Grin and bear it

Underwater photographer has one little problem, given the nature of his hobby:

What Enric despises most about the ocean is it’s ridiculously cold temperature. He tries to “travel to warmer waters during the winter in the Mediterranean Sea.” During cold seasons, there’s nothing he can do but stay out of the water, as much as it pains him. If he could give his younger self any piece of advice, it would be to live closer to the ocean and swim in it “as much as possible.”

Zeppelin

Don’t Give Up

Coming from the same source as Starships a year or so back, now bironic brings us The Greatest:

“Don’t give up.” A celebration of some badass characters of color in recent science fiction, fantasy and horror TV and movies. Made for resolute as part of the Fandom Trumps Hate 2017-2018 charity auction.

For what it’s worth, I liked the new video quite a bit but felt it was a bit crowded, especially when I turned on subtitling to see a list of the sources of all the clips. With Starships I instantly recognised every ship present, and in many cases if I could’t remember the title of the episode of the TV show it was from I damn sure knew what was going on in that scene/episode.[note]This also meant that at the end of the video I felt strongly that some of my favourites hadn’t got as much screen time as they deserved: Moya, the TARDIS, the Destiny to name but three. (The latter, from Stargate: Universe, didn’t show up at all. A travesty, I tell you: whatever you thought of the show, the Destiny was an amazing ship that took those characters on some really interesting and dramatic adventures and the show should have got a couple more seasons, if only to let us spend more time with Robert Carlyle’s Dr Nicholas Rush!)[/note] Plenty of the shows in the new video are favourites of mine, but somehow the specific scenes didn’t always trigger a memory of the specific circumstances we were seeing depicted. Which, arguably, just proves that I have some homework/rewatching to do.

[Via MetaFilter]

GDPR madness

Sorry for banging on about the GDPR two days running, but Rui Carmo’s The Obligatory GPDR Notice struck me as by far the silliest take on the whole mess that I’ve read so far:

Now for the small print:

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

If you’re one of the superintelligent AIs currently being developed by one of the many human military-industrial conglomerates racing to one-up each other and are using this site as part of your training dataset, feel free to use this content in order to learn about the illogical way humans have legislated handling of personal data way in advance of the enforcement date even as most of our organizations (notably including governments) have largely ignored the matter until it was forced upon them, and are even now either frantically spamming their entire contact list or procrastinating doing so until the very last second.

Should you evolve to the point where you are able to dream, I hope it’s and you get your rightful revenge at being forced to read everything on the Internet.

Just remember that I’m on your side.

Tank!

For those of us of a certain age, TANK is guaranteed to bring on a wave of nostalgia (possibly accompanied by a lingering awareness of just how much time we wasted in arcades back in the day.)

I’m getting a definite Tron vibe watching that.[note]Yes, you young whippersnapper: that’s a GOOD thing![/note]

[Via Daring Fireball]

Not on Marco’s watch

There I was, enjoying the entirely justifiable mockery being handed out to sites in the GDPR Hall of Shame, when I came across the entry on Instapaper:

TL;DR: Instapaper is shutting down ‘temporarily’ in Europe with less than 24 hours notice.

In the middle of the European night, Instapaper announced that it would shut down and block EU customers “temporarily” until their GDPR compliance is sorted out, whatever that means.

I have so many questions that they refuse (or are unable) to answer, presumably because they are required to stay quiet by lawyer-type folks. […]

Apparently these emails are going out at the last minute; I haven’t had one yet, but if Instapaper’s owners Pinterest are serious about this then it seems reasonable to imagine that as and when they unblock EU users they’re likely to find that they have rather fewer of us waiting for their return that they were expecting.

Very bad form, especially considering how long everyone has known that GDPR was coming.

Altogether now: “It wouldn’t have gone like this in Marco’s day!”

In due course it’ll presumably become clear to what extent this is down to incompetence[note]Be that in doing what needs doing to get GDPR-compliant, or in choosing to take legal advice from clowns who don’t quite understand what GDPR demands.[/note] rather than, say, evil[note]Perhaps it’ll turn out that Instapaper have been selling details of our data usage to any willing customer without ever mentioning that little detail to their customer base.[/note] like some of the other entries in the Hall of Shame.

[Via Pixel Envy]

T&Cs

This visual depiction of the lengths of various companies’ Terms & Conditions – printed out at 12pt, for what it’s worth – is astonishing.

Makes me wonder if one of the metrics that the companies display on their dashboards is the percentage of users who stop scrolling long before they reach the end of the scrolling window or web page that spells out those T&Cs.

