Photographed in the Botanic Garden. You can see why people can become obsessed with them.
Interestingly, the Garden allows hand-held photography, but requires that one obtain a permit for using a tripod.
Daily Archives: January 29, 2008
The way it is
Excerpt from an email sent by a colleague currently working in Africa:
FYI: Anyone watching the news right now will be aware to a greater or less extent that Kenya is hitting a big low. A Kenyan friend has written to me saying that ‘the whole country is in depression and murder, mayhem are the order of the day’. Anyone will be aware that many Kenyan people are facing a violent, dangerous & insecure time. So you should also be aware that the United Nations is currently in the process of considering evacuating ‘all staff’. All staff that is, er-hum, apart from ‘local Kenyan staff’. Whilst the UN international staff get shipped out, on huge per diems, and weep over their losses; the local staff sit tight and hope & pray they survive and that this spiral of violence ceases.
International organizations do this all the time. When the going gets tough, the humanitarians (often, not all, but often) pull out all foreign staff and leave the ‘locals’ to sweat it out. It’s their country after all, so they can fix it. The foreign staff must be saved at all costs. But why go into a job at the UN, or one of the big aidies, if you’re not prepared to stick it out when the shit hits the fan? Often you’re the least likeliest of targets; you are afforded the best protection; with the best life & health insurace; and all means of pensions, salary benefits etc.
It stinks.
Yep.
Every picture tells a story…
This is the Weichert seismograph recording for 13:12 GMT on April 18, 1906. Location: San Francisco.
Here’s the result — as captured by George Lawrence with a huge panoramic camera flown aloft by kites. This is a blown-up section of Lawrence’s huge photograph (fuller version here.)
The 1906 earthquake was felt as far away as Oregon and central Nevada. Strong shaking was experienced as far north as Eureka and as far south as King City. The San Andreas Fault ruptured along a length of almost 300 miles, from San Juan Bautista to Shelter Cove (south of Eureka), with maximum surface offsets as much as 28 feet. Much of what wasn’t destroyed by the quake was wiped out by the fires which broke out. As ever, there was looting — of which the Mayor took an exceedingly dim view (as this exhibit from the city’s Virtual Museum makes clear):
A hundred years after the quake, a team of panoramic photographers led by Ron Klein built a replica of Lawrence’s mammoth camera, suspended it from a helicopter and took a panoramic photograph from exactly the same location as Lawrence’s original vantage point.
One member of the team, Scott Haefner, still does kite aerial photography. He has an interesting website.
Don’t expect UK privacy law reform
Just because the government has been shown to be disgracefully casual in its handling of confidential personal data doesn’t mean that the Brown administration is proposing to do anything radical about it. That’s not just an uninformed, cynical take on what’s happening. It’s also the view
of Rosemary Jay, Head of the Information Law team at Pinsent Masons (the law firm that publishes OUT-LAW.COM)
One million iPhones have gone missing
Register report:
About 27 per cent of the iPhones sold in 2007 are being operated on unauthorized wireless networks, according to research released today. That works out at about one million handsets.
The unlocked phones are used largely in regions where the must-have device isn’t officially sold, according to a report issued by Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. He says the appetite for the modified phones has given way to a cottage industry that sells hacks or phones that come out of the box unlocked. Most phones originated in the US where, thanks to current currency exchange rates, prices are comparatively low…
Unlocked phones dramatically reduce the profitability of iPhones for Apple becaue the company gets $300 to $400 from its network ‘partners’ for each iPhone sold. So the missing phones generate 50 per cent less revenue and up to 75 per cent less profit than normal. A million missing phones therefore means $400m in lost revenue. Ouch!