Category: Photos
-
Air and Light: My favorite outdoor photos from the last few years
I seem to like close-up photography and patterns.
-
Fix It or Use It: What to do when something brakes
Unlike some other stuff on the inside of bathroom walls, this one is amusing for the intended reasons.
-
Anemones: They look like they’re from another planet
There are no better places than tide pools to find alien-like creatures. Sea anemones are predatory animals, but you wouldn’t know it looking at them.
-
Elephant Seals: Men should try not to be like them
Animals don’t exist as cautionary tales for humans, but if they did, elephant seals would’ve clearly been created to tell men how not to behave. This time of the year, elephant seals gather on California beaches, separated from humans by yellow plastic tape and stern warnings not to approach them.…
-
All’s Whale That Ends Whale
The stuff guys will scrawl on the inside of bathroom stalls…
-
Greece
To get to my hotel in Athens, I had to pass through a crowd composed entirely of prostitutes trying to get my attention. Many of them looked like they were from North Africa. I was 23 years old and they clearly thought they had a chance. I was curious but…
-
Wood Swirl
A piece of wood that reminded me of van Gogh’s Starry Night. Nature imitating art, once again.
-
Great Argus
Charles Darwin included an illustration of the feathers of the great argus pheasant in The Descent of Man. The pattern on great argus feathers seem to depict three-dimensional “pebbles“, showing the extent to which sexual selection will go.
-
Three Days by the Lake
For three days, I went to a small lake in the Sierras. There was a dirt track that went in for 30 minutes. The lake had no designated campsites, but there were a few fire pits. I parked my SUV next to one. I didn’t make a fire, because it…
-
Travel Tools
This is a small bag I keep in my car’s glove compartment. I’ve used the tools and repair materials it contains often enough that I consider it an excellent investment. A multitool like the Leatherman would have similar functionality, but I like the idea of having dedicated tools if space…
-
Two Notes
Two notes, one passive aggressive, the other one just aggressive. The passive aggressive I found on a vandalized hiking and mountain biking trail in Tahoe National forest. The vandalizing had clearly been done by the author of the note. The other note I found in my neighborhood. I prefer the…
-
Trash Panda
Someone took the term trash panda too literally when they designed this.
-
Meadows
This is a mountain meadow in Lower Austria. Comparable meadows in the Sierra Nevada have fewer wildflowers and fewer insects, both in terms of absolute count and in terms of the number of species. The advantage Sierra Nevada meadows have is their wilderness, especially those that have never been grazed…
-
Pictures of the Atelier
During my current stay in Austria, I’m spending a few days in a vacation home in the South of the country. It’s the same house my mom and stepfather spent our summers in when I was a kid, and it’s been mostly unoccupied since. My stepfather was an artist, and…
-
A Bold Choice
Pandemic 2020 is the name of a cafe I encountered recently while walking around Vienna. I wasn’t brave enough to enter, which I now regret, because I’d like to know what kind of person chooses such a name for their business. Two more photos from the same trip:
-
Let Us Make You Fat
Being fat used to be something to aspire to. “It Is No Longer Necessary to Be Thin, Scrawny and Undeveloped.” Here are more ads from the early 20th century.
-
Using My Phone as a Microscope
My phone camera beats any magnifying glass. Here are photos of some bugs I encountered on a California beach today. They were 1-5 mm long yet my camera captured them adequately. The background may look like pebbles it’s actually grains of sand.
-
Medium-Message Discordance
There’s something about the medium and the message disagreeing that tickles me. Maybe one day I’ll make signs that say “Brotherhood” in pink, surrounded by cute little flowers, or “Form follows function” in Comic Sans.
-
Bumper Stickers I’ve Known and Liked
Americans don’t have opinions, they have bumper stickers Rich Hall Last summer, I finally found my favorite bumper sticker on an incredibly dilapidated truck I was stuck behind in heavy traffic. We were moving so slowly I was able to take a photo. The sticker says Tengo novia – I…
-
Mushrooms Making Waves
I believe this is turkey tail mushroom (Trametes versicolor). The water in the background is Bon Tempe Lake in Marin county, California.