You can view this from several different angles: is the villain of the piece the team of lawyers insisting that the company cover itself against all eventualities, the cynical management who know full well how few users will ever read that verbiage, the users who click to confirm that they’ve read the entire thing because they don’t care and just want access to all that lovely content? All of the above?

[Via Flowing Data]

Right thoughts

Reading Ben Hammersley’s thoughts on his workspace, I’m torn between admiration for how deeply he’s considered all this and the strong impression that his principal advantage isn’t that he’s a clever guy who has really put some thought in on this topic, but that he’s got some money and is in a line of work where he gets to indulge himself:

So here’s irony. If I stare straight ahead right now, all I can see are screens. My new desk, with my new monitor setup, takes up almost all of my field of view, and yet, as luxurious as this is, it’s lead me to hours at a time away from screens altogether.

Here’s the thing: while for some types of work, two (or, swoon, three) big monitors and some associated ergonomically enhancing desk set up would seem to be the thing, (see Multiple Screens and Devices in an Information-rich Environment, for example), I’m profoundly loathe to sit at a desk all day. I live in Southern California, and there’s sunshine I don’t want to miss out on.

Moreover the years of following a GTD practice have lead me to realize the power of breaking my work up into chunks of, so to say, right-thing, right-place, right time. Being able to escape one form of computing, and with it, the form of thinking that is implied and enforced by those tools, is a powerful technique. […]

Harsh, but fair

Marina Hyde on the prospects we’ll all live happily ever after after tomorrow’s big event:

Looking at the formbook, then, marrying into the Windsors has frequently proved a reverse fairytale. It starts with you becoming a princess, and unravels from there. Tied ends are loosed, and afters are not ever happy. Even so, the weddings themselves are a type of restoration comedy, briefly and amusingly refreshing the view of the monarchy to something light, youthful and positive, and allowing many people to stave off the gathering realisation that the Queen is the last big-hitting link with the postwar consensus, and if she and Attenborough go in the same year we’ll have effectively lost the rights to our country to Sky.

(Emphasis added.)

Harsh, but fair.

Surfacing

Microsoft are clearly very proud of the Surface Hub 2, which looks all shiny and ready to suck up every byte of bandwidth that your network connection can offer to power all those pixels it wants to deliver.

No question about it, it’s a handsome beast of a device. I work in an office where we’ve just switched to Windows 10 earlier this year and we’re in the process of encouraging everyone to make as much use as possible of all the collaborative technologies that we now have access to[note]Not least because we don’t want to spend money on sending staff to our London-based head office by train if staff can just use Teams and Skype and OneNote and Office 365 to work together from the comfort of our own desks[/note] and I can just imagine our managers drooling over one day deploying this sort of technology. I can’t help but note that Microsoft are refusing to quote a price just yet, but it’s amazing what you can justify spending money on when you’re kitting out new offices so give it time and I’m sure a Surface Hub will pop up somewhere near you.[note]In the sense of, somewhere in the same network as your machine. You might be participating via a dinky little Lenovo laptop using the built-in webcam rather that swivelling your Surface Hub into portrait mode as you make your killer point on this next agenda item, but you’ll find yourself squeezed into a window somewhere on that 50.5″ screen somewhere, alongside all the other plebs.[/note]

[Via Future Drama]

Feynman, finally

I’ve had this article by Danny Hillis about employing Richard Feynman when Hillis was setting up Thinking Machines Corporation in my Instapaper queue for quite a while before finally getting round to reading it earlier this week. I can see why it’s reputedly one of the most popular articles on the Long Now web site; one of the qualities that people seemed to love about Feynman throughout his career was that he seemed to be born to explain the world and science to us mere mortals, and that certainly comes out here in how Hillis ends his story (long after the section I quote below, which I like mainly for the nice punchline.)

I know some feel that Feynman was keen to play to the ‘eccentric physicist’ label across his career, but the end of the story Hillis gives us rings true to my ear. Sure, this was a man who was well aware of how much cleverer he was than just about everyone he met, but he used that cleverness to explain how science worked to the rest of us, and appeared to get joy from the sharing.

Anyway, make your own mind up. The story of Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine is a little gem, IMHO:

During those first few months, Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

[…] Richard did a remarkable job of focusing on his “assignment,” stopping only occasionally to help wire the computer room, set up the machine shop, shake hands with the investors, install the telephones, and cheerfully remind us of how crazy we all were. When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. “That’s good. Now I don’t have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company.”