Sunday, March 11, 2012
Ships at the Bottom of the (Former) Aral Sea...
The Soviet Union drained most of the Aral Sea, using the water for irrigation projects. When they did so, hundreds of ships that had sunk were revealed, like the one below. Now you can walk among them, and find ships and camels intermixed:
WWII Kodachrome Photos...
A small collection of stunning photographs from WWII, on 4" x 5" Kodachrome transparencies. One example below, but go see the rest of them!
The Pilot and the Dog...
A great story, passed along by reader Simi L. The sender claims it's a true story, but I've been unable to verify it:
A woman was flying from Seattle to San Francisco. Unexpectedly the plane was diverted to Sacramento along the way. The flight attendant explained that there would be a delay, and if the passengers wanted to get off the aircraft the plane would re-board in 50 minutes. Everybody got off the plane except one lady who was blind.
A man had noticed her as he walked by and could tell the lady was blind because her guide dog lay quietly underneath the seats in front of her throughout the entire flight. He could also tell she had flown this very flight before because the pilot approached her, and calling her by name, said, "Kathy, we are in Sacramento for almost an hour. Would you like to get off and stretch your legs?"
The blind lady said, "No thanks, but maybe Buddy would like to stretch his legs." Picture this: all the people in the gate area came to a complete standstill when they looked up and saw the pilot walk off the plane with a guide dog for the blind! Even worse, the pilot was wearing sunglasses! People scattered. They not only tried to change planes, but they were trying to change airlines!
Faces...
All my life, I've had difficulty recognizing faces. It isn't that I can't recognize faces – people I know well I can recognize with no difficulty. The challenge I have is with people I don't know well. So I'm pretty sure I don't have any flavor of prosopagnosia.
Recently at work there was a good example of my face-recognition challenges. There's another fellow there named Tom whom I mistakenly thought was Frank Slootman, our CEO. When someone corrected me (and only then!), I asked around to a few other people – and none of them thought Tom and Frank looked anything alike! Yet I still (even after carefully examining both of them) find it challenging to be sure which is which when I see them. This sort of thing has happened to me many times.
Another common pattern: I'll meet someone for the first time (say, on a visit to a customer), and for the term of the visit I'll be able to recognize them. Then perhaps 6 months or a year later, I'll visit again – and while the rest of the ServiceNow people attending will recognize the person without difficulty, I will not recognize him or her, and I may not even realize that I've met the person before.
I suspect this difficult is related to my inability to visualize “in my mind's eye”, something I've blogged about before. Most people tell me that they can easily “bring up” the face of someone they know; I simply cannot do this, not even for people I know very well. I've got no proof these things are related; it's just an intuition...
Recently at work there was a good example of my face-recognition challenges. There's another fellow there named Tom whom I mistakenly thought was Frank Slootman, our CEO. When someone corrected me (and only then!), I asked around to a few other people – and none of them thought Tom and Frank looked anything alike! Yet I still (even after carefully examining both of them) find it challenging to be sure which is which when I see them. This sort of thing has happened to me many times.
Another common pattern: I'll meet someone for the first time (say, on a visit to a customer), and for the term of the visit I'll be able to recognize them. Then perhaps 6 months or a year later, I'll visit again – and while the rest of the ServiceNow people attending will recognize the person without difficulty, I will not recognize him or her, and I may not even realize that I've met the person before.
I suspect this difficult is related to my inability to visualize “in my mind's eye”, something I've blogged about before. Most people tell me that they can easily “bring up” the face of someone they know; I simply cannot do this, not even for people I know very well. I've got no proof these things are related; it's just an intuition...
The Deer Are Back!
Debbie and I took an evening drive up to Cuyamaca Mountain yesterday, arriving at the Stonewall Mine just before sunset. The meadows in that area used to be full of deer, but after the fires of October/November 2007 we saw none until the last couple years, and even then just a very few.
But last night... Last night, the deer were back, in force. We saw about 10 groups of deer all together, with five or six of the groups number more then 20 individuals. The grass is plentiful this year, and the deer were chowing down with some enthusiasm.
The return of the deer means that the mountain lions will be back (if they're not already). We know the rodent population must be healthy because we see lots of hawks. Hopefully that also means the bobcats are back (we've seen a few, but nothing like the numbers we used to see up there). It's very nice to see the animal ecosystem returning to some semblance of normality...
But last night... Last night, the deer were back, in force. We saw about 10 groups of deer all together, with five or six of the groups number more then 20 individuals. The grass is plentiful this year, and the deer were chowing down with some enthusiasm.
The return of the deer means that the mountain lions will be back (if they're not already). We know the rodent population must be healthy because we see lots of hawks. Hopefully that also means the bobcats are back (we've seen a few, but nothing like the numbers we used to see up there). It's very nice to see the animal ecosystem returning to some semblance of normality...