Chad Orzel's Blog, page 6

Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension

When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn’t because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.

Tourists taking photos of each other in the Forum.

I thought of this (and went to the trouble of cropping down one of those shots for the image above) because The Conversation ran a more-erudite-than-average “kids these days” piece with the dramatic headline “What’s lost when we photograph life instead of experiencing it?” While this drops a few references to modern neuroscience to claim that constant distraction is reshaping our brains for the worse, the central complaint is a fuzzier one: that the sort of self-presentation involved in taking and sharing photos at famous sites is Bad.

In pursuit of digital affirmation, even ordinary experiences become fodder for photographs.

Instead of staying present – being (and really observing) where we are – our impulse is to capitalize on all lived experiences as an opportunity to represent and express ourselves visually. Part of what’s troubling about this kind of tenacious documentation is the thin line between representation or expression and – as with the “Snap Pack” – the marketing or commodification of everyday life.

Personal photo collections, publicized through applications like Instagram and Facebook, risk primarily becoming a tool for self-promotion. The ability to constantly measure public feedback for each posted photograph enables, and may encourage, users to tweak visual representations of their own lives in an effort to simply maximize a positive response.

Now, obviously, as somebody who took 1600 photos on a one-week trip to Rome, and posted a whole bunch of them on the Internet, I’m obviously going to bristle at this a bit. I don’t have a very concrete idea of what “staying present – being (and really observing) where we are” is supposed to mean, but it’s not at all clear to me that my photographic activity is impairing that. On the contrary, I would be somewhat inclined to argue that taking all those pictures enhances the experience, at least for me (the effect might be less positive for Kate, having to wait while I futz around with photography…). Finding the right angle, lighting, and framing to get an image that captures a particular moment– or even just lends itself to a flippant photo caption— requires a level of closer observation than I might otherwise give some of these sites.

And, yes, when I select a subset of those photos to present on the Internet, that’s an act of carefully curated self-presentation, both through the images I choose and the words I use to describe them. I picked the photos in Monday’s blog post and the jokes in that album of art pictures as a way of putting forward a certain image of myself to the Internet– what I find aesthetically interesting, what I like in art and history, what I find funny. Which is hopefully appealing to a particular subset of people who will read and link and leave appreciative comments, and generally think well of me.

I absolutely agree that self-presentation is a big piece of what’s going on, here, but I would also argue that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything particularly new about it– the genre of self-presentation through carefully curated travel narrative goes back well before the invention of cameras, let alone smart phones. The idea of going to famous places and presenting a particular image of yourself by exhaustively documenting your reaction to them was already firmly established 150 years ago when Mark Twain got a really good book out of spoofing it.

You could argue, of course, that The Innocents Abroad is also a carefully curated work of self-presentation on Twain’s part, and I’ll happily agree with that. For that matter, writing a blog post about how selfie-snapping tourists are Doing It Wrong is also engaging in the same sort of activity.

A better counter might be to note that my blogging-and-photo-captioning is not remotely in Twain’s league (another point I won’t contest at all), and I think this hits closer to the heart of the matter. That is, I think the core complaint of the “photo-sharing is Bad” crowd is not so much about the fact that people are engaged in self-presentation through image curation– that’s an activity we’re all engaged in, all the time. I think the fundamental complaint driving these thinkpieces is that it’s being done by the wrong people.

That is, when somebody with intellectual heft does it– a Mark Twain, or a Robert Hughes, or even a Ph.D. candidate at a major university– silently contemplates a cultural object without electronic aids, and shares it later in a more traditional channel, then it’s important and worthwhile. A random tourist snapping selfies, though, is crass and shallow and insufficiently engaged with Experiencing the Moment. The problem with cameraphone technology and photo-sharing apps isn’t that they created self-promoting self-presentation– ostentatious intellectuals have been carefully curating their images by publicly sharing their cultural experiences for centuries. The problem with technology is that it’s democratized that process, making it trivially easy for any yob with an iPhone to seek affirmation from their friends by presenting themselves as the sort of person who visits Important Cultural Sites.

