Category: Social media
Developing countries were able to leapfrog that bottleneck
Mixed metaphor alert!
HumanProgress.org as recycled by Jacob Tudor:
The landline phone never reached more than 21.4% of the world’s population
By adopting cellular technology, developing countries were able to leapfrog that economic bottleneck.
Could it be that HumanProgress.org mixed this particular metaphor on purpose, to draw attention to the very good news they were trying to publicise, by getting mixed metaphor spotters like me all excited about how they’d said it?
Good news is notoriously hard to spread, because it typically happens so gradually.
I got into a muddle with linking to the original HumanProgress.org tweet, which is why I linked instead to Jacob Tudor’s rehashing of it. The original is number 75 of a set of 78 tweets, and linking to that gets you to the entire set, instead of linking to this particular one, so that link would only get you to this particular one while it remains the latest one.
Two photos of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
Most internetted photos of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, look like this:
Which I found here.
But the fact that almost all the internetted photos of this building look like that is misleading.
Here is a corrective, in the form of the exact sort of photo of this building that the pros earn their money by doing the exact opposite of:
Yet one more illustration of a belief I have long held about us amateur photoers, which is that we amateur photoers often tell you more about how a building actually looks, if you actually go there, than many of the photos carefully contrived by the professionals.
I hope that Michael Jennings does not object to being called an amateur photoer. By this I do not mean that he is a bad photoer. On the contrary …
I also particularly liked this photo of Michael’s, of Bilbao’s big transporter bridge
Out east in 2012
I haven’t been getting out much lately, so am instead exploring my photo-archives.
These from March 24th 2012, when I journeyed (and not for the first time) out east to the Victoria Docks, in the vicinity of the then-under-construction Emirates Air-Line, which is that strange ski lift that goes across the River:
As you can see, I especially like the cranes. And the barbed wire. There were even pylons to be seen. Best of all is that newish (-ish now) footbridge.
I used to love that place, and especially then, with all manner of new stuff going on. Memo to self: go back and see how things there have changed. Because, they have surely changed quite a lot.
And this could be the biggest change of the lot. Apparently, spurred on by TikTok, people have recently been riding on the ski lift in large numbers. There’s a first.
Marble Arch Hill is made of scaffolding!
This is definitely on my To Do List for this summer:
A viewing platform, to look out over and photo London. Made of scaffolding.
BMNB heaven.
I will be taking my zoomiest camera with me, because the nearby views look very dreary. Just a big bunch of boring trees.
Another Golden Gate photo
Big and brand new bridges are pretty rare these days, after a burst of them (or such is my recollection) around two decades ago. So, here is a photo of an Oldie But Goldie, which I encountered on Twitter recently:
This posting is partly because I love that photo, but partly also because I am lunching tomorrow with GodDaughter1’s Dad, who is a renowned bridge engineer, and I need to remind myself to ask him about any good new bridges. If there have been any, he’ll know.
3D-printed fake rhino horns
Suddenly I am finding all kinds of interesting animals-related stuff.
This, for instance:
My rule about Friday being my day for animals-related stuff has morphed, in my head, into the rule that I am not allowed to post animals-related stuff on any other day except Friday. Crackers. This is my blog and I can do what I like with it. But, it would seem that I can’t.
Snap
This photo, which I just this moment encountered on my Twitter feed, is exactly the photo I would have photoed, were I ever allowed into such a place:
Up to and including the facts that (a) I would have been indistinctly reflected in the mirror at the back, (b) everything is ever so slightly not quite vertical (that being a constant problem I have), and (c) there is a cat involved.
Charles Murray: “Our Chinese will beat their Chinese …”
I’ve been saying it for years. Don’t worry about China. Our Chinese will beat their Chinese.
That being a photo of the USA “Olympic” Maths team, which defeated China for the first time in 30 years.
Although, I found another photo of the triumphant USA Maths (that’s twice I have here corrected the spelling of that word) Team:
So, white supremacy is hanging on in there. Or to be more precise about it: ginger supremacy.
However, it would appear that this happened before lockdown, in July 2019. Maybe the Chinese Chinese have bounced back since then.
You can bet that Xi wouldn’t have been amused by this.
Colourful turtles and tortoises
Here:
Top row left to right: eastern box turtle, pancake tortoise and Bell’s hingeback tortoise.
Middle row left to right: radiated tortoise, Florida box turtle and Burmese star tortoise.
Bottom row left to right: spotted turtle, Bourret’s box turtle and European pond turtle.
For me, the bottom row is a bit of an anti-climax, but the top two rows are amazing. Blog and learn. Although, what I have not yet learned is why it is useful for turtles and tortoises to look like this. It surely can’t be camouflage, can it? Mimicry of something very scary to predators? But who are the predators of turtles and tortoises? Big bastard birds presumably. But what do I know? In the meantime: Wow.
Found, inevitably, on Twitter, via the Twitter feed, equally inevitably, of Steve Stewart-Williams.