You've probably already seen many samples of pictures from the Rough Stuff Fellowship Archive, though you might not have known it. For instance, the following image has probably been seen in many places without proper credit being given to the Rough Stuff Fellowship.
I've actually been a member of the Rough Stuff Fellowship for a year, long enough to purchase their guide to the alps, which is one of the best gravel riding books, except of course, it was written well before the current fashion for gravel riding exists. (One note about the guide: it's rated in typical "British understatement" fashion --- their "easy" rides are challenging, their "moderate" rides involves the certainty that you'll have to get off your bike and carry it, and their "strenuous" rides can involve multiple places where you'll have to carry the luggage and the bike separately! The intended audience is composed of tourists on multi-day trips quite possibly with camping gear)
The pictures in the book are outstanding. The trip to Finland, for instance, apparently started with the tandems being hoisted aboard ship via crane:
I enjoyed the pictures of the alps as they were in the 1950s and 60s, back when Grosse Scheidegg was unpaved. There are numerous pictures of fence climbing, though the famous picture of a cyclist climbing a ladder with bicycle strapped to his back is notably missing.
The winter pictures are great, though I wished that all the pictures came with the accompanying RSF guidebook description and map coordinates, but of course, back in those days of Kodachrome, photographers didn't have GPS devices.
If I have any complaints about this book, it's that the quality of paper and cover (I bought the hardcover version of this book) is lacking. It was quite clearly intended for distribution to club members, but obviously reached a much bigger audience. I wished that they had charged a fee to view the photos digitally, for instance, as the samples on a high quality monitor are a much better way to view them than on the paper in the printed book.
Nevertheless, as a reminder of the days when cyclists didn't need purpose built bikes to go anywhere they wished, the book is great and well worth the purchase. It's not going to be much of a coffee table book, but every enthusiastic gravel rider should have a copy. Recommended!
“I was born in Bosnia, the poorest country in Europe. The roads were dirt. Cars were very rare. Nobody in my family had anything to do with cars, but my parents tell me that before I could walk or talk, I was already then crazy about them. Nobody knows why. I was just, somehow, for some reason, born with it.”
I’m chatting with Mate Rimac (pronounced “mah-TAY re-MATS”) at the Geneva Motor Show. Nearby is the Rimac Automobili C_Two, a production-ready, all-electric hypercar boasting 1,887 hp, 1,696 lb-ft of torque, and performance to scare a Bugatti Chiron. Rimac claims the C_Two will hit 60 mph in 1.85 seconds, 100 mph in 4.3 seconds, and 186 mph in 11.8 seconds. The quarter mile takes just 9.1 seconds, en route to a top speed of 256 mph.
Just over the way is the gorgeous Pininfarina Battista, which is built around the C_Two’s Rimac-designed carbon-fiber monocoque with its potent Rimac-designed quad e-motor powertrain and 120-kW-hr battery pack. Across the aisle is Koenigsegg, for whom Rimac supplies ultra-high-performance hybrid technology. In the distance is Aston Martin, whose extraordinary Valkyrie hypercar also uses Rimac hybrid technology. And next door is Porsche, which has just acquired a 10 percent stake in Rimac Automobili.
Mate Rimac is just 31 years old. Yes, this hypercar creator and ultra-performance e-component specialist, whose company is headquartered near Zagreb, Croatia, is two years younger than Henry Ford was when Ford built his first car, the Quadricycle, in 1896.
Rimac bristles with the passion and intensity of the entrepreneur-engineers who shaped 20th century automaking, people like Henry Ford and W.O. Bentley, Ferdinand Piëch and Soichiro Honda. And that passion and intensity is overlaid with the preternatural tech savvy of the industry’s great 21st century disrupter, Elon Musk.
The Rimac name briefly pricked the pop culture zeitgeist in 2017 when former Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond threw the earlier Concept One electric hypercar (this one had only 1,224 hp) off the road while filming an episode of The Grand Tour. For the most part, though, it has flown under the radar, known only to a handful of engineers working at the cutting edge of high-performance electric vehicle design and development.
In high school in Croatia, Rimac studied computer, electronic, mechanical, and control engineering systems. He won regional and national championships for innovation and electronics design, and he says he held two patents by the time he was 17 years old. But … “I was always crazy about cars, so I wanted to race. As soon as I turned 18, I bought a 1984 3 Series BMW and started racing it.”
The BMW’s engine blew up after the second race. Rimac decided to replace it with an electric powertrain of his own design.
“I had this idea of building an electric car for a long time,” Rimac says, “mostly because Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia, so I was always reading a lot about him.” One of Tesla’s inventions was the alternating current electric motor, and Rimac wondered why nobody was using it to make a high-performance electric car. “That was the trigger for me,” he says. “I wanted to prove that electric cars can be exciting and fun—and to beat gas-powered cars on the racetrack.”
And with that, teenage Rimac was on the way to starting his own car company.
Rimac Automobile was founded in 2009. After more than 10 years of experimentation and evolution—to the point where almost everything the company sells is designed, engineered, and made in-house—the company’s business model is simple: Make money supplying other automakers with unique, ultra-high-performance electric vehicle and hybrid technologies.
Mate the Businessman jumps in: “We’ve had CEOs of companies with more revenue than Croatia’s GDP on our stand. If it wasn’t for the car, if we were just a battery and motor company, they would never have heard of us.”
But Mate the Enthusiast is never far away: “Of course I’m very passionate about helping other manufacturers build their cars. But if the shareholders decide it doesn’t make sense to produce our own cars, they we’ll have to find another CEO.”
When it comes to making your portfolio last a lifetime, you may be surprised at how long that might be. According to this Vanguard longevity tool, for a couple both age 40 today, there is a 50% chance that one will live to 88. That’s 48 years.
For a young person making a plan to reach financial independence at a very early age (under 50), I think using a 3% withdrawal rate is a reasonable rule of thumb. For someone retiring at a more traditional age (closer to 65), I think 4% is a reasonable rule of thumb.
In addition, I track the dividend yield of my portfolio. This is not necessarily my spending target, but more of a very safe benchmark number. Having lived through a crisis like 2008, I know that it can be hard to appreciate “very safe” things until the poo hits the fan. The analogy I fall back on is owning a rental property. If you are reliably getting rent checks that increase with inflation, you can sit back calmly and ignore what the house might sell for on the open market.
Specifically, I track the “TTM Yield” or “12 Mo. Yield” from Morningstar, which the sum of a fund’s total trailing 12-month interest and dividend payments divided by the last month’s ending share price (NAV) plus any capital gains distributed over the same period. I like this measure because it is based on historical distributions and not a forecast. Below is a very close approximation of my most recent portfolio update (66% stocks and 34% bonds).
