I don’t often talk about specific concrete worky things here (or anywhere else for that matter) but I just wanted to mention what I thought was an excellent idea I had this morning that didn’t make it, presumably because it would appeal only to info graphics geeks and the tone is maybe a bit wrong.
Background: You know how there’s some football thing happening in Moscow next week? Yeah don’t worry I didn’t either but apparently there is. It’s difficult to get visas to go to Moscow at the best of times, if you’re a football fan trying to get one at short notice it’s really difficult and, you know, two British teams abroad, cheap vodka etc. there’s bound to be a pretty high attrition rate on the way there and then some are going to be stuck in customs/ prison and be unable to leave once they get there.
The idea: So what I wanted to do was to recreate Josef Minard’s Carte Figurative (considered by some to be the best statistical graphic EVAR) but the with lines representing British football fans instead of Napoleonic Soldiers. We’d use the same visual style to show how many set off, how many get left behind at various border crossings and how many get stuck once they arrive in Moscow. Clearly a brilliant idea.
We climbed to the top of the 5th highest waterfall in the world (according to the guide book though there seems to be some dispute; wikipedia places it 18th and the world waterfall database ranks it 20th), our legs are still aching.
This is what it looks like about half way up:
This is a view from the bottom, you can’t see the lower part of the falls:
I really need not to eat any more beef for quite a while, vegetarian options in California being surprisingly hard to come by (or at least hard to choose when they’re more expensive than cheese burgers which are the one thing American cuisine gets consistently right. Having said that we did have some really nice food, including the über-Californian sea food tacos, I’m definitely going to try to recreate those).
We also saw amongst other wild animals; desert tortoises, coyotes, and sea lions:
Also a black bear! Which I failed to photograph.
And a some not so wild but very photogenic jellyfish.
Over the last few years I’ve seen an increasing number of cartograms used to display single dimensional country by country statistics such as GDP, carbon emissions, electoral college votes etc with varying degrees of success. My team has been involved with production of a few too (1. 2).
Hello, I’m going away for 3 weeks. I’ll take lots of photos to post when we get back. When we return we’re moving flat so you’ll have to come over and check it out before we start messing it up to make it nicer. Especially you lot who we haven’t seen properly for ages.
My favourite website at the moment is muxtape it’s very web 1.0, no community features or ratings or tagging or what have you, the only customisation is that you get to choose a hex colour. You just make mix tapes. Here’s mine constructed of fragments remaining on my work hard drive after I last purged the music directory.
Incidentally, whilst the casette in the image above claims to be “GREAT FOR EVERYDAY RECORDING” that’s actually a lie. I had just such a tape onto which i copied Wilmslow library’s double CD of Future Sound Of London’s preposterous ambient sound-scape Lifeforms. After only one playing the ultra thin 120min tape was already stretching.
As is traditional just before I go on holiday I’m ill at the moment. This did give me an opportunity to watch the remade Assault On Precinct 13 yesterday, pretty poor. It’s got her out of the Sopranos in it and Omar out of The Wire was in the Sopranos last night hopefully when I start Wire 4 when we get back from holiday I’ll spot someone else in it and the Markov chain will continue. Needless to say, it didn’t have the proper music…
Also, and finally, I got round to playing the new Advance Wars and by simple virtue of the fact that :
they’ve ditched CO powers.
You can skip ALL and I mean ALL speech and
3. you can turn off all battlefield animations not just combat ones
it is the best in the series. I blasted through the first 15 missions in a satisfyingly swift 4 hours, blissfully unaware of whatever stupid storyline they’ve dreamed up to accompany the tactical shenanigans. Though I do still miss the biggest tank being called Medium Tank.
I think Diary of the Dead was better than Romero’s previous return to the shambling genre Land Of The Dead. There was a more natural tone and the drama focused around human relationships as in the original trilogy (Night Of The Living …, Dawn Of The … and Day Of The …) unfortunately those relationships were conducted pretty much exclusively between those scourges of the modern horror film, bland US college kids. The only interesting characters were a hammy alcoholic Brit thesp who hangs around on the sidelines proclaiming stuff, and a deaf and dumb Amish guy called Samuel who introduces himself and excuses himself from the action in two of the films most memorable moments. The political stuff which is par for the course with Romero’s zombie flicks isn’t left as subtext as in the brilliant Dawn… and underrated Day… but instead repeatedly hammered at the audience via an annoying narration, part of the films frankly unnecessary “it’s a documentary” framing device. 6/10 probably.
In other film news in spite of what some people think ‘No Country For Old Men’ isn’t the Coen brothers’ best film, it’s good but it’s no Millers Crossing, it’s not even Fargo. Having said that, the suspense is awesome and Bardem’s Oscar winning haircut is funny. The executive summary is 1. No free will and 2. Things ain’t what they used to be.
There Will Be Blood, is I think, as great as people say it is.
Also, we saw the trailer for a film called Doomsday in the cinema on Thursday. It was a bit confusing, a cheesy 28 Days later knockoff (i.e. crazy virus sweeps the UK) that midway through morphed into a kind of Escape From NY/ Mad Max 2 feast of leather costumes and chainsaws. Also it’s directed by the guy who did Dog Soldiers and The Descent, both of which I loved.
Show Off Your Handbag is a meme (in the internet sense) inspired by this thread on Metafilter where someone asks about the ‘Go Bag’ Val Kilmer uses in the film Spartan. I’ve not seen Spartan but Kilmer’s character is obviously a very macho guy and the fact that he carries a bag provides a convenient parallel for weedy internet guys who also carry bags (like me) but don’t want to admit that they’re essentially handbags. Obviously this is an excellent opportunity for geek oneupmanship, with plenty of people apparently shoving half of Maplin into their bags on a daily basis (that’s got to be bad for your posture), one guy (the direct link to whose handbag I’m too lazy to relocate) goes as far as to claim that he goes around with live assault riffle ammunition in his backpack, I don’t know maybe people do that in the states*.
So with out further ado, here’s my cycling day handbag. No pack lunch today but otherwise this is pretty standard:
The bag itself is probably my most valued thing here, it’s totally amazing and can carry massive amounts of stuff including water as it’s totally watertight. As you can see the reflective stuff really works too which is good. I’ve got two of them (though typically I only use one) and it was totally worth paying that bit extra as I expect them to last me pretty much forever.
Other than that it’s : gloves, spare t-shirt to change into, ratchet and socket (my pedals keep coming loose for some reason), Muji cycle repair kit some one gave me for xmas (good puncture repair stuff and some alum keys), swiss army knife (mainly I use the scissors for cutting my finger nails as they work well both right and left handed), mobile phone,
notebook (I bought a Moleskine one as they were on sale but for all the hype around this brand I’m not impressed), London AtoZ (Millennium Edition!), 512Mb USB drive.
I encourage readers to show off their own handbags and post links in the comments section.
*Actually, I just found the guy apparently he was working in Kabul in a capacity not specified but presumably he’s a soldier so that explains the ammunition.
Don’t try to open the door! This is the number one mistake that stupid people in films make.
“Most of the time, it will be impossible anyway,” …
“If you try early on, it is possible to muscle the door open, but then you take a vehicle that would float for maybe 60 seconds, and it’s going to sink within five to 10 seconds, because as you open the door, the water comes in, the vehicle sinks faster.”
Also I’m glad to learn that electric windows will work in the water as that’s always been a source of concern for me.