I’m obviously choosing to frame this in the most unflattering way possible– that curation activity again– but these kinds of pieces push a lot of my buttons. To start with, there’s the Luddite element of pretending that online life is less “real” than unplugged activities, which always gets my back up. More than that, though, at their heart, these essays seem to me to flow from a deep vein of elitism that runs through not just academia but the segment of modern society that self-presents as intellectual– people who read and re-share the nebulous collection of smart-people magazines and websites that run pieces decrying the pernicious effect of Internet technologies on modern life.

Now, I’m not denying at all that the people who rail against selfie-snapping find some ineffable benefit in slow and silent contemplation, that would be lost to electronic intermediaries. I can’t quite fathom what that is, but I take them at their word on that, and believe that it’s true to the sort of people they choose to be.

What I object to is the presumption that this ineffable benefit is something universal, and those who aren’t seeking it out are Doing something Wrong. Because this is ultimately a question of personal aesthetics, and those are highly variable. If some other subset of the population finds that their experience of culture is enhanced by taking selfies and sharing them with friends via social media, well, that’s just fine, because they’re not the same kind of people. It’s just as viable and valid a set of personal preferences, and so long as it doesn’t intrude on the ability of others to enjoy the same culture in their own way (I’ve had a few close calls with selfie sticks wielded by inattentive tourists), it’s every bit as deserving of respect.

The critical stance of the standard cell-phones-ruin-everything essay, though, is based on the idea that people who use their phones to do the same thing that travelogue writers have been doing for centuries are Wrong because they’re not approaching and experiencing culture in the same manner as an ostentatious intellectual. It’s an attempt to elevate the aesthetic preferences of academics to a human universal, and denigrate the preferences of wide ranges of other people as lesser. It’s an attitude toward the public at large that I find condescending, bordering on contemptuous, and its prevalence in academia is a constant low-level irritant.

(I should note that this, too, is not especially new. Twain’s book devotes no small amount of space to lampooning and lamenting the crass and shallow among his fellow travelers. I’m inclined to think it’s gotten a bit worse of late, thanks to a variety of network effects that are well discussed elsewhere, but I could easily be wrong about that.)

Now, am I going to make a big pitch for the underappreciated aesthetics of a well-chosen Instagram selfie? No, not really. It’s not my thing– of the 1600-odd photos of Rome on my camera and smartphone, the number with me in them probably doesn’t crack double digits, and several of those are group photos with my friends from college who I only see once or twice a year.

At the same time, though, if that’s what floats your boat, go nuts. I mean, I’d prefer it if people could keep their selfie sticks the hell out of my photo frames, and well clear of my head, but the quality of an aesthetic experience is ultimately a very subjective thing, and if having a duckface selfie in front of the Arch of Septimus Severus enhances your experience of the Forum, more power to you. Be who you are, where you are, share it with your friends, and don’t waste time worrying about people who self-present as grumpy academics.

290-299/366: Offbeat Rome

Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I’ve always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures– over 1,600 all told.

This happens in part because when I’m visiting a major tourist site with a camera, I’m trying to do two things at the same time. One, of course, is to get good photos of the big attractions, to supplement my memories of the actual sites. But this is always constrained a bit by the knowledge that, you know, major tourist destinations have plenty of money they can use to buy the absolute best shots from professional photographers who have better access and equipment than I’ll ever get. The best photo I can get of, say, the Colosseum, isn’t going to be as good as I could get buying a postcard in the gift shop.

Which is where the second activity comes in, namely taking pictures of oddball things that aren’t likely to be turned into high-quality professionally-photographed postcards, but that are interesting or amusing to me. So, while you can see a lot of photographs of big attractions and masterpieces in the five sets of unprocessed photos I put on Google Photos (I, II, III, IIII, V), I’m mostly going to avoid that here and instead give you shots that very few people other than me would bother taking.

290/366: New Head

Seagull on a headless statue atop Castel Sant’Angelo.

One of my friends arranged a bunch of guided tours for our group, one of which went to the Castel Sant’Angelo, former tomb of the Emperor Hadrian turned into a military redoubt for the Popes. The top level of this has a great view over the city, decorated with some rather battered statues, many of whose heads were removed for use as projectiles to hurl at beseiging forces. This gull helpfully tried to replace the head of one such.