Asset Class / Fund
% of Portfolio
Trailing 12-Month Yield (Taken 6/11/18)
Yield Contribution
US Total Stock
Vanguard Total Stock Market Fund (VTI, VTSAX)
US Real Estate
Vanguard REIT Index Fund (VNQ, VGSLX)
6%
3.48%
0.21%
Intermediate-Term High Quality Bonds
Vanguard Intermediate-Term Tax-Exempt Fund (VWIUX)
17%
2.86%
0.49%
Inflation-Linked Treasury Bonds
Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities Fund (VAIPX)
17%
2.64%
0.45%
Totals
100%
2.47%
Our overall plan is still based on a 3% withdrawal rate. This calculation tells us that 2.5% will come out as income “naturally”, and we would have to take the remaining 0.5% by selling shares. Living off a portfolio is an area of ongoing debate, so don’t let anyone convince you that there is a “right” answer. I’m not a financial firm convincing you to let me handle your money. I’m not here to pitch you an easily-achievable dream lifestyle. Even if you run a bunch of numbers looking back to 1920, that’s still trying to use 100 years of history to forecast 50 years into the future.
Your life is not a Monte Carlo simulation, and you need a plan to ride out the rough times. We are a real 40-year-old couple with three young kids, and this money has to last us a lifetime (without stomach ulcers). Michael Pollan says that you can sum up his eating advice as “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” You can sum up my thoughts on portfolio income as “Spend mostly dividends and interest. Don’t eat too much principal.”
These cartoons appeared on Twitter and Facebook throughout February 2018, and are preserved here, museum-like, for posterity and/or people who are too cool for social media.
Funny vs. Trying To Be Funny
It has since been pointed out to me that Emily Dickinson is, in fact, hilarious. I stand by this cartoon otherwise.
“Charter” Thoughts
I spent four years teaching at a charter school. That experience makes it hard to see the charter movement either as demon or panacea. More than a new type of school, I see them mostly as individual new schools – liable to make the same sorts of ambitious moves and avoidable mistakes as any new institution.
Multivariable Woes
Sometimes the pursuit of a punch line leads you to throw more weight into the blow than your victim actually deserves.
This is probably not one of those times.
What to Name Your Math-y Band
Folks on Twitter and Facebook chimed in with their own suggestions. My favorite comes from @SpinVector: a cover band called “Partial Derivative.” If that band name isn’t taken by the end of the week, then cover bands aren’t nearly as much fun as I thought.
Statistics Education
When it comes to statistics education, I find there’s a sad mismatch between possibility and practice. I indict myself here too – I’ve at times brought too much of a “pure math” mindset (let’s prove some theorems, kids!) to a discipline with its own characteristic style of thought.
The Angel of Death
The Angel of Death comes for us all. There is no escape.
Also, my boss replied to this cartoon: “THIS IS YOU. YOU DID THIS ALL THE TIME,” which is absolutely going on my business cards now.
A Romantic Proposal
As you can perhaps tell from the old-school whiteboard photo, this dates from the early days of this blog. I revived it here because (A) It’s Valentine-themed, and (B) Hannah Fry said she liked it, and there’s no better way to take the piss out of my British friends than pretending that I am best pals with Hannah Fry.
Hyperbole and Ellipsis
Not depicted: flat statements on Euclidean geometry (e.g., “Euclidean geometry is a form of geometry that draws its name from Euclid”).
“Linear Algebra”
I shall take this opportunity to plug 3Blue1Brown’s excellent series of videos giving geometric visualizations of Linear Algebra.
I could watch 3Blue1Brown all day.
And by “could,” I mean some combination of “have done” and “shall do again.”
The Fog of Confusion
Fog is really hard to draw, okay?
This cartoon is the equivalent of those SNL sketches where the character’s first line has to be, “Hello, it’s me! Robert Mueller!” because you couldn’t follow the joke if it was any less explicit.
Bayesian on Trial
Once people know me well enough, they don’t even wait for the punch-line; instead, they sigh with resignation as soon as the set-up begins.
The Super-Additive Dessert
I am on a perpetual search for super-addictive combinations of food. One of my favorites: to the traditional quesadilla combination of tortilla + melted cheddar, add tumeric + chopped celery. Unaccountably good.
Epistemology is Hard
I have conflicted feelings about the rationalist philosophers (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, kind of Hobbes). On the one hand, I love the aesthetic of the arguments: the clear, axiomatic development modeled on mathematics.
On the other hand, this seems like a very stupid way to try to understand the world. The universe is very confusing and is never what you would have guessed. “Certain knowledge” is so elusive it’s basically an oxymoron.
I find that I’m a rationalist by inclination, but my rationalism leads to the conclusion that empiricism is the only sensible way to go.
The Trivial Case
Look forward to my graphic novel “The Life and Times of the Trivial Case,” which will be 400 pages of that green elf with different text on each page, like Dinosaur Comics.
Club Obvi
“Obviousness” is in the eye of the beholder, right?
WRONG. If it’s in the eye of the beholder, then it’s not sufficiently obvious!
The Ultimate Visionary, a math(s) teacher named Kin, scored 33.1 (of a possible 47.1) across all categories. Kin mostly stuck with the favorites, with one masterstroke exception: picking “Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405,” which was the night’s biggest underdog winner.
The Lazy Visionary scored 15.9 (of a possible 15.9) on the high-profile categories.
The Obscure Visionary, the self-effacing Colin Thomas, scored 22.3 (of a possible 31.2) on the technical categories. He writes: “I must confess that I chose several at random (having looked at, and not entirely understood, the odds page.)” But he also had this key insight: “‘good’ films tend to do well in these categories even if they don’t deserve to.”
My own ballot lost narrowly to my Oscar arch-nemesis Ryan’s, 27.4 to 27.0. Sigh.
The Mate 10 Pro is Huawei's new flagship smartphone and the latest in its line of Leica-camera equipped devices. The dual-cam setup combines a 12MP RGB sensor with a 20MP monochrome chip. Like on previous high-end Huaweis, the latter allows for a native black-and-white mode, and Huawei claims that the combination of captured image data from both sensors leads to improved dynamic range and lower noise levels.
Both of the dual-cam lenses feature a fast F1.6 aperture, and optical image stabilization is on board as well. The high-resolution setup allows for what Huawei calls a 2x lossless zoom, and PDAF combined with laser and depth sensors enables fast and precise autofocus. The Mate 10 Pro is capable of recording 4K video at 30 fps and the front camera captures images at an 8MP resolution.
Huawei isn't relying on hardware alone though—AI and neural networking are applied to improve the quality of the fake bokeh mode, and object recognition for automatic scene selection also relies on some AI magic. Finally, motion detection is being used to reduce motion blur in low light conditions.
Find out how Huawei hardware and software play together and the Mate 10 Pro shapes up in our testing on the following pages.
