LOL:
First encountered this here.
Whenever I put “LOL” here, it means I really did laugh out loud.
Category: Social media
Feline Twitter dump
I earlier promised a creature-related Twitter dump. It turns out it’s pretty much all cats:
Another optical illusion that works on a nonhuman animal.
Can cats pass the mirror self-recognition test? This one did.
Why does this advert make it look like cats created a centre left political party in the early 2000s?
Screw your traffic, humans.
These next two tweets are also feline, because they’re Schrödinger’s Cat jokes:
Schrödinger’s Dumpster.
Schrödinger’s Plates.
Fed up with all the cattery? Then maybe you’ll approve of this:
A bit barbaric but my dog approves.
Still wanting something not cat related. Well, there’s always the Babylon Bee.
Tiananmen tank man – the small picture and the bigger picture
Someone calling himself hardmaru tweets, of this photo …:
… this:
The full Tiananmen Square tank man picture is much more powerful than the cropped one.
Not sure that’s right. You only get the point of this big picture if you already know the smaller picture. If you didn’t already know that, would the big picture pack such a punch? Maybe this is my bad eyesight asking, but would you even properly see the guy in front of all the tanks?
I don’t know when this big picture first started getting around. But, having seen the small picture many times, I have only now seen this big one. So thankyou @hardmaru, and I’m glad that both can be seen.
A Twitter dump
For several months now, as alluded to tangentially already today, I have a ever heightening heap of, in particular, tweets piling up in my computer, which I have in mind to say clever things about, and which I do not in the meantime want to completely forget about. Pocket is great for articles with big headings at the top, but less good for tweets. So, here is a twitter dump, several of which are now way out of date, but still fun to remember.
This has made some impression on the pile. Not much, but some. So, in no particular order …:
Horrific find in local cafe. Destruction of great literature to create a bookish aesthetic. Shameful. Wasteful.
When God tries to punish your city for homosexuality but gays use their magic shield to protect it.
Two Concordes landing simultaneously.
I was glad to help you get home safely.
… you can be anything you want to be. You absolutely can not.
Inequality is the idea you can never be happy with a million dollars if the guy next door has a billion.
When I said Boris should get the unpopular stuff out of the way straight after the election, I meant unpopular with other people, not me.
“The United Kingdom is the last major European country where it is illegal to use e-scooters on public roads, bike paths, and pavements. This is despite surveys and usage indicating they are overwhelmingly popular where they are legal.” Time to fix that.
I see the potential for a whole new and compelling theory of modern political trends: ‘where does the bonkersness go?’ It could be called The Bonkers Dynamic, or Bonkerology.
Why did the Pilgrim Fathers leave for the New World? … They sailed because they felt themselves in a story.
Brexit Day +4: The grounded planes, the chaos in the streets, the unpaid workers, the crippling strikes, the faltering economy, the upper class buffoon in charge, the petrol bombs, the riot police, the snipers on rooftops, the tanks on the streets. But enough about France …
I will not stand for baseless attacks and slander, unless they are directed at people I personally dislike.
A little excess fear is exactly what evolutionary principles would predict. The cost of us getting killed even once is higher than the cost of responding to a hundred false alarms.
However the #CoronavirusOutbreak plays out, pundits and commentators will craft a clean story for why whatever ends up happening was obvious all along.
From Dawah to damage control – All the workshops that used to be around trying to convert non-Muslims to Islam, are now trying to keep Muslims from leaving Islam and doubting religion.
When a team loses it looks unpopular, out of touch, and hence more likely to lose in future. It is the very act of winning that changes other people’s minds because they don’t want to be on the unpopular team, and winning shows that what you’re offering is what’s popular.
No shininess at Eltz
Nudged, I’m guessing, by this posting of mine, Michael Jennings earlier this month Facebooked this closer-up photo he had photoed of Eltz Castle:
A classic of ancient adhocistical anarchy, I think you’ll agree. The very definition of picturesque.
But I also show this photo of Michael’s because I think it illustrates the opinion I expressed in this earlier shininess of architectural modernity posting. There is no shininess in the above photo, not even in the windows on show. (The things I like best are always the things that tell me how right I was, I find.)
An obvious reason for that is that the windows seem all to be recessed from the surfaces of buildings. But there seems to be another reason. Take a look at this Eltz Castle photo, this time an interior shot (one of those here):
Very lavish, but that’s not my point. Which is: Look again at those windows, the ones with all the circles. They look like Ancientist fakes to me, but Ancientist or genuinely ancient, what those windows illustrate is that glass existed for a long time before they worked out how to make its surface smooth and flat. Above all, they took a long time to work out how to make big sheets of glass, such as we moderns now take for granted. And it’s that total absence of large and smooth and shiny surfaces that does so much to explain the different atmosphere radiated by ancient architecture.
