The other day I was walking past a construction site in the Irvine Spectrum area, and noticed a rainbow-like ring appearing in the road. I immediately thought of this mystery photo on APOD and its (rather technical) explanation. Naturally, I had to take a picture myself.

A thin, rainbow-colored ring arcs across a flat (but rough) gray surface, centered around the shadow of a camera and the head and arms of the person holding it.

It basically is a rainbow, except formed by reflections in tiny glass beads (used for sandblasting) instead of raindrops. The physicist who posted his (much better) photo to APOD had a better camera handy. And a linear polarizer. (Don’t you always carry one of those?)

Sadly, I only had my phone.

I used to keep a sidebar linkblog here, but I’ve long since stopped. These days I’m more likely to post an interesting link to Twitter, or just save it up for a later post. I figured the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was as good a time as any to clean out the old plugin.

Still, I hate removing things from the web, so here’s an archive of 2½ years’ worth of linkblogging from 2005-2007. Continue reading

Seriously, doesn’t this chair look like it was made of the material they were trying to find a use for in the first episode of Better Off Ted…and turned into a chair so irritating that it increased worker productivity because people couldn’t get comfortable? (You can see it in the middle of this 10-minute preview.)

office-chair

It was the chair in our hotel room (the converted bank office with the impressive lobby). Fortunately it wasn’t nearly as scratchy as Viridian Dynamics’ “Focus Master.” (Incidentally: more Better off Ted episodes are starting up in a couple of weeks for the summer!)

Some graffiti on plywood in the Gaslamp District area:

And then there was this “You Are Under Surveillance” sign. Something about the combination of the sign, the stairway, and all the posters on the walls just looked interesting.

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