor about her record, her views, even asked a tough question or two about wise Latina women. They opted not to.

“Democrats also came into these hearings with nothing to lose. They were going to seat this nominee, tee up the next two, and school the American people on why the Supreme Court matters and how it’s letting them down and explain why balls and strikes are half the equation. They opted not to. When you think of it that way, beyond just being a waste of time, these hearings were also a waste of a thousand opportunities.”

Stuff White People Like #127: Where the Wild Things Are. “It is a guarantee that whenever it is announced that a popular book is being turned into a movie, white people will get upset. This is partly due to their fear that something they love will be made accessible to more people and thus enjoyed by more people which immediately decreases the amount of joy a white person can feel towards the original property.”

Flowchart of how to get photographed by The Sartorialist. (I don’t agree that he favours cigarettes. He just doesn’t go out of his way to avoid them.)

“Vladimir Putin ... has a knack for making first impressions. In 2001, he showed President George W. Bush his mother’s crucifix to give Dubya a sense of his soul; the same year, he surprised Azerbaijani President Heidar Aliyev by presenting Aliyev with his 1949 graduation certificate from Leningrad’s KGB academy. He also knows how to make a thoughtful gift: Putin gave canine-averse German Chancellor Angela Merkel a toy dog.”

Michael Kinsley on reverse discrimination, and Sonia Sotomayor’s membership of an elite women’s only club. “Sotomayor will feel right at home on the Supreme Court, where justices have made heroic efforts to pretend that affirmative action is one thing and that reverse discrimination is another.”

jwz has a Palm Pre, and so asks some questions and writes a small review. “Copy and paste only work [sic] with text fields, not the contents of mail messages or web pages.” Really?

“It’s kind of amazing how much Apple got right yesterday—and what they got wrong: Their product lines are completely scrambled. The Pro designation has become meaningless and $99 iPhones look just like $499 iPhones.”

The Army has commissioned a 22-page report on saffron as an alternative cash crop to the opium poppy for Afghan farmers; the piece also notes that it’s nice “to see the military studying aid and development models so closely.” Unfortunately, opium is an “almost ideal” crop, and would probably be about 50% more profitable for the farmers than saffron: “it is a high-value, low weight crop that requires minimal water; the paste collected during the harvest is easy to store and transport; and the buyers come to directly to you.”

One the first use of anesthetic in an operating room, and the the moral and medical environment of the time: “Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. ... In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients’ base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health. ... Most doctors still believed it was only pain that kept patients alive through the trauma of operations. System failure due to shock was a frequent cause of death during surgery, and the loss of sensation was believed to make it more likely. A screaming patient, however tormented, had a better prognosis than a limp and lifeless one.”

Christopher Hitchens on the lessons to be learnt from Sri Lanka’s victory over the Tamil Tigers: “It’s just not true, as some liberals tend to believe, that insurgencies, once under way, have history on their side. As well as by nations like Britain and Russia, they can be beaten by determined Third World states, such as Algeria in the 1990s and even Iraq in the present decade. Insurgent leaderships often make mistakes on the “hearts and minds” front, just as governments do, and governments are not always stupid to ban the press from the front line, tell the human rights agencies to stay the hell out of the way, and rely on the popular yearning for law and order.”

Curious interview with Kim Jong-il’s eldest son, conducted in what seems to be a glass lift on Macau. He speaks excellent English (better than his Japanese interviewer), and is about as casual and low-key and comfortable as is imaginable for any any head of state’s offspring.

“When Justice Department lawyers engaged in a sharp internal debate in 2005 over brutal interrogation techniques, even some who believed that using tough tactics was a serious mistake agreed on a basic point: the methods themselves were legal.”

Salon’s resident pilot Patrick Smith on Air France Flight 447, including why turbulence and lightning are typically nothing to worry about.

Some nice visualisations of various stochastic phenomena, produced with Processing. e.g. Benford’s Law, the output of pseudo random number generators.

[pic] “From now on if it’s getting onstage it better have a guitar and testicles and if that doesn’t sound right to you, we’ll just keep adding more until it does.”

Video of General Motors crash tests conducted in the 60s. It’s carnage out there!

Yet another theory of what made humans successful: fire—because eating cooked food is more efficient way to consume it, and the behaviours surrounding it (women doing cooking, and so forth) themselves provided an evolutionary advantage.

Etihad’s 8-bunk crew rest area above a 777’s cabin. (Many more photos linked from the bottom of this AskThePilot column.)

Identify stars with Andriod: point a G1 at a star, and, using GPS, accelerometer, and compass, it’ll tell you what you’re looking at. (Does the iPhone have a compass?)

[pic] Moskovskaya subway station in St. Petersburg has platform screen doors with stone (instead of the more typical glass) surrounds, which makes the platform look more like a lift lobby.

Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air: very educational and informative (free) book by David MacKay (Cambridge professor of physics) on how we can reduce the amount of carbon web pump into the air. Serious, responsible, realistic, and not shrill. (Except occasionally, when irritated by particularly wrong-headed energy saving schemes, such as the advice to unplug your phone charger when not using it.) Towards the end he presents five sample energy plans that vary in their energy source mix (more/less nuclear, etc.). As he says, there’s something “unpalatable” about every one—but these are our choices. I’m impressed (and glad) that it’s currently #54 on Amazon UK’s best-seller list. A few misc things I was surprised by: (a) Wind farms take up an enormous amount of space (“if we covered the windiest 10% of the [UK] with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person” (p. 33); the UK average energy comsumption per day is 125 kWh/d (p. 104); (b) I knew air travel dumped a whole lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, but it turns out this is mostly because of the distances involved; travelling to Australia by car, for example, is about as efficient as flying there (p. 128).

Annotated transcript of Steve Jobs’ deposition to the SEC on the issue of stock options. “What comes through in the deposition is how Jobs sees himself and entries fierce loyalty to those who work for him.”

Jamie Zawinski’s battle-scarred keyboard. (Alt key partly partly worn through!)

NY Times’s “Global Edition—; replaces the International Herald Tribune. Still rather US-centric though (compared to, say, the BBC’s international site); the top story is “U.S. Said to Seek a Chrysler Plan for Bankruptcy.”

The New Yorker is being sued over a story by Jared Diamond, in which he describes a long running feud between New Guinea highlanders. One of the highlanders is now saying that Diamond has falsely accused him of “serious criminal activity” and “murder.” I do like Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I was struck by the frequency with which he described highlanders as “friends.” It seemed like it was important to him to form friendships with the highlanders, and for readers to be aware of his friendship. (Among other examples (try Amazon book search), the book is dedicated to “Esa, Karinga, Omwai, Paran, Sauakari, Wiwor, and all my other New Guinea friends and teachers”) Is it really possible to form a genuine friendship with people with a very different culture and values and history, and who are are also the subjects of your research? Is this common for anthropologists?

Photographs of people with their head stuck in the freezer. (David Horvitz’s idea.)

Fun Flash music generator thing. Time is horizontal, pitch vertical.

This is great: holds public prognosicators to account by recording their predictions. A bit like the Long Now Foundation’s Long Predictions, except that it accepts user-submitted predictions. (Curiously, no environmental predictions have been entered yet.)

(NSFW) “In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order.” (Borderline questionable artist statement.)

The EcoDrain: heat exchanger to capture the wasted heat (not water!) that goes down the plughole.

Chart of common household activities and common foods in low water use/high water use pairs. e.g. coffee–37 gallons, tea–9 gallons. Eating chicken instead of beef saves about as much water as making every other suggested change on the entire page! Dishwashers use less water than washing up by hand.

Photos of Somalian pirates. The BBC claims that the captured pirates often aren’t punished, mostly because international law makes doing so difficult.

Rave about the Austin nightlife and the support it gets from the local government: “Right now I am looking at a street sign - a municipal street sign, presumably suported by an ordinance and everything - that says ‘Restricted lane, musician loading and unloading’.”

“User:Diikiw/Wiikid, formerly Wikiid, is an article that was created on the web site Wikipedia in 2008. It is notable in its attempt to become the first Wikipedia page to gain notoriety solely for the fact that it was a page on Wikipedia; this was intended to spark a debate as to whether or not Wikipedia could be considered a source notable enough to allow a entriess permanent entry on the site. It can be looked at both as metahumor and as a piece of postmodern art.”

The Dr Martens “For Life” range: repairs for life, they promise.

More newspaper doom and gloom: it’s likely that soon, major US cities will be without a daily paper. See also David Simon’s recent article pointing out that there’s a bunch of things that citizen journalists can’t do, like get judges to badger police when they refuse to give out information. I think papers need to do a better job of complementing and acknowledging the other available sources of news and information, and place less emphasis on reporting the stuff that happened yesterday. A newspaper is a truly terrible source of up-to-the-minute news; there’s no sense pretending that nothing noteworthy ever happens between the time the paper is sent to press and the time a reader buys it.

I’m really taken by this exceptional photograph of twins by The Sartorialist. For some reason the feeling I get from it is much the same feeling as the feeling I get from American Gothic—there’s a sadness to it, a strangeness, a secret running deep. [Update 1: feels a bit like Diane Arbus as well. The same twins are the subject of an October 2008 picture. Update 2: Via Altamira, the twins are from Saudi Arabia and are Sama and Haya Abukhadra. Update 3: another picture by the Sartorialist, this time October 2009 in Milan.]

Errol Morris talks to press photographers about their favourite pictures of George Bush.

Ten Major Newspapers that may fold or go digital only in the next year. Some big names here: the SF Chronicle, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Miami Herald.

Why the state of the stock market is not necessarily indicative of the state of the economy as a whole.

Good pictures! See the page footer for links to pages on other “celebration gestures”

Moderately interesting article on the decline of the U.S. Air Force due to neglect brought on by at least 30 years of inferior competition. (“The last American soldier killed on the ground by an enemy air attack died in Korea, on April 15, 1953.”) Also has an intriguing (and regrettably small) image of an AIM-7 air-to-air missile just about to hit a Iraqi MIG-29 Fulcrum, extracted from the downed Fulcrum’s head-up display.

Paul Graham on Hacker News, and building community on news aggregation sites: “The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that’s too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.”

The bottom of an article on the first Australian-designed car to achieve a five-star safety rating has an interesting crash timeline: 1ms “car’s door pressure sensore detects a pressure wave” ... 7ms “crash computer confirms a serious crash” ... 8ms “computer sends ‘fire’ signal to side airbag” ... 27ms “airbag starts controlled deflation” ... 50ms “crash computer unlocks car’s doors” ... 70ms “engineers classify crash as ‘complete’” ... 150–300ms “occupant becomes aware of collision.”

“Point and shoot tips from the old masters.” Your point and shoot camera might seem pretty limiting compared to the expensive cameras packed by pros, but it’s almost certainly a whole bunch more capable than the cameras used by “every documentary photographer working from the 1930s to the 1980s.” “If everything in your image is going to be in focus, then everything has to add to the photo. Select your backgrounds carefully.”

Movie trilogy ratings, by movie. Nice work.

“Good essay on the Amish, and what leads them (often) to reject newtechnology: new stuff is only accepted if and only if it strengthens their communities, and helps them remain independent. “The Amish use disposable diapers (why not?), chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and are big boosters of genetically modified corn.”

James Surowiecki: “Decisionmakers ... should try to come up with their best estimates of how likely a policy is to succeed, as well as its potential payoff, and then pursue the policy with the greatest expected value.” This is not a good idea! If this were followed, no one would ever buy insurance, since the expected value of any sort of insurance purchase is less than zero. (By and large, insurance companies make money, meaning that policy holders lose money.) Pursuing a “highest expected value” policy would mean bets on, amongst other things, extremely unlikely events with huge payoffs.

On the directing work that goes on during the live broadcast of NFL games. “In the seconds between the return from the two-minute-warning commercial break and the snap of the ball to Giants quarterback Eli Manning, as play-by-play man Greg Gumbel quickly oriented the audience ... the following scene-setting images flashed past in rapid succession ...”

More on “meritocracy” from Michael Young, who came up with the term: “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.” (Interesting comparison of Blair and Atlee’s cabinets, also.)

Surprising: positive story about Wal-Mart in Boing Boing, from a writer who worked undercover as an associate. Sounds as though he might’ve started out with this conclusion in mind though, since he mentions being suspicious of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, and also talks about a guy, Adam Shepard, who worked up from nothing to a car, house, and $2,500 in savings in 10 months. (See Timothy Noah’s article in Slate for a brief taster on “the potential evils of a society whose hierarchy is based entirely on merit.”)

An idea a day, from David Horvitz. “THE IDEA IS TO HAVE THEM REACH THE VICINITY OF THEIR DESTINATION, AND THEN BE RETURNED TO YOU. CREATE A COLLECTION OF THESE ENVELOPES THAT HAVE BEEN AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK.”

As part settlement of a cosmetics class action lawsuit to do with price fixing, $175m worth of cosmetics are being distributed by 20 US high-end department stores to customers who made a purchase between 1994 and 2003, no proof or purchase required.

Interview with Steven Soderbergh. Defending Che: “The people that are anti-Che just see it as a commercial for him. Some of them can’t really get beyond the idea of a Che movie. For them, by definition if you make a movie of him you’re supporting him. It’s impossible for them to understand that’s not how art works. That that’s not how an artist works. I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn’t mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.”

Surprisingly good and interesting (given the subject matter) analysis and description of the Windows and OS X windows-management systems.

US Presidents’ approval ratings over time.

“Fifty People, One Question” visits London—surprisinly engaging in-and-out-of-focus video of people saying where they’d like to wake up tomorrow. Londoners put on a fairly good showing compared to Brooklyn, New York and New Orleans. Not entirely sure why they decided to shoot people in a tunnel looking out toward the light though.

Christopher Hitchens on things Obama. Good anecdote: “It was, I think, Lloyd George who said of Lord Derby that, like a cushion, he bore the imprint of whoever had last sat upon him.”

Vice DO: “This is what the world would look like if more time travellers set their sights on gangster rap instead of baby Hitler.”

The International Aquatic Plant layout competition 2008. i.e. acquarium plant arrangement.

Nice step-by-step views of the components of the Internation Space Station in chronological order.

Dry Christmas tree burn FAST. (Looks like a flame thrower about 5 seconds after ignition.)

My favourite car—a pre-war Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic—is going to auction after being found in a garage in 2007. (Better picture.)

Wow, tanning was once a really loathsome job: “It was this combination of urine, animal feces and decaying flesh that made ancient tanneries so odiferous.”