IOM timelapse

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It seems like only yesterday we were enjoying Brook Wassall’s work, and there’s some more coming from him on here later this weekend. In the meantime, Brook has just released this timelapse video as a kind of goodbye to the Isle of Man.

Do click HD, Do go full screen.

[vimeo clip_id=”126379235″ width=”678″ height =”381″]

It’s a good choice of location, because Brook lives there and because, lest we forget, the Isle of Man has the largest concentration of dark skies sites in the British Isles.

Says Brook:

I started this project back in January 2014 to showcase the Isle of Man’s beautiful landscapes, as well as the lit up night sky. This is my first timelapse film and as a result everything has been a steep learning curve over the 16 months making it. I have spent countless hours researching and there were many reshoots and reprocessed clips before I got something I was really happy with, and somewhere around 5,000-10,000 photos must have been taken in the process.

Tomorrow I move to the UK to seek new adventures, therefore it meant a lot to me to finish this before I left, and so I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Thanks, Brook. I think I did. It’s pretty special.

Poorly timed giraffe danger warning

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I’m going to look at some wildlife this weekend. I hope, anyway. Wildlife is exactly that: wild, and sometimes it doesn’t want to be looked at. Mostly, when it doesn’t want to be looked at, wildlife hides away, but sometimes, wildlife fights back and even the most unlikely of wildlife can be deadly.

I’m not talking about lions, hippos, rhinos or elephants here – you look at them and you think DANGER! Teeths, tusks, horns, speed, weight, bulk. DANGER!
But tall isn’t scary. When you look at a giraffe, you just see bewilderingly puny looking legs and neck. Giraffes don’t look dangerous. They look like one of those string and wood toys that you push the base on and they collapse. You let giraffes play with your kids’ cuddly toys:

No. Giraffes aren’t dangerous. Or are they? Because here’s what was waiting for me on the pisspoor TimesLive site this morning:

Cyclist trampled to death by giraffe

The giraffe probably got irritated by some typically arrogant RLJ’ing behaviour.

A Sunday afternoon cycle ride for Braan Bosse of Nigel, on the Far East Rand, ended in his death when he was attacked by a giraffe at the Thaba Monata Game Lodge, in Bela Bela, Limpopo.
Lodge owner Marily Abatemarco believes Bosse, 46, was trampled to death.

Rather unusual, though, right? I thought so too.
But then, somewhere deep in my memory, I found this:

Seventy-year-old Schalk Hagen died without telling anyone exactly what happened to him. Now the prime suspect in his death is a giraffe.

I was quite ready to cower away from the lions and the elephants this weekend. Now it seems that I have to hide from the bloody giraffes as well. Seriously?
You don’t get this sort of danger in the UK – sure, you might come across a vaguely irritated badger or a mildly disgruntled fox, but they’re not going to smash your skull in, eat you or jump up and down all over your rapidly spatchcocked corpse just because they’re anxious to be seen to be living up to their “wildlife” moniker. I didn’t move here for this – if I’d wanted constant animal-related danger, I would have chosen Australia. (Spoiler: No, I wouldn’t – it’s full of Australians.)

Anyway, my new plan is to stay in the short scrub, where there is limited danger of unforeseen giraffe attack (aside, of course, from the extremely sneaky limbo giraffe) (but fortunately they’re pretty rare in the Western Cape).

Musical Mid-Life Crisis

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No. Not me. Not specifically, anyway. Given the way that the data below are interpreted, I’ve been having a MMLC for possibly forever already. Nothing will change if I ever make it as far as 42.

data

But this is very interesting for a number of different reasons. And before we go any further, the first of those reasons is that we can even look at this data. People have been buying and listening to popular music for decades, but while we’ve known what they’ve been buying (through the charts), we don’t actually know who’s  been buying it. Now, although these data are for a single music streaming service – just one of the many ways of accessing music these days – the ease and simplicity of correlating musical tastes with age, gender etc are still things that we never had before.

Secondly, I love the way that study author Ajay Kalia has devised a benchmark “Artist Popularity Rank” to measure stuff against. Any data analysis is utterly pointless unless you have a means of comparison. In this case, he used “artist hotttnesss” [sic] to see what was currently popular (Taylor Swift) and what was not (Natasha Bedingfield) which could then be cross-matched with who was listening to it.

To give you an idea of how popularity rank scales, as of January 2015:

  • Taylor Swift had a popularity rank of #1

  • Eminem had a popularity rank of about #50

  • Muse had a popularity rank of about #250

  • Alan Jackson had a popularity rank of about #500

  • Norah Jones had a popularity rank of about #1000

  • Natasha Bedingfield had a current-popularity rank of about #3000

Admission: I have no idea who Alan Jackson is. But, you know, #500. So, whatevs.

Next up, I’m suspicious of data that looks this good. I mean, I’m not really suspicious, (but I am a bit). How perfect are those curves? (careful now). Look at it through the thirties: gorgeous. And then, yes, that dip – a definite kink – at 42:

Around age 42, music taste briefly curves back to the popular charts — a musical midlife crisis and attempt to harken back to our youth, perhaps?

I’m not on Spotify, nor am I in the US, so I won’t be skewing their pretty data when I look at the last five songs I’ve shared on here – those being from 2015, 1987, 2013, 1949 (oops) and 2015 again. As I suggested earlier, I’m continually right in the middle of a MMLC.

Fortunately, looking at their spiralling graph, we’re all back onto the straight, narrow and distinctly uncool by the time we’re 45. Definitely something to look forward to.

There is that other point on there which I’m conveniently ignoring :

Sorry, fellow parents. We may be word-perfect on dozens of nursery rhymes and pre-school TV themes, but our pop savviness is in question. “Becoming a parent has an equivalent impact on your ‘music relevancy’ as ageing about four years,” writes Kalia.

That’s fine by me. I never claimed to be relevant anyway.

If you want more detail, here’s the full blog post on the study.

Freedom

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Ages (one year) before Mel Gibson did his thing in a kilt, although some time after Bill Wallace allegedly shouted the same stuff, came 1994 and South Africa’s first democratic elections, as today’s Google doodle reminded us.

image

Much has been achieved in the 21 years, although I think that you’d be absolutely correct if you were to say that a whole lot more could have been done with a bit better government and a great deal less corruption.

No more swimming problems

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It’s autumn. The pool heating has been switched off (the local equivalent of your UK central heating going on) and it’ll be a few months before it goes back on.
Still, at least there won’t be any issues like this for a while:
image

Obviously, whales can’t do that, so surely all aquatic mammals should be dead by now? Cause of death: “Drowned, after getting a stitch.”

(Or not.)