Let the little big day commence.

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bourbakiaxiom:

dabacahin:

On a lifeboat

“Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing. You must make adjustments if you want to survive. Much becomes expendable. You get your happiness where you can.”

— Yann Martel, Life of Pi

(Image: Thank you, Ripple Effects.)

I just finished reading this – and partly because I saw this post on my dash, and remembered that we owned a copy!

I liked it quite a lot. The first half is set in India, and I clearly love that: it reminded me of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children somewhat. And the wildlife on the boat reminded me of the flora on the boat in The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco (one of the better bits, in one of his more disappointing novels). And the the ending was a surprise to me, which I will not spoil.

So, thank you, dabacahin, for posting this – I enjoyed the book-length version of your post!

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tomhardyvariations:

fuckyeahtomandcharlotte:

Tom Hardy Explains Why Shooting ‘The Revenant’ Was So Bloody Hard

A great interview, raw, honest, and deeply insightful about both himself and the process of making the film. Here’s the article Anne Thompson wrote to accompany it:

Of course, there were obvious uncomfortable logistical challenges from following the unpredictable weather with an entire crew to rugged, remote Calgary locations (which informed his character, scalped trapper John Fitzgerald), but it was learning an unorthodox new cinema language and “a funny old lens” that threw Hardy at first. Iñárritu asked for trust in executing what he called “the tightrope.” “He was very controlling in every way,” says Hardy. “You didn’t know what you were trusting and how it was going to work. It’s like learning Black Russian. It was confusing. We had to wrestle our characters off him.”

Finally, when his “Inception” costar Leonardo DiCaprio breached the playback area, Hardy was able to see what the camera was up to, and then “the penny dropped.”

That’s the phrase Hardy uses for when a character clicks for him. When he knows exactly what he’s doing. That didn’t take long on Richard LaGravenese’s brothers Kray period biopic “Legend,” which took seven weeks—not eight months—to shoot (now THAT was “fun”) with Hardy playing opposite himself (a tennis ball) with the aid of old-fashioned split screens and earpieces (so he could “sound clash” with his twin brother).

And he’s chuffed that George Miller is earning his just kudos for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” “It’s such a massive explosion of technicolor brilliance, orchestrated madness at its peak,” he says. Did he mind giving Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) the gun to take the one shot that could save them? “No. Because I’d miss,” he says. “The reality is I would miss and she wouldn’t. The great thing about Mad Max is he’s real. He’s not that confident. He doesn’t think he’s going to make it. He knows what he’s good at and what he isn’t.”

As for that thick accent on “The Revenant,” “I thought it sounded kind of cool,” he says. “I’ll go with that!” Hardy dropped onto that set, right after finishing “Legend,” without much fuss or bother. “I was a bit naughty, I didn’t do any research. I had time to grow a beard, get a wig on and go up the mountain. What you see is what you get.” He’s paying homage to Tom Berenger’s Sargeant Barnes in “Platoon,” a character he’s loved since he was a kid. “There’s a little of him in there.” (X)

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hirxeth:

“I came home heart sore and soul withered.”

Jane Eyre (2011) dir. Cary Fukunaga

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acagoldsmith:

Book Shelf by red-gold-sparks

Bums me out a little that Zelazny’s the only one whose jacket designer didn’t give me the courtesy of an actual title on the spine.

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Spindrift 2, Cape Horn, December 22, 2015. Source.

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leirelatent:

Ted Nasmith – Luthien Escapes upon Huan

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“‘But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,’ faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

‘Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’”

– A Christmas Carol, of course; this is Dickens on a roll. Check out the rhythm of that last sentence, how it marshals the whole speech toward certainty. (via velogiraffe)

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Spindrift 2 is around Cape Horn and heading north into the Atlantic. They’re 30 days out from Ushant, with 15 days left to get back to the start/finish line. IDEC and Banque Pop’s ghost are still on the Pacific side, so it’s looking hopeful for the record as long as the weather cooperates.

Winds were light for the rounding, which meant Yann Riou was able to fly the drone. There’s a great shot of Yann (usually invisible behind the camera) as it comes in for a landing. And I’m pretty sure that’s Dongfeng alumnus Thomas Rouxel catching it.

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It’s the season of Christmas counts. I did the one that I do, but I still feel birdy-ish. I want an excuse to do some more without the pressure/commitment of something major like another Christmas count or a conventional big day.

So I thought: What about a little big day?

The normal way an obsessive birder does a big day is to devote the whole day to it and spend a lot of it driving from place to place. I don’t want to do that, but a scaled-down version sounds like fun. So here’s my plan:

• A single day.
• 100% human-powered. Walking or biking only.
• I don’t want to bird dawn to dusk; I’ve got too much going on with work and the holidays. But I could do an hour each in the morning, noon, and evening, and then just incidental birding around the house during the rest of the day. So:
• 0700 – 0800: Franklin Trail (rural/chaparral)
• 1200 – 1300: Carpinteria Creek Lagoon and Carpinteria Bluffs (freshwater wetland/coastal sage scrub/rocky and sandy beaches)
• 1600 – 1700: Carpinteria Salt Marsh (coastal estuary)

I started listing species, and I think 70 should be pretty easy. With luck I could get to 80 or even 90. If I get all the likely species on my list plus all the “bonus” species that I think are reasonably possible, it gets me to 99.

So, you know, if magic happens: 100. Not that I expect that. It will be fun no matter what; that’s the best thing about birdwatching.

I realize this isn’t anything super impressive for a serious birder. But I’m pretty casual about it, so for me it sounds like a fun challenge.

