Pictures
drorzel | October 15, 2007This is the famous carving of the Three Wise Monkeys on the stable at the Nikko Tosho-gu:
Looking at that suggests a possible question for a non-dorky poll, analogous to the dork classic "what superpower would you want?":
If you could go through life either seeing no evil, hearing no evil, or speaking no evil, which would you pick?
(It's non-dorky because it's a question of ethics and morals, and there's nothing dorky about ethics and morals...)
It would sort of depend in the mechanism by which evil went unseen or unheard-- if it involved some sort of evil suppression field in your…
drorzel | October 13, 2007Here's another installment in the payoff for Rajesh Vaidya's donation. This is one of a bunch of pictures Kate took of me and Emmy playing on the floor:
This sort of looks like it ought to be a scene from one of our physics conversations, so here's my lame attempt at a caption:
I'm sure somebody out there can do a lot better than that, though, so have at it.
drorzel | October 13, 2007It's Saturday, and it's Homecoming weekend at Union, so I'll be over on campus watching sporting events for a good chunk of the day. That means it's a perfect time to pay off another blog purchase, this one from Rajesh Vaidya who asked for LOLEmmys, at least five pictures worth.
There are two problems with this request: First, the Queen of Niskayuna is much too dignified to speak in LOLCat. More importantly, though, I'm not very good at coming up with these. However, that's why I have clever readers. So, here's a picture:
And here's my lame attempt at a caption:
I'm sure somebody out there…
drorzel | October 6, 2007It's as good an explanation as any for this:
I'm not sure what this particular bit of Engrish is advertising, but I like the poster. It was hanging on a wall in Kamakura when we visited there in the pouring rain.
The original image, and 140 other pictures from Kamakura, can be found in this Flickr photoset.
drorzel | September 30, 2007
"Dude, what is your deal?"
"What? I'm just taking a couple of pictures."
"A couple? You've taken, like, forty pictures of me already today. You're cramping my style. I'm trying to go for a walk, here. I've got bushes to sniff, lawns to pee on, critters to chase-- I don't have time for photography."
"Sorry, but you remember that book contract?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm obliged to provide them with a number of reproduction-quality photographs of you, for possible use as chapter illustrations."
"Oh." She's quiet for a minute. "So, these are going to be published?"
"Maybe."
"Well, then, at least make…
drorzel | September 30, 2007The selection of a smaller subject area for viewing, and the contrast between the dim interior and the bright exterior really enhance the aesthetic experience of the garden:
What?
That's a picture of the garden at Koto-in, a subtemple of Daitoku-ji in northwest Kyoto, cropped down a bit from the original in this set of pictures. You can also get something of the same effect from a pure outdoor shot:
In this case, a shot through the upper gate at Ninna-ji, also in northwest Kyoto, and part of the same photoset.
drorzel | September 27, 2007The Silver Pavilion:
The Golden Pavilion:
Which do you like better?
I actually have much better pictures of the Golden Pavilion (which can be seen at Flickr), but this is about as good as the Silver Pavilion shots get (see this set), so to make it a fair comparison, I went with the picture above. I'm also inordinately amused by pictures of other people taking pictures of stuff.
To answer a question raised in the previous poll, this is "non-dorky" because it's about making aesthetic judgements, not science stuff. As any smarmy art history major can tell you, science is for dorks, and dorks…
drorzel | September 25, 2007A simple question: We have the Great Buddha at Nara:
and the Great Buddha at Kamakura:
Which is better?
(Unfortunately, that's the best picture I have of the Nara Daibutsu. The camera has a million different modes, selected by a clicky wheel on the top, and the wheel kept getting spun to odd settings as I put the camera in and out of the case. The other shots I took in Nara were all blurry, because it was on some low-light-level setting and took really long exposures.)
drorzel | September 23, 2007Some time back, I proposed a contest:
The person who comes closest to the actual number [of pictures taken in Japan] without going over will win something cheap and tacky from Japan that I will buy before I leave.
I haven't fogotten about this, I've just been too busy to do all that much with the pictures. But we do have a winner, of this priceless artifact:
The total number of pictures I took on the trip was 1,508 (or, at least, that's the total number I ended up with-- I distinctly remember taking some pictures at one temple in northwest Kyoto, but they're not on either of the memory…
drorzel | September 23, 2007At dinner with my parents last night, we were talking about the dinners at Sumiyoshi, the ryokan we stayed at in Takayama. I haven't gotten around to uploading those pictures yet, but I dug this one out:
It's not the best picture of Kate, but she does provide a sense of scale... It was a great meal-- sashimi, tempura, beef cooked at the table, fish, pickles, miso soup, and probably some other things I'm forgetting.
There was also this from the next morning:
Which really just begs to be captioned "I Can Has Toaster," but discretion is the better part of valor.
