wired:

Space…turns out, it’s still awesome.

MORE: The 30 Most Amazing Space Photos We Saw Last Month

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Rumble Fish, 1983, director Francis Ford Coppola

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Rumble Fish, 1983, director Francis Ford Coppola

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llamapunk:

midesko:

volcanize:

later nerds

Now how to explain this to the insurance company

!! anonsally!!

That giraffe clearly does not know the first thing about riding. I give him or her points for trying, though.

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There haven’t been any real changes in the VOR standings for the last day. The official tracker shows SCA and Mapfre having switched places at the back of the fleet, but that’s only because the tracker doesn’t know where the boats are headed. It computes its “distance to lead” (DTL) number by measuring the distance from each boat to the next mark of the course, which in this case is Cape Town. But the boats aren’t going straight to Cape Town; they’re heading south to pick up the westerlies first.

The tracker also showed the DTL numbers tightening considerably as the boats rounded Fernando, but again, that was an anomaly of how it computes the distances. Basically, those DTL numbers are going to be pretty meaningless until the boats have turned for the final run to Cape Town.

A small low pressure region is creating some interesting wind off Rio, about 400 miles south of the lead boats. They should be reaching that area about 24 hours from now. At least according to the weather model being displayed in my iPad’s WeatherMap+ app, at that point winds will still be varying from very light to quite strong across a relatively small area. There’s an opportunity for boats that get it right to squirt through quickly, while boats that get it wrong risk being left behind.

Then it will be all about cutting the corner and getting into the westerlies, which also is looking kind of tricky. I think that at least within the two clumps of boats (the lead three, and then the following four) there’s a good chance of some reshuffling over the next several days.

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It’s been a while since someone asked. Maybe my views have changed?

(consults self)

Nope.

But thank you for your interest.

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thesoutherly:

Circa 1983

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spiritofsailing:

100” Super Maxi “Comanche”

Because if a 65’ planing dinghy is good, a 100’ planing dinghy will be even better.

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Sophie Ciszek aboard SCA, October 21, 2014. Source.

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behance andyleeUK

behance andyleeUK

behance andyleeUK

behance andyleeUK

behance andyleeUK

behance andyleeUK

behance andyleeUK

nevver:

Dark now my sky, Andy Lee

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kbhew:

And I’m super disappointed because this is my favorite race ever and I can’t find anyone to share the excitement with! :(

Greetings! VOR obsession is very much spoken here. :-)

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Person in charge Sam Davies aboard SCA. Source.

This video was uploaded on October 14, as SCA sailed south along the coast of Morocco. My guess is that it was shot that morning, shortly after the 0715 position update, in which they learned that by being on the wrong side of a major windshift they had dropped from third place to sixth.

I’m fascinated by Sam’s manner in this clip. A bad thing has happened, and she’s trying to help the crew not be discouraged by it. But you can hear her own disappointment, and maybe just a hint of defensiveness about the bad call (which would have been a joint decision by her and navigator Libby Greenhalgh). She’s speaking to them as equals. There’s no hierarchy, no taking of responsibility. They’re all in the same boat, so to speak.

Her approach here reinforced something I noticed when I started watching videos of the various teams before the start of the race. Sam doesn’t project the sense of authority I’d expect from a professional racing skipper. It’s true that that expectation came from watching other professional skippers who all happened to be men. But I don’t think it’s only a gender difference, or something rooted in Sam’s generally open, friendly manner. I think it’s her lack of experience in this specific role.

I’ve been thinking about that chart I posted the other day:

It showed that the then-current rankings in the race (which are unchanged now, four days later), almost perfectly line up with the number of previous times the crew of each boat has sailed in the race.

By that measure, the women of the SCA team come up short, and I think that probably is a major factor in how they’re doing so far. That inexperience isn’t anything they should feel bad about; it’s just a fact. This race is extremely grueling and physically demanding, and over the years has become increasingly professionalized. Opportunities for women to compete in those contests have been extremely few.

Team SCA knew this going in and did their best to mitigate it. They gave spots to the (few) women who actually have sailed the race before. They gave spots to the (few) women who have done long-distance offshore racing at a professional level. They filled out the team with women who have competed at a high level in other types of sailing (Olympic and one-design racing), even though that experience was mostly limited to near-shore buoy races.

And they worked hard on training. SCA started their training program earlier than any other team. They did grueling physical workouts. They crossed the Atlantic and spent months practicing in the strong winds of the Canary Islands. They competed in the Round Britain and Fastnet races.