291/366: Waterworks

A part of the Aqua Claudia in the Parco degli Acquedotti.

A different organized tour was part of the wedding, bringing a bunch of us out to the suburban neighborhood where the bride grew up. This happens to be right near the Parco degli Acquedotti, which as you can probably guess from the name features two aqueducts: a piece of the Acqua Felice from the late 1500’s, and a piece of the Acqua Claudia dating back to about 52 CE. The 2000-year-old one is arguably in better shape than the newer one, a testament to the engineering prowess of ancient Rome.

We probably wouldn’t’ve gone out there if not for the wedding event, and from the look of it basically nobody else does either, other than residents of the (very pleasant) neighborhood. It’s a very nice park, with walking/jogging trails going around the aqueducts, and has a great view of the Colli Albani in the distance, as you can see above.

292/366: Memento Mori

A great grim reaper statue from a memorial at the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli.

Our hotel was very close to the Forum, and down a steep hill from the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, which houses the shackles used to bind the Apostle Peter when he was arrested by the Romans. This is most famous for the memorial to Pope Julius II that includes Michaleangelo’s statue of Moses (which stands in a shadowy corner of the church that you can illuminate properly for a minute or two by putting a one-euro coin into a machine). Being a Renaissance church, though, it has all manner of elaborate memorials around the walls, and I liked this skeleton quite a bit.

293/366: Church Ladies

Female figures on the side arches of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo.

The meeting place for one of our group tours was the Piazza del Popolo, which includes the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, which legend says was built over the grave of Nero to put down the angry ghosts associated with that malicious bastard. Like San Pietro in Vincoli, this is most famous for housing works by a famous artist, in this case two paintings by Caravaggio. (Also like San Pietro in Vincoli, these stand in a dark spot that you can illuminate briefly for one euro a pop…) I enjoyed the random statues of women perched atop the arches lining the nave; these are most likely meant to represent angels or some other religious figures, but I find it amusing to imagine them as gossips from the congragation, especially these two. “So I says to her, I says…” “Talk to the hand, Lucrezia, because I don’t want to hear it.”

294/366: Arches

The Forum seen from a window in the Tabularium at the Musei Capitolini.

The largest batch of photos by far came from our last day, when Kate and I visited the Roman Forum, and then I went to the Musei Capitolini while Kate went to a different museum to see more modern stuff. The Musei Capitolini occupies two large palaces facing each other across the Camplidoglio, connected by a tunnel underground. One of the galleries is the Tabularium, which has windows looking over the Forum, from which I got this shot of both of the triumphal arches at either end of the ruins: the Arch of Septimus Severus in the foreground, and the Arch of Titus at the far entrance, over by the Colosseum (which you can’t see in this).

295/366: Mask

A statue of a small child playing with a theater mask from the Musei Capitolini.

The museums have a gigantic collection of ancient statues, many of them temple statues of various gods and heroes in very formal poses. There are odd bits of other, more lively subjects, though, such as this charming statue of a toddler playing with a theater mask. These odd bits always make me wonder how skewed our picture of ancient statuary is– were these lighthearted subjects really odd exceptions, or did people just make more of an effort to preserve the more Serious statues of various divinities than odd fountain decorations?

296/366: Fresco

8th-century fresco from Santa Maria Antiqua, with a rectangular area showing the effect of modern cleaning and restoration.

Rome is, of course, home to a lot of famous frescoes, and we saw the Sistine Chapel (the ceiling is really high up) and Raphael’s frescoes at the Villa Farnesina (the man was a great painter, but had clearly never seen an actual dolphin…). The fresco photo that goes in here, though, is from Santa Maria Antiqua, a seriously under-advertised church on the Forum. This is full of frescoes dating back to the 8th century, and has only recently reopened after extensive restoration work, whose effect you can see in the photo above, from a section that has deliberately been put on display only partially cleaned.

