Via Strange Maps comes a field outside Minden, Neb., shaped like...well, like Nebraska:
Strange Maps writes:
Is Nebraska Field a coincidence, then? When not being centrally irrigated, each of the mile-by-mile blocks is often divided into smaller fields, mostly rectangular but not really symmetrical. That sort of describes the shape of Nebraska – but still, chances of a field mimicking it so perfectly seem very remote indeed.
Nebraska is rectangular in an oblong sort of way, with straight borders everywhere except in the east, where it is bounded by the Missouri River. An immediately recognisable feature on its western border is the square chunk bitten out by Colorado, allowing that state to be completely rectangular.
The field mimics all these shapes: the straight lines north, west and south, the indentation in the southwest, the slightly slanting eastern border, near what looks like a little, elongated lake. And all in the right proportions too.
So: coincidence or design? It has to be one or the other.
Pretty cool, though.
Autumn in the Green Mountain State:
Cornwall, Vt., 17 October 1992. Same here:
Just up the road in Whiting, same day:
And up in Weybridge, 1 November 1992:
Few people knew before, you know, this blog entry, that I lived in Vermont for a few months in 1992. (I was young, I needed the work.) Actually, it was the most beautiful place I've lived. That said, I grew up in one big city and went to college in another, so the things that made Vermont beautiful were precisely those things that made it difficult for me to live there: wide open spaces, trees, idyllic rural living, etc.
I moved back to Chicago in short order, but not after taking a few hundred photos. These, for example, I took in Middlebury, where I lived at the time:
The first two are from July 1992; the last one, from September, in southern Vermont, near where my friend Renee lived at the time.
I went back to Middlebury in May 2006. It looked almost exactly the same, except I had a digital camera with me instead of one that took expensive slides. Unfortunately it was rainy and gray in 2006, so these photos from 1992 turned out much better.
More photos from 1992. Taking the Kyle of Lochalsh train from Inverness through the Scottish highlands capped the trip. I took three rolls of film in as many hours. (We didn't have digital cameras back then, so each photo, with processing, cost about 35c—the equivalent of about 70c today—so those three rolls represent about $75 of today's dollars.)
Here are three of those shots, from 24 June 1992:
Note, please, that I have licensed some of my work as stock photos, and I would like to do so again. So even though generally this blog is licensed as a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States work, photographs are not, and have never been, CC-licensed. Only the text is covered by the CC license. Photos are, and always have been, Copyright © David Braverman, all rights reserved, from the point of creation.
The trip I took in 1992 went from West Sussex, England, to Nice, France; Genève, Switzerland; Strasbourg, France; then back to the U.K. As I continue the (excruciatingly slow) process of scanning all these slides, I'll continue to post the better ones. Like these, the first from Nice:
And Strasbourg:
Like many Americans, I backpacked through Europe right after graduating from college, in the summer of 1992. I've been scanning all of my slides, gradually, for a couple of years in fact, and I'm now up to that Europe trip. (The trip starts on slide #2362, and I'm just today up to slide #2500.)
Here are two. First, Chichester Cathedral, England:
Then, from Rolle, Switzerland:
I'm glad I took slides—almost all of them on Kodachrome 64. Some of the earliest photos still have perfect color and grain, 27 years later. I hope they all last another century. If not, at least I've got a huge chunk of them scanned. Then there are the 180 rolls of negatives...but that project is a long way off.
Pilot and author James Fallows is thankful for the reasonable and minimal changes to New York City airspace the FAA announced last week:
When regulators and security officials address a problem through minimal rather than excessive rule-setting and interference or panicky over-reaction, that is worth our thankfulness too. Building toward a crescendo of things to be thankful for at this time of year.
By the way, it's a very fun trip for private pilots:
(From a flight I took in March 2000.)
Silly me for forgetting that U.S. citizens need visas to visit India. (I'm usually more up on those things.) So yesterday I got mine, for the CCMBA Delhi residency.
Color me impressed. Travisa, the company that the Indian government employs to handle their visa processing, had me in and out in 15 minutes to drop off my application, then sent me a text the same afternoon letting me know my passport had come back, then had me in and out in 90 seconds in the afternoon. Total time spent getting the visa, including filling out the application: about 2½ hours, of which almost 2 hours was spent on buses getting to and from the Travisa office.
I sincerely hope (without much confidence) that China and Russia make it similarly easy.
While the Burj Dubai will likely remain the tallest building in the world for a long time, the rankings of the next few buildings on the "world's tallest" list got shuffled today when the organization that ranks them changed the definition a bit:
The old standard was that a skyscraper's height was determined by calculating the distance from the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the building's spire or structural top.
The new standard is that height is measured from "the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance" to the top.
This means that Trump Tower, Chicago, moved up to 6th place, and some of the other "official" heights got jiggled a bit. The new rankings as of January (when Burj Dubai opens) are:
- Burj Dubai, U.A.E., 818 m
- Taipei 101, Taiwan, 508 m
- Shanghai World Financial Center, China, 492 m
- Petronas Towers 1, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 452 m
- Petronas Towers 2, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 452 m
Sears Willis Tower, Chicago, 442 m- Trump Tower, Chicago, 423 m
- Jin Mao Building, Shanghai, China, 421 m
- Two International Financial Center, Hong Kong, 415 m
- CITIC Plaza, Guangzhou, China, 390 m
Notice that all but two of the entrants in the list are in Asia, the exceptions being within five blocks of each other right here in Chicago. Still, it's sad to see the Hancock Center, Empire State Building, and a few others I could name, missing from the top-10 list.
Two more photos, one of London and one of Dubai. Guess which is which:
