… because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is.
That’s Bryan Caplan, complaining about something called the Human Development Index, in a piece entitled Against the Human Development Index.
Month: January 2015
Drone on the White House lawn
Story here:
A man believed to be a recreational drone operator accidentally crashed a small device onto the White House grounds early Monday, investigators said, briefly triggering a lockdown and reinforcing concerns about security at the executive mansion.
LATER: The inevitable “let’s ban drones” discussion is upon us.
EVEN LATER: Sports enthusiasts are clamoring for aerial robots that can record their best moves.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Photographers – photographers with hats (one of the hats being rather scary)
Before and after perusing the remains of that demo I chanced upon yesterday, I was photographing photographers. Here are a few of them:
As you can see from the top left snap, he is photoing Westminster Abbey, and those two dramatic crouching shots, top middle and top right, are of photographers wanting to get the upper reaches rather than the lower reaches of Westminster Abbey in the background behind their friends.
Several quite good additions to the Interesting Hats sub-directory there, especially the gent, middle left, who looks to me like he’s in The Hunt For Red October. Is he being post-modern and ironic? Or does he, perchance, actually mean it? Either way, I don’t like it. I mean, do people now wander around London with swastikas in their hats? But, if you were guessing who the spy was, you’d have to pick the one in the Union Jack hat.
The lady bottom middle is a bit out of focus. But, her hat gets her included nevertheless.
And the gent at the bottom left is not very bald, but he is a bit. He makes it into that sub-directory.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Shelves
When it comes to Micklethwait’s Laws, the best one undoubtedly is and will always be Micklethwait’s Law of Negotiated Misery.
But there is also a Micklethwait’s Law of Shelves. On the face of it, Micklethwait’s Law of Shelves is not that fundamental, but, writing about it now, I do think it explains quite a lot about the world, and about why there is so much stuff in the world, clogging it up. It is a law that, unlike with (so far as I am aware) Micklethwait’s Law of Negotiated Misery, many others have discovered the truth of, even if I’ve not been able to find it spelt out in so many words on the www. Micklethwait’s (or Whoever’s) Law of Shelves states that …:
… there is always room for more shelves.
That’s my bedroom. Imagine what the rest of my place is like.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Good drone
A while back I linked to a report mentioning how drones with cameras had been hovering near sunbathing girls at the beach. Not good.
Well, here is a report another drone doing things on the beach, but this time good things. It flies out to sea from the beach and delivers a life preserver to a swimmer in difficulties, which I presume means something like a rubber ring the swimmer can get into instead of having to depend on their swimming skills:
That, at any rate, is the idea. This thing is not at the the soon-to-be-crowdfunded stage.
Via Instapundit.
The odd thing about the above photo is how unclear it is how big this thing is.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Some photographers last November
At the end of November 2014 (on the day that I also took these photos) I made a small pilgrimage to Tower Bridge, the excuse being that I might be able to photo up someone’s skirt through the observation floor that they had recently installed at the top of that bridge, and the reason being that I simply like to go on random pilgrimages in central London, for the sake of what I might see on the way there, there, and on the way back.
As often happens with these small pilgrimages of mine, I got there not at midday, but towards the end of the day. By which I mean just before and during the ending of daylight. And the ending of daylight is a very good time for taking photos, especially with a digital camera that is good in low light conditions, and especially if you are someone who likes taking pictures of other photographers in ways that don’t show their faces but do show the screens of their cameras. At dusk, those screens tend to show up particularly well, as a number of these photographer photos illustrate:
The more I photo, the more I find myself liking to take categories of photos, photos in sets. At first, my photos of photographers were just photos of photographers. But soon I was subdividing that huge category, into photographers taking selfies, photographers looking at the photos they’d taken. Recently I have found myself making further subdivisions, often of photos I have been taking for some while but which I had not been putting into a separate category in my head, if you get my meaning. So, above, in addition to all the photos of photographer’s camera screens, we see contributions to the photographers taking selfies category (subdivision: couples taking selfies), to the photographers looking at the photos they have just taken category, but also a good addition to the bald blokes taking photos category, and two for the photographers with interesting hats category.
And of course, there is that vast category that has hove into view in the last few years, of people taking photos with their mobile phones. No less than seven of the above twelve snaps are of people doing this. This was not a decision on my part, merely a consequence of me picking out nice photos of people taking photos.
My favourite photo of these is the last one of all, bottom right. The light is nearly gone, but that means that the view of the shot he is taking (with his mobile phone) shines forth splendidly, as strongly as what he is photoing. And I love that I got what he was photoing as well as his screen picture of what he was photoing.
It was the essentialness of posting that one photo, very late but not never, that made me, while I was about it, also stick up the others, all twelve having already been subdivided into a separate little directory.