Covered this week; When realities change in the blink of an eye… The most incredible image of the Moon you’ll ever see… When an old teacher has a brush with notoriety that you weren’t aware of… An obsessive aristocrat, rediscovered paintings and an art-world feud… Pictures on the internet, real or fake? Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information… Nutmeg, genocide and the cost of Manhattan…
February 25, 2019
Interesting to me in life has always been those things that the normal person never thinks about, though in the blink of an eye, can become their reality. This is a story like that.
I lost my legs a little over a year ago. Back then I was a fresh transplant to Brooklyn, commuting every day to a coding bootcamp in the Financial District where I excelled in getting my ass handed to me. Each morning I sucked down as many free coffees as I could stomach before getting to work on whatever project we’d been assigned that day, trying desperately to juggle SQL tables, asynchronous functions, data flow charts that looked to me like little more than a bunch of squiggly lines. It didn’t help that half the time I was hungover from the free beers we had on tap in the kitchen, or that I’d discovered the Brooklyn bars that all my friends had been telling me about, either.
February 26, 2019
As a Moon lover… this photo by Andrew McCarthy is probably the best image of the Moon I’ve ever seen.
The 81 Megapixel image above is made up of nearly 50,000 images that have been stacked and processed in Photoshop. The A7 II was used to capture the earthshine and the stars, while the ZWO ASI 224MC was used to capture [sic] all of the detail in the moon itself. Andrew needed to capture almost 50,000 images so that he could average out blurring, and atmospheric turbulence.
February 27, 2019
So, today’s link is pretty interesting… Last night I’m out driving and pick up a fare. A couple and a kid. Turns out it’s a student from my alma mater (School of the Art Institute), his teacher and the teacher’s wife. Start to talk and I start mentioning the names of some of my favorite teachers… we get to the English Department and I mention Jim McManus who I had and loved for many classes. Long story short, turns out that a few years after I graduated McManus’ life intersected with the World Series of Poker in a truly astonishing way. I came home and immediately jumped to a Google search. Wow, this is cool. Ordered the book Positively Fifth Street and now, can’t wait to read it.
The number of preliminary events was increased from 16 to 25 in the year 2000 at the World Series of Poker. The main event grew a sizeable amount, as well, to 512 entrants. This made it tough to find enough seats for everyone, and play was delayed for two hours at the start of day 1. On the upside of all of the difficulties the large field created, the champion would walk away with $1.5 million, the largest prize ever. Many professional players took home bracelets in the preliminary events of 2000. Most notably, two women players who took home bracelets in preliminary events: Jerri Thomas ($1,500 seven-card stud) and Jennifer Harman($5,000 no-limit deuce-to-seven lowball). Jim McManus was at the tournament on assignment for Harper’s Magazine to cover the growing success of women on the felt that year, but in addition to the story he was writing, McManus had some other ideas about what to do with his cash advance. He jumped into a satellite tournament and won a seat in the main event.
February 28, 2019
Today’s link gets us into a story about one of those things going on in the world that you had no idea about. Like, did you know there was a Six family in Amsterdam where the original Patriarch was buddies with Rembrandt, to the point where the great Dutch master painted portraits of multiple members of his family? Well, it’s a long tale… but worth it if you’re interested in the machinations of the art world.
The painting dated from somewhere between 1633 and 1635. The giveaway was the particular type of lace collar, which was the height of fashion in that brief span and then quickly went out of style. What especially excited Six was not just that Christie’s had failed to see that the painting was most likely from the hand of the master, but also that the auction house had labeled it “circle of Rembrandt” — i.e., from a follower. “You see the problem, right?” he asked me. I was puzzling for the solution to the riddle when he blurted it out: “Rembrandt wasn’t famous yet in the early 1630s, so there was no circle. I knew right away Christie’s had screwed up.”
March 1, 2019
This is definitely something I’ve wondered from time to time while perusing Instagram… but there’s a lot of talented photographers out there… both in capturing the picture in the first place and then in the post-production.
A meteor shower was predicted one week later, and with some clever title, a photo story and the image itself, the image spread on the Internet extremely quickly. The result was tons of media attention, and a lot of people calling the shot fake for numerous reasons.
March 2, 2019
The longer all this bullshit evolves the more sickened I am at humanities capacity to always modulate to the lowest common denominator… thinking back to the promise of the internet in the early days, it’s sad how in so many ways this amazing tech is just distilled down to how much shit can we sell to people who don’t really need it… but the bigger issue here is how all of our personal data is being used against us, compromising our privacy and further, our ability to not have our identities stolen and used for ill-gotten purposes. Sad indeed.
Thanks to a new Vermont law requiring companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the Secretary of State, we’ve been able to assemble a list of 121 data brokers operating in the U.S. It’s a rare, rough glimpse into a bustling economy that operates largely in the shadows, and often with few rules.
March 3, 2019
Sad when a society suffering genocide just becomes throwaway Sunday reading after the passage of a few centuries… but so goes it…
But this simple version of the story gets quite a bit wrong, and the full account is astounding. Rather than simply sitting on a precious resource, the Bandanese were expert traders who cornered the nutmeg market. After the Europeans’ arrival, they repelled and vexed these intruders for over a century. Even after a brutal and openly genocidal campaign laid them low, they did not vanish from history, but slipped to the peripheries of Dutch control to run new trading operations and organize a bit of nutmeg smuggling. Their regional trade dominance outlasted the colonial nutmeg craze. At least two Bandanese villages survive to this day, carrying on old traditions on the nearby Kei Islands.
Taking the next couple weeks off, back on March 18th…
