Worth Your Time

The Photography of Jack Sharp

I’d never heard of Jack Sharp until just today, but I’m very glad I did.

From the site’s about page:

Jack Sharp (1928-1992), born in Harrold, Bedfordshire, UK. Moved to Geneva, Switzerland in 1955 to join CERN as an engineer and raise his family. Loved life, the outdoors and fully embraced anything he took interest in.

Two things struck me as I was browsing his photos:

His use of aperture is masterful. It seems like he’s always capturing the perfect amount of context in each shot.
His exposures are also perfect. I find exposure to be one of the most surprisingly difficult elements to get right. His are spot on every time.

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One more test

another test of something

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Typos of the New York Times

Discovered the wonderful @nyttypos this morning. A fantastic Twitter account I discovered this morning. The account’s bio:

I am an appellate lawyer and persnickety dude. As a hobby, I correct typos in the Times, which no longer employs copy editors and consequently has tons of typos

Some of my favourite corrections so far are just next-level pedantry. Definitely the content I signed up for:

Delete: "have" is an idiotic verb-noun-agreement error for "has" in "The rise in the number of cases in the Midwest have prompted alarm and fear." "Cases," the prepositional object of "of," is not the subject of "have"; "rise" is. pic.twitter.com/TTOnxofDzc
— Typos of the New York Times (@nyttypos) September 15, 2020

And drawing attention to the $3,500 vest in this photo, which is “on ground”, is just fantastic work:

For example, here we have a guy in a Walt Whitman-inspired outfit of an unbuttoned $3500 Bottega Veneta cardigan, no shirt, "vest (on ground)," and an interesting/vaguely scary pair of orange-fingered gray gloves. pic.twitter.com/cf9TtxPfGE
— Typos of the New York Times (@nyttypos) September 14, 2020

Underwater datacentres

Microsoft filled a mobile datacenter with nitrogen, and lowered it down 117 feet to the ocean’s floor off Scotland in 2018. They pulled it up earlier this summer too see how things were looking.

“Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land

Seems like things went pretty good!

The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference.

Home audio studio, 1980s vs 2020

I don’t know this blog at all, but was intrigued with this post. A “proper” setup in the 1980s involved reverb machines and DATs and mixers and tape recorders, to the tune of £10,893 ($14,000USD). Assuming they didn’t adjust for inflation, that’s almost $30,000 in equipment in today’s money.

Through the magic of computers, they suggest you can get the equivalent today for just £1530 ($2000USD). There’s a little more to it than that — I wouldn’t want to edit sound on a several year old Mac that cost five hundred bucks, but mileage will vary. You can get an extremely well equipped Mac for $3-4000, putting the total still far below the $30,000 required in 1985.

Topic lists over book lists

I’m no longer going to maintain a list of Books to Read. Instead, I’m going to start a list of Topics to Explore.

For the last several decades, I’ve set out each year with the goal of reading more books. Some years I do well, some years not so much. I keep several actual lists of books, as well as a few mental lists, and get regular recommendations from others. But it seems I never actually achieve my goal. I only ever add to my list of “books not read”.

My Topics to Explore list so far is as random and far-reaching as the old book lists, but something feels better about this approach. In exploring a topic in this list, I’m going to count all forms of media, not just books. In this model, reading a Wikipedia page or a NYT article, or watching a Youtube video all “count” towards my goal. Instead of feeling guilty about the books I’m not reading, I can feel good about the topics I am exploring. I’m only a month or so in, but it’s already going well.

Here’s a slice of my current topic list, in Notion:

I’ll obviously report back on the good stuff I find along the way.

Books people re-read

Great answers to the interesting question “what books have you re-read”. I’ve re-read a few of Hemmingway’s and Steinbeck’s, but I can’t think of any other than those. I reread both A Farewell to Arms last year, and The Grapes of Wrath just last year.

The Grapes of Wrath in particular stands up very well. It’s the best book I’ve ever read by an large margin. It’s almost impossibly good.