July | 2012 | proper manky

Weather Forecast

Read the following today in Canada by Richard Ford (review forthcoming):

“I just stared at the mare’s tails in the west – the sky behind them purple and gold and bright green, turning blue in the high reaches.”

Mare’s tails? Never had heard this expression before. Googled it. Turns out it refers to cirrus clouds. Asked TLMW, who is a card-carrying member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Drew a blank as well.

Apparently, there’s an old sailor’s expression that goes thus: “Mare’s tails and mackerel scales make tall ships carry low sails.” Mare’s tails are those hooked-shaped cirrus clouds and mackerel scales are cirrocumulus which appear as bands of fish scales. Both are high altitude clouds above 20,000 ft. When both are seen together it is a sign to the sailor of a storm front bringing in a weather change within 24 hours. Mare’s tales. Ok.

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Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

New book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt looks interesting. Above is a brief video intro. Another one with different narration, along with a brief review, is here.

The book is by a journalist and a cartoonist who team up to showcase the American underbelly and illustrate the human and environmental devastation in so-called “sacrifice zones” of global capitalism which, as they tell it, seem like Dante’s circles of hell. They cast a spotlight in areas most media ignores.

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Kat Edmonson – Lucky

Didn’t care all that much for this album on first listening but it has since grown nicely on me. Particularly like her delicately subdued and searching take on the Beach Boys’ “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” Also, “Don’t Know” is quite lovely. Julie London-ish.

Album was funded via Kickstarter project. Good review on NPR.

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2012 Olympics of Bad Taste

”A Coller Coaster Raping a Crane”

Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond’s observation tower, ArcelorMittal Orbit, which will, sadly, serve as a permanent reminder of London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games. Here’s another view of the atrocity.

This is even worse than the 2012 Olympics logo.

“Lisa Simpson Is Blowing for Gold”

And she always seemed like such a nice girl …

Man U IPO Analysis

Outstandingly detailed analysis of Manchester United’s recently announced plans to float on the NYSE via an IPO. All this to crawl out from under the debt burden that resulted from the current owners’ highly leveraged takeover in 2005. Much to learn here. Among the many reasons the author gives for this effort to raise much needed capital, two stand out in particular:

(1) Although the exact figure is open to debate, there is no doubt that United have wasted around half a billion pounds that could have been spent on the football club, purely for the dubious pleasure of having the Glazers as owners. […] The money wasted in the Glazers’ reign is now estimated at £553 million, comprising £295 million interest payments, £128 million debt repayments, £101 million for various bits of financial reengineering (fees for takeover, refinancing, interest swap termination, bond issue and IPO) and £29 million payments to the Glazer family via consultancy fees and dividends.

(2) United are under pressure to increase their wage bill of £153 million, as they have now slipped to third in the English wages league behind Manchester City (£174 million) and Chelsea (£168 million). In 2008, United’s wage bill was £67 million higher than City’s, but it is now £21 million lower, a turnaround of £88 million in just three years.

Tough to remain competitive like that. Add to this that Ferguson, the manager, has announced that he’ll be retiring soon. He’s probably the only person alive who could have managed a very succesful team under these conditions. As the prospectus drily puts it, “Any successor to our current manager may not be as successful as our current manager.”

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Savages

I was prepared to like this movie based on the book reviews and reading the first few pages. But what a fucking waste of much-needed life time! The linked review above nails it in horrid detail – I could add some more scathing remarks but this should suffice as stern warning.

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A Love Supreme

Digging deep into one of jazz history’s finest albums ever. Of unbelievable intensity. Almost some kind of holy object. Somehow, as if by magic, everything comes together here. There’s so much empathy, respect, and understanding between the musicians. It’s simple and straightforward, it’s insanely complex. For some, it’s perhaps hard to listen to at first but it’s so immensely human. Touching, really. Ashley Kahn’s book about the album covers it perfectly.

