Photography

Los Alamos means "the poplars". A friend lent me J.P. Hogan's 1980 novel Thrice Upon A Time. It's set in 2010 but has pre-PC "mini" computers the size of fridges, with text terminals and command-line interfaces. Four years before Neuromancer... 1970s computer designers: "What? You folks run your screens in graphics mode all the time? But why? It's so inefficient compared to text mode! Must be unbearably slow!" Had some skin moles lasered. The smell of burning hair is strong immediately inside the clinic's front door. The lasering makes a noise like quietly frying bacon. Pluto's orbit is…

Abisko national park is in the mountains of extreme northern Sweden, Sámi country, reindeer country, where half of the year is lit by constant sun and the other half is frigid darkness and aurorae. Getting there takes 17½ hours by train from Stockholm Central. There's a sleeper train with no changes, so if you only count time when you're conscious, the trip takes 10 hours. You can fly to Arlanda airport and get right onto this train without making the detour into Stockholm. And the trail head is next to the platform when you get off. Some friends and I went up hiking over the Mid-summer…

The former school / functions venue in my housing area has been converted into housing for single male asylum seekers. I'm putting a note on their front door, offering to teach them some boardgames. Wonder if the weight-loss advertisers realise that the pics of amply built women they intend to frighten female customers with are actually attractive to a bunch of dudes. They're basically providing free soft porn to a market segment who will never buy their product. If I had to be a war vet, then I'd prefer to be one whose son wrote Alice in Chains's "Rooster" about him. When I was a teen in…

I spent last week in Denmark at a friendly, informative and rather unusual conference. The thirteenth Castella Maris Baltici conference (“castles of the Baltic Sea”) was a moveable feast. In five days we slept in three different towns on Zealand and Funen and spent a sum of only two days presenting our research indoors. The rest of the time we rode a bus around the area and looked at castle sites and at fortifications, secular buildings, churches and a monastery in four towns. Our Danish hosts had planned all of this so well that the schedule never broke down. Add to this that the food and…

Spent Wednesday through Friday in Estonia at the kind invitation of Marge Konsa and the Institute of History and Archaeology in Tartu. Gave a lecture on computer-aided statistics for burial studies (here's my presentation), then went to Tallinn, where Jüri Peets and Raili Allmäe showed me the finds and horrifically battle-damaged bones from the two 8th century Swedish mass burials in ships at Salme on Saaremaa. Also had time to meet with my grad school buddy Marika Mägi and do a lot of sight-seeing. Pics on Flickr! The vibe in Estonia is optimistic and self-confident. Plaques about EU funding…

"Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people who take pictures, you know, carry a camera. Because if I did I'd have stacks and stacks and stacks of different acts." -Edwin Starr You've been outside enough to know that the deepest photos of the Universe -- of the night sky -- aren't quite the same thing you see when you open your gaze on even the darkest nights; there's often a lot more visible in the photos than there are to the unaided eye. As Earth, Wind & Fire would sing you (how's that for one from the vault), it might feel like you find yourself in a land called Fantasy. That's…

This is the view from the staff break room in the humanities building at the Kalmar campus of the Linnaeus University. To the lower left is the university building. I haven't been here much during the 14 months since I began my stint as some-time lecturer at Linnaeus. Most of my teaching has been at the other campus in Växjö. A few things surprise me about this break room. For instance, I am not used to having colleagues showing up and joining me for tea and a chat. It's nice! Also I haven't seen a training tower for sea captains anywhere else – top right in the picture. And perhaps most…

"...because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers." -Marissa Meyer Before you get irate, I don't actually agree at all with that quote above; I have no talent for photography at all and a tremendous respect for those who do, and who cultivate it to produce something beautiful. So this weekend, the most appropriate song I could find for you was by a group known as Camera Obscura, and their rather dark ballad, Your Picture. Why do I bring up photography today? Because one of my blog's biggest fans, Felicity, runs a fun little…

