Would you believe I found a postcard for Irvine?
It’s a bunch of office buildings with mountains in the background. I guess it makes sense. I mean, what else would you put in an Irvine postcard?
Category: Life
Re-creating Ansel Adams’ UCI
Here’s a cool project: In Ansel Adams’ Footsteps, re-creating his photographs of UC Irvine from the 1960s. There are a lot more trees now. (Or, as a friend pointed out, the trees that were there are a lot taller!) It’s a really impressive look at how the campus has changed…plus it’s always fascinating to look at Ansel Adams’ photography. I remember when I was in college, prints of Adams’ photos lined the walls of one of the Student Center hallways.
A couple of years ago I did my own then and now project — well, less a project than a spur-of-the moment 2007 re-creation of a 1997 photo I took of the Student Center as seen from what was then the Humanities Office Building (now Murray Krieger Hall). In this case the trees hadn’t changed much in 10 years, but UCI had flattened the Student Center complex and built an entirely new one.
Venti Schmenti
So what do you think…
Would it be a bad idea to bring this travel mug to Starbucks?
Man-Eating Bird
Fossils linked to Maori legend of man-eating bird
The giant Haast’s Eagle, which died out at least 500 years ago, was originally thought to have been a scavenger, but new analysis of fossils indicates that it was a lion-level predator…making it the probable basis for the Maori Te Hokioi legend.
Partly Cloudy, Late Afternoon
Shock & Wave
Weird: Routine Coast Guard training exercise spooks press because it’s 9/11. I wonder how many people were freaked out by the shuttle landing’s sonic boom because of the timing?
Wingnet
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of disks on the freeway. Or a pigeon with a datacard.
[A] company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a “data card” strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data.
2024 (well, 2023) update: Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet (via)
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers. With the proliferation of super-fast home connectivity like gigabit fiber, one might expect the carrier pigeon to be blown away in 2023. Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin. However, as you will learn later, the pigeon gets outpaced at distances over about 600 miles.
I’d been wondering whether bandwidth or SD card density had changed faster since then!