Fueled by the discovery that a Starbucks in Washington has "a bicycle powered blender and the customers make their own drinks," Make Blog's Phil Torrone went bike-blender crazy, pulling together a great post on making and buying bike-powered blenders.
The company in charge of Australia's largest underground mine has admitted it failed to supply a safe work environment after the death of an employee.
The practices the company had in place resulted in the death of a worker. The maximunm penalty is $300,000. Huge multinational company, youngish worker, great possible future.
Legendary music producer Arif Mardin died Sunday night. This was a very classy man, much loved by all the artists he ever worked with. And the artists he worked with were as diverse an array as anyone has ever tackled. For decades he was a star in-house producer with Atlantic Records, making records with Willie Nelson, Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, Average White Band, Barbra Streisand, The Rascals, Phil Collins, John Prine, Halls and Oats, George Benson, Average White Band and dozens more[sigma]
He retired from Atlantic in 2001 and a few months later he went into the studio with an unknown young woman for his pals at Blue Note Records. The result was the Grammy-winning, multi-platinum debut by Norah Jones, COME AWAY WITH ME. And our song tonight is my favorite from that album, a cover of Hank Williams[base '] classic "Cold Cold Heart."
In honor of Arif[base ']s passing I have 2 brand new box sets called WILLIE NELSON[^] THE COMPLETE ATLANTIC SESSIONS. If you wanna play this game, be sure to include an e-mail address. Just send us your top 10 songs (could be "my top 10 songs of all time," "my top 10 songs by women singers," "my top 10 songs with a political message," "my top ten songs with an alto sax," "my top 10 songs from the 80[base ']s"[sigma] anything). Tomorrow morning I[base ']m going to look [OE]em all over and pick one and John[base ']s gonna look [OE]em all over and he[base ']ll pick one too. And the two winners are going to each get a box of Willie.
Enjoy Norah!
(guest blogged by Howie Klein)
I missed the death of Arif Mardin, not hitting the mainstream news.His is a name I remember seeing on so many albums as I grew up. All those wonderful soul albums. I will always associate him with the sound of Aretha Franklin.
Cory Doctorow:
Here's a great step-by-step guide to taking pictures of fireworks, something I've tried to do quite a lot, without any notable success. This'll be handy come Canada Day weekend or July 4.
Focal Length? - One of the hardest parts of photographing fireworks is having your camera trained on the right part of the sky at the right time. This is especially difficult if you're shooting with a longer focal length and are trying to take more tightly cropped shots. I generally shoot at a wider focal length than a tight one but during a show will try a few tighter shots (I usually use a zoom lens to give me this option) to see if I can get lucky with them. Keep in mind that cropping of your wider shots can always be done later.
Aperture - A common question around photographing fireworks is what aperture to use. Many people think you need a fast lens to get them but in reality it's quite the opposite as the light that the fireworks emit is quite bright. I find that apertures in the mid to small range tend to work reasonably well and would usually shoot somewhere between f/8 to f/16.
Update: Kevin sez, "If you're looking to take more unconventional photos of fireworks, there are a lot of things you can do that will result in amazing effects beyond what a live audience can appreciate. Intentionally bluring your photos, taking zoomed photos, long exposures where you intentionally pan, track, zoom, change the focus, or some combination of the above can result in startling effects. My partner Rachel and I have been experimenting with this for a few years. You can see one of her albums here and one of mine from the same event here."
Tim Berners-Lee talks about net neutrality. [MetaFilter]
Now kids, St Tim (I actually think it's Sir Tim these days) did invent the web. He invented HTML which is how we write for the web. He knew what he was doing. It was supposed to be open and free. I like to think life was like that. The new proposals to have a kind of Web-Pro fro which people would have to pay is appalling.
The implications are really rather interesting. There are adoption studies compared to blood-siblings which strongly suggest a prenatal determination of homosexuality. So if we are talking biblical abomination, it's something in the nature of eye colour. Also, I can't help thinking of a family I know of where, of five sons, four are gay. I think the straight one is the youngest. He grew up having sex with his brothers in fact, but they all insist that he is straight. Nowt so queer as folk! [The Lackidaisical Procrastinator]
8:38:18 PM
For one thing, we're no longer owned by Microsoft, which for some reason seems to make it easier for us to build a site that works as well in Firefox and Safari as it does in Internet Explorer. And now that larger computer screens and broadband have become commonplace, we felt Slate could do more to take advantage of both. The new home page, for example, is wider than the old one and has graphics so numerous that a dial-up modem would have choked on them. We've used the additional real estate to give permanent homes to Explainer, the Has-Been, Doonesbury, Today's Pictures, and our editorial cartoons[~]regular features that have sometimes been hard to find.
I love that remark that suddenly Slate can work in non-MS browsers now.