This is seriously under-promoted in guidebooks and at the Forum itself (a British man there at the same time as us was holding forth on this: “Did you notice the incredibly banal little sign saying ‘Oh, by the way, your ticket also admits you to this…’ Why would you not promote this more heavily?”). It’s really amazing, though, not to be missed if you’re in Rome doing touristy stuff.

297/366: Other Forum

The Forum of Trajan, with weird white sculpted trees.

Across the street from the main Forum there’s the Forum of Trajan, a market area which a guide described as the world’s first shopping mall. There’s a museum associated with it that we didn’t have time to get to, which I mildly regret because it probably would’ve explained what the deal was with these weird and clearly modern sculptures of white trees displayed in the forum itself.

298/366: Dome

The dome of the Pantheon

I said I was mostly avoiding pictures of major tourist attractions for this post, but I have to make an exception for the one site we found impressive enough to visit twice: the Pantheon. This has a gigantic concrete dome dating from around 120 CE, with a hole in the center to admit natural light. It’s incredibly impressive, and also really difficult to get a photo that captures the immensity of the thing. This is the best I managed; you can see the crowd of people milling around inside (it was consecrated as a church in 609, which helped keep it intact and also explains the Christian decorations), all the way up the dome to a bit of the oculus. It’s simply breathtaking in person, though– we saw it as part of a walking tour on Monday, and Kate and I went back on our own on Friday before we left.

Also, there’s outstanding gelato just a block or two away, found via Ex Urbe’s gelato atlas, an essential guide for tourism…

299/366: Candlelight

The stairwell of our hotel lit by candles as we made our departure.

This one’s a cell-phone snapshot, not all that great in photographic terms, but important as documentation of our final morning in Rome. Our hotel was very close to the Forum, occupying one floor of an old building. It had some quirks, including an elevator whose door needed to be closed manually, but was mostly good, and the location can’t be beat.

The last night we were there, though, the building suffered a power outage– the proprietor said something about a fire in the underground electrical lines while writing down my credit card information. Which meant that we had no air conditioning for the last several hours of our stay, and more importantly no elevator, so we had to lug our bags down from the fourth floor ourselves. In a interior stairwell that was kind of dim even when the electricity worked, now lit only by these tea lights that somebody placed on the landings.

So, you know, not the most glamorous circumstances under which to depart, but we managed. And now we’re home, where SteelyKid and The Pip are starting summer day camp today, and I’m easing back into a more normal routine by writing a blog post at Starbucks…

Song of the Day

As of today, I can officially no longer claim to be in my “early 40’s,” so here’s a great song with a thematically appropriate title:

(The lyrical content has no particular relevance to my life, I hasten to add…)

I’m taking a bit of a social-media hiatus at the moment, but it is very nice to see all the well-wishes from Facebook friends and acquaintances. Though I found it a little creepy to go to Google and see a special birthday-cake doodle with “Happy birthday, Chad!” as the mouseover text…

Kate and I are leaving tonight for Rome, to go to a friend’s wedding there. So you can expect some more variety in the next weekly photo dump than the kids-and-trees pictures you got last time. Not likely to be much between now and then, though.

Big Media Me: Here and Now

The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded– it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call…)

You can listen to the clip online, but the main question was whether Americans know enough about basic science. I talked a little about numbers from various iterations of the Science and Engineering Indicators reports that the NSF puts out, and made a pitch for science as a process because, well, I have a whole book about that. While a pre-interview talk with one of their producers was the proximate cause of the Beyoncé analogy from a couple weeks ago, the conversation didn’t go in that direction, so I didn’t use that bit.

Anyway, it was fun to do, and I think it came out well (even though I continue to not particularly like the sound of my own voice). So if you’ve got ten-ish minutes to kill, give it a listen…

284-289/366: Week in Nature Photos

Another week, another batch of photos. This is coming on Friday rather than the weekend because I’m going to be incommunicado for most of the next week, and have some free time now.

284/366: LIGO, Eat Your Heart Out

Gravity wave clouds above our house.

Sure, LIGO detected gravitational waves from a second pair of merging black holes, but I found me some gravity waves.

(The pattern was much more pronounced 5-10 minutes before this was taken, but I was in the car driving when SteelyKid pointed it out.)

