My cousin, Elias, the pirate. He also builds castles.
Found this morning in a box in the closet: some old comrades—Captains of Crush grippers (T, 1, 2) and a favorite collection of essays.
If you’ve ever wanted a real gripper, you owe it to yourself to pick up a Captain of Crush from Iron Mind—they start around 100lbs of closing pressure. Most that you find in casual sports stores don’t measure up to 25 lbs of pressure. And if you want a multi-year challenge, aim to be one of the beasts that can close a #3.
Really fun day yesterday: full cast on site for kids voiceovers and they had a great time playing our new games.
“Playboy: What made you decide to go into rock and roll music?
Bob Dylan: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Pheonix comes and burns the house down. The next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can burn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?”
“Everything you ever wanted to know about Bob Dylan, in one answer.”
“For scientific leadership, give me Scott, for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen. But when you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton. Incomparable in adversity, he was the miracle worker who would save your life against all the odds and long after your number was up. The greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none.”
Sir Raymond Priestley
Member of the Nimrod expedition 1907-1909
This is an annotated Google Earth map of Shackleton’s South Pole expedition—a fantastic use of Google Earth.
You can preview it in the browser if you have the Google Earth browser plugin installed, or you can download the full package of files and folders for use with the desktop version of Google Earth (a much richer experience).
“Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.”
Yacht designer Jeremy Wurmfield has created a new daysailer—the e33—built by my friends at Lyman-Morse.
In general, I find modern daysailers uninteresting and tend more towards older H-boats and E-boats—but I’m curious about this one. It looks well proportioned and the default rigging is smart (no winches necessary, easy to sail alone or with a group of novices).
Rad is a storyboard artist at Dreamworks, his blog shares drawing techniques, process, and insight; it’s good stuff.
by Garry Kasparov
“This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? “
“A central aesthetic principle in Japan is simplicity, but it is different from simplicity in the West. Let me explain the difference by comparing cooking knives. The knives made by the German company, Henckel, for example, are well crafted and easy to use because they are highly ergonomic. The thumb automatically finds its place when you grab the knife.
Japanese cooks who have special skills prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb). This is, in a nutshell, Japanese simplicity.”
On Japanese Aesthetics, Kenya Hara
I like this notion of simplicity, though wonder if it’s correct. That said, I dislike OXO products (and OXO style products which is exactly what that Henckel knife is shooting for), regardless of what IDEO says.
“Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance… And women understand it—without noticing it.”
Peter “Dr. Dance” Lovatt, Sexual Politics of Dancing
via stephen
