Anhinga anhinga playground

Бостон и окрестности (включая Кэйп Код) наполнены дымом, вроде бы, от канадских пожаров, пахнет гарью.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/05/30/canadian_fires_bring_smoke_to_new_england/
http://wbztv.com/local/cape.cod.smoke.2.1724527.html



Смогом это пока не называют, и, видимо, не очень боятся (хотя людям с дыхательными проблемами советуют ограничить пребывание на улице).

Расстояние от этих пожаров где-то 300-400 км. Оказывается, необязательно иметь вулкан, чтобы такое устроить..

People are saying it's becoming easier to do one's own gadgets in recent years. I was given a couple of cool references related to this:

"Hack a Day", for the ideas:
http://hackaday.com/

and "SparkFun Electronics", for parts:
http://sparkfun.com/

I am not sure that I can do any of this yet, given my "great talents".

But then if someone would have told me a year ago that I'll be playing piano or making my own ceramics, I'd be very surprised, and yet I have done quite a bit of both in the last few months. But I had very good teachers in both cases.

I wonder whether there are teachers running electronic labs around here...

"if the Singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent outages and terrible customer service" -- Scott Aaronson in his The Singularity Is Far posting.

On the other hand, speaking about customer service and outages in our current Matrix...

Trying our new camera in Jamaica Plains today:



( 10 more photos )

Originals are available here (and are really large, this is Canon PowerShot SX20 IS, so they are a few megabytes each, 4000x3000 pixels).

There was a strange "contact trip effect" with this camera. It is known that when one takes photos, one also sees more details by one's eyes afterwards. However, it seems that after taking more photos with a high-resolution, high-zoom camera, the effect is stronger, than with a less powerful camera -- and this is really weird! To have a synchronization effect with another person is one thing, but to have a synchronization with a camera?

I've got myself a new small netbook.

So it looks like no internet holiday for me during my upcoming trip to Las Cruces, New Mexico in a week or so:

http://subsessile.nmsu.edu/blast/

Prague, Brno, attending SumTopo 2009:

http://www.umat.feec.vutbr.cz/~kovar/webs/sumtopo/
http://atlas-conferences.com/cgi-bin/abstract/caxs-01

Limited internet connectivity during this period, but I'll try to check the comments to this post.

Limited internet connectivity during this period, but I'll try to check the comments to this post.

( Pinewoods of Castel Fusano, Ostia )

I liked reading this profile (in the actual magazine issue):

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/12/090112fa_fact_toobin

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/06/san-francisco-sculpt.html (via Andrew Sullivan)

In the Asian Art Museum in SF till May 25 (see links at the end of the post)

********

Obama finally leads in the superdelegates as well (although he still trails about 15 votes among the DNC/DPL bureaucracy):

http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/2008/02/superdelegate-history-tracker.html