Breakfast was served in the…
drorzel | September 22, 2007The city of Nara, near Kyoto, is full of temples and shrines dating back to the eigth centruy, when it was briefly the capital of Japan. One of the largest shrines in the city, the Kasuga Taisha shrine, is dedicated to deities that use deer as their sacred messengers.
As a result, deer are allowed to roam freely in Nara, and there are times when you can almost believe that they are sacred messengers of the gods:
Other times, not so much:
(The top picture shows a deer reclining next to the stone marker at the entrance of Todai-ji Temple, which houses the Great Buddha. The bottom picture was…
drorzel | September 12, 2007Two words: Beef Sushi
This was bought at a stand in Takayama, which takes a lot of pride in the local beef (which was, indeed, excellent). I'm not sure it's completely raw-- another place had a poster showing similar sushi pieces being roasted with a blowtorch, but alas, they were closed for renovations. I couldn't see exactly how this was prepared, but the color here mostly comes from a thick soy-sauce glaze put on the meat before it was served.
Even if it wasn't actually raw, it was certainly extremely rare. And goooooood....
drorzel | August 16, 2007One final vacation picture: what with all the snorkeling and boat-chartering and hiking, I was starting to worry that I might seem too cool to be a physicist. There was a chance that I might meet somebody, and not have them realize immediately what I do for a living.
At the same time, my Northern European heritage doesn't exactly put me in a great position for dealing with intense tropical sun. After a day or two, I noticed that my scalp was strting to sunburn, through my hair. So I needed a hat of some sort.
I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and looked long and hard to find a hat…
drorzel | August 11, 2007Our vacation in the Virgin Islands was with family, so we spent most of our time in a group of six people, and there was no small element of cat-herding involved in getting things arranged. This tends to drive me up the wall, so I made a point of spending one morning doing something that didn't require me to wait on anybody else: I hiked the Caneel Hill Trail:
(The sign in the picture is actually near the end of the hike that I did, but it shows the trail clearly.)
The trail really starts in Cruz Bay, but I picked it up where it intersects the Lind Point Trail, just up the hill from where we…
drorzel | August 9, 2007I should preface this with a note that I am one of the world's worst nature photographers. I don't have a very fancy camera, and I'm not terribly good at spotting critters at the best of times, so my best pictures are of relatively immobile creatures like the crab in yesterday's post. Still, I find myself trying to take pictures of lots of animals and bird, and here's a selection of what I got from St. John. The vast majority of these are birds, for whatever reason, such as these pelicans off Lovango Key:
(click for larger image). Pelicans on land or in the water are ridiculous, ungainly-…
drorzel | August 8, 2007
The "Ankle-Breaker Crab" (Coenobita iversonii) is a species of carnivorous land crab found in the Caribbean Islands. It closely resembles the ordinary Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus), but is distinguished from its more common cousin by its habit of living in special titanium-reinforced shells, and its diet, which consists primarily of hikers.
Coenobita iversonii are most commonly found at altitudes of 150 m or more above sea level, living in colonies of 100 or more in the underbrush near hiking trails. They are the only arthropod known to feed primarily on humans, and they hunt…
drorzel | August 7, 2007Here's the second in a series of vacation-picture posts, this one providing pretty much what you would expect of a vacation in the Caribbean: it's all about the beaches, baby:
Well, actually, our trip to the Virgin Islands was really mostly about the snorkeling:
but you don't get a lot of really good pictures from that (not without an underwater camera, which I don't have), and anyway, on St. John you mostly snorkel from the beach...
The beach shown above is Honeymoon Beach, a ten-minute hike from Estate Lindholm, and it's pretty much everything you expect from a Caribbean beach: soft white…
drorzel | August 6, 2007I took a rather large number of pictures on the recent trip, and I'm very happy with at least some of them. I'm uploading the raw images to Flickr, but I'm also cropping and tweaking them in GIMP for posting here. Because, well, it's my blog, and if I want to try to make you all jealous of my tropical vacation, I can do that.
This is the first post in what will be a series of vacation-picture posts, from our recent trip to St. John in the US Virgin Islands. This time out, I'll just talk about where we stayed, just outside of Cruz Bay:
Our rooms were at Estate Lindholm, a small B&B on a…
drorzel | August 5, 2007Because for the past week, this has been the view from my balcony:
We're back in the Capital District now, after a travel day about which the less said the better, but for a week there, damn, life was good.
drorzel | June 22, 2007Here's my achievement for the week:
OK, that may not seem like much, but this is what it looked like before I started:
OK, that's not really my only accomplishment for the week-- I have three students for the first half of the summer (two of them for the whole summer), and all three got off to good starts on their summer projects this week. That's why it's taken me a whole week to clean my office-- I've been run ragged getting them all going, and keeping on top of their progress.
Still, the important papers have been filed, the unimportant ones recycled, and the trash taken away. Time to…