-
Yearning From Above
I’m on a plane. This morning, I woke up in a Sheraton hotel room and this afternoon I’ll be in a corporate office with a glass wall on one side, a white board with week-old diagrams in blue and green on the other, and my desk in between. Looking out…
-
Arabian Nights
Here are some beautiful illustrations by Franz Xaver Simm from an old (likely late 1800s) German edition of 1001 Nights:
-
Needle Ice
This is needle ice, which I observed growing out of the ground the morning of September 12th next to a backcountry lake in Yosemite National Park at 9,370 feet. More on the phenomenon here.
-
Insufficiently Fractal
I’ve just come back from a week of backpacking in the Sierra Nevada. The first day we got altitude sickness, by the second day my lips became so dry they cracked, we didn’t bring enough whiskey to last us beyond the third evening, by the fourth evening all we had…
-
Madaus
A few years ago, my uncle gave me an old book created by the German pharmaceutical company Madaus, which is nowadays part of Rottapharm Biotech, to celebrate their 50th birthday. There is no publication date, but since Madaus was founded in 1919, it’s probably from 1969. The book’s visual style also fits that era.…
-
Long Trails
The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. I was curious if someone has made a list of long-distance hiking trails, and of course the answer is yes. Worldwide, there are 46 trails longer than 1,000 kilometers that are passing through mostly wild areas with…
-
I Put my Toaster in the Dishwasher
A 2012 blog post recently dug out by Slime Mold Time Mold points out that It is very difficult to discern the difference between Conventional Wisdom and Conventional Ignorance. For example, it may be fine to put a toaster in a dishwasher, despite everyone with a shred of common sense…
-
Two Good Lakes
I like people but I don’t like crowds. I don’t actually mind crowds either if they don’t cause congestion. Some crowding in a subway station is fine as long as it doesn’t result in me not getting on a train. I don’t mind busy city streets as long as I…
-
Ads from 1909
Here are some ads from the March 1909 edition of Sunset Magazine. This poor fellow doesn’t get attention from the ladies because they prefer to listen to the gramophone instead of his awkward attempts at conversation. Bay Area cities used to beg people to move there. This was before the…
-
Kokopelli
He pops up in the most unexpected places. I’ve seen him on rocks, on traffic signs, on clothing. Here he is on the side of an excavator.
-
Free Bumper Stickers!
I’m worried that people could assume that I’m insecure, even though I’m confident and self-assured. To preempt this, I’ve designed bumper stickers that declare “I’m not insecure”. It’s something I need people to know. I then ordered the smallest possible amount, which was still more than I knew what to…
-
Gangerl
Off the dirt track crossing a deserted mountain pass in northwestern Namibia, we encountered an ancient Land Rover stuck in the sand. Next to it stood its three passengers, desperate for someone to find and rescue them. Even before I was born, my father had taken every opportunity to go…
-
Bears
Talk with backpackers anywhere in the Western United States, and eventually bears will come up. I’ve come across bears a few times and they now make me less anxious than they used to. I knew all along that that black bears aren’t dangerous to hikers who behave sensibly. After discovering…
-
Bicycle Conversion
Leaving a hardware store, I saw an e-bike unlike any I had seen before chained to a lamppost. It was a standard road bike with two motors added to the frame. They were connected to the rear wheel hub with separate bike chains. The battery was housed in a hard…
-
The Brotherhood of Mt Shasta
As you hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, for many days you catch glimpses of Mt Shasta between the trees. As you drive through the empty plains of Northern California, it beckons on the horizon. As you take a flight into San Francisco crossing the Sierra Nevada,…
-
Trains
Trains are different in America. Like so many other things (people, portion sizes, cars, ambition), they’re bigger here than they were in Europe. The part of the United States where I live and that I’m most familiar with, which is California and the western states, the most frequently encountered kind…
-
The Tickle Trunk
Our canoe was made by the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation from heavy-duty aluminum and weighted 75 pounds. On account of it being late summer, some of the river passages had low water levels and were muddy and we often had to get out of the canoe to push or pull…
-
Desert Tales
The number of weird things that happen to a person in the wild is directly proportional to how much time that person spends in the wild Steven Rinella: American Buffalo Desert solitaire I was backpacking through the landscapes of arid southern California while reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. One…
Nehaveigur 