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dutch-dc-sailor:

yachtmasters:

Salt Water 😆 by straorza

8 meters are just the most gorgeous boats ever created.

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puppygamer:

if i don’t move soon i’m going to wind up drinking myself to death so i decided to give up drinking so i could start preparing to move instead

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My BEST posts of 2015

December ♥ 19

November ♥ 758

October ♥ 566

September ♥ 389

August ♥ 603

July ♥ 19285

June ♥ 7032

May ♥ 28080

April ♥ 139

March ♥ 238

February ♥ 948

January ♥ 405

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tool.

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Perfect freeze-frame is perfect.

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justemoinue2:

A Walk in the Oaks

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smdxn:

Why We Have to Act on Climate Now – In One Chart

The precipitous rise in carbon pollution is what’s driving climate change, leading to rising sea levels, more extreme drought, superstorms, wildfires, and public health problems across the world. No nation is immune to these consequences. Humans caused this rise in pollution and temperature, and it will take all of us to actually do something about it.

Also: why we are failing.

I find this chart both interesting and depressing. Not just for the data.. For the evidence it contains of the human shortcomings that stand in the way of our solving the problem. Because this chart is a lie.

I noticed it after a few seconds, because I’ve seen honest versions of this chart before. But the difference is subtle.

Hint: If you click through to the source page at whitehouse.gov the lie isn’t there. It was introduced in the Tumblr version of the chart, presumably by the person running @smdxn, presumably because they thought it made the image more impactful, more motivating. This version does a better job of promoting fear and concern, but it does so by deceiving you.

Did you find the lie?

It’s the label circled in red at the center of the chart. On the original version of the chart it says “Carbon Dioxide Levels”, because the red line it is labeling is the line with the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide readings. That’s the number that has trended steadily upward for the last century as humanity has systematically pumped CO2 into the atmosphere. (The chart smooths out the annual wiggle in the data as Northern Hemisphere foliage sucks up and releases carbon, but that’s a legitimate simplification that helps visualize the underlying trend.)

The gray bars represent the ice-core-derived global temperature readings, sometimes up, sometimes down, but generally upward. But that data is messier, reflecting the many complexities, some of them not yet fully understood, of the global climate system. It’s still trending upward, and we’re still fucked. But it’s not quite as obvious. Also, it doesn’t have that sexy red color that we’re evolutionarily predisposed to react to emotionally: bright red = scary/important.

So for this version of the chart @smdxn switched the label so it reads “Global Temperature.” They also removed the red coloring from the numbers along the right side of the chart, presumably because that helps sell the deception that the red line refers to temperature rather than to CO2. So now, at least from a quick glance, it looks like the red line shows global temperature tracking steadily and scarily upward. Omg! We need to do something!

For a committed partisan, that deception probably seemed justified. The fact that global temperature has been climbing in fits and starts means that dishonest people on the other side like to cherry-pick particular slices of time in which temperature has held steady or even fallen for a few years and make a big deal about it. If you’ve ever come across an Internet commenter attacking the comments section of an article with references to “the hiatus”, that’s what they were talking about. And that’s clearly dishonest and deceptive. You don’t do that kind of cherry-picking on accident. But neither do you re-label a graph to switch the meaning of the two sets of data it shows on accident. The person who did that here intended to deceive.

Why does it matter that some activist decided it was okay to make this chart deceptive rather than communicative? That it was more important that the person viewing it be alarmed than that they understand?

It matters because of the scale of the problem. As long as we’re fighting politics-as-usual battles with each other, we’re losing this war. There’s just no way to make the kinds of changes we need to make unless we have not just a scientific consensus, but a societal consensus. The kind of partisanship that @smdxn is engaging in by deceptively relabeling the chart works against achieving that consensus.

There’s a reason why a scientific consensus on this issue exists. Science has rules, and a process, and when you do it right it allows the truth to win out over noise and human bias and self-interest. Society as currently constituted doesn’t have that rule. Or it does, but it’s more of a fragile guideline, one that gets trampled underfoot as soon as partisans start doing their rugby scrum back and forth over it.

Partisans think it’s okay to lie as long as they’re lying in the service of their cause. That’s why Peter Gleick thought it was okay to forge a sexier, more evil-sounding “strategy memo” to be released along with the internal documents he’d stolen from The Heartland Institute. That’s why Roger Pielke, Jr., gets maligned as “one of them” for saying top-down carbon pricing solutions can’t work given political economy as it currently operates. That’s why Naomi Oreskes recently called it “denialism” for climate scientists to say nuclear power needs to be part of our strategy. In each of those cases, partisans are stooping to deception precisely because they are partisans, because they are engaged in battle, because the people on the other side are doing it too, and that gets them upset and clouds their judgement.

For a committed partisan, lies become just another tool in service to the cause.

It’s a mistake. As long as there are two sides to this issue, we lose. We need to understand each other, to listen to each other, if we’re going to solve this. Lying won’t get it done, and those who engage in it are deluding themselves. They’re not part of the solution. They’re part of the problem.

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ranunculusss:

16/365

The Mill and the Cross is a film inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Procession to Calvary and directed by Lech Majewski. The film focuses on the 500 characters depicted in Bruegel’s painting. Majewski’s film is so mystifying because the composition of something so earthbound and historical events surrounding it arouse an overpowering sense of the surreal.

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“#feelings are shit I’m turning into a robot”

– someone on tumblr who might see this

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muchtoofullofsand:

matineemoustache:

White Christmas (1954)

@cdmonson & @jennidrewes !!!!

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