Best version of this trope I’ve ever seen. Good old John Downer, still producing amazing footage, even if some of the edits are just a bit too obvious for my taste. The entire series of Earthflight might be worth watching out for.

The camera first shows him standing with a warm smile on his face, hand on chin. He then beckons his interviewers to a table, leaving visible behind him a portrait of himself in exactly the same pose—in sunglasses.

Airplane, right? But no, this is part of one of the funniest deconstructions I’ve read in a long time. And without it, I’m sure the original videos, linked to from the article, would have mostly been beyond me.

Cy Twombly, titan of modern art, dies at 83.

So, farewell then

Cy Twombly.

Keith’s mum says you were a great artist.

But I just wish

You had married

Twyla Tharp.

Occasionally I try to impart some elements of good science storytelling to people, and one of the points I make (based entirely on Garrett Hardin) is the big difference between literacy and numeracy. Literacy understands full well that the difference between a million and a billion is one letter. And that a billion is bigger than a million. But how much bigger? My example is simple enough. If a million seconds is 11 days (which it is, give or take), how long is a billion seconds?

It’s especially worrying when the big numbers refer to big money. US Senator Everett Dirksen was clearly onto something when he said, “a billion here, a billion there … pretty soon you’re talking about real money”.

So I was pleased that my friend Dag had linked to a recent blog post by Philip Greenspun, in which he divided the US budget numbers by a billion to come up with a homely little homily:

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

And that’s supposed to bring new understanding — just by removing the same number of zeroes from all the numbers?

The BBC’s More or Less pulled a similar trick in the run-up to last year’s election in the UK, but rather than dividing by a big number, they divided by the number of households in the UK, revealing just how much each UK resident owed. Naturally I can’t find the details now, but at the time I found it much more illuminating — and scarier — than the overall numbers, and suspect I would have even if those numbers had been deflated a billionfold.

Oh, about 32 years, by the way.

Stormy weather

Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky … has been the lament for far too many weeks, and not only here in Rome. So here for your delectation is Ivie Anderson fronting the Duke Ellington Orchestra in a 1933? recording of Stormy Weather. There’s also a video on YouTube of a different recording.