Sunday, 15 Jul 2018
Photorealist Fruit 
Dennis Wojtkiewicz paints large portraits of sliced fruit, at first glance they appear real but then you realise they’re just too perfect to be real.
Beautiful.
Via Colossal.
Photorealist Fruit
Wednesday, 11 Jul 2018
Thirty Years of Trump & Russia
New York Magazine has published an extensive piece by Jonathan Chait looking at Donald Trump's thirty plus year relationship with Russia. If you have any interest in the ongoing Russia collusion investigation, this is worth reading.
Early in the article, Chait posits a sobering thought:
...suppose the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper. If that’s true, we are in the midst of a scandal unprecedented in American history, a subversion of the integrity of the presidency. It would mean the Cold War that Americans had long considered won has dissolved into the bizarre spectacle of Reagan’s party’s abetting the hijacking of American government by a former KGB agent. It would mean that when Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the president and his inner circle, possibly beginning this summer, Trump may not merely rail on Twitter but provoke a constitutional crisis.
Also worth reading is the evaluation of Chait's article by Tom Nichols from Politico Magazine. In his words, "Thirty years of contacts with Russia are hard to dismiss as a series of disconnected events".
Thursday, 24 May 2018
Highways above the North Atlantic
Howard Slutsken from CNN explains in simple terms how the hundreds of daily international flights are routed across the North Atlantic.
With the recent introduction of advanced navigation equipment and procedures, aircraft on the OTS cruise five minutes' flying time behind the preceding plane, which is about 40 miles. Laterally, there's a 25-mile separation from the closest plane on either side, and a 1,000-foot safety zone above and below.
The video below beautifully illustrates the concept of layering and staggering the air traffic across the Atlantic.
Thursday, 5 Apr 2018
2001: A Space Odyssey, how well did it predict the future?
Fifty years after the release of Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stephen Wolfram makes a detailed analysis of how the future predicted in the film compares to the world today.
One of the most obvious is that the haircuts and clothing styles and general formality look wrong. Of course these would have been very hard to predict. But perhaps one could at least have anticipated (given the hippie movement etc.) that clothing styles and so on would get less formal. But back in 1968, I certainly remember for example getting dressed up even to go on an airplane.
This is a great read with lots of observations I would never have considered.
Tuesday, 20 Mar 2018
Why I Hate Facebook
The New York Times continues to peel back the layers on the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica debacle. I’ve never trusted Facebook, never will, yet literally billions of people do. The quote below is just one example of why I dislike them so much.
…This wasn’t a breach in the technical sense. It is something even more troubling: an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model, which involves having people go to the site for social interaction, only to be quietly subjected to an enormous level of surveillance. The results of that surveillance are used to fuel a sophisticated and opaque system for narrowly targeting advertisements and other wares to Facebook’s users.
Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.
I fucking hate Facebook, did I mention that already?
Saturday, 17 Mar 2018
A Country in Ruins
CNN have published an eye opening look at the destruction of Syria's cities from seven years of war.
Wednesday, 21 Feb 2018
Mechanical Crustaceans
Steeven Salvat has created a series of incredible detailed drawings of various crustacens showing cutaway mechanical internals. Even the paper he uses is hand made and tinted with tea to create a vintage look.
