Second and Third Thoughts
Until you know what it is like to walk out on the field as a No. 11, with the opposition sniggering, and your team preparing to take the field behind you, it’s impossible to know what batting at No. 11 is really like. It takes a special person to bat last.
via Jimmy Anderson and the eleven legends | cricket with balls.
Great piece by Jarrod Kimber.
I’ve spent a large part of today watching videos on YouTube, and not cat ones. I happened across a set of videos created by a guy known as Thunderf00t called Why Do People Laugh At Creationists?. There are 42 videos (the link goes to the master playlist), mostly about 5 to 10 minutes long, uploaded from September 2007 to the present. By and large, each video deals with the daft assertions of creationists. Thunderf00t explains the science that invalidates the creationists’ claims: Science, bitches. It works!
Wimbledon: Tech behind world’s most prestigious tennis tournament.
Terrific photo gallery by Andrew Hoyle for CNET.
It’s easy to see why the message that anyone can do anything if they try hard enough might be popular.
Unfortunately it’s not true.
via The 10,000 Hours Myth: Practice Predicts Only 12% of Performance — PsyBlog.
No more guilt about not putting in the 10,000 hours.
Oh, and then this: Opening a Bottle of Red Wine. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s five minutes of a master sommelier called Ronan Sayburn opening and decanting a bottle of fine wine, perfectly. It’s such a joy to watch him and experience the pleasure of seeing something done really well…
He’s right.
Apple has always tried to build an emotional connection between its devices and customers. With its increasing focus on privacy, it’s clear that Apple not only sees privacy as important to maintaining this bond, but as a means of differentiating itself from the competition. For a variety business and technical reasons, it’s an advantage that will be hard for Apple’s competition to duplicate.
via Why Apple really cares about your privacy | Macworld.
Interesting read.
There was a mention of this video during TV coverage of the Goodwood Festival of Speed. I tracked it down on YouTube. It shows Ari Vatanen in a Peugeot rally car attacking the Pikes Peak Hill Climb. Beautiful cinematography and incredible driving!
I’ve always been partial to a good Bloody Mary. It works not only as tasty preprandial, but also an early morning breakfast before the tummy has properly woken up. I’ve drunk more than a few in airline lounges, or in the Eurostar lounge waiting for the 06:10 to Brussels. So when I happened on this SeriousEats article, The Bloody Mary: The History and Science of an Oddball Classic, I didn’t hesitate to click on the link.
My attention was drawn recently to the article Are Wine Tasters Idiots?, reprised from 2013 on Jancis Robinson’s website. The first part of the article lists several examples of the alleged idiocy: cheap wines being preferred over expensive ones, experts describing the same white wine differently simply because the wine in one glass was dyed red, inconsistent assessments of the same wine by different panels, and so on. (There’s more detail in the referenced article from The Observer.)
The author, Alex Hunt MW, then continues with, it seems to me, a slightly injured tone:
What I find so strange is the underlying assumption that wine criticism should be a scientific, repeatable process. I have not seen the same sort of expectations applied to art, film or music critics. Wine experts, it feels, are far more likely to be demonised as the ‘other’, when in fact we have far more rigorous tests of identification and knowledge. The type of tasting exams many of us have passed are, I submit, unflukeable.
After we came back, at the end of May, from our holiday in Jordan, I decided to try to create an ebook containing some of my photos and a commentary using iBooks Author just because…
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