I’m at the SciPy 2009 conference at Caltech in Pasadena today and yesterday. It is an amazing collection of nerds and questionable facial hair styles. There have been some interesting talks.
I like this ‘snub cube’ fountain:
The SciPy crowd:
A fountain in front of the building the conference is in:
For a few months I have subscribed to Shorpy, a site that posts high-quality scans of historic American photographs. I save the ones I like, and I’ve set my computer to rotate randomly through them as my computer desktop picture. This morning I saw something I couldn’t ignore! Take a look at the photo below of the French Market in New Orleans in 1910:
What do you see just above and to the right of the wagon wheel? You can click on the image for the full view, or look at a zoom-in below:
It’s Che Guevara, of course! You can clearly see an eye, his beard, two nostrils and hat. He even appears to be sticking his tongue out. I am forced to wonder how his image ended up on a horse-drawn cart in New Orleans eighteen years before he was born. But clearly it’s a sign of something profound and mystical. Any ideas?
Seen this morning in front of the La Jolla Farmers Market, parked in a red zone:
I spent several hours today standing at the corner of El Norte Parkway and Elm Street in Escondido as a course marshal for the Amgen Tour of California. Today was the final stage of the eight stage (plus prologue) race that started in Sacramento.
While I waited hours for the brief seconds of each pack of cyclists to pass, I decided to amuse myself by taking pictures of all the ‘brodozers’ that drove by. A brodozer is a pick-up truck that has been jacked up on shocks with huge noisy tires. They are a particularly nasty form of transportation. They are a big middle finger to the environment and are driven by young males in a very aggressive manner. One of my scariest moments on a bicycle was due to a brodozer in East County San Diego. This county is infested with brodozers, and Escondido is particularly bad.
Below are 16 of the 17 brodozers I was able to capture. There were many that passed before I had inspiration, and others I missed. It’s interesting that white is the dominant color, and none appear to have been off-road recently. The seventeenth was the only vehicle I saw escorted off the course by the police. That brodozer needed to be told more than once by the police to get off the course. This tells you all you need to know about brodozer drivers.
Date: 11/03/09
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Leaving San Diego
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Today we’re driving from San Diego to Boulder. The various mapping services give the drive time on the order of seventeen and a half hours. Most of our things have been picked up by the movers and we’re only carrying the things we need, can’t replace, or is alive (meow). The movers were supposed to have come yesterday so we could leave yesterday, but there was armageddon traffic on I-5 so they delayed coming today. The apartment is empty and we’ve turned in our keys.
I’m sad to leave San Diego, it has been a very good place to live for seven years. I’m leaving behinds lots of friends and a place I’m used to living with weather I like. Boulder is an exciting new place with new friends to make. It has four seasons, which will be a new thing for both of us. I don’t know if we’ll ever live in San Diego again, but I do want to come back and see my old friends and go for a bike ride with them.
Goodbye!
Posted in Commentary, Cycling, Photos | 1 Comment »