Key Photographic / Video Specifications
Leica-branded dual-camera
Dual 12MP RGB / 20MP Monochrome
F1.6 aperture
OIS
2x lossless zoom
4-in-1 AF with depth, contrast, PDAF and laser
dual-LED flash
4K video
8MP front camera
Other Specifications
6" 2160 x 1080 OLED HDR display, 18:9 aspect ratio
An intriguing set of photographer-specific jackets just popped up on Kickstarter. Dubbed Pixentu, these jackets have been designed to meet the gadget-toting needs of photographers, providing an extended hoodie for the rain and a large number of pockets intended for items a photographer is likely to carry around, including memory cards, film, lenses, cards, a camera, and even a travel tripod—bye bye backpack.
Pixentu exists in three different iterations: as an outdoor jacket, a travel blazer, and a street photography jacket.
While the three varieties mostly offer the same pockets, there are some small differences. The travel blazer, for example, is a 2-in-1 combination unit that can be used as a jacket or as a vest, but lacks compartments for a tablet, travel tripod, and camera. The outdoor jacket, in comparison, doesn't transform into a vest and is a lighter option than the street photography jacket, which is better for cold temperatures.
Neither the blazer nor the outdoor jacket have the extended hoodie featured on the street photography jacket; with that hoodie, photographers can shield their camera from rain while taking a shot. Pixentu says its jackets are made from unspecified durable Japanese material, while the lens pockets are water-resistant and feature a soft lining.
The Pixentu jackets are currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, where they've very nearly reached their goal. The super early bird units are offered for pledges starting at £99 / $132, and shipping to backers is estimated to start in February of 2018.
Adobe has just launched Lightroom 2015.12, adding support for new lenses and cameras, including the Canon EOS 6D Mark II, Nikon D7500, and Leica TL2. The update also fixes several bugs, including a problem with missing iPhone video GPS data, with the wrong photo being shown in the navigator preview pane, 'erratic deletion of files,' trouble exporting to Flickr, and more.
As far as new support goes, users now have access to 'new color matching camera profiles,' too.
Adobe advises that some Lightroom customers could still experience crashing problems if they're using older AMD GPU drivers, and that they should update to Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.1 to fix the problem.
The previous version of Lightroom CC (2015.10) was released in April. The company explains that it decided to skip releasing Camera Raw 9.11 'due to the unfortunate events that occurred on that day,' instead jumping straight to version 9.12. As a result, Adobe went straight from Lightroom 2015.10 to 2015.12 in order to keep the two products' names in sync.
Lightroom CC 2015.12 adds support for the following cameras:
Canon EOS 6D Mark II
Canon EOS 200D(EOS Kiss X9, EOS Rebel SL2)
Leica TL2
Nikon D7500
Olympus Tough TG-5
The full list of new camera lens profile support can be found on Adobe's blog.
Amazon today began targeting low-income shoppers with price cuts to its Prime membership program. Apple yesterday jumped into the voice-controlled home speaker business to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home. Google’s Waymo self-driving vehicles logged 25,000 miles hands-free last week, on top of 3 million miles already driven, mainly in cities, on the way to “fully self-driving cars” in the not-all-that-distant future.
So what is GE, the great American conglomerate that Jack Welch famously built through Six Sigma training, portfolio slight-of-hand and ruthless personnel management doing these days?
Well we’re not sure because mostly what we hear from GE is that GE is, or was, going to make $2 a share next year, and whether they do or not is all anybody seems to care about. Not whether GE is involved in self-driving cars or self-regulating homes or any other enormous market opportunities those of us lucky to be alive right now are seeing develop right before our eyes.
Just this: will they or will they not earn $2 a share?
Now, that two bucks earnings target was disclosed last spring at GE’s 2016 shareholder meeting, in CEO Jeff Immelt’s loopy, shorthanded fashion, as follows:
From a financial standpoint, people that are investing in GE right now can look out over the next couple of years and see a very clear walk to hit in excess of $2 a share by 2020. This has to do with using the GE Capital proceeds to buy back stock. We use our float. The Alstom earnings, which are very clear and measurable and we're making good progress on those, and just sustaining our industrial growth the way we have over the last four or five years. You do those things, you get north of $2 a share by 2020—or by 2018. (Source: Thomson StreetEvents)
After a less-than-upbeat analyst day in December and an earnings report in April that was long on earnings and short on cash flow, however, Immelt took the opportunity to walk back that two-buck number in May as being “the high end of the range,” cautioning that “resource markets” must remain “stable” to hit the two bucks.
By “resource markets,” of course, he means “oil prices,” upon which a decent portion of GE’s earnings now depend thanks to the M&A push the company made into oil and gas-dependent businesses prior to oil’s 2014 collapse—in particular the $3.3 billion purchase of production equipment supplier Lufkin that top-ticked the price of the commodity on which its business hinges the way John Paulson’s housing short top-ticked the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Given that GE’s stock sits on its 52-week-lows while the S&P 500 keeps breaking to new all-time highs, it’s clear the buy-side doesn’t believe the two-buck number, no matter how often Immelt defends it, and the sell-side seems nervous too, particularly after the first quarter’s cash flow miss. As the Merrill Lynch analyst dryly noted, GE’s Q1 cash flow disappointment “seems to be related mostly to the fact that GE’s latest contracts are coming from regions that tend to pay their bills later.”
Not a good sign for the two bucks target.
After all, GE is a conglomerate, and not in the JNJ “steady-Eddie” sense of selling basic products for the health and well-being of consumers.
No, GE is a conglomerate that sells highly engineered, high priced products and services to airlines, oil companies, power generators, developed governments, undeveloped governments and about-to-be-toppled governments, among other unpredictable buying classes.
So how predictable can GE’s earnings possibly be?
“Plenty predicable,” a reader with grey hair might respond. “Jack Welch made GE a beat-the-earnings-by-a-penny machine back when.”
And “Neutron Jack,” as he was known for the way he emptied buildings in his hunt for efficiencies, certainly did make GE that kind of machine, even humble-bragging about it in the 1999 annual report:
But “making the numbers at GE” was no doubt a whole lot easier when GE Capital was a readily available hat out of which rabbits could be pulled whenever the quarter had to be beaten by the proverbial penny.
And that trick ended in 2008 when the particularly addictive brand of Financial Fentanyl on which GE Capital had gotten hooked—CDs—froze up, leading the Feds to step in and guarantee $139 billion in GE Capital debt in order to keep The House that Jack Built from falling down like, well, like a house of cards.
It always seemed to your editor, even back when GE was beating every quarter by a penny and almost every other company in the S&P 500 wanted some of that “Six Sigma” magic (the way almost every other company in the S&P 500 today wants some of that “Zero-Based-Budgeting” magic from Warren Buffett’s ruthless buddies at 3G), that Jack had turned GE from a company that made stuff(refrigerators, lightbulbs, jet engines, turbines etc.) into a company that made the numbers.
And when all you make is “the number,” nobody knows or cares what’s behind that number. It could be asset sales and tax gimmicks and channel-stuffing and worse, or it could be great products—and GE makes some great products, still, today—but you wouldn’t know it because it’s all about “the number.”
