They really do seem to be trying to kill us. House defense bill adds a provision to allow military aircraft to disable their civilian transponders (a basic anti-collision safeguard) when flying around DC. (You know, the place where a military helicopter collided with a civilian airplane in January.)

Defense Bill Will Make D.C. Skies Less Safe, N.T.S.B. Chair Says

The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board warned that a provision in the new defense bill would worsen the risk of midair collisions ne...

KGEI Transmitter Building, Redwood City, CA, 2024. All the pixels, bouncing off he sky on their way to your radio, at

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KGEI Transmitter Building

Redwood City, CA 10 November 2024 Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/6.3), Phase One IQ4-150 digital back, Cambo 1250 camera (vertically s...

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The late Tom Stoppard, in his play Hapgood, had some good advice for writers of scientific papers.

Just got a letter from a place I haven’t worked at for eight years (UPenn) telling me that my personal data was leaked by a company I’ve never done business with (Oracle), and so they’re giving me two years of credit monitoring with another company (Equifax) to make up for it. The future isn’t everything it was cracked up to be.

"CARTWHEEL" Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020. All the pixels, hardened for blasts and EMP, at

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"CARTWHEEL Tower", Fort Reno, Washington DC

23 February 2020 The CARTWHEEL tower (center left) was built in the early 1960

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I’m always amused when movies set in the present day have a scene with a crowd of press photographers and use the whirring of 35mm film motor drives as a sound effect.

Photo nerditry: Because of the kind of photography I do, I generally use a big camera on a tripod, and spend a long time fussing with exposure, focus, and composition before I trigger the shutter.. But I frequently carry around a small mirrorless camera, often without a tripod or multiple lenses. I use that as a sketchbook, to plan my "real" photos. Occasionally I end up printing and publishing them, but I try at the time to think of them as ephemeral. This gives me permission to experiment.

I'm just imagining what the reaction would have been if Obama had suggested renaming NFL football. They would have had to put him in witness protection.

AT&T Long Lines "Oak Hill" Tower, San Jose. CA. 2021. All the pixels, delivered station-to-station, or, for a small additional charge, person-to-person, at

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AT&T Long Lines Oak Hill Tower

20 June 2021. San Jose, CA. This unusual (possibly unique) Brutalist-style concrete tower was built in 1972 as relay station on the former AT&T Lo...

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While we're all appreciating the late Tom Stoppard, I want to throw in a good word for his under-appreciated espionage drama Hapgood. I missed the original West End production (in 1988), but was mesmerized by the version he revised for Stockard Channing at Lincoln Center in 1994. You can find many of the same physics and math themes in his later (and much more critically successful) Arcadia, but I think Hapgood deserves to be better known than it is.