Kurt Johnson

Tarangire national park, Tanzania.  Taken in 2007 with a 100-400mm zoom at 400/5.6.

East Dallas in the shadows of the high rises downtown.

Hayaku: A Time Lapse Journey Through Japan from Brad Kremer on Vimeo.

Go to Vimeo and watch it full screen in HD.  Brad should be on the payroll of the national tourism board.  H/t Jeffrey Friedl.

After years of resisting Flickr I thought I’d try it out since it should make it easier to sort favorites and let others make prints.  See my page.

I love this clip because it’s so true.  I’m flying over Roswell NM right now and thinking of  how slow the airplane’s internet is moving.

This is the best online tool I’ve seen so far.  It’s graphical and easy to use.  I’d suggest adjusting the “Advanced Settings” to increase the Annual Maintenance Costs – 1.5%-3% seems more reasonable based on the folks I talk to.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calculator.html

Last weekend I had the privilege of trying four different BBQ places in Lockhart, the “BBQ Capital of Texas”.  For my money Smitty’s was the best all around – particularly the pork ribs.  I put Kreuz in the #2 spot.

More pics below the fold.

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Stars over El Capitan in Guadalupe Mountains National Park (Texas).  35 minute exposure.

Are here.

From my trip last week.  The Eiffel Tower and Invalides are visible at left.  This is from a point and shoot camera (Panasonic LX-3); I’m getting less and less excited about lugging a full SLR rig around town when on vacation.

Boschendal, one of the oldest vineyards in South Africa.  Taken in 2006.

This is unbelievably cool.  This guy has persisted in finding ways to move extremely heavy items using only primitive tools.  He’s approaching the point where given time he can assemble something like  Stonehenge – not only without cranes but nearly unassisted by other people!  Very inspirational.

The original website is here.

Taken last weekend at the Dallas Arboretum.

Outdoor shower and private oceanside pool, built into the rocks at the Hideaway in Nha Trang.

This Michael Lewis piece from the NY Times might be the best article I’ve read all week.  Shane Battier plays basketball like a trader at a hedge fund:

Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in different relationships to other players — how well he scored off screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that Allen Iverson is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his right; when he goes to his left he kills his team…

Battier says. “My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well…if you knew none of this, you would never guess any of it from watching the game. Bryant was quicker than Battier, so the latter spent much of his time chasing around after him, Keystone Cops-like… [but] when he decides where to be on the court and what angles to take, he is constantly reminding himself of the odds on the stack of papers he read through an hour earlier as his feet soaked in the whirlpool. “The numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”

Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter.

[emphasis mine]

Perhaps not surprisingly, the VP of Basketball Operations for the Rockets is a former management consultant  (and coincidentally a classmate from OU).

Full article

The rest of the album from my trip is here.

Sunlight and clouds near Nha Trang, Vietnam

I’m in the airport on the way back from Vietnam.  More photos coming soon.

Happy holidays from my nephew Edward.