bikes and things

I’m no petrol head or F1 fan but this clip blew me away. Apparently these pits stops are now down to sub three seconds. I have watched this a few times and it still seems impossibly fast.

There’s loads more information over at kottke.org on this. The attention to training and precision is quite something.

Teams now spend huge sums to design their own equipment and improve the fitness of their teams who also work as mechanics. McLaren is working with the English Institute of Sport to hone their 24-member team’s technique while Williams has partnered with Olympic champion Michael Johnson’s Performance Center to work on everything from diet to eye-hand coordination to core strength.

Practice makes perfect as they say.

The new normal.

Via xkcd.com

This is probably one of the best things I’ve read recently about Google. A fantastic critique of why their new contact lens isn’t such a great idea for those with Diabetes as well as fairly succinctly distilling why Google+ is utter crap. Summary; they’re engineers and don’t get humans.

This quote really jumped out at me at how succinctly it sums up Google.

And yet, I cannot get over what seems to me a tone-deaf approach by Google’s scientists. It also highlights Google’s fundamental challenge: it fails to think about people as people, instead it treats them as an academic or an engineering problem. Instead of trying to understand the needs of actual people, they emerge with an elegant technological solution.

It is not just this one time. Google+, their social network, is a fail because it fundamentally isn’t social or about people…

Via Daringfireball

Got off my bike this evening a opened an email from Everpix saying that they’re closing their doors. Everpix is one of my favourite services, and one that I’d written about previously.

So sad to see it go as it was such a nice idea. I loved receiving that email each day with what I’d been up to the last few years ago on that date. Alas it’s no more. Hopefully someone will buy it or a similar service will start.

Love seeing robots work in factories. So elegent and graceful yet also slightly sinister. Ok, so it’s a bit of a PR piece for Tesla but damn it’s beautiful.

A long but worthwhile watch on the history of aspect ratio in films. I never knew how anamorphic worked either.

I often get asked this and my reply usually is “How much do you want to spend?“. The discussion inevitably ends up with a Nikon mid range DSLR camera with a crop sensor. But then at this price range the kit lens is always going to be completely crap. I’m not the only one who thinks like this it seems.

I’d go further and suggest that you shouldn’t buy an SLR if you only ever plan to use its kit lens or an inexpensive zoom lens. Kit lenses and low-end zooms produce blurry, distorted, drab images — they can look decent on blogs or phones, but the flaws become apparent when you see them on big Retina screens or printed at larger sizes.

I always recommend that people buy a 35mm prime lens, which is roughly the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a full frame camera. Before I went full frame I had a D300 which I used a Nikkor 35mm ƒ1.8 which is a complete bargain at £150. It’s sharp, compact and unobtrusive, fast and is one of the best ways of improving your photography in my opinion. Whilst it suffers from a little vignetting wide open and a tiny bit of pincushion distortion these are both easily corrected for in the latest version of Lightroom with the tick of a box. It’s also one less thing to distract you from actually taking good pictures. Zooming around trying to improve the composition seems to be fatal to progression. Zoom with your legs and just take more bloody pictures.

Computing in films, remixed.

So much good space footage and imagery seems to be going around at the moment. This one via @MathewWilson is fantastic.

Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun’s lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays — a phenomenon known as coronal rain.

Over the course of the next day, hot plasma in the corona cooled and condensed along strong magnetic fields in the region. Magnetic fields, themselves, are invisible, but the charged plasma is forced to move along the lines, showing up brightly in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 304 Angstroms, which highlights material at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. This plasma acts as a tracer, helping scientists watch the dance of magnetic fields on the sun, outlining the fields as it slowly falls back to the solar surface.

Quite hard to comprehend really. Seems weird to see images of the surface of the planet as well as the robot roaming around it. There’s many more incredible pictures coming out of NASA on their Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

This remarkable self-portrait of NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover includes a sweeping panoramic view of its current location in the Yellowknife Bay region of the Red Planet’s Gale Crater.