Here’s a series of shots I did last weekend at Taughannock park. Fun with trees and roots and reflections. I shot them (with the Canon 20D digital) in colour and converted to B&W in Photoshop. The detail of these at their highest resolution is amazing! Working in the Cornell darkroom has put me in a black and white mindset and though I haven’t done any printing yet, I developed a few rolls of film on Sunday.

More than a dozen images follow…

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I’ve just read through the transcript of Paul Martin’s Parliamentary Address yesterday on Bill C-38 (The Civil Marriage Act). Text and video available.

You really ought to read or watch the speech in it’s entirety. Paul Martin has declared himself a true champion with this address. Here are some choice snippets:
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Way back in January when Condoleezza Rice had her confirmation hearing I was listening on NPR to the tough questioning she faced (primarily from Senator Barbara Boxer).

At some point later in the day, and I can’t remember who it was addressing her, a male questioner called her Mr. Rice. Yeah, ‘Mister’. I thought it was kinda funny, so I googled for other incidents of Rice being called ‘Mr.’ and indeed came across a few news articles with the error.

So I created this graphic

and started a CafePress shop just in case anyone might want it on a t-shirt. Sure enough, it’s big in France! HAHA

As a side note, Barbara Boxer’s courageous efforts to get at some truth that day have not gone unnoticed. On Valentine’s Day she received about 4500 roses as a thank-you.

Ambulance services in Ithaca are operated by Bangs Ambulance, so you can imagine it’s a little weird discovering another service business in town called Bangs Funeral Home.

We’ve made a few jokes about it. Picture the Bangs Ambulance with divided services in the back, with EMS on one side and an embalming set-up on the other. What motivation would the company have to get you to the hospital before you fully expired? Probably none, since surely the profit margin on a funeral is significantly higher than that of a transport fee.

Kind of gives you the shivers, right?

Well today I came across this history of Bangs Ambulance which states “Bangs Funeral Home & Bangs Ambulance are two separate businesses with no correlation between them.” Good to know.

Back in the late 40s though, as Bangs calls it the era of Load and Go, hearses were used to transport injured people to the hospital while they were laying down so many funeral homes expanded to provide EMS. This photo from their site illustrates the situation perfectly:

Nelson Mandela was released after serving 27 years in prison, charged with attempting to overthrow the South African government.

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These “mad geniuses of cuisine” in Chicago, led by chef Homaru Cantu, are inventing some interesting stuff including new cutlery-type mechanisms for eating, futuristic cooking methods, and yes - paper food!
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So of course I’ve been out and about a little bit, testing and tweaking the new camera. On the weekend I transferred some pics and here’s an example of the results:
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As I mentioned previously I’ve been making crochet mocassins. I’ve auctioned a few pair on eBay and have sold two so far. Of course every pair is different, so I can be creative with the yarns and colours I use for each design.
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As everybody (hopefully) knows, the world wide web was invented at CERN, a European particle physics lab. As you might expect physicsists were “early adopters” of the new tech, many of the earliest websites had to do with physics. For example, the first US website was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, there’s some history here. Probably the most revolutionary “early web” physics contribution was the arXiv, which collects pre-prints of physics papers. This was started in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg (now at Cornell), and has been active ever since. It’s now the primary method that physicists use to get their papers (I check it every day). The effects of this on physics, and science publish in general, are still being debated, but everybody agrees they’ve been huge.

Lately, however, physics on the web was a little more stagnent. So it’s nice to be able to link to a couple of general interest sites. The first is interactions, which has particle physics news. As well, they’re running a bunch of blogs called Quantum Diaries. These are nice becuase you can get a bit of a feel for what day-to-day physics life is like (you’ll be suprised to learn it’s not all glamour and big money). The also have a nice image bank where you can see some particle physics imagery.

The second site is Symmetry Magazine which is a monthly newsmagazine (it’s a combined effort from a couple of older physics magazines). This one has more in depth articles, mostly concerned with particle physics.

So everybody go read about the fizzix! There will be a quiz next week…

Because it’s fun to see Ann Coulter’s face with the proverbial pie in it:

Watch the video of CBCs Fifth Estate interview with AC as she gets her ‘facts’ wrong.

via Meat-Eating Leftist