285/366:

SteelyKid with her hand-written report on the peregrine falcon.

SteelyKid’s second-grade class has spent the last month or two researching birds– each kid picked a particular species, and they used library books and Google on the school computers to amass a huge amount of facts about their chosen birds. Then they made slide presentations in Google Docs about their birds. (And some other things as well– SteelyKid excitedly told me in the car one afternoon “I typed your name into Google Image Search, and it came up with a picture of you and Mommy! I put it on my ‘About the Author’ page!”)

The photo above is not that– I have the slide deck, but don’t want to post it– but is a more traditional sort of second-grade project hanging in the hall. From this, you can learn that her bird was the peregrine falcon, and she’s really excited about how fast they dive.

286/366: Adventure Walk

The Pip is somewhat skeptical about walking down this path.

I’ve had a lot of Pip Time this week, because his day care was closed Monday, then late Monday night he started complaining that his throat hurt, and it was officially diagnosed as strep on Tuesday morning. So he was home from school, mostly with me, Monday through Wednesday. Of course, he’s got the same mutant immune response as his sister, where he gets strep throat to a sufficient degree that he’s not allowed to go to school, but it doesn’t impact his appetite or energy level at all.

So we went on a couple of “adventure walks” to tire him out and keep me from losing my mind. This shot is from a hike through the woods near Lock 7. He was half right to be dubious about this path, because it dead-ends on a little plateau overlooking a massively overgrown creek bed, but it has a nice view, and he chattered a lot about how cool it was to walk this really narrow path.

287/366: Dragonfly

Bright green dragonfly near Lock 7.

Not the greatest photo, because I couldn’t get close enough without spooking them, but The Pip was really impressed with these iridescent green dragonflies around the creeks near Lock 7. Largely because there’s a Wild Kratts episode about dragonflies, so he had all manner of nature facts about them that he could relate to me as we walked.

288/366: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Pip shrugs expressively at Peebles Island.

Wednesday’s “adventure walk” was over at Peebles Island State Park, where the Mohawk flows into the Hudson. The highlight of this was when The Pip found a really big feather– seriously, the thing is like a foot and a half long– on the path. But while I have a lot of photos of him waving his feather around proudly, I love his look in this one. He’s an expressive Little Dude.

289/366: Herons

Some herons in the Mohawk near Peebles Island.

And it wouldn’t be an adventure walk without some wildlife, so here’s a telephoto shot of a couple of herons (I’m fairly certain that wading fishing birds in this part of the world are herons, anyway) taken from Peebles Island.

This wasn’t the nature highlight for The Pip, who couldn’t really pick them out except on my camera display, nor was the garter snake we saw slither down the cliff. No, his favorite bit was when we saw a groundhog fleeing into some weeds. Specifically, he kept chattering about how “we saw a groundhog’s BUTT!” Because he is, after all, four and a half years old.

And that’s the current state of nature photography in Chateau Steelypips.

279-283/366: Week in Photos

Shortened “week” this week, because I did the last photo dump on Tuesday. 80% of these are also from a single day, this Friday, when I decided to call a Mental Health Day and get away from stuff that was annoying me by driving down to Scoharie County to hike up Vroman’s Nose.

279/366: Road

Rt. 30 from the top of Vroman’s Nose.

Vroman’s Nose is a huge rock outcrop in the middle of a valley, with a moderately steep trail going up through woods to a dramatic cliff with views over the valley. These are very cool when you’re there, but the camera really dilutes the impact of those kind of panoramic views. So instead you get some more focused views from the top, like this shot of the road along the base of the cliff.

280/366: Farm

Farm and cliff from atop Vroman’s Nose.

There’s also this farm, with a precarious ledge in the frame to help give a sense of how high up this is. There was a sign at the trail head warning that peregrine falcons nest here, which has SteelyKid clamoring to go down there (peregrine falcons are her favorite bird, and she’s doing a school report on them). I maybe shouldn’t’ve told her about that, because I suspect it will be more than a little terrifying to see the kids out on these ledges…

281/366: Painting

Turkey vultures from the top of Vroman’s Nose.

