furiousBlog

My brother-in-law sent me a link to this great and tragic story about an attempt to retrieve the body of a scuba diver from the bottom of the third deepest freshwater cave on Earth. It's an incredible story of adventure, death, and pushing the limits of human and technological endurance. It's a little long, but a really good read:

Every minute he spent on the bottom—his VR3 dive computer said he was now approaching 886 feet—would add more than an hour of decompression time on the way up. Still, Shaw felt remarkably relaxed, sweeping his light left and right, reveling in the fact that he was the first human ever to lay line at this depth. Suddenly, he stopped. About 50 feet to his left, perfectly illuminated in the gin-clear water, was a human body. It was on its back, the arms reaching toward the surface. Shaw knew immediately who it was: Deon Dreyer, a 20-year-old South African who had blacked out deep in Bushman's ten years earlier and disappeared. Divers had been keeping an eye out for him ever since.

...and further on, about Deon Dreyer's death:

The team had been doing a practice dive. On the way back up, at 196 feet, Deon appeared to be fine, exchanging hand signals with his buddy. The group continued ascending. At 164 feet they suddenly noticed a light below them. A quick, confused diver count came up one short. Team leader Dietloff Giliomee wasn't sure what was happening. Then another diver, in the eerie glow of his submersible light, dragged his finger across his throat. Giliomee desperately started swimming down but stopped when he realized the light below him was already more than 100 feet deeper and fading fast. "I decided it was a suicide chase," he wrote in the accident report.

Link

My boss emailed this around yesterday. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. It's a blog entry with screenshots from a pirated copy of Revenge of the Sith that was translated into Chinese, and then from that translation they created English subtitles. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The real line here is "they're all over me".

Here, they're translating Jedi Council into Presbyterian Church.

Here's the link to the whole blog entry. He links to a friend's blog who has more here.

I have about 30 photography sites that I visit almost daily. Some could be called photoblogs, but most are just sites where someone posts their photos (kind of like my photo site, eighteenpercent.net). I've decided to start an occasional series where I'll introduce my readers to one of them every so often. I figure I'll do this whenever one of them posts a photo that I really like.

The first entry in this series is Shutterbug. From the 'about page':

shutterbug belongs to me, tracey. i'm 23 and live in sydney australia. i'm currently working as a web developer trying to get a start in photography.

shutterbug is an up to date collection of my
latest photographs and experiments.

Lately, I've been really loving her photos of food. Food photography is an area of photography that I've been wanting to get into. Here are a couple of her food shots that I really like (note: the photos here have been resized down a little, which causes a little distorition -- click on them to see the full-size shot on Shutterbug):





The photos on Shutterbug are consistently great. In particular, the lighting and color of most of the shots blow me away.

I'm not really sure how to wrap up this entry, so I'll just post a couple more photos that I refound just now while going through her archives:

or, 'Ben's anti-Bush enthusiasm nearly ends in horrible fiery traffic accident'

Yesterday, as I was driving into work for my first day back after my week-and-a-half 'vacation', I saw the following license plate:



I decided that it would be great to post a photo of it here on furiousBlog, so when he turned off at the exit before mine, I followed, camera equipped cell-phone at the ready. I thought this would work out fine, since at the first stoplight, I could snap a quick shot. But, then the prey turned suddenly into a parking lot. So, increasing my stalker quotient a notch or two, I followed. Then, behaving like the wildebeast (I am a clumsy cheetah in this story), he performed another sudden turn, at which point, I decided all was lost. I continued on, made an illegal U-turn, then pulled up to the light exiting the parking lot, accepting defeat.

But, luck was with me, because it turns out that the prey turned simply to make the legal version of my U-turn by cutting through the lot. He then pulled up to the front of the leftmost (out of two) left-turn lanes; I was in the straight/right turn lane behind one other car. So, I pulled out the phonecam and snapped off a shot.

It was at this point that the light turned green, or so I thought. The prey took off like a shot, as did the car in front of me. And so did I, only to be confronted slight seconds later by the front end of an oncoming semi-truck. In one sweeping glance I saw the headlights, then the surprised/angry face of the driver, then (and this is the important part) above the top of the truck, the two left-turn signals that had turned green, and the straight/right-turn signal that had stayed red. The car in front of me, I noticed at this point, had turned left from the straight lane, tricking me into following: leading me like a Siren into the bone-smashing clutches of death by Mack truck.

All of this seemed to happen in slow-motion. It wasn't until I swerved left, tires squealing*, narrowly cheating fate, that I was able to process what had happened and take a look at the photo. Of course, it was impossible to make out the license plate, meaning that my brush with death was all for naught.

* The words 'tires squealing' have been added here for effect only. I'm pretty sure that neither mine nor the truck's tired did any squealing.

I want to learn more about economics. Can anyone in my small readership recommend a good book? Preferably, I'd like it to be not too deep, since it'd be easy to go over my head with this topic. I'm particularly interested in how various government policies and actions (raising/lowering taxes, deficits, etc.) affect the economy in both the short and long terms.

I'm going to do some searching around for recommendations, too, so if I find anything, I'll post it.