But they faced a problem with the role of skipper. Being in charge of a large group of professional sailors racing around the world is a specialized skill — and there simply weren’t any women who had that skill. In choosing Sam Davies Team SCA got the next-best thing: someone who has raced competitively across oceans and around the world, just not while managing other people. Sam has raced across the Atlantic many times and around the world nonstop in the Vendée Globe twice — but almost all of that racing has been singlehanded.

On some level it’s an extremely silly comparison, but I find myself thinking back to my first real job after college, working as an emergency-credentialed (and largely untrained) substitute teacher for the L.A. Unified School District. Like many first-time teachers I started off by trying to be everyone’s friend, relating to the students as equals, being open and honest and “cool”. And it worked, after a fashion. But I quickly learned that that approach has its downside. Before long I was actively cultivating an air of authority, maintaining a degree of distance. I was still friendly. But I learned that it was helpful to have a more structured, hierarchical relationship with the people I was in charge of. It wasn’t something that came to me naturally. But when I learned to do a convincing imitation of it, my effectiveness improved.

Whatever SCA team’s experience gap was at the start, they have a chance to narrow it significantly going forward. And I’m especially interested in seeing how Sam develops in the role of “person in charge”.

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debunkshy:

#tennessee warbler

#stones #wi

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The official VOR site answered twitter questions.

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Actually, yes. Largely in response to some of the very cool things I’ve come to appreciate via Tumblr over the last few years, I did indeed begin work on a book during last year’s NaNoWriMo. I completed 50,000 words of my first draft that November, and went on to complete that draft in March (I think?) of this year.

I’m now working my way through a second draft, tightening up the story and filling in some missing pieces. I’m about 1/3 of the way through that. When that’s done I intend to start showing it to a few people and getting feedback, while I work on a third and hopefully final draft.

It’s young adult fiction, loosely based on my own teenage experiences growing up in southern California in the late 1970s. It was heavily influenced by Eleanor & Park, which I loved, in that it’s a love story told from alternating boy/girl perspectives. It also features offshore sailboat racing, of the sort I engaged in during that time.

When I read descriptions of bad fanfic I recognize things I’ve done in it, so I think there’s a good chance that’s all it is or ever will be. Other times, though, the characters seem like real people to me, their plight the sort of thing that can make my heart race or my eyes get misty. But I’m easily influenced in that direction, so who knows?

Thank you for the question, and for saying you enjoy my blog. That means a lot to me.

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Heh. According to Team SCA’s official app, no one is on watch. I guess the boat is sailing itself. Good job, boat!

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radivs:

'Red-tailed Hawk' by Rick Dobson

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October—with a gorgeous pageant of colour… Never had she imagined anything so splendid. A great, tinted peace. Blue, wind-winnowed skies. Sunlight sleeping in the glades of that fairyland. Long dreamy purple days paddling idly in their canoe along shores and up the rivers of crimson and gold. A sleepy, red hunter’s moon. Enchanted tempests that stripped the leaves from the trees and heaped them along the shores. Flying shadows of clouds. What had all the smug, opulent lands out front to compare with this? —L.M. Montgomery in The Blue Castle

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Able Was I Ere I Sailed into the Saint Helena High

As the VOR fleet sails south past Brazil a key decision is how close to hug the coast. Vestas, which previously made the gutsy call of splitting to the east of the fleet in the doldrums, now appears to have made another gutsy call. In the past 12 hours they’ve cut well to the inshore side of the two leaders. It puts them farther from the finish in Cape Town, but if it means they sail in stronger wind it could be worth it.

The big decision coming up is how to cross the Saint Helena High, that big dark patch of low winds in the forecast map above. Once the boats are south of it and into the westerlies of the Roaring Forties they’re going to be gone. Did you see that photo of SCA surfing at 30 knots I posted last night? They’re going to be doing that, except they’ll be doing it while surfing the huge waves that roll up from the Southern Ocean. It’s going to be wild, probably some of the hairiest sailing they’ll do until they dive deep into the Southern Ocean in Leg 5.

But first there’s that Saint Helena High to get across. It’s named after the remote South Atlantic Island where Napolean was sent to live out his life after he escaped from Elba and ruled for the Hundred Days. I’ve wondered what it must have been like for him there, so isolated, while the events of the world passed him by.

Any VOR racers who make the wrong call cutting across the high are going to get a chance to know how he felt. They’ll be sitting with no wind while the rest of the fleet turns the corner and takes off.

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