One of the best contemporary drummers; no contest.
Campout at The Turf
Our night up a tree by the estuary was utterly perfect.
#bigcanopycampout
The Big Canopy Campout
I’m going to be sleeping up the nearest of these lovely holm oaks tomorrow night.
Right here.
It’s part of the Big Canopy Campout in aid of critically threatened rainforest through the World Land Trust. You can donate here! Please!
The tree is an absolute cracker, with a nice spreading canopy and right on the waterfront of the River Exe where the canal meets and the wildfowl nest.
Huge thanks to Clive, the landlord of the Turf Hotel, in whose garden the tree lives.
Carlsberg glues beer cans together becoming first brewery to abandon plastic rings
The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things
I'm cautious about being my own echo-chamber, but it's hard to resist when an article perfectly encapsulates your own point of view.
This article by George Monbiot in today's Guardian is perfect, and important; and opens the door to further thought (though not much further) about the power to change things. Anything. Read it, please, but the main thrust of the argument is that individual change (so far as one can, in the wider context) is trivial within that context:
As he says, "The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability." Any change exists within its own ecosystem and generates effects throughout that system. The change that is required is not that supermarkets be granted the additional income stream of mandatory charging for plastic bags - bags that require tens to hundreds of uses to offset the impact of single-use plastic - but that the economic ecosystem that demands growth at the expense of all else be changed. How does that happen?
The automatic response to that question is government, policy and law. But single countries exist within their own political ecosystems. A tax change in one country causes the corporations to relocate to a more favourable setting. A global treaty in this respect is fanciful at best and risible at worst. Individual companies exist within the ecosystem of their industry marketplace, and one company obtaining its raw materials from anywhere other than the cheapest source will be beaten and eaten by its less ethically-conscious so more profitable and powerful competitors. Likewise sole traders.
This is a species-level issue, and while individual people or semi-mobilised groups clicking online petitions might chip away comfortingly at their own personal impacts, it will have no effect on the trajectory of the top-level zero-sum ecosystem of our planet.
Read Monbiot though. He's more positive than me.
London Underground Live
I don't know why this is so compelling, but this live map of where the trains are on the tube is great!
Goodbye Twitter
That's it, I'm off Twitter too. Just because.
What's the difference between an onion and a ukulele?
You don't cry when you chop up a ukulele.
Djazz
I am very much enjoying Rob Scallon's latest, ridiculous, Jazz/Djent fusion. Nice.
On Using an 'O'-ring Part II
After a useful piece of advice on the RTCUK group that said you should clip to an 'O'-ring on your bridge rather than directly onto the bridge, I started to do exactly that. The rationale was that a carabiner will wear in the same place and abrade the bridge quicker than a ring that will wear uniformly all round it. Fair enough.
Well yesterday I was putting up a high hammock and had set up a Y-rig with two doubled ropes off the bridge. One was on my ring, but the other was clipped straight to the bridge. Because each leg was attached to anchors quite far apart, the tie-in points migrated to the ends of the bridge - but the directly-clipped one went beyond the bridge-end fittings.
This is not a good thing. Lesson learned. I'm buying a second 'O'-ring.
Tree Chilling
Thanks Jos for the great picture! An oak that can't help but make you happy.
Old-Growth Forests vs. Second-Growth Plantations
My Funeral
At my funeral, this is the piece to which everybody leaves.
Mastodon - Open Source Decentralized Facebook/Twitter Alternative
"Mastodon is a decentralized social network that uses standard interoperability protocols and is completely [FOSS]. What this means is that anyone can run a Mastodon server, and the users of those servers can talk to each other. More than that, non-Mastodon servers are also part of this network if they conform to the same protocols. This means that Mastodon is more future-proof than Facebook or Twitter: Even if Mastodon-the-software falls out of fashion, the network can be simply continued by other interoperable software. You don't have to tear out your entire social graph to have all friends migrate to something new if that happens. Furthermore, Mastodon allows self-determination and control. When you run a server, it's yours. Your rules, your community, hosted on your hardware... you don't depend on anybody, definitely not on a [Silicon Valley headquarters]."
from BoingBoing
Find me at @collapsibletank@mastodon.social
Chomsky Gets to the Core of it
Nadal
Rafael Nadal looks like Tom Cruise with his face smushed against a window.
Think Twice
There are a number of great maths channels on YouTube, such as Numberphile and Mathologer - but the most beautiful and elegant is Think Twice, where smart and smooth animation visualises otherwise complex formulae or theorems. For example, here's the derivation and properties of the Dragon Curve.
(Mr Puzzle has a nice review of some laser-cut puzzles including a Dragon Curve one here.)
Ancient Beech in Ill-considered Leggings
A return to a tree in Danes' Wood I'd only seen out of leaf, and which was hard to find with the wood in its summerwear. Turns out it's a beech and I can't tell my arse from my arbour.
Surprisingly tricky, requiring quite a lot of repositioning in order to get a good enough line for several of the re-pitches, but each stage was quite short.
The tree branches considerably all the way up, so there are a lot of choices to make, but once at the top you can move from place to place relatively easily with a long lanyard to play with. Also - great for limbwalking.
Inevitably I'd climbed about one metre higher than my rope would allow for a return to ground, and because of being too lazy to climb up and move my anchor point, I ended up using my lanyard to unclip from my zig-zag and drop to earth with my foot ascender still attached. Getting cramp in your supporting leg while trying to detach from a foot-ascender is both hilarious and agonising in equal measure.
Summertime
Aw yiss...
Noah Lee - "Julie-O"
The whole of this is great, but Noah Lee's piece is really special.