If I get too snooty about how we electric vehicle drivers are living in the future, you can remind me of this. An advertisement from 1912.
Right – I’m off to glide noiselessly down the boulevard and through the park.
(Thanks to Plug In Sites).
I wonder if this came about as a result of courtship or combat? Rather a wonderful video, anyway.
Some late-night photographic fun. It seems amazing now that I thought some of my previous cars were good, despite a total absence of blue LEDs.
I needed some staples.
I went to my stationery cupboard.
I discover that, in the past, I used to get everything from the same bricks and mortar stationery store, so everything in there is labelled ‘Staples’.
Most confusing.
Jessamy Caulkin interviewed David Attenborough for the Telegraph Magazine.
At one point, he talks about scuba diving, which has long a favourite hobby of mine, but Attenborough, of course, explains its appeal much better than I can.
‘People say, “What was the most magical moment in your career as a naturalist?” and I always reply, “The first time I put on a mask and went below the surface and moved in three dimensions with just the flick of a fin, and suddenly saw all these amazing multi-coloured things living in communities right there.”‘
His initiation into scuba diving, he tells me, is indelibly printed on his mind. ‘You suddenly realise you can move in any direction. You’re not harnessed by gravity any more. You’re free. It’s bliss. An extraordinary experience, like going into space. There’s no equivalent anywhere else in the natural world of such splendour: all of these things moving through an architecture of coral.’ ‘You never know what you’re going to see when you turn the corner – it’s far more obviously exciting and visually thrilling than, say, the tropical rainforest, which is the nearest biological parallel. In the rainforest they’re all hiding, so you have to be quite a good naturalist to really see what splendours are there. But on the reef they’re all on display. It’s like the Christmas windows at Harrods.’
Some years ago, by a happy coincidence of flight timings, I spent my 40th birthday on the Barrier Reef. I didn’t have quite the same photographic capabilities with me as Sir David, alas!
Grantchester Meadows this morning
My friend Mike Flynn has been working for some years on very fast routing algorithms — routing as in maps, that is — and his primary demonstration of this is TimeToAnywhere – a system which can work out how long it takes to drive from one location to everywhere else on the map.
So you can say, for example, “There’s been an accident here. Which ambulances could reach it in less than 15 mins?” Or, “I work in Dry Drayton. Where could I live, and still have less than a half-hour commute?”
Each coloured boundary represents 10 minutes’ driving.
This is pretty, but those of you with a computing background may also realise that, using most of the standard algorithms, this is also a very time-consuming problem when you try do it across this number of points. Mike, however, measures the time taken by his system in microseconds.
He’s recently set up a demo server which, if it doesn’t get too swamped, is fun to play with to get a feel for the speed! You can find it at TimeToAnywhere.com, and if you want to know how to get the most out of it, watch Mike’s short video.
An early Land Rover in Singapore
Jaguar Land Rover have announced that production of the Defender, first produced in 1948, will be ceasing next year. This is not surprising and makes perfect sense. What Car? magazine are quoted in this Guardian article:
“Off-road, very little can touch it. On-road, there’s very little to recommend it.â€
Still, after nearly 60 years, it’s hard not to think of it as the sad demise of a classic British icon.
I have a soft spot for them, even though I’ve very seldom been in one in the last few decades, and I’ve never owned one, despite trying to think of a good excuse! At the time I was born, though, my parents were working in northern Kenya, and I apparently spent much of my time, both before and after my birth, riding around in one, so perhaps I have early imprinted memories. They certainly tend to feature in lots of family photographs.
Land Rover estimate that about two-thirds of all the Land Rover Defenders ever built are still in operation.
I seem to be doing a lot of this at present. This was sunset over Fenstanton as I was setting out for the Sunday afternoon dog-walk. These days I regularly find myself in a pitch-black wood looking for a pitch-black dog, but it’s usually a wood I know well. This, on the other hand, became a longish walk in a pitch-black wood that I’d never visited before.
Seemed quite nice, though. Must go back in daylight sometime and see what it actually looks like.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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