Here’s what flying in and out of Newark looks like right now:
That storm is very heavy, but narrow. It’s going to wash over New York like a big wave.
Hat tip to Flightaware.
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Here’s what flying in and out of Newark looks like right now:
That storm is very heavy, but narrow. It’s going to wash over New York like a big wave.
Hat tip to Flightaware.
I’ve been fascinated for years by what comes and goes at the Fort Irwin National Training Center—
—in the Mojave Desert, amidst the dark and colorful Calico Mountains of California, situated in the forbidding nowhere that stretches between Barstow and Death Valley.
Here and there, amidst the webwork of trails in the dirt left by tanks, jeeps and other combat vehicles, fake towns and other structures go up and come down. So, for example, here is Etrebat Shar, a fake town in an “artificial Afghanistan” that I shot earlier this month, on June 2:
And here is a broader view across the desert valley east of Fort Irwin itself:
Look to the right of the “town.” See that area where it looks like something got erased? Well, it did. I took the two shots above earlier this month, on June 2. Here’s a shot of the same scene on June 25, 2013:
Not only is the “town” a bit bigger, but there’s this whole other collection of walls and buildings, covering a far larger area, to the right, or east.
I also see in this shot that it was gone on December 8, 2014.
Now I’m fascinated by this town and the erased something-or-other nearby, which I also shot on June 2:
It appears to be “Medina Wasl,” which Wikipedia says is one of twelve towns built for desert warfare training:
One of the features of the base is the presence of 12 mock “villages” which are used to train troops in Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) prior to their deployment. The villages mimic real villages and have variety of buildings such as religious sites, hotels, traffic circles, etc. filled with foreign language speaking actors portraying government officials, local police, local military, villagers, street vendors, and insurgents. The largest two are known as Razish and Ujen, the closest located about 30 minutes from the main part of the post. Most of the buildings are created using intermodal containers, stacked to create larger structures, the largest village consists of 585 buildings that can engage an entire brigade combat team into a fight.
Now I’m slowly going through my other shots over the years to see if I can find Razish and Ujen… if they haven’t been erased.
It would be cool to hear from military folk familiar with Fort Irwin, or veterans who have worked or fought mock battles in those towns.
Once, in the early ’80s, on a trip from Durham to some beach in North Carolina, we stopped to use the toilets at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. In the stall where I sat was a long conversation, in writing, between two squatters debating some major issue of the time. Think of the best back-and-forth you’ve ever read in a comment thread and you’ll get a rough picture of what this was like.
So I sat there, becoming engrossed and amazed at the high quality of the dialog — and the unlikelihood of it happening where it was.
Until I got to the bottom. There, ending the conversation, were the penultimate and ultimate summaries, posed as a question and answer:
Q: Why do people feel compelled to settle their differences on bathroom walls?
A. Because you suck my dick.
That story became legendary in our family and social network, to such a degree that my then-teenage daughter and her girlfriends developed a convention of saying “Because you suck my dick” whenever an argument went on too long and wasn’t going anywhere. This was roughly the same as dropping a cow: a way to end a conversation with an absurdity.
The whole thing came back to me when I read Pro-Trump Chalk Messages Cause Conflicts on College Campuses in the NYTimes today. The story it suggests is that this kind of thing regresses toward a mean that is simply mean. Or stupid. For example,
Wesleyan University issued a moratorium in 2003, after members of the faculty complained that they were being written about in sexually explicit chalk messages.
So I’m thinking we need a name for this, or at least an initialism. So I suggest BYSMD.
You’re welcome.
At the uptown end of the 59th Street/Columbus Circle subway platform there hangs from the ceiling a box with three disks on fat stalks, connected by thick black cables that run to something unseen in the downtown direction. Knowing a few things about radio and how it works, I saw that and thought, Hmm… That has to be a cell. I wonder whose? So I looked at my phone and saw my T-Mobile connection had five dots (that’s iPhone for bars), and said LTE as well. So I ran @Ookla‘s Speedtest app and got the results above.
Pretty good, no?
Sure, you’re not going to binge-watch anything there, or upload piles of pictures to some cloud, but you can at tug on your e-tether to everywhere for a few minutes. Nice to have.
So I’m wondering, @TMobile… Are those speeds the max one should expect from LTE when your local cell is almost as close as your hat?
And how long before you put these along the rest of the A/B/C/D Train routes? (The only other one I know is at 72nd, a B/C stop.) Or the rest of the subway system? In Boston too? BART? (Gotta hit all my cities.)
Meanwhile, thanks for taking care of my Main Stop in midtown.
Tags: @Ookla, @TMobile, infrastructure, internet, mobile, new york, research, RF, speedtest, subway, telephony
Made a dawn run to the nearby Peets for some dry cappuccinos, and was bathed in glow on my return by one of the most spectacular sunrises I have ever seen. It was post-peak when I got back (to the place where I’m staying in Gold River, California), but with some underexposure and white balance tweaking, I was able to get the shots in this set here.