Yo, check it out, I found an Andrew Wyeth painting!

I did not, in fact, see any peregrine falcons for sure– there were some raptors circling over the parking lot that looked smaller than turkey vultures, but I didn’t get any pictures good enough to tell. There were a bunch of turkey vultures, though.

282/366: Mammal

Chipmunk in the woods on Vroman’s Nose.

Besides the vultures, I saw a bunch of these fuzzy little dudes.

283/366: Candy

SteelyKid wants you to know she got 58 pieces of candy at the softball party.

And speaking of cute mammals…

The other big event of the week was SteelyKid’s final softball game of the year. No photos of the actual game, because it was intermittently raining from the very first inning, and shifted to steady rain by the third. They cut the game short, and the end-of-season party was a giant mob of people huddled under the pavilion in the park.

They had pinatas for the various teams, which they ended up just ripping open and shaking out over the picnic tables where the kids were sitting. SteelyKid netted a bag of Tootsie Rolls the size of her head.

When we got home, she counted her haul, made a sign, and said “Daddy, I want you to take a picture of me with my candy and put it on the Internet.” So, here you go.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Mundane Space, Spectroscopy, Changing Constants, Rest Energy, Magnetic Sensing, Wiffle Balls, and Revolutions

Another few weeks of physics blogging at Forbes, collected here for your convenience.

— Commercialization Of Space: Three Cheers For The Mundane: Some belated but brief comments on the SpaceApps conference I went to down in NYC.

— How Studying Atoms On Earth Helps Us Learn About Other Planets: As a snobby grad student in cold-atom physics, I thought of old-school spectroscopy as boring and pointless, but a recent DAMOP session showed how those classic atomic physics studies still have a lot to offer for studies of astrophysics.

— Are The Constants Of Nature Changing, And How Can We Tell?: An explanation of some of the techniques involved in trying to test exotic models of physics where values like the fine-structure constant evolve in time.

— The Simple Explanation Of Why E=mc2: Ethan “Starts With a Bang” Siegel did a post on the World’s Most Famous Equation that followed Einstein’s original math-y derivation. There’s a more elegant and illuminating way to think about it, though, that starts with changing the question.

— Using Atomic Magnets To Study Baby Humans And Baby Planets: More stuff from DAMOP, this time a couple of conversations at a poster session about cool things people I know are doing using extremely sensitive magnetic field sensors.

— Why Are There Holes In A Wiffle Ball?: In which I launch plastic balls out of a surgical tube crossbow and analyze the video to see the effects of air resistance.

— Are There Revolutions In Physics?: Chuck Klosterman’s new book sets up an argument between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Thomas Kuhn over whether physics has actually seen revolutionary changes. The answer’s probably yes, but Tyson left himself a loophole to wriggle through.

I’m generally happy with these, and very pleased with how the E=mc2 thing came out, but blog traffic in general has fallen off a cliff. Not sure if that’s a function of Forbes’s increasingly irritating ads driving people away, or a start-of-summer thing, or just the presidential primaries sucking all the oxygen out of the Internet, but the last several blogging weeks have been really frustrating.

Lightning Bolt vs. Charge

The Pip is nuts about superheroes, so when he and his speech teacher made a book, naturally, it introduced a new super hero: Lightning Bolt. It’s only a couple of sheets of paper folded in half and stapled, and the text and illustrations were done by his teacher, but the contents are 100% our Little Dude, so I’ll reproduce it here.

LIGHTNING BOLT by [The Pip] Orzel

[Illustration: Lightning bolt’s Mask]

Alternate Identity Len Boom

Occupation: Scientist

Speciality: Studying super powers. In his lab there’s a computer that can communicate with Lightning Bolt.

Home Town: Lightning Bolt City

Powers:

— can shoot lightning bolts

— can surf on a lightning bolt to get across hot lava or water

[Illustration: Lightning Bolt’s Uniform]

Uniform

— made of metal

— Protects Lightning Bolt from villains

Shoes

— When the shoes light up it means somebody’s in trouble

— The shoes can shoot lightning bolts

[Illustration: A boot with a lightning bolt shooting from the toes]

“Charge”

(one of Lightning Bolt’s villains)

Half Human, Half Rhino

Sometimes he gets mad and defeats himself. Lots of times he runs into buildings and knocks them down on himself.

