David Meadows

Man Utd fan, Apple fan, former borough councillor, likes reading and watching tv, UK civil servant. What do I do? I do my best...

[Red Cartel Era @RedCartelHQ]

Man City competing fairly after the Sheikh takeover 😭

[David Meadows @DavidjMeadows]

@0ivankaTrump1 16

[Chino @ChinoUTD]

🚨 Sir Alex Ferguson on Manchester City being found guilty of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules:

“I read the news and the first person I thought about was Carlos Tevez.

Funny, isn’t it? After all these years.

We wanted Carlos to stay. David Gill spoke to his representatives, we made our offer, they said we’d left it too late and eventually he went across Manchester.

Then City put up that bloody ‘Welcome to Manchester’ poster.

I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘They haven’t just signed one of our players. They want us to know they can.’

That was when I called them a small club with a small mentality.

But there was something else happening around that period that people forget.

Suddenly City could walk into conversations for players that previously would have been choosing between United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Madrid, Barcelona.

I remember one summer hearing that Adebayor had agreed to join City, then apparently his people were still contacting us and Chelsea.

I thought, ‘What a strange situation. Players who would rather be somewhere else are signing for City anyway.’

At the time, you simply accepted that they had enormous financial power. You competed with it.

That’s football.

But if you then discover years later that rules were being broken during the period in which you’re trying to compete with that financial power, you’re entitled to look back differently.

Because people will say, ‘Ferguson was just angry because City became successful.’

No.

I was angry before they were successful.

I was standing there in 2009 watching them take Tevez, chase players everywhere and put his face on a building to celebrate taking him from us.

Imagine telling me then, ‘Alex, one day the Premier League will investigate how all of this was being financed.’

I’d probably have pointed at the poster and said, ‘You might want to start there.’

And that’s the part people miss when discussing what happened afterwards.

Once you change the financial strength of one club, you don’t only change that club.

You change where players go.

You change what everybody else has to pay.

You change which manager gets which footballer.

You change title races before the first ball is kicked.

People can spend the next twenty years asking whether this player would’ve joined United, whether that player would’ve joined Chelsea, whether somebody else would’ve gone to Arsenal.

Nobody can prove those alternate histories.

But I know this much.

When I was fighting them, I thought I was fighting Manchester City.

Apparently I should’ve brought an accountant.”

[David Meadows @DavidjMeadows]

@GilesMilton1 @Waterstones Found it. They had to search for it and said it was in the historical section. It wasn’t in the new release section.

[David Meadows @DavidjMeadows]

@GilesMilton1 When’s it out? Just looked in Waterstones and couldn’t see it?

[GARY PLAYER @garyplayer]

I have spent 73 years in professional golf and have been a proud member of the PGA and PGA TOUR for decades. This game has given me so much, and I feel a responsibility to speak up for its future. Many people may not realise that the formation of the modern PGA TOUR was also a period of disagreement within professional golf. We have faced division before, but one truth has never changed. We have the privilege of earning our living on the golf course because of the fans and sponsors who support us. We must never lose sight of that.

The spirit of the Presidents Cup from last week should remind us that fierce competition and mutual respect belong together. That same spirit should guide the PGA TOUR, LIV Golf and everyone with a responsibility to our game. We can have our differences and still work towards a common goal. Golf fans around the world want to see the best players compete against one another week in and week out. I want to see Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau competing regularly against Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, not just at our major championships. My hope is that we can finally put the divisions of recent years behind us and make that possible.

Even more importantly, we must consider the young players who are beginning their professional careers and the children who dream of following them. They deserve opportunities to test themselves against the best and a game whose leaders are working together to help them succeed. Let us come together, once and for all, with gratitude for those who support us and a shared commitment to golf’s future. Let us open more doors for younger generations around the world. They are the lifeblood of our game. GP

[David Meadows @DavidjMeadows]

@TechnicallyTee No one talking about how last years 17 Pro Max cases fit the 18 Pro Max? They say the camera plateau is bigger but I can’t see it at all. Bad news for the case manufacturers but no one talking about it?

[David Meadows @DavidjMeadows]

@TechnicallyTee 512Gb 18 Pro Max Black

[Giles Milton @GilesMilton1]

You’ll need one woollen hat, a scarf, a hot water bottle and a piping hot cup of tea…
Here’s why..

[Alex Boge @alexboge]

I find these World Trade Center simulations by Kostack Studio fascinating because they remove the smoke and let you see the collapse much more clearly.

In the real footage, so much is hidden by fire, dust, debris, distance, and chaos that many people come away with the impression that the towers simply dropped straight down into their own footprints.

But that is not really what happened.

These simulations make it much easier to see that the collapse begins in the heavily damaged and fire-weakened region, the upper section starts moving and tilting, and the destruction then propagates downward through the structure.

