Tokyo Times : Waterslide Ruins

One of a great set of photos taken at a resort gone to seed.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Sean Stiegemeier, who created the video embedded above, writes,

So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). Four days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another four. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get

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Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 (vimeo)

Woody Allen



F.W. Murnau – Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Trailer, 1927)

Wow.

Roger Ebert, on Sunrise:

Murnau, raised in the dark shadows of expressionism, pushed his images as far as he could, forced them upon us, haunted us with them. The more you consider “Sunrise” the deeper it becomes — not because the story grows any more subtle, but because you realize the real subject is the horror beneath the surface.

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Featuring an a cast of internet luminaries, Olga Nunes and Elaine Doyle have created “We Love xkcd”, a real life version of “I Love xkcd”, which itself was an animated version of the comic xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel.

FEATURING THE AWESOMENESS OF: Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Bruce Schneier, Jason Kottke, Google Zurich, Hank Green, MC Frontalot, Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Mr. Toast, Miss Cellania, Team Genius, Phil Plait, Allan Amato, Maddy Gaiman, Charissa Gilreath, Belinda Casas, Chuck Martinez, Jeremy James, Joanna Gaunder, Lee Israel & Octavio Coleman Esq. of The Jejune Institute.

via Boing Boing

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

[Douglas] Hofstadter’s Law. Which law governs my life on levels so recursive, fractal, and self-referential that it could only have been described this profoundly by the Gödel, Escher, Bach guy.

I’ve always remembered that story, because it strikes me that applies to nearly every case where an outsider tries to make sense of an insider’s perspective. We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks. I know a reverse slam is harder than a simple dunk. But how much harder? And how much harder again would a slam be if you had a defender drapped all over you? (I also know very little about sports as well)

I was really bored one day and was actually watching golf. I remember watching Phil Mickelson at the PGA (or was it the U.S Open?). He was in the rough, just off the green, and chipped within a few feet of the hole. Ho-hum, I thought. He bogeyed the hole. Mickelson had taken a FULL swing at a ball in an impossible lie and sent it 20 feet, to within an easy putt of the hole. I’ve never played golf, so I had no idea how hard that was, or why that was anything special. The announcer, though, had a completely different perspective.

I think that misunderstanding over degree of difficulty issues is one of the major reasons for conflict between insiders and outsiders. We bridle at the school teacher who asks for a raise, because we don’t realize–and we can never realize unless we’ve been a teacher ourselves–how hard being a school teacher is. Mickelson shoots 75 and says, afterward, he thought he had a great round and we scoff, but only because we don’t know golf the way he does and we don’t understand how insanely difficult that chip shot was.

Goodbye Amanda