In this case, two bucks.
Now, as most people who live on the West Coast know, including the folks working on autonomous vehicles and magical voice-activated home controllers and the development of a logistics infrastructure that allows anyone with an internet connection, a credit card and an address to order anything, anytime, Trader Joe’s sells a wine call “Two Buck Chuck.”
“Two Buck Chuck” took the market by storm when it came out back when, and it is still called “Two Buck Chuck” despite the fact that it is today priced at $2.99 a bottle and the brand name is actually “Charles Shaw,” not “Chuck.”
And all we can think of is how silly it is that the public perception of one of the world’s largest and most valuable companies comes down to an artificially constructed net per-share earnings number that happens to round to two bucks.
Call it the “two-buck shuck and jive.”
We’ll take the under.
* This virtual column was posted Tuesday June 6, 2017. On Monday, June 12, GE unexpectedly announced that one Jeff Immelt is leaving the CEO position August 1 and retiring as Chairman December 31, 2017. One John Flannery is being appointed to take his place in both roles. The two-buck shuck and jive is, we'd bet, history.
Jeff Matthews
Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available at Amazon.com
The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: the content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.
We love crowdfunding, but we don’t review things from active crowdfunding campaigns. That’s because our reviews aim to find the best stuff for most people. Though “best for most” changes meaning depending on context, everything we consider has at least one thing in common: It must actually exist, and you must be able to buy it right now.
Make tech shopping simpler
Sign up for our newsletter and let our experts help you find the things you need, even faster.
We may be willing to risk our own money funding ideas we believe in (my editors on this article and I have backed more than 50 projects between the three of us), but we wouldn’t bet our readers’ trust on them. Even if we do get offered a preproduction unit, there’s no guarantee it’ll be the same thing as the final production unit customers receive. Reputable publications can review reliable-looking products that then totally fail to appear, or can be delayed by months, if not years. Though we have reviewed and recommended a number of things that started as crowdfunding campaigns (Peak camera bags, the Anova sous vide, and the Pebble smartwatch, for starters), we tested those only once they were finished and ready to ship to people.
Crowdfunding isn’t shopping
When you back a crowdfunding project, you are taking a project’s organizers at their word that they will use your money to develop, manufacture, and ship an item by a certain date (that will almost certainly be pushed back several times during the process). Kickstarter clearly lays this out on its Trust & Safety page, specifically saying, “Kickstarter is not a store,” “Creators are responsible for their projects,” and “Some projects won’t go as planned.” This means if something goes wrong, that’s for you and the creators to sort out, not Kickstarter. So when you back something, you need a reason beyond wanting the final product.
If something goes wrong, that’s for you and the creators to sort out, not Kickstarter.
Helping fund a successful project can be very rewarding. But if you’re considering backing a project that promises a complex product, you should make sure you know what you’re getting into first. Even if you truly believe in a product and the ability of the team behind it to bring it to fruition, you should still be realistic about their chances of success.
Over the years, we’ve identified common red flags among projects that underdeliver or entirely fail to deliver. Think of the following as the “7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Kickstarters.”
A company may have successfully manufactured and delivered a product previously—but even that doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing.
The Coolest Cooler (a combination cooler, speaker, USB battery, and blender) was one of the most-funded Kickstarters ever, which likely had a lot to do with its impressive teaser video featuring a fully functioning prototype. But when it came to actually producing the thing, there were huge delays due to strikes at its manufacturing plant. To make matters worse for project backers, they started selling the limited units they managed to produce on Amazon before backers received theirs. Adding insult to injury, the creators then asked for more money from backers for expedited shipping. By the time backers actually got their preorders, the reviews were in: The cooler was a thinly spread jack of all trades that didn’t do anything well.
Looks can and will deceive
Making a fully functioning prototype that looks and performs like a finished product is difficult. If a team can pull that off before asking for funding, they probably know what they’re doing when it comes to designing and building things. But manufacturing at scale with a limited budget is not the same as making a few prototypes. Zano successfully managed to make a handful of drones and raised millions of dollars to produce them, but didn’t ship to most backers. And though the Kreyos smartwatch did ship to all backers, it was missing a number of promised features.
It’s literally too good to be true
Does it disobey the fundamental laws of physics? If it seems too good to be true, it probably is—and “but what if it isn’t” isn’t a good enough reason. The Skarp promised a great shave—using laser beams. Triton Gills promised the ability to breathe underwater like a fish. If these ideas were actually doable, they would have been able to secure funding from traditional avenues to make them.
Lofty promises = broken promises
Is it massively overfunded? If so, expect delays. Delivering 10,000 units is very different from delivering 100,000. Conversely, some projects now preempt this by putting hard limits on how many units they’re willing to presell. This is a sign of good planning.
Ideas ≠ products
Is there a total lack of a functioning prototype? The Pseudo Film Cannister ran a campaign with some bare 3D renders and cardboard cutouts—despite pitching an incredibly complex and expensive concept that many have tried and failed at. Concepts are easy, making it work is hard.
It already exists
Is this just rebranded off-the-shelf hardware? The Anonabox was a cheap router that can be purchased wholesale with freely available software loaded on it. If you’re suspicious, look for news coverage of the project, especially from publications that don’t appear to be fawning over it. You can also try Google image searching project pictures in case they’re directly copied from their supplier. Diving into the comments will often help as well. Kickstarter has public comments, and enthusiast sub-reddits, forums, and sites will often be the first to flag these issues.
It doesn’t exist, for a good reason
This is a little more subjective because we don’t all share the same opinions about what’s missing from our world. But we have noticed some trends that tend to disappoint.
Is it another smartwatch? Though there have been notable successes (like the Pebble) both IndieGoGo and Kickstarter are built on a cemetery of smartwatches that have failed to ship entirely or functioned abysmally. Even major electronics companies have trouble getting it right, let alone crowdfunded startups like the aforementioned Kreyos Meteor, as well as the Buddy, Neptune Pine, Leikr, and Agent.
A project that doesn’t trigger any of the red flags we talked about can still end up failing some way or another—Kickstarter just isn’t a great way to get products if you care about getting your money’s worth. There are exceptions, but there is always a risk.
Crowdfunding is best suited to patronizing artists whose work you enjoy, respect, and want to see more of. Back writers, comic book artists, dancers, photographers and people who are printing art, crafting stuffed animals, and making video games. Even if there are delays or issues, you’re supporting a creator whose work means something to you. Or back whatever you want—but we’re not going to write about it until it ships.
As sports fans around the world get ready for the official opening of the 2016 Rio Olympics, Canon's Professional Services team are preparing too.
We spoke to Elizabeth Pratt, Director of Professional Products Marketing at Canon Professional Services about how Canon is preparing for the biggest event in the sporting calendar.
