Travel
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The Most Spectacular Place You’ll Never See
Unless you look out the window. When I did that on 4 November 2007, halfway between London and Denver, I saw this: Best I could tell at the time, this was Greenland. That’s how I labeled it in this album on Flickr. For years after that, I kept looking at Greenland maps, trying to find Continue reading
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Some thoughts on App Based Car Services (ABCS)
I started using Uber in April. According to my Uber page on the Web, I’ve had fifteen rides so far. But, given all the bad news that’s going down, my patronage of the company is at least suspended. As an overdue hedge, I just signed up with Lyft. I’m also looking at BlaBlaCar here in the U.K. (where I Continue reading
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Urban originals
It would have been great to visit the Egyptian Spice Market in Istanbul with my old friend Stephen Lewis, whose knowledge that city runs deep and long. But I was just passing through the Old City by chance, waylaid en route from Sydney to Tel Aviv, and Stephen was still in Sofia, which he also Continue reading
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Weather vs. Flying
Here in the temperate zones, summer is beaches and picnics and biking and dinner on the deck outside. It is also thunderstorms and airport delays. Right now a line of thunderheads is sliding northeastward across New Jersey. Here is how it looks to FlightAware‘s map of aviation and weather activity for Newark Liberty Airport: Notice Continue reading
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50,000 Photos as a Blog
Yesterday I posted some shots of the crater-shaped Kiglapait Mountains on the frozen coast of Labrador, including the one above. Here’s how views of those shots, and many others, looked in Flickr’s stats: It got 90 views. Not a lot. But a lot of other shots got a bunch of views too, and they add Continue reading
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Something beyond perfection
I last visited Barcelona more than twenty years ago. Back then the Sagrada Família was already impressive, but also incomplete. All that stood were the nativity façade and some small number (four? eight?) of the Sagrada’s eventual eighteen towers. I recall nothing of the interior, perhaps because there was none. In many ways, in fact, Continue reading
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The Holy Mountain of Montserrat
To an window-sitter accustomed to flying over the American West, Catalonia from altitude looks like Utah. On the northern horizon the Pyrenees, like the Uintahs, run east-west above a dry landscape of settled alluvium, much of it reddish as the San Rafael desert. While the shapes of the ancient towns below are clearly old world in Continue reading
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Found
Getting out of a Taxi in Madrid yesterday, by mistake I picked up a coat that a prior passenger had left on the seat. Here’s the label: The coat wasn’t exceptional except in respect to the apparent antiquity of that label. Rather than take it with me (since I’m moving on), I left it in Continue reading
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Wanted: Just-the-Facts Maps
In Google sets out future for Maps — Lays down gauntlet to Nokia with plans for personalized, context-aware and ’emotional’ maps in future, in Rethink Wireless, Caroline Gabriel begins this way: Google may be feeling the heat from an unlikely source, Nokia, at least in its critical Maps business. The search giant has put location awareness Continue reading
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Loving the Alps of Los Angeles
I orient by landmarks. When I was growing up in New Jersey, the skyline of New York raked the eastern sky. To the west were the Watchung “Mountains“: hills roughly half the height of Manhattan’s ranking skyscrapers. But they gave me practice for my favorite indulgence here in Los Angeles: multi-angulating my ass in respect to Continue reading
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Plug your car into the rest of your life
Your late-model car knows a lot more than its dashboard tells you. It knows how fast you’ve been going on every trip, your fuel mileage, your tire pressures and much more. It even knows what your engine light really means — before it comes on. In fact your car has hundreds of sensors with interesting Continue reading
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Getting kicks at 66
A year ago I entered the final demographic. So far, so good. @Deanland texted earlier, asking if I had a new affinity with WFAN, the New Yawk sports station that radiates at 660 on what used to be the AM “dial.” Back when range mattered, WFAN was still called WNBC, and its status as a Continue reading
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A good word for a good cause
@BlakeHunskicer has a kickstarter project, Fleeing the War at Home: An interactive documentary introducing the crisis in Syria through the personal histories and dreams of Syrian refugees, with a few days and a few thousand dollars left to go. Blake is one of the graduate students I got to know this last year as a visiting Continue reading
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Hot Death from Above
Driving from New York to Boston today, I heard “Summer ‘Heat Tourists’ Sweat With Smiles In Death Valley” — a four-minute feature on NPR, aired on the 100th anniversary of the hottest temperature ever recorded outdoors on Earth, which happened in Death Valley: 134° Fahrenheit, which is around 57° Celsius. The report says Death Valley Continue reading
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West Fork Fire
On my way back to New York from Sydney on Wednesday, while flying east over the San Juan National Forest and the Rio Grande National Forest in southern Colorado, I shot what at first I though was a controlled burn, but later realized was the West Fork Fire. I knew it was a big one Continue reading
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Opposites distract
Just discovered by Antipodr that Bermuda and Perth are antipodes: located at the exact other ends of the Earth from each other. I’m in Melbourne, Australia, which is the antipode of a spot on the h of North Atlantic Ocean on Antipodr’s map. By the end of tomorrow I’ll be back in New York, a couple thousand Continue reading
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Let’s help Airbnb rebuild the bridge it just burned
[Trieste, Italy, 12:02am Friday 21 May 2013 — As I say in the comments here, Airbnb has responded to this post, explaining that a bug in the system was involved. While that might patch Airbnb’s relationship with my wife and I, the bridge remains burned with other customers as long as Airbnb’s Verified ID system retains Continue reading