Minecraft’s hierarchy of needs:
- Tools
- Shelter
- Light
- Food
Once all those are taken care of, you can start exploring and building.
Voit! (Egad!)
I’ve never understood the tendency to write in all-caps except for the letter L, the one letter whose lower case looks exactly like another letter’s upper-case. But it’s surprisingly common.
Fortunately I don’t think anyone’s going to pull a “Cancel that, it says HELF” on this warning sign!
Aw, Nuts!
Silly as it sounds to recall nuts for undeclared nuts, not all nuts are the same.
If you’re allergic to cashews but not pecans, you want to know whether the pecans you might eat have come in contact with cashews. And that’s not even getting into the peanut/tree nut difference!
In this case [Edit: link broken], a process breakdown at a roaster opened up everything to cross-contamination by every other kind of nut they sell. They’re recalling affected lots while they fix the problem.
But does it have electrolytes?
Found on a case of bottled water whose marketers really hope you don’t understand how pH works.*
I bet when you heat it up, it goes beyond hot, and actually speeds up its molecular motion!
*You make water alkaline by adding OH– ions.
Venus and Mercury Again
They’re not as close as they were two nights ago, but I managed to frame them with a more interesting foreground.
The Lesser Evil of Selfie Sticks
I’ve known about portrait distance for a while, and often thought that was a downside of using fixed-lens phone cameras for portraits. To frame someone’s face in a phone you have to either zoom (losing detail) or hold it close enough that the viewing angles distort the face. I prefer using my phone for long shots and using a camera with an optical zoom for portraits.
Unexpected consequence: Selfies are now a major source of young people’s self-image…which is distorted, leading them to feel worse about themselves and even seek out plastic surgery.
The researchers looked specifically at selfies taken from 12 inches away — a common distance for someone snapping a selfie without the assistance of a selfie stick. In a selfie taken from that distance, men’s noses appear 30 percent wider and women’s noses appear 29 percent wider than they actually are.
I think we can all agree that selfie sticks are a lesser evil than unnecessary cosmetic surgery!
Update: From the Facebook comments, here’s a link to a series of portraits taken at distances ranging from 2 meters down to 20 cm, demonstrating how different your face looks at each distance.
Venus and Mercury Spotted!
Venus and Mercury close together after last night’s sunset.
I lucked out in that…
- I remembered they were going to be visible when I got to the store on the way home.
- The parking lot was both wide and slightly uphill from the western side of the street, giving me a clear view.
- The sky had just darkened enough to see both.
- The clouds were just wispy enough not to block them.
As it is, I still had to crop out a street light and its lens flare to get this photo, or I would have framed it better.
But hey, it’s not often you get to see Mercury from a city at all, never mind right next to another planet!