Behind the scenes with Canon at the Rio Olympics
The first shift of CPS staff, starting at 7:30AM, pauses to pose for a group photo.
What exactly are you doing in Rio right now?
I’m down here with Canon Professional Services, and there are also some folks here from our broadcast team. CPS provides event support for all kinds of things, any time a lot of media gathers — events like the Super Bowl, the Indy 500, the Kentucky Derby, the political conventions that we recently attended. These are very important assignments for photographers and we want to be on-site to ensure everything goes smoothly.
Elizabeth Pratt, Director of Professional Products Marketing at Canon Professional Services.
Elizabeth is currently in Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympics
We offer cleaning and checks on equipment to make sure that everything is working at factory spec. Also in situations like this, for someone shooting with an older model camera we like to give them the opportunity to shoot with the latest equipment.
And then of course photographers also have a need for remote cameras, but not everybody takes six cameras to an event so they can use four of them as remotes. So we loan additional cameras to help them out.
Behind the scenes with Canon at the Rio Olympics
With over 70 Canon staff supporting photographers and broadcasters, coordinating schedules is no easy task.
How long does it take to plan your presence at an event as big as the Olympics?
We started planning at least a year ago, just trying to determine how much equipment we were going to need to be able to support all of our customers, how we were going to get it all into and out of the country, through customs… It’s a collaboration between the home country, the CPS folks who are based in Rio, Canon USA is supporting with a lot of equipment, Canon Europe is contributing to the equipment as well, and we’re all sending staff. So the planning really starts at least a year in advance.
Behind the scenes with Canon at the Rio Olympics
Racks of lenses and professional Canon DSLRs, ready to be distributed to photographers at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Can you give us an idea of exactly how much equipment you’re sending?
Almost 1600 lenses and about 900 DSLR bodies. That’s EOS 7D II, EOS-1D X II and EOS 5DS cameras. We also have 78 staff. We have what we call our Professional Market Specialists, whose job is to support professional photographers and filmmakers by answering questions and giving people advice and support. In addition to these people we have logistics folks on site, and then actual technicians who are working on the cameras.
At most events we just do cleaning and checks, but here in Rio we have virtually a complete repair center set up where we’re doing much more extensive repairs than we normally do on-site.
How many languages do you have represented among your staff over there?
Twelve languages including English.
Behind the scenes with Canon at the Rio Olympics
The EOS-1D X II is a capable video camera, as well as being designed to capture fast sequences of still images.
Are you supporting any photographers in Rio who are using the EOS-1D X II for video, or for broadcast?
There are plenty of people shooting video with the EOS-1D X II – not necessarily for broadcast, but certainly several independent agencies and teams. Under the terms of the IOC, photographers are not permitted to shoot video at the Olympics but our big clients like Getty and AP are incorporating video more and more. We talk about video a lot to photographers and they’re being asked to shoot more video and to learn about video.
We’re starting to see newspapers and publications even merge departments and cross-train people [for stills and video].
Behind the scenes with Canon at the Rio Olympics
Canon has worked with Getty, which is creating a submersible remote camera setup using the EOS-1D X II and the 11-24mm wide-angle zoom, specifically to shoot underwater events at the Olympics.
How closely do you work with agency clients ahead of big events like this?
We’ve worked very closely with the big agencies in preparation for the Olympics. We have some robotic cameras down here and we worked with the agencies to develop them for their needs. These robotic solutions are amazing. You can shoot remotely on them from the press center with multiple remote cameras attached to one computer, and switch back and forth. It allows perspectives on the Olympics that we’ve never seen before.
We've been helping to support an underwater system, which was developed by Getty. It’s an EOS-1D X Mark II and 11-24mm lens. The camera is in an underwater housing, and it’s networked so that it can be controlled remotely. The flexibility of control is exceptional, and the 11-24mm has really nice distortion correction — you don’t have the kind of distortion at the frame edges that you might get with other wide-angle lenses.
Behind the scenes with Canon at the Rio Olympics
A Canon technician uses an illuminated loupe to check for dust on the sensor of an EOS-1D X II.
How many of this sort of major events have you personally been involved in?
I started off as a professional market specialist with Canon and my first Olympics was Athens in 2004.
We’re much more collaborative now in the way that we work with clients. We reach out to them well in advance and talk to them about their workflow and how their needs are changing. Then we customize solutions to meet those needs.
When I started with Canon years ago, we just made cameras and said ‘here you go’. Our whole mindset has really changed, to try and figure out how to change and adapt as the industry changes.
How will the next Olympics in 2020 be different?
I think we’re at a very interesting place now with technology, with the integration of 4K into DSLRs and the ability to grab incredibly high resolution, beautiful frames from that video. I think there’s potential to change the way that photographers work. I don’t want to try to predict the future but I think that’s probably going to be one of the biggest factors that influences what’s going to change and what new equipment will bring in the next four years.
Follow up from before... jume asked, "What are 5 books you think everyone should read?" and in looking at past entries I found a special subset of books that I think people definitely DO NOT have to read, and I thought well that'd make for a fun entry too!
Not Your Mother's Life: Changing the Rules of Work, Love, and Family Hated for: Fear-mongering. Telling all college students to be afraid, be very afraid, of what happens when you MUST have a baby and your precious career comes crashing down on you because your five-year plan was a little off.
Swamplandia Hated for: Totally unnecesary rape scene and huge plot disappointment. Everybody's life sucks.
The Fountainhead Hated for: Portraying an self-absorbed asshole as just brilliant and misunderstood. And if you're not the brilliant savior, you're in the way. Go crawl in a hole and die.
The Catcher in the Rye Hated for: Whiny brat thinks his life is rough and treats women like they all owe him something.
Mavs Beat Celtics in OT. From the Boston Globe: “Celtics forward Jae Crowder stepped to the foul line with 6.7 seconds left in regulation Monday and calmly drained three free throws, improbably sending this game against the Mavericks to overtime. Crowder said he’d had dreams about such a situation. It was his first game here as an opponent, his first since being traded away from a Mavericks team that had used him as little more than a bit player for 2½ seasons. But then the power of Crowder’s Predator-style dreadlocks ponytail failed him in OT, and the Mavs pulled it out 118-113.” I made up one of those sentences.
School Kids in Richardson Possibly Exposed to Measles. From the Morning News: “Collin County Health Care Services sent a letter to parents at Schell Elementary School in Richardson last week, notifying them that the agency was reviewing who might have been exposed. … Jawaid Asghar, the agency’s chief epidemiologist, told the Dallas Morning News on Monday that the child had not been vaccinated. Asghar added, ‘You people in Collin County who rely on prayer instead of vaccines confuse me.’” I’m sorry. I made up one of those sentences, too.
