Indeed:
It’s the roof of this, looking upstream into the sunset, last August.
Month: January 2019
Hell or Habito
I continue to photo taxi adverts, whenever I get the chance. Last Sunday, I photoed this one:
There wasn’t space for to get the whole taxi, and there wasn’t time for me to go the other side of the road and get the whole taxi, because I was in a hurry to be somewhere else. But I hope you agree that that photo suffices.
This being the century of the internet, I have since found this, and this, and this.
I bet Jimbo Phillips never thought he’d be selling mortgages.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
The STAEDTLER Mars plastic has staying power
Recently, I bought a book on Amazon, about English as a Global Language. I’ve not read it right through yet, but it seems really good.
As regulars here will know, one of the things I like to do is reproduce short excerpts from books. This I do by scanning. But, unfortunately, my copy of English as a Global Language came to me full of underlinings of what the previous owner consider to be significant sentences and phrases. For what it’s worth, I often agreed with his choices. But such underlinings play havoc with scanning, so I wanted them gone.
Luckily they were not in ink, only in pencil. So, an eraser of some kind ought to do the trick. So, where could I buy an eraser locally? I actually wasn’t sure. It would certainly be a palaver. So, maybe I already owned an eraser. I had a rootle through a couple of small transparent crates, which I use to keep such things as pens, pencils, felt tip markers, and so forth and so on.
I found several erasers, all hard as rock. They hadn’t been used for a decade and they might as well have been plastic cutlery for all the use they were for removing pencil marks. But then, I came across this:
Just like everything else in the crate, this thing had not been touched for a decade. This too would prove useless, surely.
But no. It worked perfectly. The rubber was as soft and useable as it was the day, lost in the mists of time of the previous decade or even longer, when I first acquired it. Amazing. And the print of the book was utterly untouched, so soft was the rubber of this wondrous item.
One of the things you seldom see on the internet is any reportage of how well something works a decade later. Usually the reviews are instant. Does it work now? If it does, five stars, or four if you have some minor quibble about it.
So now, I am delighted to report that the STAEDTLER Mars plastic, or whatever it’s called, has real staying power, as a remover of pencil marks. Buy a STAEDTLER Mars plastic now, and if you still have it a decade hence, it will still work.
The thing is, it was such a trivial task. To have to have spent an afternoon wandering around London SW1 looking for a new eraser would have been so annoying. To be able to get erasing right away was just so satisfying, compared to all that nonsense. That the actual erasing took hardly any time at all only emphasises the contrast between how well things went and how annoyingly they would have gone, in the absence of my STAEDTLER Mars plastic.
I may never do any actual scanning of this book, but that’s not the point. The point is, now I can, with no bother.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Reflection reflections
I basically picked last night’s quota photo for alliterative reasons. QUota. QUantum. As we bloggers say: heh. No long essay was required to present that little joke, if joke it even was.
In the course of my search late last night for a suitable QP, I came across other photos which seemed suitable for showing here, but which demanded little essays to explain what it was that made them suitable. And I was too knackered for that, having spent yesterday working on this talk for Christian Michel’s 6/20 soiree, and then in the evening giving the talk.
In particular, late last night, I encountered in my photo-archives this remarkable (I think) photo, which I took in Regent’s Park in March of 2012, as it was getting dark, when on my way back from taking photos on and from Primrose Hill:
What I find remarkable about that photo is the contrast between how very red the reflection in the water of the lights on the BT Tower is, compared with how very un-red the actual lights themselves are, as photoed through the mere air.
You often get this with reflections. In photos, I mean. Your actual eyes make adjustments as they scan the scene. What I would have seen, with my eyes, when photoing the above photo, is quite bright red lights on the tower, and a similarly bright reflection.
But my camera, on automatic, doesn’t think like this. All my camera is concerned about is the overall balance. It has to pick just one balance and apply it to everything. And because a reflection is involved, it often ends up picking a balance where the actual view is very light and bright, but the reflection contains all the action. I often do this-and-this-same-thing-relected photos with a glass window doing the reflecting. And often what you get with that is a completely blank white sky, but then in the reflection you get all the distinctions between quite light and not so light, quite blue and not so blue, that you don’t get in the bit of the photo that is directly of the sky.
And that’s what surely happened with the above photo. The redness got lost when we were just looking at the lights themselves. But the water darkened and strengthened that same redness, and made it really red.
On the day, I was more interested in the birds swimming around on the water. The next eight photos in that directory are of ducks and geese, and the final three are of a swan. After that I called it a day, what with daylight having ended. I only really noticed this reflected redness thing last night.
Most Real Photographers have to have the skill of knowing at once when they’ve photoed a good photo, and why. We unreal photoers can take our time.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Quota Quantum Cloud
Now thrive the cardboard makers
Indeed:
That’s the wrapping of the new sofa, which arrived the day before yesterday.
It interests me that cardboard seems to have defeated expanded polystyrene as the delivery wrapping of choice these days. It’s basic superiority is structural. It is weak in compression, but strong in tension, at least in one direction. Polystyrene is weak in every direction. Its only strength is as padding. And even there, cardboard (or just scrunched up paper) usually seems to suffice. Worst of all, expanded polystyrene is (the clue is in the “expanded”) takes up too much warehouse and lorry space.
Expanded polystyrene looks cooler. But cardboard does the actual job better.
And consider also the sofa itself. Central to its low price, compared to the big bulbous monster sofa style, is that it can be folded flat. Again, far less warehouse and lorry space.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Something for Transport Blog?
Here.
Transport Blog is up again, but not being added to again. I miss transport blogging.
More about the bloke whose Twitter feed I found this bit of video at here.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
How Twitter works
Or maybe that should be: How Twitter rots the brain.
Instapundit is a daily destination for me, and yesterday, there’s a posting about a piece at Quillette by Cathy Young about Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
So I read that, and am impressed. Solzhenitsyn was a hero of mine when I was at school and university, and like Young, I was puzzled by his subsequent opposition to Western liberalism and fondness for Russian nationalism, along with all the nasty baggage that is liable to bring with it, like anti-Semitism.
At the bottom of the Cathy Young article is the suggestion that I should consider following Cathy Young at Twitter. I do so. I scroll down, and soon find myself smiling at otter jokes, all the otter jokes being based on the fact that “otter” is only one letter away from “other”. Significant otters. In otter news. (Yes, Happy New Year again.)
And: Why did the otters cross the road? To get to the otter side.
This didn’t take long at all.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Crane – scaffolding – roof clutter
And all in the one photo:
Also, trees without leaves. Taken in January 2009. On my way home, looking out towards Vauxhall Bridge Road and beyond, in the general direction of Battersea.
At present, sofas are more important to me than blogging, as the above blatant quota photo well illustrates.
This morning, the new sofa finally arrived. It is my hope, and the promise of Westminster City Council, that the old sofa will depart tomorrow.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Books and a telegram
I just posted something at Samizdata about a talk I’ll be doing for Christian Michel this coming Sunday, i.e. January 6th. A rerun of this, basically, but with my thinking somewhat further advanced.
In the course of my homework for this posting, and for the talk itself, I came across these two rather fine images, which nicely illustrate the two history dates loom large in my story, the invention of the printing press …:
… and the invention of the electric telegraph:
I found these images here, and here.
Note how all the books are German. A major impact of printing being nationalism.