A page from the Pip’s book about Lightning Bolt.

So, there you have it: The Pip’s superhero creation. Watch your back, Stan Lee.

276-278/366: Fun With Editing

Last in a series of themed collections of pictures. These ones are showcasing my rudimentary GIMP skills, pasting together multiple pictures into composites.

276/366: Sky-Bison for Scale

One of the earliest happenings in the three-week period I’m dumping photos from was SteelyKid getting strep throat again. She spent a Friday at home, and I took the opportunity to introduce her to Avatar: The Last Airbender on DVD. They’re now a few episodes into the third season, so that was a big hit.

This reignited an interest in our stuffed Appa toy, which I used to use for scale in baby-blogging photos, which in turn led to taking some new Appa-for-scale pictures:

Some Appa-for-scale comparisons.

They’ve grown just a little…

This also led to The Pip demanding a stuffed Appa of his very own, which turns out to be slightly smaller. That made a great excuse for a physics blogging post at Forbes, though…

277/366: Scootering Pip

The Pip rolling past obstacles on the Flying Turtle scooter.

As mentioned in previous photo dump posts, I took the kids down to my parents’ for Memorial Day weekend, where there was a lot of scooter-riding. For some reason, this involved stringing Bodie’s leash across the gap between the kitchen table and the stove, but that couldn’t stop The Pip.

278/366: Taekwondo Faces

SteelyKid thinking and waiting.

I couldn’t decide which of these photos of SteelyKid waiting with her team at the taekwondo tournament I liked best, so I just stuck them all together. You can see that she noticed me with the camera between the second and third…

And that, I believe, catches us up to today.

268-275/366: Miscellaneous Photo Dump

This one, we’ll do sorta-kinda chronologically:

268/366: Niska-Parade

Why is it always bagpipes?

One of the big temporal landmarks of the recent stretch without photo-blogging posts was “Niska-Day,” the annual community festival here. This kicks off with a parade, the route for which comes right to the end of our street. Here’s one of the first marching elements, the local bagpipe group.

269/366: Niska-Ride

SteelyKid is on this somewhere.

Of course, if you’re a kid, the real highlight of Niska-Day is the bit with the carnival rides. SteelyKid is on this, having dragged one of her more timid friends along through sheer force of personality.

270/366: Rainy Providence

Providence, RI looking a little dreary.

A big chunk of the last three weeks was taken up with DAMOP, held in Providence, RI this year. The first day of the meeting was grey and rainy, so I snapped this from inside the convention center.

271/366: Sunny Providence

Nice park near the water in Providence.

The weather got nicer. It was kind of an odd town, though, in that there weren’t many places to eat right near the convention center. On the bright side, though, that did force me to get out and walk around, and I ate lunch in this nice little park a couple of times.

272/366: Physicists

One of the poster sessions at DAMOP.

Of course, there were physicists at DAMOP. Around 1300 of them, in fact.

273/366: Targeted Advertising

Sandwich advertisement at DAMOP.

I didn’t eat here, but I did appreciate the attempt to draw in visitors to their fine city.

274/366: In Memoriam

The American Legion leads off the Memorial Day parade in Whitney Point.

After DAMOP, I took the kids down to my parents’ for Memorial Day weekend, giving Kate a little peace and quiet. We went downtown to watch the Memorial Day parade (though we didn’t follow it to the cemetery, as the kids aren’t fond of loud noises so the gun salute would not have been appreciated).

275/366: Cricket

Cricket at the park during SteelyKid’s softball game.

During SteelyKid’s softball game this past Saturday, these guys were on another field in the park playing cricket. I’m not sure if it was a pick-up game or some sort of team practice. Doesn’t seem to have been an official league game or anything, as they didn’t have enough people to be two teams, and it didn’t go on for 16 hours. Anyway, I thought it was kind of cool to see, so I took some telephoto shots of it.

One more thematic photo dump coming up after this one…