Ethan Couch’s Probation Hearing Is Today. From Fox Channel 4: “Affluenza teen Ethan Couch remains in a holding facility in Mexico fighting deportation. Whether part of a strategy or not, he will miss a court hearing during which the Tarrant County district attorney will ask to have his case moved from the juvenile system to the adult courts. The district attorney will also ask that Couch be forced to shave that ridiculous goatee.” Now the gag has worn thin. I know. The laws of comedy suggest that it would get funny again if I posted four more items. But right now I have to go walk my dog. Have a good Tuesday.
But somehow, we made it through all of that discussion without ever asking the most important question of all about humans—
How big a building would you need to fit them all in it?
It’s a question that’s tantalized almost no one through the ages, and today we’re gonna tackle it hard.
But before we ask all 7.3 billion humans to stop what they’re doing so I can arrange and bunch them together at my whim, let’s discuss the number 7.3 billion.
The first thing to note is that when I did a post on population density in August of 2013, the number I kept referring to was 7.1 billion. The world population has grown by 194,000,000, or almost 3%, since then.
Second, 7.3 billion people is a lot of people. If each living human were represented by a dry grain of rice, the rice would fill a cube-shaped box with a side of 6.1 meters,1 or about 20 feet—around the size of a two-story house.
That’s a lot of rice grains.
And how about 7.3 billion grains of sand? Well according to this delightful chart, “sand” can mean a lot of things. 7.3 billion “very coarse” grains (about 2mm in diameter) would fill a large cubic room with a height of 4m (13ft). 7.3 billion medium-size grains (.25mm in diameter) would fill a medium, 46cm high (1.5ft) cardboard box. And 7.3 billion of the finest, .0625mm sand grains (any smaller and it wouldn’t be sand anymore—it would be silt) would take up about 1,700 cubic centimeters of space, almost but not quite filling a 2-liter soda bottle.
Also, walking 7.3 billion steps would take you around the Earth…150 times. (At two steps per second, that would take you 115 years.) (I’m doing that thing where I’m going on divergent math spirals during the post and then just putting what I figured out into the actual post. I’ll try to stay on topic here but it won’t be easy. Let’s keep going.)
7.3 billion humans in one-dimensional configurations
The first activity today will be putting all humans in a single file line. We’ll start near Quito, Ecuador, right on the equator, and the line will follow the equator. We’ll begin with Carlos. Stand here, Carlos.
Second in line will be Daniela. Third is you, Andrea.1 Since we’re trying to be efficient, I want everyone to stand as close as possible to the people in front of you and behind you without actually touching. Some people will require more or less space than others because people are different sizes, but let’s assume each person we add to the line will make the line one foot (about 30cm) longer on average.2
So we do this for a while and the line gets longer and longer. We build bridges over oceans and tunnels through mountains to make a clean line along the equator. Eventually, the line goes around the whole Earth gets back to Carlos. But we’ve only gotten through 131 million people—less than 2% of humans—so we’ll need to wind around the Earth again. And again. Finally, halfway through the 56th loop, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, we get to the final human, and we’re done.
Okay that kind of annoyed me because it ended up in the shape of spring, not a line. Let’s try another way.
Carlos, stand on the X again. We’re gonna have Daniela stand on your shoulders, and then Andrea’s gonna stand on hers, and we’ll just keep going up from there.
The average human is 165cm (5’5″) tall, but about a foot of that is from the shoulders to the top of the head, so when we add someone onto the top person’s shoulders, the height of the tower rises by an average of about 134cm (4’5″).
We stack and stack and eventually, we reach the moon. Unfortunately, we’ve only used 286 million people at this point and have 96% of humans still left to go. By the time we finally finish, the tower is 9.8 million km (6.1m miles) high, and we’re around 1/5th of the way to Mars, 1/4th of the way to Venus, and 1/15th of the way to the sun.2
How about if we all held hands and formed a huge circle? Let’s say that we’ll stand side-by-side, holding hands, which is enough distance apart to take up about three feet (91cm) of the circle each.
Continuing like this, our final circle has a circumference of 6.6 million km (4.1m miles) and a diameter of 2.1 million km (1.3m miles).
While we’re all out there holding hands and dying instantly from being in space without suits, the Earth will look to us around the same size as the moon usually looks in our night sky.
Okay one dimensional shapes are pretty inconvenient for everyone—let’s reel things in and try this in two dimensions:
7.3 billion humans in two-dimensional configurations
The addition of a second dimension to our human shapes makes the species seem a lot smaller.
When arranging humans in two dimensions, the first question we need to ask is, “How much ground area does each human need when we’re bunching them all together as closely as we can without killing everyone?” The answer, for this post, is .1 square meters, giving us a rate of 10 people per square meter.
How Many People Can Fit in a Square Meter Comfortably-ish?
The quest for this answer brought me to the most obscure corners of the internet, where I came across two key groups of bored people. The first one shows nine Canadian journalists choosing to spend time positioning themselves together into one square meter. Doing so gives each of them an average of one 33cm x 33cm (13″ x 13″) square to stand in. You can see in the video that while it’s definitely tight, no one is forced to molest anyone else and everyone can breathe.
But that’s using all adults. The world’s median age is 29, and the youngest billion humans tend to be quite little. The second case brings us across the world to a random New Zealand elementary school, where a teacher has decided to get cute and cram as many kids as she can into a square meter. She maxes out at a shocking 22 kids.
Putting these two performances together, it seems reasonable to say that 10 humans per square meter is a safe estimate for what we can use as our human-bunching metric. Nine adults in the square managed fine and the addition of children into the mix should be able to easily increase that total by one to 10 (yes, some adults are much larger than average, but others are tiny—the world’s average adult is a not-that-large 62kg (137lb) person).
At 10 people per square meter, we can fit 1,000 people in a 10m x 10m square. A basketball court is 28m x 15m, which means we can fit 4,200 people on one, all in bounds.
We can fit 54,000 people on an American football field, which is large enough to hold the entire population of Liechtenstein or Monaco, and if we expand our field to the size of a soccer field—sorry, a football pitch—we can hold over 71,000 people, more than enough space to contain the population of Greenland.
Tiananmen Square is pretty huge—880m x 500m or just under half a square kilometer.
If it were empty, it could hold 4.4 million people, or the entire population of Croatia, Oman, Lebanon, Panama, Moldova, Uruguay, Kuwait, Mongolia, or Lithuania.
A full square kilometer could fit 10 million people—the population of a megacity—and you could pack all 26 million Scandinavians—everyone in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark3—into one square mile.
Central Park, with an area of 3.41 square km (1.3 sq mi), could easily hold the population of Australia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Venezuela, Malaysia, Nepal, Mozambique or Syria. You could fit all 13.9 million Jews into Central Park and still have room for the population of Romania, Chile, or the Netherlands. The entire human race in 5,000 BC, which historians estimate to be between 5 – 20 million people, would fill up at most a little over half of Central Park.
We’re just getting started, so settle in.
You could squeeze all 320 million Americans into a 5.7km x 5.7km (3.5mi x 3.5mi) square, which would take less than five hours to walk around.
