I would love this for my home.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Monday, 23 August 2010
I happened to take a picture of each of the tunnels we traveled through yesterday from the Pittsburgh Airport Marriott where we stayed east to Harrisburg where we got off of the Pennsylvania turnpike to begin the southeastern slog to Delaware. As a bonus we took I376 through Pittsburgh so we got two extra tunnels to make up for the fact that we didn't drive hundreds of miles out of our way to go through the Lehigh tunnel, which is on the Northeastern Extension (I476), and definitely not on the way home to Delaware.
Fort Pitt Tunnel.
More Fort Pitt Bridge, and Pittsburgh.
Some cool wind turbines near Somerset, PA.
Some cool and huge electrical equipment on a truck.
Kittatinny Mountain and Blue Mountain are the double tunnels on the turnpike west of Harrisburg. You leave one and immediately enter the next.
After these tunnels we traveled over the Susquehanna river bridge which is not visually interesting, though the river below and the view of Three Mile Island is. However the best photography would come from stopping and taking a picture which would be too dangerous.
If you have a favorite tunnel from this photo essay, please comment.
We play the alphabet game when travelling sometimes. You must find a word on a sign or somewhere on the road that begins with each letter of the alphabet. Vehicles and buildings and generally anything but what is in our own car are allowed. We allow a one letter pass, but still you always risk getting stuck at Q or Z. That's why this sign would come in handy.
The post doesn't say where this is. Technically we would need to see words starting with these letters and at the correct time in the sequence, so I would need four of these signs. Daury Queen can help with the q, as can a Quit Smoking billboard. We allow the Nissan Xterra for X, and that car brand also supplies the very helpful Nissan Quest. I have never seen a xylophone sale on a billboard so X is usually my pass letter.
(via Neatorama, via The Litter Box)
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Saturday, 14 August 2010
Friday, 13 August 2010
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
The Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) is tall and flowering and was attracting butterflies, bees and spiders the other day (click photos for larger).
The butterfly is an Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), though I didn't get him to pose to show the swallowtail better. It is the state butterfly of Delaware.
The bee.
And a very interesting, but shy and hard to photograph bright yellow spider.
If you know what kind of spider this is please post in the comments.
The butterfly is an Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), though I didn't get him to pose to show the swallowtail better. It is the state butterfly of Delaware.
The bee.
And a very interesting, but shy and hard to photograph bright yellow spider.
If you know what kind of spider this is please post in the comments.
Zeit means time in German, and zeitgeist means the spirit of the times. Zeightgeist is misspelled.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
CAPTCHAs are designed to make you prove you are a human and to stop a computer program from contributing to comment spam or other bad behaviors. Neatorama has a link to some extremely difficult captchas that make you prove you are super human.
One of my favorites is:
Firstly, I assume they want the solution to the equation in the box, my Russian is non-existent. The equation isn't too difficult once you parse it. I think that the limit is ln(2), because arctan(x) goes to 0 while sin(1/x) can only bounce back and forth wildly between -1 and 1 as x grows. You can see that in the graph below (click for larger).
However, the square root won't like the parts of the function when sin(1/x) is negative, but if complex numbers using i are allowed and we make this a complex function you would still get to ln(2) eventually. The graph shows these blank areas on every oscillation as x gets smaller and smaller as you move left on the plot.
Probably we should expand the functions into Taylor series and then do the limit (maybe using L'Hopital's rule also) to get a more rigorous result. Coincidentally, it also goes to ln(2) when x goes to infinity, this time because sin(1/x) goes to zero, while the arctan of x is bounded between -pi and +pi.
Monday, 2 August 2010
BoingBoing points to the painstaking miniature graphite sculptures of Dalton Ghetti. The letters above (click for larger) are from his alphabet sculpted from the graphite in pencil leads. I copied and pasted the letters from the whole set below.
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