Damn, I must have ridden those very train carriages thousands of times! The crash happened just four stops up the commuter train line from where I live. My wife and I went there this morning with our camera. Details here. . Update 21 January: On the basis of first reports and information from a former railway employee, I thought this was an ostentatious suicide attempt. Now there are indications that it was a horrific accident caused by the unsanctioned habits of train drivers. Apparently they routinely jury-rig the safety apparatus for convenience, and in cold weather, to keep the brakes…

After a couple of months of testing, the results are in. I've attempted to wrestle with this issue on this blog before, but with unsatisfying results. PHS (Push Here Stupid) cameras can be tricky, for a number of reasons. A few years ago, my sister gave Julia a Sony, that new fancy digital camera with all sorts of bells and whistled. It took amazingly good photographs. But cameras in the same line that I've looked at later don't take photographs that are nearly as good. Why? In my opinion, because they are made by Sony. It seems to me that Sony is great at coming out with wonderful…

Early this morning this little guy found a really good crack in some wood where s/he could sleep during the day. Unfortunately the crack turned out to be the space between the gate to our yard and the door jamb, so all day the sleeper has been see-sawing to and fro as we have opened and closed the door. I don't know what kind of moth it is, only that it looks lovely. Can you identify it, Dear Reader? To narrow down the possibilities, note that this moth lives on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago at about N 59° 18', E 18° 15'. Update same evening: Johan Lundgren pinpointed the moth…

The NASA Mars rover Curiosity just landed on Mars. Those of us who tuned in vicariously via NASA's live coverage watched as a roomful of tense engineers exploded, and heard their disembodied voices whispering and booming through the control room. Holy shit. We did it. Their headsets fell askew, they glad-handed one another, criss-crossing the room, and then, immobilized by a sudden hush as the news spread: We've got thumbnails. Thumbnails. We watched as a tiny image formed, transmuted across the void of space and into this room. It was black and white, an indistinguishable gesture of light…

Last week my dad and his wife took us to Tärnskär, "Tern Island" again like three years ago. This time we looked closer at the lovely glacial abrasion features on the island's higher end.

  In 1993, convicted murderer Joseph Jernigan was executed in texas and his body donated to science. It was preserved in gelatin and sliced into 1,871 sections. Scans of these sections were strung together into an animation, and played back on a computer screen as it was swept across the field of a long-exposure camera shot. The result is these strange and haunting images of Jernigan's ghost, floating in the twilight. More images can be found here, created by Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott. Via Mo Costandi

Eurasian Jay, Garrulus glandarius, Sw. nötskrika, "nut screecher". Photographed in Fisksätra 6 April 2012.

Jules Verne, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie. Salade paysanne. Lardons, enfants de la patrie! Restaurant Les Pierres qui Roulent, "The Rolling Stones". Electrical filling stations are quite common in Paris. Carnyx trumpet, c. 3rd century BC, found in 2004 in a richly filled votive pit at a sanctuary at Tintignac in Limousin. Brass aquamanile. Meuse Valley, 1150-1200. Musée des arts décoratifs. King Solomon arbitrates between the two would-be mothers. Ebony cabinet, Paris, 1620s. Musée des arts décoratifs. One of the crucified brigands. Painted limestone retable. Champagne, c.…

The Dear Reader may remember that I recently reported from the hibernation grounds of the local yachting club. Here's a photograph from the same site, taken by my dad. It demonstrates why you might want to weigh the winter cover for your boat down with water tanks like everybody except this one member has.

I'm looking for a small (will always live in Amanda's purse) point and shoot camera and have so far narrowed the choices down to the following. Anybody have any advice on which one I should get (or an alternative, if you'd like to suggest one)? (Descriptions/details are from Amazon, for consistency) Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS 12.1 MP CMOS Digital Camera with Full 1080p HD Video (Silver) World's thinnest digital camera with a 24mm ultra Wide-Angle lens and 5x Optical Zoom and Optical Image Stabilizer. Canon's HS SYSTEM with a 12.1 MP CMOS and DIGIC 4 Image Processor improves shooting in low-…

Here's what's currently outside my kitchen window. Rosehip in the foreground, rowan berries in the middle, and cloned white brick houses like my own in the background.