Author: 6000

Over the top

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This is awful. Where’s the incentive to do well in your exams when dismemberment is the only reward?

It’s no wonder that this female student looks so despondent: she has studied hard and knows the answers to all the questions in front of her. She is also now aware that her inevitable bifurcation lies ahead.

Look, I fully recognise that the number of students achieving the top grades is getting disproportionately high, potentially devaluing the qualification, but to lower those numbers through traumatic and/or surgical hemisection seems at best, a little harsh, and at worst, wholly barbaric.

Either way, these reforms are completely over the top and need revisiting.
Why not just make the exam papers more difficult or something?

Quite astounding

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I’ve been dashing around the Northern Suburbs of the Mother City this morning; collecting documents, running errands, and generally braving the N1 traffic.

I’d rather be elsewhere…

How astounding is this ethereal image of the French barque Belem in the Nærøyfjord in Norway? The muted colours, the silent waterfall, the layers of mist and cloud, the permanence of the mountains.

Even better bigger and on black here.

Brilliant work by Bent Inge Ask, whose entire photostream is wonderful.

‘Clipse

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There was a total solar eclipse yesterday. These things happen on a fairly regular basis, but this one was important because it was visible from the USA, so we all had to take a whole lot more notice of it than we did of the one in Indonesia last year, or the one in the Faroe Islands in 2015.

But for the rest of the world, the day (or night) went on as normal. So, I’ve collected together the best bits of eclipse ephemera so that you don’t feel that you have missed out.

Most exaggerated emotional response (written):

I was lucky enough to experience a total solar eclipse in the Britain in 1999. It’s a weird experience, sure, but it’s brief and it’s not something that I really dwelled upon after the event. So I think this description by Dr Francisco Diego of University College London is a bit lah-di-dah:

It steals your soul and it happens in complete silence.

Apart from whooping Americans. Lots of them.


Best photo:

This much-shared image from NASA, featuring eclipse, sunspots and the ISS in transit.


Worst photo:

Lots of competition for this one, but this cellphone pic from Trisha O’Farrell in Oregon is really appalling.
I’m not being rude; I’m being honest. I mean, she must know, right?


Most interesting phenomenon:

We all knew what was going to happen. It was going to go dark for a couple of minutes and then it was going to get light again, so we’re actually after secondary phenomena here. This image of traffic congestion from Google Maps, perfectly matching the path of totality across the Southern US states, hits the spot:

 

Least interesting phenomenon:

Unaffected goats.

 

Best live reaction from a broom cupboard somewhere in a South American embassy in London:

Which is almost the same as this (satirical) article from last week. But real.


Next total solar eclipse:

July 2nd, 2019 19:24:08 – visible across central Chile and Argentina.


Next total solar eclipses visible from South Africa:

November 25th, 2030 06:51:37
August 2nd, 2046 10:21:13
July 24, 2055 09:57:50

See you there.

 

Unplugged

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Herewith the album cover for a-ha’s MTV Unplugged session, recorded on pretty close to the Summer Solstice in north-western Norway. 

It’s due for release on 6th October and will feature two new songs: This Is Our Home and Break In The Clouds, along with nineteen acoustic versions of previous work.

Of course I’m looking forward to it. Why wouldn’t I be?

Different sounds

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This has been doing the rounds on BBC 6 Music for a while now:

It sounds properly exotic, and it’s by Four Tet, who turns out to be a 39-year-old from Putney called Kieran Hebden. Which is kinda where the exoticness ends. Although I’m pretty sure that we’re listening to a Hammered Dulcimer here (like this one, remember?), so maybe it’s not that mundane after all.

Kieran has been in the music business for twenty years, and has worked with artists like Thom Yorke, Floating Points and Jamie xx. He’s widely respected in the electronic music community, but that doesn’t stop Soundcloud user “Infinbeatz” from telling him to

throw a high lvl filter overlap on the 10k range

at 2:21.

I’m not convinced that doing that would make an appreciable difference, to be fair.
I’m not 100% sure where this unusual, hypnotic track fits into my music collection, but I feel I have to make room for it somewhere, high lvl filter overlap on the 10k range or not.