Here’s a lovely article on why WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE HORRIBLE DEATHS SOON

Herewith the second of the things I saw on The Telegraph website this morning (this being the first), albeit that this one appears to have been around for a short while. It’s all about antibiotic resistance.

The microbiologist in me has been telling you for a long time that we’re about to run out of useful antibiotics and that we’re all doomed buggered. Well, here’s a nice little project from The Telegraph which sums up whole miserable situation up quite nicely. It doesn’t condescendingly spoon-feed the information, but rather, it’s nicely aimed at engaging with an audience which it presumes is interested and intelligent. Yes. I mean you guys.

There are expert quotes:

“We risk going into a post-antibiotic era, and that could start any time in the next 10 or 20 years, when modern medicine becomes impossible. Routine surgical procedures – hip replacements, caesarean sections, modern cancer treatments – all are based on using antibiotics to prevent or treat infections. Without them, people will die.”

…some lovely soundbites:

Sir Alexander Fleming did warn us. During a speech in Stockholm in 1945 after accepting his Nobel Prize, Fleming sounded “one note of warning” over bacteria becoming resistant through inappropriate use of the drug. “The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops.” he said. The idea of his precious discovery being stockpiled by online pharmacies, used to fatten up our fish and livestock, dumped in rivers and sprayed over fields, would have baffled and horrified him in equal measure.

…and a superb interactive graph showing how long it took for our bacterial foes to become resistant to each and every antibiotic from Penicillin (13 years) to Macrolides (a couple of months).

It even mentions Dr Ajit Lalvani, with whom I used to play football every Thursday evening in Oxford (decent, if unenergetic midfield general; good at pointing a lot, in case you were wondering), so it must be good.

If you have a few minutes spare, and you want to read how utterly doomed we all are (because who doesn’t?) and how you can do pretty much nothing about it, go and give it a read.

Epecuén

I watched this last night and I shared it on Facebook. Then I watched it again this morning and I felt that it was more than deserving of its own post on the blog. You may remember Danny MacAskill from such posts as Imaginate and Way Back Home, but Red Bull have moved on since them and given us something with some superb videography and a fascinating backstory.

Oh, and there are bike stunts galore as well:

Epecuén was a town built on the tourism trade from Buenos Aires. Visitors from the capital were attracted by the therapeutic salty waters of Lago Epecuén and would travel the 600km by train.
It was a thriving town of 1,500 inhabitants, when disaster struck:

On 10 November 1985, a seiche caused by a rare weather pattern broke a nearby dam first, then the dike protecting the town. Rapidly made uninhabitable, the town saw the waters rise progressively, reaching up to 10 metres (33 ft) at its maximum. The village was never rebuilt.

At the time of the catastrophe, there were up to 280 businesses in Epecuén, including lodges, guesthouses, hotels, and businesses that 25,000 tourists visited between November and March, from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The town now has a sole resident, Pablo Novak, who returned to his home when the waters receded after covering the town for 25 years.

Yes, that’s Pablo cycling at the start of the video and yes, I had to look up seiche as well:

A seiche is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbours and seas. The key requirement for formation of a seiche is that the body of water be at least partially bounded, allowing the formation of the standing wave.

It’s complicated stuff, with mathematical formulae and hydrodynamic renderings everywhere, but suffice to say that you’ve probably seen an example of a seiche in that extra high peak of water caused when a wave bounces back off a sea wall and meets another coming in. I think this is what they mean, anyway, because:

Seiche is also a French term for a cuttlefish or Bobtail squid.

And it seems unlikely that the widespread damage we see in the video was caused by a cuttlefish.

ALTHOUGH YOU NEVER KNOW…

Anyway, I think it’s a wonderful video with some amazing shots and I quite like the music as well – something of a theme with cycle stunt videos. I’m very proud to announce that my 5 year old daughter has placed Sound of Guns’ Sometimes right at the top of her favourite music list (Sail by AWOLNation coming a close second). 

The second track, Long Highway by The Jezabels is especially nice – full of passion and energy. (For the sake of completeness, the very different and arguably more appropriate first is Night Wolves by Farewell J.R.)

But enough about waves and music. Perhaps I’m being over generous with my praise of the video. Could it just be that Epecuén, like Cape Town, is a difficult place to photograph or film badly? This amazing 2011 photoset from The Atlantic would seem to support that view.

Either way, this was 10 minutes, well spent.
Twice.

Jim’ll Paint It

Just a quick mention for this (in hindsight, not particularly well named) tumblr, which recently dived into my field of attention.

Got something in your brain that you’d really like to see with your eyes? Just ask and if I like the sound of it I’ll paint it for you for free using incredibly high tech and sophisticated MS Paint software.

Yep. James Murray takes requests from the general public and makes a picture of it on Paint. Which is about as far as my technical artistic skills go as well. But he’s much better than me.
Much, much better:

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Brian Blessed punching a polar bear in the face, as requested by Emily Griffin and Lyam Brabson.

Yes, I liked this one (and not just because of the violence against animals), but there are far more complicated requests on there too. Look out for this from Professor Green, for example:

Dear Jim,
Please paint me Steven Seagal, Jeremy Kyle and Slipknot on an 18-30s holiday in Weston-Super-Mare. Kyle is pissed at Slipknot for using all the semi-skimmed milk but Seagal steps in and offers his Almond Milk as an alternative. There happens to be a Lilliput Lane Pottery Collectors convention taking place on the beach as well.

Here it is. And it’s ever so realistic.

Cheeseburger

As brilliantly described by Andy Salzman on the Bugle Podcast this week, and as adequately transcribed for posterity by me.

…at Bertie Beefcake’s Big Burger Bonanza in Mogadishu, the world’s first triple Michelin-starred burger van, owned by the former bodybuilder Bertram Harpoon, whose burgers include his signature thrice-slapshotted puck of ruthlessly-executed, guilt-free cow, served between two sesame-besieged mattressèes of yeast-inflated and heat-metamorphed, wheat-influenced dough, besauced with a deconstructed and reconstructed ketchupine rouge de tomato squeegé, comfortingly blanketed with a rectangulant of time-ripened, coagulated, udder-originated lactotem of maternal bovoid.

Or to give it its nickname, the cheeseburger.
Also comes with a slice of gherkin.

If you want to hear him do it (and you really should) here’s the Soundcloud link – whisk through to 19:00 and you can enjoy it “in person”, as it were. Very, very funny.

EDIT: The review of celebrity chef Sclutan Malvane’s new Parisian restaurant Le Conscience de Mort [sic] which follows the cheeseburger passage isn’t half bad, either.

Overhead

Spotted and sharing: Klaus Leidorf’s Aerial Archaeology.

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You can click the link for the details, but here’s the gist:

Perched at the window of his Cessna 172, photographer Klaus Leidorf crisscrosses the skies above Germany while capturing images of farms, cities, industrial sites, and whatever else he discovers along his flight path, a process he refers to as “aerial archaeology.”

And I think the different perspective is pretty cool:

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Loads more from Klaus on his Flickr stream.