Alas, the shot above is not in that set. It’s a screen shot I took of an adjusted raw file that Adobe Photoshop CS6 simply refused to save. “The file could not be created,” it said. No explanation. I checked permissions. No problem there. It just refused. I just checke, and the same thing happens with all files from all directories on all drives. Photoshop is suddenly useless to for editing RAW files. Any suggestions?
[Later…] An Adobe forum provided the answer here. All better now.
One of the things that fascinates me about Prague are the skewers atop the spires of its many iconic buildings, each of which pierces a shiny ball. It’s a great look.
I am sure there’s a reason for those things, other than the look itself.
I am also sure there is a word for the ball. The skewer too.
I know it’s not spire, because that labels any conical or tapered point on the roof of a building. Prague is said to be the city of a hundred, or a thousand, spires. Most of those have these balls too, and I’ve become obsessed, while I’m here, with finding out what the hell they’re called.
I’m sure more than a few people out there on the lazyweb know. So tell me.
Thank you.
I travel a lot, and buy newspapers wherever I happen to be. That would be true online as well, if I could do it. But I can’t, because that’s not an option.
For example, my butt is in California right now, but my nose is in Boston, where I’m reading the Globe. I don’t want a subscription to the Globe, but I would like to pay for today’s paper, or for at least the right to read a few stories from it.
Not easy. Or even possible, after the first one or two. Because, soon enough this paywall thingie comes up:
It’ a subscription come-on, modeled after the one the New York Times has been using for years, and I wrote about back in 2012, here. (The switch after the above bait: “$.99*… *That’s less than $1 for 4 full weeks! Then pay the regular low rate of $3.99 per week.”)
I had some advice for the Times at that last link, and I’ve got some for all papers today: create an à la carte option. I know there are lots of reasons not to, all of which arise from system-based considerations on the sell side of the relationship with newspaper buyers.
What I’m saying is that the newsstand option has worked fine for more than a century in the physical world, and should be an option in the networked one as well.
At least think about it. Constructively, as in Let’s see… how can we do that? Not “It’s too hard.” Or “People only want free stuff.” Those are all echoes inside the old box. I want us to think and work outside of that box.
People are willing to pay value for value if it’s easy. So let’s make it easy. The ideas I vetted three years ago are still good, but don’t cover the à la carte option. Let’s just focus on that one, and consider what’s possible.
Here’s a hunk of what one set (aka Album) in my Flickr stream looks like:
And here are what my stats on Flickr looked like earlier today (or yesterday, since Flickr is on GMT and it’s tomorrow there):
I ended up with 32,954 views, with no one of my 49,000+ photos getting more than 56 views. More than 95% of those views arrived via Flickr itself. The stats there are spread across 87 pages of results. Pages 1 to 63 go from 395 views (#1) down to 2. From page 64 to 87, all the results are for 1 view.
I just pulled the searches alone, and got this:
1 |
395 |
|
2 |
307 |
|
3 |
206 |
41 |
164 |
48 |
143 |
|
49 |
139 |
51 |
138 |
56 |
134 |
|
57 |
134 |
75 |
113 |
79 |
108 |
87 |
A contact’s home page |
100 |
88 |
100 |
92 |
95 |
95 |
93 |
|
96 |
93 |
102 |
90 |
107 |
86 |
110 |
83 |
|
111 |
82 |
130 |
70 |
|
131 |
69 |
139 |
63 |
144 |
61 |
153 |
58 |
|
154 |
57 |
165 |
54 |
|
166 |
54 |
|
167 |
53 |
169 |
53 |
171 |
51 |
173 |
51 |
|
174 |
50 |
178 |
50 |
|
179 |
50 |
184 |
49 |
189 |
47 |
203 |
41 |
39 |
211 |
39 |
|
212 |
39 |
216 |
38 |
220 |
37 |
221 |
37 |
225 |
37 |
229 |
36 |
235 |
34 |
239 |
33 |
244 |
32 |
249 |
31 |
251 |
31 |
|
252 |
31 |
262 |
29 |
264 |
29 |
|
265 |
29 |
269 |
28 |
272 |
28 |
|
273 |
28 |
|
274 |
28 |
|
275 |
27 |
|
276 |
27 |
284 |
26 |
287 |
26 |
300 |
24 |
The numbers on the left are where they fall in the order of popularity. I think the last one means there were 24 searches for roads aerial desert, which was the #300 search.
When I go to the bottom of the pile where all are tied with just one view, I get this stuff:
1 |
||
1 |
||
1 |
1 |
||
1 |
||
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
||
1 |
||
1 |
||
1 |
||
1 |
||
1 |
||
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
||
1 |
1 |
||
1 |
1 |
||
1 |
1 |
1 |
||
1 |
Most of the results are not searches, but photos, or photos that are “with” another shot. For example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/with/9382370440/. Somehow all those are “with” this shot: https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/9382370440/.
I think that means somebody searches, finds a shot, and looks for other shots like it. Not sure, though.
What I am sure about is that my photos get more action than my writing. I never meant it that way, but there it is.