Monica

In the last two weeks we lost both merle_ and pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

I've been accumulating browser tabs for a while, so here's a "misc" dump. (Aside: this new LJ "choose your icon by browsing pictures, and by the way we won't put them in alphabetical order or anything nice like that" interface really stinks. Grr.)

siderea posted The Music Theory Song: Intervals (YouTube). For anyone who's trying to work on ear training to hear intervals, and for those of you who already grok that, this video's for you. Really.

12 letters that didn't make the (English) alphabet. I forget where this link came from.

thnidu over on Dreamwidth posted a link to "Earth as Art", which looks to be a nifty photo collection. The link isn't currently working for me, so I'm linking his entry instead of there for now.

More beautiful photography, from a locked post. Warning: gravity alert -- it wouldn't be hard to get sucked in.

Some time back I noticed that one of the regulars in the Mi Yodeya weekly parsha chat drew a lot on Abarbanel and that it sounded interesting. I asked him if he knew of an English translation and at the time he didn't, but more recently someone else who remembered my question pointed me at this adaptation (not translation). This sounds like something I should check out. (And it's kind of cool that, months later, somebody remembered my asking and followed up.)

When atheism is good: a chassidic story, linked by thnidu on DW again.

From XKCD: an exploration of wise men, stars, and paths. What would the trip look like, depending on what star you were following when? I can't confirm the math, but I found it an interesting read. (I don't know why he has the journey starting in Jerusalem, though.)

A map of every grocery store ever. Interestingly, my regular "big shopping trip" store (as opposed to the "grab a few things on the way home from work" store) recently remodelled and deviated from the norms. Now I can't find anything without effort.

And a funny cartoon from gnomi:( Read more... )

I don't think I've ever seen mammatus clouds before. They sure are pretty.

This information visualization on population per land area surprised me at the extremes (Bangladesh and UAE).

Avram's letter to his parents on leaving home, an interesting little d'var torah for Lech L'cha (starts with Genesis 12).

A few weeks ago I played Quack in the Box for the first time. It's a fun, cynical little game about health care, and now that I've linked it here, with luck I won't forget its name. :-)

Not a link, but is anybody else suddenly seeing a lot of LJ spam?

A full chanukiyah makes me happy -- you might say it provides a warm glow.



The commandment is to publicize the miracle, so after a couple minutes that becomes:



(I took these with my phone; I haven't yet read the camera documentation nor played much with those settings, so these are with default settings.)

siderea found this beautiful video of time-lapse photography by Terje Srgjerd of the Arctic light, just before the midnight sun but when it never quite gets dark. This is stunning, and if you click through to his Vimeo page you'll find links to two others too:

The Arctic Light from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Today's APotD isn't of the sun but of the moon, in partial eclipse, behind a colorful lightning storm:

thnidu posted a link to this video composed of time-lapse photography covering one day in Helsinki -- two views, side by side, one at each solstice:

(Link later broken, alas.)

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.

Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

Remember this funky snow formation, from the storm on Feb 6?



I wondered then how long it would hold that form. (It had already survived most of a day when I took the picture, which is longer than I would have thought.) The answer turned out to be: 12 days. It was there last night when I came home from work, and gone this morning. It did suffer some minor degradation along the way, but only minor -- the form was intact.

Wow.

The album is here. A few excerpts are behind the cut. (The official snowfall was 21".)

( Read more... )

Everything I know about work, I learned in the SCA, by metahacker.

Pumpkins in prison, a photo by ticklethepear. (Though it looks like they might be able to break out if they really had to.)

dagonell wrote that we show our humanity most in how we treat the weak, such as this aid for an ailing penguin. Neat!

From a locked post (I'll happily credit you if you like): Shopping while Black: a social experiment.

From a coworker: this wedding gift won't open until it's in the right location. Only 50 tries. Fun!

What cats would say to you if they could talk (GraphJam).

I enjoy Bill Walsh's writings on language and copy-editing, such as common punctuation problems. And sometimes he makes me laugh, as in this work of a punctuation vigilante.

(Aside: RSS feeds to LJ seem to be broken again.)

Today Erik and Baldur are 16 years old. Photos of their high-energy (ahem) celebration behind the cut.

( Read more... )

The kind and generous browngirl sent me a box of home-made fruitcakes, beautifully decorated. She does wonderful things with baked goods, and I'm savoring them. :-)

( pictures )

On Sunday I helped a friend paint her house. (Well, priming, actually -- painting commenced today.) Painting isn't hard; why is my body complaining about it? It's as if some key joints woke up and said "hey, we're in our 40s -- the warranty has to have expired by now!". Sheesh.

I've had a loaner cat for a few days, while a friend was out of town dealing with family stuff. The visitor is a very easy-going cat; two of my cats need to learn to chill. :-) But, he's gone home now and all is well. (When I wasn't home I kept him in one room lest there be trouble otherwise, and this had the effect of turning him into something of a puppy-dog when I let him out. Very friendly cat...)

Someone named Darter, who does a lot of photography in the SCA, posted his Pennsic pictures recently. Hey, I recognize that singer. (Seriously, I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see a reasonable picture of myself, because I can't do decent posed pics no matter how important it is, and I'm rarely the subject of candids.)

Speaking of Pennsic, I had to call a number of trailer-repair places before I found someone who would talk to me about the damaged axle on the Pennsic house. About a week and a half ago I talked to someone who promised to go take a look soon. I sure hope he got up there this weekend. (How did I find repair places? After several false starts trying the referral path, I started working my way through the listings here.)

Thursday I got a phone call from the "retention manager" at the Trib, who assured me that they are trying to solve my delivery problem. In the last few days I haven't missed a paper, which is good; I do wonder how long it will last. We've done this before. Well, she asked me to call her Tuesday with an update, so I can ask her about the long-term fix then. This is, by the way, the first time someone has called who has left a return number, so that's progress.