As Elvin Jones, the drummer in the A Love Supreme quartet, is quoted to have said: “It’s unique. In a sense, it’s not even jazz. […] It’s totally spiritual: old people can appreciate it, little kids who haven’t been indoctrinated into music in any way can appreciate it. Every time someone hears it, that music touches them somehow.” True that.

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Socialized Medicine in France

H/T TLMW

Funny David Sedaris story … would love to know what the French version is for “good-time teeth” …

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Intel Buys Stake in ASML

Pretty ballsy deal to keep pace with Moore’s Law. Intel may just have kicked 450mm and EUV into overdrive! Nikon, the main competitor to ASML for chip lithography equipment, is not going to like this. The deal could eventually help reduce chip production costs by up to 40%. But it does come at a price. Don’t know about its ultimate demise but this is pretty much what the slow-down in Moore’s Law looks like. The economy of scale of making things smaller is diminishing and advanced technology nodes are delivering less while costing increasingly more to develop. And, as seen by this deal, suppliers like ASML are not going to eat a big chunk of the costs like they did in the 200-to-300nm conversion. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Not convinced that EUV will be ready, as predicted, by 2015. Too many delays already, but maybe this cash infusion will indeed accelerate development.

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Ragu alla Bolognese

Update: TLMW went rogue and made this one instead. It was amazing – photo below, though it obviously doesn’t do justice as to how good it tasted! Crash hot spaggy bol, as the Aussies say.

TLMW passed on this recipe. Must make! Had a delicious version at Stella’s a while back. Always amazing how the simple things can be messed up so easily. And delightful when they aren’t.

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Furry Tail Stories

Reading with P-Nut

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Fantastic Landscape Photography

Very cool interview with Mitch Dobrowner, winner of the 2012 Sony World Photography Award for his b&w landscape (and weather) photography. His submission photos are here. His own portfolio site is here. Here are two examples of his work: These are stunning shots. Some look so surreal that one might think they have been photoshopped. However:

I treat the digital sensor as if it were a piece of film; I filter for my scene with traditional filters at the time of capture. I’m conscious that adjustments made later in Photoshop are destructive and so I prefer working in this way. I’m not saying this is the fine art, or purist, way of doing it, I’m just saying it’s my preferred way. […] It’s my vision and what I saw at the time and it has integrity. The judges checked my RAW files and were happy that they were more or less what I submitted as my entry because I’m doing most of my work ‘in camera.’

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Gabo Has Senile Dementia

Source: Guardian

Nobel prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez is suffering from senile dementia and can no longer write. […] Apparently he is no longer in a condition to write the second part of his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale. His last novel, Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores, published five years ago, received mixed reviews.

However, I very much liked it. In that book, he wrote: ”It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things, though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us.” On the eve of the 90th birthday of the narrator, a journalist and columnist for a local newspaper, is feeling close to death. As a birthday present to himself, he pays for a night with a 14-year old virgin prostitute. The night does not quite turn out the way he expected, but he eventually reaches another unexpected type of bliss. The book is ~120 pages short; it made me laugh and sad. I am very sorry to read about his dementia that is now effectively ending his writing career.

Here’s a very personal account about dementia with references to Gabo.

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“Gun Has No Trigger” – But Does Have Akkadian Translation

Source: Guardian

Assyriology graduate students have translated a song by the Dirty Projectors – Gun Has No Trigger – into Akkadian, writing out the cuneiform using an Old-Babylonian lapidary script.

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Wisdom of the Crowds? Or Folly Thereof?

Source: NYT

After the better part of a decade in which various markets, from Intrade to the stock market, became many people’s preferred way to peer into the future, a backlash is clearly under way. Not so long ago, knowing about the existence of Intrade was a mark of being in the vanguard. Today, mocking Intrade, ideally on Twitter, is a sign of sophistication. Markets are at their best when they can synthesize large amounts of disparate information, as on an election night. Experts are most useful when a system exists to identify the most truly knowledgeable – a system that often resembles a market.

I remember a few years back Paul Krugman in the New York Times titled a blog post on prediction markets “Nobody Knows Anything.” So, there.

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