This is an amazing NASA time-lapse movie of going around the world in 1-minute.
My Dilbert Idea
I heard someone in a meeting say that their committee acted as “an incubator of innovation for contributions to the value chain” and thought how perfect that would be as a Dilbert strip. So, I emailed Scott Adams with the idea…and he actually used it! Here is what he did with it:
Actual phrase from a meeting at my work.
Dr. Lustig and Fructose
This is a recent talk by Dr. Robert Lustig that I just ran across. I’m posting it here mainly so I can watch it myself later.
Robert Lustig, MD – The trouble with fructose: a Darwinian perspective from Ancestry on Vimeo.
There are no more secrets
My first Flash Project:
Surveillance Camera Apparition
My Y-Cam Security Camera emails photos whenever it senses motion on my porch. It is has been highly reliable and has never sent a false alarm in 5 months of use. These photos were captured in the pre-dawn hours of April 7, 2011. Each image is time-stamped and shows a weird bright apparition changing location and shape. I have absolutely no explanation for what this might be. I do believe it is a real object that has activated the camera and is not an optical illusion or camera malfunction. The 14 images are displayed as a slideshow. Note that there are several gaps of nearly an hour each between some of the photos. The porch is in absolute darkness except for the IR LEDs from the camera.
I welcome any comments and/or theories from anyone as to what is going on here in these images. Has anyone ever seen something like this before? I don’t believe it’s just a moth flying around because the camera does not detect small objects. I am totally baffled. This is absolutely not a hoax.
A Photogenic Banana Slug
I ran across this banana slug on my gravel driveway and took it’s photo with my Canon S95 camera in RAW format. The photo turned out to have very nice detail and made for an exceptionally interesting image. I thought I’d share it here (click on the image for the detailed full-size version):
A spectacular banana slug specimen
Communing with ducks and a fox
Here’s the ducks:
And here’s the fox:
Hiking with Bobcats
It seems that I’m encountering the same bobcat each time I hike up to Hiker’s Hut lately. This bobcat apparently lives in the nearby meadow and the park rangers have even named him “Old Sam.” On one hike, I watched him dive into a rabbit hole and come out with a rabbit.
Today, I brought along my Canon G9 compact hiking camera to get a better image than my usual iPhone and even got a short movie. I’ve posted it on YouTube and reposted it here:
Mountain Lion at McDonald Park
Here’s what I just wrote in La Honda Yahoo Groups:
I just got back from an exciting hike. I saw a mountain lion in the meadow on my way up to the Hiker’s Hut and decided it was not a good idea to walk by it again on the way down by myself. So I used my cell phone to call the ranger station to pick me up in their truck, since they’re only 10 minutes away. It only took about 30 minutes before 2 trucks with three rangers and two sheriff deputies (with high powered rifles) showed up. I also got a call from the fish and game dept while waiting. They gave me a ride back to my car at Heritage Grove. They said it was no problem that I called. I’ve seen coyote, bob cats, and foxes there before. This was a huge cat with a long tail and light colored chest. I blew my whistle at it and waved my arms. It just sat down (like a cat) and calmly looked at me. There were a couple deer nearby that it was more interested in. I had pepper spray with me, but decided to not take any chances at being a statistic.
Since writing this, I’ve been contacted by other hikers with accounts of their own close encounters with Mountain Lions.