And a square 10km x 10km (6.2mi x 6.2mi), or a small island about twice the size of Bermuda, could hold a billion people (which you could walk the perimeter of in about 8 hours). A slightly larger island, Martha’s Vineyard, has an area of 226km2 and could fit all the world’s Christians on it [insert your own wisecrack here]. Alternatively, Martha’s Vineyard could fit the entire combined population of North America and South America…and still have room for the entire population of Africa. As for the world’s females, if they ever got annoyed with men and wanted to start a club, they could hold their membership-wide meetings in the 360km2 Gaza Strip.
Anyway, what we really want to know is how big a piece of land we’d need to hold everyone—all 7.3 billion of us. And the answer is, a 27km x 27km (16.8mi x 16.8mi) square.
That square is smaller than Bahrain. And on top of Africa, it would look like this:
The square is also smaller than New York City.
NYC has an area of 786 square km, or 303 sq mi, and the whole human race could fit inside it—with room for another half a billion people. Specifically:
Manhattan could fit 590 million people
Brooklyn could fit 1.38 billion people
Queens could fit 2.83 billion people
The Bronx could fit 1.09 billion people
Staten Island could fit 1.51 billion people
So let’s try it. First by geographic region:
How’s everyone doing down there?
Great. Now, let’s shift around and organize by religion:
So that’s how much ground space the human race takes up—but that’s only talking about the living humans.
Scientists’ estimates for the total number of humans who have ever lived4 tend to range from 90 to 110 billion people. The most common estimates are around 108 billion total humans. Using that assumption, a little under 7% of all people who have ever lived are alive right now:
We just had a Dinner Table discussion about which dead human we’d like to bring back to life—but what if we brought all dead humans back? How much space would we need to make room for them?
We’d need 10,800 square kilometers—a square with a side of 103km (65mi)—which would easily fit inside Jamaica, Qatar, Kuwait, The Gambia, or Connecticut.
Continuing into hypothetical world, we could fit a trillion people in South Korea, Iceland, Guatemala, or Cuba, and if we covered every square meter of the Earth’s land with people, it would fit 1.48 quadrillion people—200,000 times the current world population. To finish the job, let’s cover the entire surface of the Earth with people—including oceans—to bring the total people that could fit on an Earth-sized planet to a little over five quadrillion people.3
And that’s all fine, but my grandfathers didn’t fight in World War II so I could write posts about two-dimensional things. Time to get in the ring with the big boys.
7.3 billion humans in three-dimensional configurations
Sticking with our 10 humans per square meter of floor metric, we bring height into the equation using the worldwide average human height of 165cm (65in).4 So we can build ourselves a booth with a square meter base and a 1.65 meter height that will fit 10 average humans. This gives us our 3D metric—.165m3/person, or 6.06 people per cubic meter.
When we put lots of people in three-dimensional buildings, we’ll do it by building different height “floors”—some floors would be higher than 1.65m for taller people, others would be shorter than average for shorter people, but each person would be on a floor where the ceiling was just a few millimeters above their head, and the floors would average out to be 1.65m high each.
The Empire State Building has a volume of 1.05 million cubic meters, which when hollowed out and replaced with our new “floors” would hold 6.3 million very unhappy people.
AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, is a huge domed structure with a volume of 2.94 million cubic meters. With the addition of floors, it could hold 17.6 million people. That’s big enough to fit the entire population of Dallas…plus the populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.
The largest building in the world, volume-wise, is the Boeing Everett Factory in Washington State. With a 900m x 495m base (which almost exactly matches the dimensions of Tiananmen Square) and a ceiling over 33m high, the factory’s volume is 13.3 million cubic meters—which we could fit all the world’s French people into with room left over for all the Belgians as well (78.7 million person capacity).
But if we’re gonna fit all of us into a single building, nothing currently on Earth is going to work—we have to build it ourselves.
At .165 meters per person, we’ll need a little over 1.2 billion cubic meters, or just over one cubic kilometer (1.204km3 to be exact).5 This cubic building would have a side of 1.07km (about 2/3 of a mile), giving it a base of about 1.1km—a little over double the size of the Boeing Factory base—and a height of 1,070m (3,511 feet), which is 29% taller than the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper. That’s a large building, but neither the base nor the height alone are unfathomable by modern architectural standards. Here’s what it would look like if we built it in Manhattan (with other structures added for reference):
Somewhere in that building is you. Somewhere else are all your friends. Somewhere in there is a 16-year-old Cambodian girl and all her friends. Somewhere is a Somali pirate, his barber, and all his barber’s friends. Every NBA player is in there, along with every rockstar, movie star, supermodel, and politician. Every bartender and construction worker and priest and lawyer and prisoner and princess and soldier and dentist are somewhere in that building, along with all 1.4 billion Chinese people, every blond person, and every member of ISIS.
The human race, which seems overwhelmingly large in one dimension when it’s wrapping 55 times around the Earth or forming a circle that dwarfs the moon’s orbit, seems much more manageable when it can fit inside Bahrain or New York City with room to spare and almost quaint when organized neatly into a cube that would take you only 20 minutes to jog around.
And with that, our initial goal is accomplished. But what if, instead of ending this post here, we went just one step further? After all that work, who wants to stop now while there’s still so much empty space in all of our atoms?
7.3 Billion Humans Compressed Down to Their Atomic Nuclei
Every atom’s different, but a general ballpark rule is that an atom’s diameter is about 100,000 times larger than the diameter of its nucleus, the thing that carries nearly all of the atom’s mass. Translated into three dimensions, that means an atom’s nucleus makes up only around one quadrillionth of an atom’s total volume. The way I visualize this is by imagining an atom to be a cubic kilometer—a hollow cube taller than the tallest skyscraper (around the size of our humanity cube above). This building is so large that if you were inside it, hanging from the ceiling, and you let go, it would take you about 15 seconds of free fall before you hit the ground. If you’re standing on one side of the base, it would take you about 12 minutes to walk across to the other.
If that huge cube is an atom, somewhere in the middle is a 1 cm3sugar cube—and that’s the nucleus. And the atom’s mass would be about exactly the mass of the sugar cube, which takes up one quadrillionth of the total space. Just about all of the other 999,999,999,999,999 quadrillionths of the atom is massless, empty space.
Your body’s mass is the combined masses of the sugar cubes in the middle of each of your body’s atoms.
So how big is the human race really? When we get rid of the empty space in all the atoms of all 7.3 billion people, what are we left with?
An M&M.
Not even, actually. The volume of a human is about .0664 cubic meters, putting the combined volume of all humans at about 485 million cubic meters. When we reduce that to one quadrillionth of its size, we get .485 cubic centimeters. An M&M is .636cm3, about 30% too large. A Skittle is too large too (.74cm3), as are a quarter (.809cm3) and a nickel (.689cm3). It’s pretty hard to find everyday objects as small as .485cm3 (a US penny works, but at .433cm3, falls just short of fitting us all in it).
