Underwater Photography, Temperature Timelines, and the Case for American Cheese

Welcome to this week’s edition of our Friday Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.

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Earth’s Average Temperature Timeline by xkcd »

Randall Munroe of xkcd recently published one of the best (and most terrifying) infographics on climate change I’ve ever seen. Don’t skip to the end, read the whole thing (including the alt text).

• Related reading: “When Will New York Sink?” by Andrew Rice of New York Magazine:

  The life span of a city is measured in centuries, and New York, which is approaching its fifth, probably doesn’t have another five to go, at least in any presently recognizable form. Instead, Jacob has said, the city will become a “gradual Atlantis.”

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Underwater Freediving Photography »

Speaking of things being underwater (sigh, okay that was bad), I’ve been digging the freediving photography of Alex Voyer and Alex Roubaud of Fisheye, particularly their “Pool” and “Humans” galleries.

Last year, Jenny G. Zhang of My Modern Met interviewed the freediving duo about how they approach underwater photography and why they do it. I liked this bit:

How do you manage to get so up close and personal with wild creatures in the ocean?

Freediving is our way to take pictures; it’s a soft method to approach animals. Encountering a freediver in the ocean is a strange experience for those creatures, as we are quite big and our behavior is really different from what they usually see in their environment. We have to be patient and let them come to us. They quickly understand that we are not aggressive, and they are therefore curious about us.

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American Cheese is Perfect »

Kat Kinsman of Extra Crispy (such a great site name) amusingly argues the importance of American cheese, at least in the morning:

I would never suggest that American cheese make a cameo on your fancy and excellent night cheese plate, and it would likely be mortified by the mere suggestion. American cheese knows its place, and that place is on your breakfast table (or car or desk or wherever you feed yourself), melted—always melted—onto scrambled eggs or omelets, into hash browns, nestled between ham and biscuit, against a poppy seed-crusted Kaiser roll in a classic New York egg-and-cheese sandwich, or if you are me—a professional breakfast journalist—atop steaming pancakes because I just can’t deal with sugar shock that early in the day or ever. It may not offer the most assertive flavor, but it provides a pleasant, essential lubrication, and I’m going to end this sentence before it gets weird.

I love how nearly every instance of “American cheese” in the article links to an outside article about American cheese. Cheesy.

(Anyone else hungry now?)

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kottke.org, the Fall 2016 Edition »

A major redesign of Jason Kottke’s seminal blog — which was more than two years in the making — went live this week. Gone are the days of the header’s classic blue gradient, sadly, but the new design is great. (The “hamburger” button in the footer is a fun touch. Try it.)

As much as I love the colorful new look, the new bio Jason wrote for himself is one of the best new aspects in my opinion:

Biography. With the help of some friends (aka the kottke.org board of advisors), I rewrote the about page. I liked the brevity of the old version, but in the words of one friend, “the previous version undersold the site so much it was almost inaccurate”. This is the first bio I’ve ever written that takes seriously what the site is and what I’ve done in my career…and as such it makes me really uncomfortable. Taking credit, particularly in public, has never been my thing. But I wanted to have a chance at explaining kottke.org to people who might not know the whole story.

Take all that credit, Jason! To say that kottke.org has been a major influence on writers like me (these Quality Linkage columns are a perfect example) and the web at large would be a big understatement. I’m glad it’s still going as strong as ever.

• I’m also digging the redesign of The Morning News.

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iPhone 7 and 7 Plus Camera Review in Rwanda »

Austin Mann has pretty much become the “iPhone camera review guy”. First he reviewed the iPhone 6 camera in Iceland, then the iPhone 6s camera in Switzerland.

Now he’s reviewed the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus cameras in Rwanda — with the help of some gear provided by our friends at Studio Neat! — and boy did they ever produce some fantastic shots.

While on the outside the iPhone 7 appears almost identical to its predecessors, the inside — particularly the camera — is a completely different story. Apple keeps building new tools into the iPhone platform and it gives us more and more ways to flex our creative muscles.

This year, there’s a bunch of new tech that impacts our iPhone 7 camera: longer battery life, waterproofing, and more, but the new tool I’m most excited about is the 2x optical zoom. It’s one of the most significant camera upgrades I can remember in a long time. This new camera lens is not just iterating on existing capabilities, it’s opening up completely new perspectives, and I can’t wait to see what you all create with it.

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Federico Viticci’s iOS 10 Review »

Last but not least: This week Viticci and the rest of the MacStories team published their highly anticipated (and extremely thorough, as in 50k words) iOS 10 review. No stone was left unturned, believe me.

They coded up a special reading experience just for this review, and if you’re a Club MacStories member, you get exclusive access to an eBook version plus a special “Making-Of” newsletter about how they put the review together with workflows and whatnot.

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Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.