At Eltz, you might get occasional flashes of light, little splinters. And you can see great stuff in old windows, from the inside, as the above photo also illustrates lavishly. But you’re never going to see anything reflected in glass like that, outside. Not any Thing, that you can recognise.
When the only choice is between different risks
The opposite of risk isn’t safety.
The opposite of risk is another type of risk.
I don’t think “opposite” is quite the right word here. The truth is more that sometimes there’s a choice between risk and possible reward on the one hand, and not risk and not reward. However, there is often, as now, a choice between risks, as above. The reward of taking the right risk is that you get to avoid an even bigger disaster, and maybe also get rewarded, but maybe no disaster or not such bad disaster is your only reward.
(Think 1940. For Britain then, there was no safe or painless alternative. Both alternatives, war or surrender, were horrifying.)
But I know exactly what Alice Smith means. People often speak about health risks as if skill in avoiding a list of only the more obvious ones will confer immortality.
To talk, during a crisis, such as the one now winding down, as if the choice is between big risk and no risk is, as Alice Smith is surely saying, foolishness. If that was the choice, there would be no crisis. The definition of crisis is that there are no risk-free alternatives. Whatever gets done will have been a big risk.
I now favour the risk of ending Lockdown. But, it is a risk. I just think that keeping it going is a bigger risk.
To put it in Twitter speak, the argument is not about whether to kill your granny, but how.
When you write two trilogies and only realise it afterwards
Without planning to, I realise I’ve written two trilogies.
The first trilogy was my three books on genetics: Genome, Nature via Nurture and Francis Crick.
The second was my three books on innovation: The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything and How Innovation Works
He found the time to write them all, but I’ll be lucky if I even find the time to read them all. But, hope to.
I can certainly recommend the one about How Innovation Works. One word summary: incrementally.
Expanded summary: Innovations happen when they’re ready, at which point they switch from impossible to inevitable with amazing suddenness, when everything all comes together. Individual inventors are over-rated; innovation is a team game. I think that’s about right.
Just learned about the existence of …
DRACULA PARROTS. Me to. But how did he learn this? Doesn’t say. Hate that. Scroll down, scroll down. Here we go:
Despite it’s name and vulture-like visage, the Dracula Parrot is actually not bloodthirsty at all. It feeds almost exclusively on just a few species of figs, …
Could’ve googled this but I thought he made up the name “Dracula Parrot” himself and that I’d only get back to the original tweet.
Now, if you are looking to see a bird that is truly vampiric, look no further than the vampire finch, …
Pass. Had enough vampire birds for now.
BabelColour
Simon Evans, whom I follow, did a tweet asking what is the greatest photo ever. Many excellent photos followed.
The Chosen One joined in the discussion:
May I humbly suggest @StuartHumphryes for your delectation? An amazing collection of superb photos
It certainly is. Cue more excellent photos, and excellent photographic restorations and history lessons. This is Twitter being brilliant. Twitter can be horrible. So, ignore the horrible and go with the brilliant.
Simon Evans was already a fan of Humphryes, who calls his Twitter feed “BabelColour” (see above). But I’d never encountered the discoveries and recreations of Humphryes until now.
Following.
Book Warehouse bag lady photoer
When I photoed this photo on Westminster Bridge, way back in 2007, well, you know what I was interested in:
But now, it’s the bag that gets my attention.
Oh, I was interested in a general way in the phenomenon of photoers photoing while carrying shopping bags, often in way that hid their faces, which I was already watching out for. But particular bags were of less concern.
But look at the list of addresses on this bag, of Book Warehouse branches in London:
Now, only one remains.
I loved those places. There was one that was only a walk away from me, the one in Strutton Ground. There’s nothing like a remainder bookshop to find unexpectedly interesting titles, old and new, at prices that make them worth it the way full price never would be. Best of all, if you like the look of a book, you can have a leaf through it, and can soon find if you’d really like it, the way you can’t on the internet without relying on other people’s opinions. In Book Warehouse you could suck it, so to speak, and see.
When Gramex was in its final address in Lower Marsh before closing, that was in a basement right underneath the Waterloo version of Book Warehouse, which itself had had to move. But as Lower Marsh went up market (they should now start calling it Upper Marsh), it went beyond the reach of such places.
Memo to self: When all this Coronavirus nonsense is over, make a pilgrimage to Golders Green to check out the last resting place of Book Warehouse. If it is even still there. According to Google Maps it is, but that can often be out of date.
More and more, I now suspect, my prodigious archive of photoer photos will be of use at least as much for what else is in the photos, besides photoers.