And that’s where we’ll end things today. With an M&M weighing 450 million tonnes—heavier than 75 Pyramids of Giza—that we could all fit into if someone squished us hard enough.
___________
If you liked this post, here are four more posts in the Pointless Calculations category:
According to this possibly-accurate list of popular Ecuadorian names, Carlos, Daniela, and Andrea are red hot right now.↩
This metric system / non-metric system thing is unbelievably annoying. Almost half of WBW readers are from metric system countries, so I can’t just use imperial units, but a little over half of readers are from the US, so I can’t just use the metric system either, because feet and miles are a bit more intuitive to all those people. So I’ll just put calculations in both systems, which is annoying for everyone—because the US decided to stick with a totally nonsensical system of measurement.↩
Super awkward to start this section with such a mundane sentence after rousing things up so much at the end of the last section.↩
While I was at it, I worked out that to fit all 108 billion humans that have ever lived, we’d need a cubic building with sides of 2.6km.↩
There are about 7,000 grains of rice to a cup, or to 240mL, which translates to 7.3 billion grains filling 251 cubic meters. (In this post, gray square footnotes will be for calculations and other technical details. Blue circles for extraneous thoughts and facts.)↩
At the closest they ever come to Earth, Mars is 33.9 million miles away, Venus is 24m miles away, and the sun is 93m miles away.↩
The definition of Scandinavia is a little confusing. Some people exclude Denmark or Finland, others include Iceland. The most common definition seems to be those four countries.↩
I was trying to find a replacement water filter for a GE refrigerator (the machine is fresh from a $430 board swap that restored its ice-dispensing capability; examining the discarded PC board revealed a handful of chips and some relays labeled “Made in China”; perhaps $10 of parts total). This GE MWF seems to be the part. The product name is “Pharmaceutical refrigerator water filter” and I inferred that it was intended to be used in pharmacies somehow. Maybe they need extra pure water for giving to customers or for mixing with powders?
It turns out this is to address “Drugs in Our Drinking Water?”, something relatively new for Americans to worry about. Supposedly if your bones are aching you can just take a drink from the nearest river and will get plenty of ibuprofen. Or maybe just have a glass of tapwater.
What do readers think? Where does this paranoia rank? Above or below vaccine paranoia?
Upon arrival, the taxi driver was a lumbering hulk with a huge back, but his cab radio spewed out Engelbert Humperdinck songs.
Communism as an economic system is gone, and the government is democratic, but still the place seems to have the character types and status markers of a communist society.
Neither Americanization nor Europeanization seems to have progressed very far here; with respect to the latter category, I think of Belgrade as the anti-Barcelona. Nothing here is very attractive, yet in a quite charming way. The place conjures up, still, some of the better sides of 1920s Europe and also 1980s communism. That said, infrastructure and services are quite acceptable. Prices are reasonable.
The food is good but not so varied or original and it seems like a waste of time to look for true peaks. There are no noteworthy or signature sights. Museums still refer to “the former Republic of Yugoslavia” and the Serbs seem to be searching for a new identity. There is lots of talk about the past. The country is stuck in the middle income trap.
I recommend this place for all those who feel they are sick of Europe, but actually are not, but who would be, unless they came here. That includes me.
Hong Kong is a tough marriage market for women because of the city’s skewed gender ratio — 876 males for every 1,000 females, a gap predicted to worsen to 712 to 1,000 by 2041.
ICYMI, I photographed Klyde Warren Park in Dallas for Robert Draper's story "Unexpected Texas" that ran in Sunday, November 16 New York Time's travel section. He also focused on El Paso with photographs by Nancy Newberry and Houston with photographs by Sandy Carson. Read Draper's story here.
You likely remember our contest, the 10 Most Beautiful Women in Dallas. It wasn’t that long ago we revealed to you the winners in our December issue. We’ve changed it up this year and are shining the spotlight on the other half. In May, we put out a call for Dallas’ best bachelors. From the hundreds of nominees we received, we narrowed the pile to down to 20 outstanding Dallas gents. Now we need your help selecting the top 10. Check out our first five candidates this week, select your three favorites, and vote. You can come back and vote once a day every day. Voting for this first round ends Sunday at midnight, when we’ll release the candidates of Week 2. We’ll need you to come back and help us out again. Ready, set, go.
Whether you were part of Generation X or a baby boomer, it’s a good night for nostalgia. The Zombies are beginning their two-night stand at the Kessler Theater, and I’ve already stated my case for the 60s pop act in twoseparate instances, but I’ll say it again. Rod Argent may have garnered more attention for his namesake solo career, but it’s singer Colin Blunstone’s angelic vocals that set the group apart from many of their peers. While other bands of the era were attempting to adopt a tough American blues sound, the Zombies added a confident elegance to their music that influenced many others rock groups. That even includes the Beatles, to put this show in its proper historical perspective. You’ll likely recognize “Time of the Season” from the various films in which it’s been used, as it’s one of the go-to songs for any movie attempting to capture the essence of the free love era. But we’ll be listening for lesser known selections, such as “Friends of Mine,” or “The Way I Feel Inside.” Recommended.
If you grew up in the 90s, it was impossible to miss the highly marketable tennis star Andre Agassi, who was basically the tennis equivalent of Michael Jordan at the time. He redefined the sport with an outwardly flamboyant style both in play and appearance. I’m not sure if he’ll still be exhibiting that same sartorial flair this evening, but he will be on hand as the special guest for KIPP Dallas-Fort Worth’s first annual fundraiser. It’s billed as “Are you Smarter than a KIPPster?,” and includes a group of well-known Dallasites pitted against middle school students currently enrolled in the charter school program. Our ever-busy Mayor Mike Rawlings will be there, as will KERA’s Krys Boyd, who will moderate. The event begins at 6:30 this evening, at the Frontiers of Flight Museum.
Wealthfront is the world’s largest and fastest-growing automated investment service (AIS). With more than $800 million in client assets under management, Wealthfront offers the most tax-efficient and low-cost index fund-based solution for long-term investors on the market. Having grown more than 700% since the start of 2013, Wealthfront now provides service to clients across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., with client accounts ranging in size from $5,000 to over $10,000,000. Wealthfront is on the leading edge of a much larger trend, one catalyzed by a new generation of younger investors. There are 90 million people in the millennial generation with an aggregate net worth of more than $2 Trillion. They have grown up with software and lived through two […]
When it comes to making your portfolio last a lifetime, you may be surprised at how long that might be. According to this Vanguard longevity tool, for a couple both age 40 today, there is a 50% chance that one will live to 88. That’s 48 years.
jume asked, "What are 5 books you think everyone should read?" and in looking at past entries I found a special subset of books that I think people definitely DO NOT have to read, and I thought well that'd make for a fun entry too!
