Awesome
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From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium
Hollywood Park Racetrack is gone. In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, named after the racetrack. Wikipedia says the park— consists of over 8.5 million square feet (790,000 m2)… Continue reading
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Idea: Woodstock vs. TED.
So I just read about “a 50th anniversary Woodstock celebration that would include TED-style talks.” Details here and here in the Gothamist. This celebration doesn’t have the Woodstock name, but it does have the place, now called the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. Since the Woodstock name belongs to folks planning the other big Woodstock 50th birthday party, this… Continue reading
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A miracle of flight
That was the view to the south from 31,000 feet above the center of Greenland a few hours ago: a late afternoon aurora over a blue dusk. According to my little hand-held GPS, we were around here: “11/10/17, 11:48:32 AM” “2.4 mi” “0:00:16” “538 mph” “30072 ft” “283° true” “N70° 56′ 10.4″ W38° 52′ 59.1″”. That’s about four… Continue reading
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Everybody should have a surprise birthday party as surreal and wonderful as this one
The scene above is what greeted me when I arrived at what I expected to be a small family dinner last night: dozens of relatives and old friends, all with of my face. For one tiny moment, I thought I might be dead, and loved ones were gathered to greet me. But the gates weren’t pearly. They… Continue reading
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Watch Jesus this weekend
Every year about this time I lament the absence of a good copy of Franco Zefferelli‘s Jesus of Nazareth, which aired as a mini-series on low-def TV in 1977, though it was surely filmed in at least 35mm stock. But this year, to my amazement, there is an HD version on YouTube. It seems to… Continue reading
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Falling in love again with ancient audio gear
Back when I was a freshman in college, I tried to build what was already legendary audio gear: a Dynaco PAS-3X preamplifier, and a Stereo 35 power amplifier. Both were available only as kits, and I screwed them up. I mean, I wasn’t bad with a soldering iron, but I sucked at following directions. So my cousin… Continue reading
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Blogging all over the place
People are asking me why I blog so little these days. Fact is, I blog as much as ever. Just not all here. For example, there’s Linux Journal. My latest there is Privacy is Personal. A good one, I think. Then there’s the ProjectVRM blog. The best recent post there is If your voice comes… Continue reading
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This is why you want a window seat
I’ve seen auroras on red-eyes between the U.S. and Europe before. This one over Lake Superior, for example, on a July night in 2007. And this one over Greenland in September 2012. But both of those were fairly dim. Sunday night’s red-eye was different. This one was a real show. And I almost missed it. First, my window seat… Continue reading
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Every thing has a face, and vice versa
That line came to me a few minutes ago, as I looked and read through the latest photographic blog posts by Stephen Lewis in his blog, Bubkes). This one… … titled Farmyard, Grandmother, Chicken, and Ovid in Exile, is accompanied by richly detailed text, including this: The courtyard in the photo no longer exists; it and and… Continue reading
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#10books that changed my life
There’s a challenge going around Facebook: to name ten books that have changed your life. So I’ve thought about my own, and kept a running list here in draft form. Now that it’s close enough to publish, methinks, here they are, in no order, and not limited to ten (or to Facebook) — War and… Continue reading
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Something beyond perfection
I last visited Barcelona more than twenty years ago. Back then the Sagrada Família was already impressive, but also incomplete. All that stood were the nativity façade and some small number (four? eight?) of the Sagrada’s eventual eighteen towers. I recall nothing of the interior, perhaps because there was none. In many ways, in fact,… Continue reading
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The Holy Mountain of Montserrat
To an window-sitter accustomed to flying over the American West, Catalonia from altitude looks like Utah. On the northern horizon the Pyrenees, like the Uintahs, run east-west above a dry landscape of settled alluvium, much of it reddish as the San Rafael desert. While the shapes of the ancient towns below are clearly old world in… Continue reading
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Loving the Alps of Los Angeles
I orient by landmarks. When I was growing up in New Jersey, the skyline of New York raked the eastern sky. To the west were the Watchung “Mountains“: hills roughly half the height of Manhattan’s ranking skyscrapers. But they gave me practice for my favorite indulgence here in Los Angeles: multi-angulating my ass in respect to… Continue reading
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Plug your car into the rest of your life
Your late-model car knows a lot more than its dashboard tells you. It knows how fast you’ve been going on every trip, your fuel mileage, your tire pressures and much more. It even knows what your engine light really means — before it comes on. In fact your car has hundreds of sensors with interesting… Continue reading
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A good word for a good cause
@BlakeHunskicer has a kickstarter project, Fleeing the War at Home: An interactive documentary introducing the crisis in Syria through the personal histories and dreams of Syrian refugees, with a few days and a few thousand dollars left to go. Blake is one of the graduate students I got to know this last year as a visiting… Continue reading
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Springing in Paris
That’s the Parc de la Villette, also variously known as Parc La Villette, Parc Villette, or just Villette, here in Paris. I shot it two days ago, when we got here and the weather was clear. It got cloudy and wet after that. But it looks like things will clear up for::::: From the About… Continue reading
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And Earth is a bigger target
A comet is headed for Mars. Now approaching at 125,000 miles per hour, it will explode with the force of 35 million megatons of TNT if it hits. That’s a third the size of the collision that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which famously erased the dinosaurs and ended the Mesozoic, around 66 Million B.C. It… Continue reading
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Flying into New York at night
The conditions were what pilots call “severe clear” from Charlotte to New York on Thursday night. I made sure (paying $44 to USAirways) that I had a window seat on the left side, and had a perfect view through an imperfect window of nearly every city and town from Charlotte to New York. Rolling by… Continue reading
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An evening above Toronto
Thanks to my hosts with the Conference Board of Canada, I got some excellent quality time in Toronto this week, including drinks and dinner, respectively, at the Horizons bar and the rotating 360 restaurant at the 1500-foot level of the CN Tower. Of course, being the aerial photography freak that I am, I took a… Continue reading