The Chaitén Volcano, Chile. // London of yore. (h/t, Mick) // Shopping for lingerie in Saudi Arabia. // Photographs of work. // Fun with mirrors. // Assorted aircraft factories. // More birds flocking. // Aerial landscapes. // Wingsuits. (h/t, Rob) // Colour scheme generator. // Cassette inlays. // This track is pretty awful, but the break dancing is fun. // Steampunk acid machine. // Robot meets lighthouse. // Cave for sale. $300,000. // Stealth boat for sale. // Your Lamborghini has arrived. (h/t, Coudal) // From amputee to mermaid. // Milky Way as tube map. // And, via The Thin Man and CeeMoJones, it’s St. Germain.

From Dan Meth, via Anna, comes The Trilogy Meter.

Feel free to take issue with the meter’s readings.

Japanese industrial plants. 

Via Coudal. 

Via Dan, this is one of the funniest, most cringeworthy things I’ve seen this year. A six-day “occupation” of the NYU student centre food court today reached a gripping climax. Behold the magnificence of student activism: 

The footage does, I think, provide plausible justification for having these whiny, pretentious people publicly beaten with lengths of copper piping: “Excuse me, brutality here… We need to look at the situation, the hierarchy, the power relationship…” So here we have a group of over-indulged poseurs who expect to be taken seriously by mouthing every conceivable cliché and fatuous trope they’ve managed to internalise. Just like thousands of other terribly “edgy” students. Not only that, they feel entitled to disrupt the university and other students’ work while coercing others to do as they demand – and all at someone else’s expense. Is that “social justice”? It’s so hard to keep track of these things. Will Mr Lotorto and his merry band be offering to pay for the disruption and damage caused by their “occupation”? Or will they go on whining and rubbing their metaphorical nipples?

Update: See the comments.

Fabian Tassano spies a little opportunism:

Mike Edwards of CAFOD has written to the Telegraph to argue for a pragmatist perspective on the question of whether the establishment view on climate change is correct. In other words, we may as well assume it is correct, because the consequences of doing so are the ‘right’ ones.

The longer I work on climate change, the less important I think it is whether or not the warmists or the sceptics are right. […] Imagine a world where we had listened to the climate scientists and started to change our resource-consuming behaviour and address the inequities of the global economic system. Although the warming still didn’t materialise, we would have addressed a host of environmental issues and be living a largely pollution-free existence. We may even be saying thank you to the climate scientists who, although they got it wrong, provided us the opportunity to create a cleaner, brighter and fairer world.

Unfortunately, it is easy to imagine that Dr Edwards is not unusual in believing that the preferred effects of particular research conclusions should influence those conclusions. The vast majority of ‘researchers’ seem to share a leftist ideological outlook these days, and also seem to share the belief that this perspective is indubitably the morally correct one, providing them with a spurious legitimacy for actions which would be considered questionable in other contexts. In some cases, this ideological bias – wanting research to support the creation of a ‘fairer’ world – may have effects only at the margin. For example, when a result is ambiguous, the choice of how to present it is made in the direction that is most supportive of the preferred belief system. Though individually small in effect, an accumulation of such minor biases at the margin can easily add up to something significant. In other cases, the bias is more blatant. Research results can often be guessed in advance, and those which would undermine the consensus can be avoided by the simple method of withholding financial support.