It’s unpopular Olympics opinion time!
If your competitive event is determined by judges, then I probably won’t be able to watch it comfortably.
There. I said it.
It isn’t that I dislike, to use the most obvious example, figure skating. I respect figure skating; I do not respect the way it is measured, and that is the crux of the problem for me. I personally require events to be determined by measured outcomes: score, distance, time. It’s the only fair way to judge competitors. It’s the only way to respect their great athleticism, and I think we can all agree that skaters are great athletes.
I don’t know how you can fairly judge an event like figure skating using precise measurements, but I do know that the judging system creates all sorts of unnecessary drama that is inherently unfair to the athletes.
So I will gladly watch curling, obsessively watch it if I am honest, but I will avoid figure skating almost entirely because I can’t get past the feeling that if the outcome is the correct one, it may only be so accidentally.
An electrical plant
“There is something wonderfully unsettling about a plant that feasts on animals. Perhaps it is the way it shatters all expectation. Carl Linnaeus, the great 18th-century Swedish naturalist who devised our system for ordering life, rebelled at the idea. For Venus flytraps to actually eat insects, he declared, would go ‘against the order of nature as willed by God.’ The plants only catch insects by accident, he reasoned, and once a hapless bug stopped struggling, the plant would surely open its leaves and let it go free.”
[via]
Cryosphere
“The Extreme Ice Survey is the most wide-ranging glacier study ever conducted using ground-based, real-time photography. EIS uses time-lapse photography, conventional photography, and video to document the rapid changes now occurring on the Earth’s glacial ice. The EIS team has installed 27 time-lapse cameras at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and the Rocky Mountains. EIS supplements this ongoing record with annual repeat photography in Iceland, the Alps, and Bolivia.”
Lots more here.
Spirit
“So disadvantaged, the Rover can now only scratch at the dirt, becoming the first Dickensian character on another planet.”
[via]
Snow over it.
Hardy-har-har. I’m so punny! Sigh.
Things are looking up. For one thing, it isn’t snowing. For another, a plow truck and front-end loader showed up yesterday evening and moved a whole hell of a lot of snow out of the way on my street. With some help from Ogre, my car is now completely dug out and moved over to the sunny side of the street.
Today is partly sunny and breezy but not very warm. Secretly, I’d like several days of 70-degree weather (or, you know, an eternity of 70-degree weather) but that would be a disaster with all this snow. The dirty mountains of snow and ice are ridiculous. And depressing. And everywhere. And in the damn way. And did I mention ridiculous?
I hope this weather cycle is over. I can’t imagine we’ll get another big snow storm even though as I type this it is only mid-February AND there is a pretty good chance of a little bit of snow on Monday. Ahem.