The towers do not simply disappear vertically into their own footprints. Large portions of the upper structure and exterior are moving outward and to the side as the collapse develops. Much of that motion is simply obscured in the real videos once the enormous debris cloud forms.

And this is also why I find these simulations useful when people describe the collapses as looking like “controlled demolition.”

Strip away the smoke and dust and the resemblance becomes much less convincing.

What you see is a highly asymmetric structural failure beginning around the aircraft-damaged and fire-affected floors, followed by an enormous moving mass progressively overwhelming the structure beneath it. There is tilting, rotation, exterior columns peeling away, debris being thrown far outside the building footprint, and structural failure occurring chaotically as the collapse moves downward.

That is very different from the neat mental image usually implied by “controlled demolition,” where structural supports are deliberately severed in a carefully timed sequence to produce a predetermined collapse.

And importantly, we already know what preceded these collapses.

Both towers suffered massive aircraft-impact damage. Fireproofing was stripped from portions of the structure. Large, uncontrolled fires then burned across multiple floors - for about 56 minutes in the South Tower and about 102 minutes in the North Tower - heating and weakening structural components until collapse initiated.

Once that upper mass began moving, the loads imposed on the floors and structure beneath became vastly greater than anything they had been designed to carry.

The result was progressive collapse.

No, an animation is not proof simply because it looks convincing, and these are not official NIST simulations. They are visualizations built under particular assumptions.

But as visualizations, I think they are extremely useful.

They let you see something the original footage often cannot show clearly: beneath that enormous cloud of smoke and debris was a complicated, violent, asymmetric structural failure - not two buildings neatly dropping straight down into their own footprints.

A note on the simulation: this is not intended to reproduce the collapse down to the exact motion of every beam, floor panel, and fragment of debris. No practical simulation could do that. Its value is in modeling the large-scale structural behavior - how the major sections deform, move, tilt, separate, and progressively fail. Think of it as a visualization of the mechanics and overall collapse behavior, not a frame-by-frame reconstruction of where every piece of steel ultimately landed.

[Philip McCarroll @philmccarroll]

This is incomprehensible... and brilliant. The bit he climbs off the ladder up onto the platform 🫣

All whilst demolishing a fag 😅 Different breed.

[Prof. Frank McDonough @FXMC1957]

22 August 1969. The Beatles completed their last photo shoot together in the grounds of John Lennon’s mansion in Tittenhurst Park, Ascot. Ethan Russell, Monte Freso and Mal Evans were the photographers. The group were never photographed together again after this day.

[Justin ROSE @JustinRose99]

First @McLarenF1 signed golf bag giveaway!!

Just RT for a chance to win it!!

I’ll pick one winner on Monday 17th September… 🍀

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Stars in Their Eyes 1990:
On the ITV show, contestant Gary Gibson performed as John Lennon. Incredible uncanny resemblance.

[Let Us Now Praise... The Beatles @BeatlesPraise]

"My god, when Paul sits down and he’s writing 'Get Back' [in Peter Jackson's 9-hour 2021 documentary Get Back] and George and Ringo are just sitting there across from him listening and Ringo starts clapping his hands to the beat, [I'm] just thinking: how are we seeing this?! This is the first time these guys are hearing this! They don’t know what this song is going to be. It’s magical. I couldn’t get over that. I wanted nine more hours.

"I will talk about the Beatles forever, once that subject comes up. Because they have that thing that you can’t define. It’s something otherworldly. It’s why if you play the Beatles for kids now, they cotton on to them. There’s just — it’s hitting all of us on some kind of level that is something else.

"I don’t know what that is, but . . . it’s divine. They’re the greatest band that has ever existed, they’re the greatest band that ever will exist. They’re like Shakespeare; they’re like Bach. Every several hundred years somebody or something comes along that redefines that kind of beauty, and I think the Beatles are that. They are for me."
--#PaulRudd

#Actor #Movies #TV #CriticsChoice #AFIAwards #TheBeatles #GetBack #Creativity #Universal #GOAT

Source: Fly On The Wall podcast with Dana Carvey and David Spade, 2023

[Danny Baker @prodnose]

Astounding to hear. They literally were from another dimension.

[Paul M @paul_meds]

Never has a third/fourth playoff match felt more meaningless. Many of these players have played 50+ games during the past 12 months, let them go home ffs.

[Giles Milton @GilesMilton1]

My forthcoming book, Empire at the Edge of the World, is now available for pre-order.
An epic tale of adventure, endurance, madness and survival in the High Arctic.
Available everywhere.

[David Meadows @DavidjMeadows]

@BillyHo_Golf Billy, any tickets for any days next week?