One of the dahlias from the botanical gardens in Mendocino:

A friend I met via Mardi Gras reminded me of my early love of fractals. She worked at IBM during the heydey, so got exposed to a lot of the stuff there. (Benoit Mandelbrot is an IBM Fellow.)

So I was flipping through The Beauty of Fractals— when I should have been doing something else, of course — and saw this on one of the pages.

A fractal raindrop

After spending about ten minutes performing the mathematical equivalent of sounding out the syllables, I figured out how they got it, and made my own version.

It’s the Mandelbrot set, believe it or not, but turned inside out ( z → 1/z ), rotated, and colored in an interesting way. (Called Binary Decomposition.)

It’s also subsampled 8 times along each axis for a nice level of anti-aliasing.

So, I went to Burning Man this year. It’s difficult to describe — and certainly deserves more time than I can devote to it at the moment — but I got some awfully neat photos out of it.

Like this one:

Click for the full sized version

That’s a fire dancer, or a poi spinner. There’s a rope, with a burning thingie on the end of it, and the guy or girl twirls it — well, really them; at least one per hand — around at high speed, doing all sorts of way cool patterns and things while they dance around.

In the full-sized version of the picture, you can see all sorts of nifty textures in the fire as it spins and twirls and burns.

I was driving through Pismo Beach last Sunday, and decided to stop atthe pier. Looking out, the sea was wind-whipped and sun-drenched, butmostly calm — much to the disappointment of the surfers bobbing in thewaves.

There were two kiteboarders out on the water. They were using the highwind for all it was worth, slashing through the sea and catching airoff the tops of waves, like BMX riders, but wetter. I so want to do this sometime.

Kiteboarder and surfers

Having made his point, he heads into the sun

Lots of birds flying, or trying to fly, in the high wind. Many werejust hanging in air, enjoying a stationary vantage above it all. Thisgull gave a look, wondering why we weren’t up flying with him.(“I want to learn to fly like that,” Jonathan said, and a strange light glowed in his eyes. “Tell me what to do.”)

Click image for full-sized (wallpaperable) version

One of our backpacking trips last year was doing the first few days of the High Sierra Trail. The trail is 72 miles one way, from Crescent meadow to the Whitney portal. While it’s a gorgeous area of our planet, far removed from the chaos of the world below, doing ~120 miles at elevation (7,000 - 12,000 feet) over ten days for the round trip would have been a little... advanced, for our skill level.

On the morning of the third day, as we were retracing our path back out, the sun was at our backs. A few minutes before, it had crested the hills we’d just come from, and started wending its tendrils down into the valley below.

The world wakes to the sun-god rising

The NPS site has more photos showing the variety of the terrain, and some of the stark beauty you can find on the trail back there. I’ve got more (un-retouched) photos of our hike in a gallery.

The burn of The Man occurs on Saturday night, the next to last day of the event. The man is lit with mass amounts of neon, and the arms — which had been down the entire week — were raised up toward the sky to call all people on the playa to see the burn. There were a ton of drums (over one hundred) all synchronized, doing ‘The heartbeat of the man’. There were people between the crowd and the man, walking along with flamethrowers, doing controlled burns out into the air. Soon, fireworks were launched from the base of the man, to let everyone know it was about to start.

Once it was lit, it started to burn quickly. The sound of the crowd, the raw sound of that much timber being engulfed by flames, and the wall of nearly painful heat (at about a hundred yards away!) were overwhelming. Once I remembered to start taking photos again, I got this:

The man burns

What you’re seeing in the foreground is a fire funnel. The structure burns so hot, so fast, that the air around it gets heated to hundreds of degrees instantly, and like a hot air balloon without the balloon, it careens into the sky above.

Right after this photo was taken, the fire funnel broke off from the structure. The crowd started yelling “Woo, woo, woo!” As they realized that it was aimed for them, the yells changed to “Woo! Woo... wha? whoa, Whoa! WHOA!”

It dissipated right as it impacted the front lines of people, but for a while there I wasn’t sure if I should be giggling or wincing.

It’s a bright day in mid-May. After a easy climb up the ridge line along the ocean, the trail meanders back among the trees, getting us closer to our campground for the night. Along the way, we stop to snack and rest a bit.

The air is warm and sun filters through the trees, leaves and light shifting with the breeze. You can hear birds chirping, and a creek softly in the distance.

full sized version

Soon, soon, I can go backpacking again.

Read the extended entry for details about the photo.

I will walk into the fire until its heat doesn’t burn me
And I will feed the fire– Sarah McLachlan, Into The Fire

A photo from inside the remnants of a fire funnel, as it dissipated.

One second exposure, no flash, unretouched. Larger versions with more detail, and others colors (blue, where the embers look like frenetic streamers, and sea-green) are in my new wallpaper gallery.

I spent 19 days travelling around China, from mid-September to early October 2002. Even with nearly three weeks, I barely scratched the surface of modern China, let alone its past.

One of our stops was Nanjing, a city whose name some of you may recognize. For those who don’t, you may find it interesting to google upon the Nanjing Massacre or the rape of Nanjing.

The city lies along the 3900 mile river Yangtze, one of the siltiest rivers in the world. It’s so silty that in the ‘50s, foreign engineers said building a bridge spanning its mile width would be impossible — the riverbed was just too soft. (It’s also so silty that the new Yangtze Dam we’ve all heard about has a maximum lifespan of 100 years, but that’s a post for another day.)

The Chinese, being who they are, built one on their own anyway, which opened on a proud day for them in ‘68. Though it spans a mile of water, it’s four miles long, leaving quite a bit over land. Looking landward from underneath the bridge underscores modern China’s architectural fascination with artificially long, straight lines.

Click the link below to read details about the photo itself.

Continue reading "Yangtze River Bridge, Nanjing, China"

This one is an oldie but goodie.

On the final day of our Grand Cayon hike, we climbed out from Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the canyon, to the top of the south rim. It was a bit of a hike -- okay, so parts of it were a real bitch -- but there were some gorgeous views along the way. I took this shot about three miles up Bright Angel Trail from the Colorado river, sometime around nine in the morning.

Clicking will take you to the gallery, to then get a larger view, or see other Grand Canyon photos

It’s hard to describe how impressive a view like this is in person. What you’re seeing is huge, and dominates your entire vision in a direction. It’s like being in the middle of the mountains, and then realizing that it’s only a small vertical slice out of the entire canyon trail. (The vertical elevation change from river to south rim is 4420 feet, according to the NPS.)

I’d like to go back someday. I think.

The above was taken at the end of a storm. The sun was pushing through, and though it wasn’t directly visible, its affects were streaming all through the sky.

Click on the image for a (rather large) full-sized version.

Addendum: Based on the comments, I guess I should clarify: I took this photo. Though no one has asked, there was minimal postprocessing of the image. I cropped it for effect, removed the noise from the camera’s JPG encoding process, and expanded the dynamic range (0-255, instead of the camera’s best try resulting in an approximately 220 max -- due to the exposure time, I think. This gets the image closer to what the human eye will see). I’m happy with this shot.