Saturday geometries

An older Portland peeks through the wood and steel beams in Director Park, where I was focused on not fainting while standing in line in 90-degree heat to register for the conference.

Much more to follow….

The Great Namaste

This year's world record attempt at the World Domination Summit: the world's longest yoga chain, currently held by a group in India.

We didn't sign up for this because it started at 8:30 and we knew we'd be getting in late the night before (little anticipating how late it would actually turn out to be.) But our hotel overlooks Pioneer Square and I took this picture of the new record holders on my way to a badly needed recaffeinization session in the hotel restaurant.

Portland

Portland at last.

I think they need to add a zero or two to that Times Square distance marker. Technically, that may have been the miles traveled, but after a five hour delay due to mechanical problems followed by delays waiting for our replacement plane to arrive, we didn't land in Portland until after 3 am, and it was after 4 before I fell asleep.

There was a beautiful moon, huge, golden, almost full, setting over the Willamette as we drove into the city. Or maybe I was just hallucinating from lack of sleep. Either way, it was spectacular.

The opposite of interesting...

…is sitting in an airport an hour after your flight was supposed to have departed, with ongoing mechanical difficulties having postponed your departure indefinitely.

Jayne and I are waiting in the lounge, where we are slowly eating our way through the assortment of free snacks, so it definitely could be worse, but it will be long after midnight before we get to Portland.

Urban poetry

Tomorrow I'm going to Oregon, for the 2014 World Domination Summit in Portland, followed by a few days at the coast.

So before I start getting too mellow, here's a very New York piece of public art: a closeup of the 1938 Noguchi relief, called News, on the old AP building in Rockefeller Center.

Astronomy Tuesday

Orion rising.

And doing a handstand at the same time. This picture of Orion rising above the Earth's horizon is upside down for those of us used to seeing the hunter from the Northern Hemisphere. You can see the three stars in the belt through the Earth's atmosphere, and above them is the sword. The bright star on the upper left is Rigel, the blue-white supergiant (actually a triple star system, only one of which is a blue-white supergiant) sitting on Orion's knee. (The bright star over to the right of Orion in this picture is Sirius.)

For some reason I find an inverted Orion more disorienting than the rotated moon I saw in the Southern Hemisphere a few years ago. I know I saw Orion in Africa as well; we looked at the nebula through binoculars from the deck of our lodge in Zambia. But it was already overhead, and with all of the unfamiliar stars we were seeing for the first time, I never noticed that the constellations were doing cartwheels around the upside-down moon.

Image Credit: NASA, ISS Expedition 40, Reid Wiseman

Sunday bird blogging

Red white and blue birds for the holiday weekend.

These are the two morphs, or variants, of the red-footed booby, the common brown and the rarer white. The white booby makes an appropriate Fourth of July bird, even if it's from Ecuador.

Saturday reflections

This seems to go with the picture from the Apple store -- overlapping shapes and reflections from an atrium in Chicago.

Adventures in consumerism

The staircase at the Apple store on 14th Street in New York.

This is my first iPhone picture -- cropped, and tweaked a little in Photoshop, but as good as a lot of pictures I've taken with high-end point and shoots. I'm not surprised; the National Geographic photographer on the trip to the Galapagos last year was experimenting with iPhone photography and took some beautiful pictures with his phone.

But I don't really need another camera. Or, more accurately, I really don't need another camera. And I don't need a phone. My employer gives me a Blackberry, and it's more than sufficient for the little use I make of a mobile phone. I did want another music player since my iPod was stolen last year, but I haven't been in any great hurry to replace it. So although I decided several months ago that having a phone to replace my iPod and provide a decent camera that I'd always have with me meant that I would probably be buying an iPhone, it was low on the list of priorities, somewhere around Rent a storage locker for off-season clothes and Learn to make spaeztle.

(I'm also put off by the way the gadget-obsessed have turned Apple products into an embarrassing fetish. I actually know people -- real people, with brains and everything -- who find owning a new model of iPhone on the day it comes out absolutely necessary to their health and happiness. I like Apple. I'm typing this on a MacBook. But if you asked me which particular model I own, of just about anything, I couldn't tell you.)

So it was ironic that when I finally went to Apple last weekend and said, basically, "Fine! I give up! Give me an iPhone!" they said No. I'd picked out the phone, picked out the storage capacity, picked out the data plan, picked out the protective case. All that was left was paying for everything and activating the phone, and the carrier, who shall remain nameless here (hint: rhymes with horizon) said, We don't think so. They needed more information first and they'd get back to me within 48 hours.

I'm going to skip over the tedious approval process that ensued. First World problems. White Whines. Affluent consumers deprived of their toys. Finally I passed muster, and I went back to Apple yesterday to pick up my iPhone -- which, honestly, was looking much more desirable now that no one wanted to let me buy one -- and found that I had to start the entire process from scratch. Pick a phone. Pick a plan. Pick a case. I actually cried.

I think it's only fitting that when I used Siri for the first time, trying to create a reminder to pick up my laundry by 7 tomorrow,  pick up laundry became pick up one drink.

As if one would be enough.

Red white and blue

Here's another picture of the rusty, peeling train tracks in Chicago, done up in red, white and blue for the holiday.

Urban poetry

Patterns of light on the underside of the elevated tracks in Chicago.

Astronomy Tuesday

You may have seen this picture already, but I couldn't resist including it: a new selfie from Mars.

This picture of the Curiosity rover, commemorating one Martian year (687 Earth days) spent exploring the planet, was taken the old-fashioned way: Curiosity balanced a camera on a rock, set the self-timer, then ran back to pose and smile just as the shutter went off.

As if! No one takes selfies like that anymore. Curiosity extended its robotic arm and used the camera on the end, just like a teenage girl taking a picture with her phone to post on Facebook. This photo is actually a mosaic of dozens of different shots, excluding any that showed the arm, so the illusion of the camera on the rock -- or the assistance of a passing Martian -- is still there.

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS