Soi-disant

• In 1970, there were roughly 350,000 people in jails and prisons in the US.  Today there are more than 2.2 million with another 5 million on probation or parole.  One in every 31 Americans is subject to some form of correctional control.  Public safety is a legitimate priority for any nation, but it doesn’t explain the fact that the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.  While more than one in 100 adults in America are behind bars, that number is one in 15 [I believe this figure is high] for African-American men.  For every 9 people executed in the US in the last 40 years, one person on death row was found to be innocent.  [I found some “facts” in this article to be suspect.]
• But it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes US prison policy.  Some prisoners are locked up for life — literally — and many receive harsh sentences for non-violent crime.  These long sentences are leading to an ageing prison population — with 8% of prisoners now over the age of 55.  This, in turn, is increasing the burden of providing healthcare and geriatric services.  And in California alone, it is believed that around 50% of inmates need mental health treatment.  In Texas, there’s an old saying among prisoners: “You’re guilty until proven rich.”  (And now add, “Or too old or sick to discharge anyway?”  (This article as well has some unsupported assertions.)
• Once an isolationist communist state, over the past 20 years China has become the world’s biggest exporter of consumer goods.  But behind this apparent success story is a dark secret — millions of men and women locked up in prisons are forced into intensive manual labour.  China has the biggest penal colony in the world — a “secret” network of more than 1,000 slave labour prisons and camps known collectively as “The Laogai”.  And the use of the inmates of these prisons — in what some experts call “state sponsored slavery” — has been credited with contributing to the country’s economic boom.  Those who refuse to work are beaten.  In the US, meanwhile, increased prison privatisation in recent decades is a hidden factor behind America’s obscene spike in incarceration rates.  It’s believable that the money generated by highly profitable companies like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group has some influence on increasing the prison population.  As long as there’s a profit motive to lock people up for private gain, prison populations will continue to inflate. But by how much is unknown.

• The giant wheel reflected in water is a noria – used for irrigation in times gone by, but purely æsthetic today.  Hama is the 4th biggest city in Syria, with almost 700,000 inhabitants in 2009.
• Byblos is the Greek name of the Phoenician city Gebal.  It is a Mediterranean city in the Mount Lebanon Governorate of present-day Lebanon under the current Arabic name of Jubayl (referred to as Gibelet during the Crusades).  It’s believed to have been founded around 5000 BC, built by Cronus as the first city in Phoenicia.  Today, it’s believed by many to be the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world.  The name Byblos is Greek; papyrus received its early Greek name from its being exported to the Aegean through Byblos.  Hence the English word Bible is derived from byblos as the “papyrus-book.”
• The Greek word Petra means “stone”.  Established sometime around the 6th century BC, it was the capital city of the Nabataeans, who controlled the water by means of dams, cisterns and water conduits [sort of like controlling oil today], storing it against prolonged periods of drought and creating an artificial oasis in the desert.  Shown is Al-Khaznehis, or “The Treasury”.

• For generations it was usually men who became doctors, psychologists and dentists.  Today, there are so few men applying to professional studies in medicine, psychology and dentistry in Norway that the University of Oslo is considering giving them preferential treatment.  Of those who applied for professional studies in psychology for the current term, only 20% were men, and that number is declining.  Of those offered admission to dentistry, 70% were women.  The figures for medicine aren’t quite so lopsided: 40% men.  Moreover, men granted admission to these 3 study programmes turn down the offer more frequently than women [no information given on what they chose to do instead].  Gender points [preferential treatment based on gender] are effective for studies with strict admission requirements and many applicants.  For example, women comprise only 27% of the primary applicants to nanotechnology, a programme with few spaces.  But thanks to gender points for women, the first class had almost 50% women.  [I fail to see why achieving this ratio is that important.]  The demand for gender balance conflicts with the meritocratic ideals in academia, that admission should be granted to students with the best marks.  If one argues that the school system is better suited to girls than to boys and that this is the reason girls get better marks, then gender points might be fair.  If this is not the reason, then it’s reasonable to ask, “Is it fair for one gender to get extra points for putting in less effort at school than the other gender?”  Studies of school performance show that the level of the parents’ education is far more significant than the gender of the applicant.  Should applicants whose parents have a low level of education be awarded additional points for relevant study programmes?
• “Patriarchy is any system of organisation in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males.  It’s not that males perform better or have a higher aptitude for “male” roles — females can perform high status roles as well as males — but they’re not as strongly motivated to attain the upper hierarchical positions.  Male roles aren’t given high status because men fill them — rather, men occupy the roles because the high status motivates a male more strongly.  The result?  Society comes to associate such roles with males.  Patriarchy and male dominance are as well-represented in societies that dislike these institutions as in societies that value them.  This indicates that our attitudes may be somewhat irrelevant.  These universal realities are the social result of the fact that males have a stronger tendency to exhibit whatever behaviour is necessary for the attainment of hierarchical dominance.  This is the result of physiological differences between males and females: males produce more testosterone.  The upper hierarchical positions (and here is meant not just politicians, but executives of even small companies) are relatively few in number and are occupied by those most willing to give up other satisfactions in order to attain them.  Attainment of such positions demands motivation possessed by only the small minority of people who have the strongest dominance tendency.  This minority, like the minority of people who are more than 6 feet tall, will be composed primarily of men.  Intellect works in the service of emotion.  We could reduce the extent this tendency is manifested in society to the minimum possible for an industrial society (though this is unlikely to happen).  We could, theoretically, reduce it to that found in Pygmy society — if we’re willing to give up science, industrialisation, hospitals, and other advances for which extensive hierarchy is necessary.  But even if we do this, we’ll still find that there is a minimal threshold below which no society can limit the manifestations of male dominance tendency in its social system.” — Steven Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, 1977
• French philosopher Auguste Comte devised his hierarchy of the sciences around 1830.  He placed mathematics at the top, followed by astrophysics, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology.  Knut Liestøl, a professor of informatics at the University of Oslo, took the number of grant allocations under Norway’s Outstanding Young Investigators Scheme and divided it by the number of doctoral research fellows in the same subject area.  His results corresponded almost perfectly to Compte’s hierarchy.  Further, the percentage of women in permanent positions at Norwegian universities provide a ‘perfect’ ranking in relation to Comte: female mathematics, 12%; astrophysics/physics, 14%; chemistry, 18%; biology, 20%; and sociology, 41%.  In the field of medicine, certain fields are consistently ranked near the top.  The highest is surgery and at the bottom, geriatrics.  There’s also a hierarchy of “prestigious diseases”: heart attack, leukæmia and brain tumours are the most prestigious, while conditions such as fibromyalgia and anxiety disorder have the lowest status.  One medical professor stated that men overestimate their competency, whereas women were generally more modest about their expertise than perhaps they should be.  [ Should be?]

• The term pink slime was first coined in 2002 on a production facility tour by Food Safety Inspection Service microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein, who later emailed colleagues that he didn’t consider the stuff to be ground beef.  Ground-up connective tissue, glands, and other beef scraps (once used for dog food), are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill salmonella and E coli, diluted with real ground beef or hamburger, and voila! (think sawdust in meatloaf), the components come together to become food for people.  It neither tastes as good as, nor is it as nutritious as, pure ground beef — but it helps keep costs down.  Thus (in my optimistic assumption) does it reduce the price to grateful consumers while making a bit more money for suppliers.  Originally dubbed Soylent Pink, if it were nutrionally and gastronomically equivalent to ground beef it’d routinely be a part of same.  The USDA plans to purchase 7 million pounds of Lean Beef Trimmings (LBT) this year for the national school lunch programme.  “But wait,” says Zirnstein, “they’ve taken a processed product and, without labelling it, added it to raw ground beef.”  70% of ground beef (including ground round) contains the stuff.  If it makes more money and customers hardly note the changeover, investors may demand it — unless it’s unsafe somehow.
• The former director of food safety for Beef Products Incorporated, the South Dakota-based company that manufactures the now-infamous “pink slime,” revealed that there’s even more of the concoction in supermarket meat than in school lunches.  The US Department of Agriculture limits the amount of ammonia-treated meat byproducts in a serving of ground beef to 15%, but apparently oversight is spotty.  The American Meat Institute states that ammonia-treated LFTB is “valuable, lean, nutritious, safe beef.”  [It depends on what you compare it to.]
• The pinkish, semi-solid substance made from trimmings (smaller pieces of fat containing bits of beef) that have been heated and spun to separate out fat (like cream from milk) are treated along the way with ammonia (or citric acid) to control harmful bacteria (it raises pH levels).  The lean beef that remains is used in hamburger, sausage, and ground beef.  A similar process is used in cheeses and chocolates.  “There’s no concern about safety risks associated with the product,” said a USDA spokesman.  Nevertheless, McDonald’s Corporation (MCD), world’s largest restaurant chain, Burger King Holdings Incorporated, and Yum! Brands Incorporated’s Taco Bell have all stopped using pink slime.  Fast food chains stopped because people vote with their wallets, but schoolkids don’t always have an option.  Consider this: if these bits aren’t used, 1.5 million additional head of cattle will need to be slaughtered each year to meet demand, according to the meat industry.  The consumer will have to pay more.
• Despite government claims that the meat product is safe, several supermarket chains and the New York City school district announced that they’ll stop carrying products containing pink slime.  According to a recent Associated Press food editor’s homemade burger test, unadulterated meat was tasty and juicy with just the right texture.  A pink slime burger wasn’t very tasty, didn’t release juices, and contained bits of gristle.  [But remember, you can’t know how good an Oreo cookie is unless you’ve tasted lima beans.]

• An Israeli firefighter is seen through a cloud of green smoke during a 2008 drill simulating a suicide bomb attack on a bus.  Medical students joined security services for the exercise at a stadium in Jerusalem.
• Firefighters walk toward flames towering from a pipeline explosion at the Chinese port of Dalian 17 July 2010.  In the northeastern port city, two oil pipelines exploded, sending flames hundreds of feet into the air and burning for over 15 hours, destroying several structures.  The damaged pipes released thousands of gallons of oil, which flowed into the nearby harbour and the Yellow Sea.  Officials said no one was killed.  More than 2,000 firefighters and 338 engines from 14 different cities worked through the night to douse flames.
• The suburb of Agbogbloshie in Ghana’s capital Accra has in recent years become a dumping ground for computers and electronic waste from Europe and the US.  Hundreds of tons of e-waste end up here every month as countries in the West attempt to unload their ever-increasing piles of toxic junk.  Of the 20 to 50 million tons of electronics discarded each year 70% end up in poor nations.  In the EU alone, 6.6 million tons of e-waste are unaccounted for every year.

• In 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications.  His goal was to support funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in response to significant proposed cuts by President Nixon.  Watching it reminded me of just how compassionate and decent a person Mr Rogers was, which really comes across in this video – so much so that a hostile chairperson thawed completely and gave him everything he asked for.
• John Nese is the proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles.  His father ran it as a grocery store, but John converted it into the ultimate soda-lovers destination.  About 500 varieties of sodapop line the shelves, sourced lovingly from around the world by John, who has made it his mission to keep small soda-makers afloat and help them find consumers.  Galcos also acts as distributor for restaurants and bars on the US West Coast, spreading the gospel of soda made with cane sugar (he sells no high-fructose-corn-syrup-sweetened sodas if he can avoid it).  He’s made the topic surprisingly entertaining.
• Michael F Scheuer is a former CIA intelligence officer and currently adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies.  He became a public figure after being outed as the anonymous author of the 2004 book Imperial Hubris, in which he criticised many of the US’ assumptions about Islamist insurgencies.  He depicted bin Laden as a rational actor fighting to weaken the US by weakening its economy.  He challenges the assumption that terrorism is the threat the US faces in the modern era, arguing rather that Islamist insurgency is the core of the conflict.  His criticism of US foreign policy includes a sweeping condemnation of the invasion of Iraq, which he characterised as a “Christmas present” to Islamist recruitment efforts and a validation of claims the US is at war with Islam.  Scheuer laments “the war in Iraq was instigated by US citizen Israel-firsters and their evangelical Christian allies.”  In December 2011, Scheuer endorsed candidate Ron Paul for US president saying, “his precise use of history and common sense exposes the exorbitantly costly effort to build democracies in the Islamic world for what it is; namely, Washington throwing money down the drain for a cause impossibly lost from the start that will involve us in wars where we have no interests.”  Gayane Chichakyan (an unusually well-informed interviewer) elicited the view from him that America creates its own enemies.  [Are feelings and beliefs in this matter arrived at via being accurately and thoroughly informed?  Just how much do our genetic proclivities concede ground to our knowledge?]

A significant number of US states and cities are, in the real sense of the word, bankrupt.  They can’t pay obligations with current revenue streams.  This includes public sector pension benefits promised but underfunded.  What if cities and states are permitted to go through the bankruptcy process?  Those with claims would petition the bankruptcy court for protection and would, in all likelihood, take pennies on the dollar in return.  Pension plan recipients would take less than they expected in benefits; current labour agreements might be vacated by the courts.  Bankruptcy judges would pool available assets and determine the greater and lesser losers.  There are now 10 insolvent states in the US — California, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.  These account for over 1/3 of the US population.  In addition, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, New York and Hawaii are in bad shape.  Only 2 states are solvent: Montana and South Dakota.  US cities in the worst shape include: California cities San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; New York City; Cincinnati, Ohio; Honolulu, Hawai’i; Washington DC; New Jersey cities Newark, Camden, and Paterson; Michigan cities Detroit and Hamtramck; Reading, Pennsylvania; Illinois cities Joliet and Chicago; and Central Falls, Rhode Island.  (And Miami, Florida and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania have now begun dropping bankruptcy hints.) New York, with a $9 billion budget deficit, is considering borrowing $6 billion from its state pension fund in order to make a $6 billion payment due to that same pension fund.  "The problem of state and local debt is more serious than the real estate bubble," says Michael Hudson, Wall Street analyst and professor of economics at the University of Missouri.  “I think most cities will avoid default by cutting services,” said Joe Weisenthal, deputy editor, The Business Insider.  Cities and states coast-to-coast seem to be trying that and the toll is undeniable.  Bankruptcies threaten public worker pensions and may cause a run on municipal bonds.  Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts explains that cities are deeply cutting public services and laying off staff.  “It’ll mean fewer teachers, less material to help children learn, fewer fire trucks, fewer police, fewer health workers, fewer highway workers — altogether, a diminished quality of life.”

Water near glowing magma is so hot and under such high pressure that it has 10 times the energy of normal geothermal sources.  Krafla is in the north of Iceland — a dip in the landscape that’s actually a caldera 10 kilometres wide, created by an ancient collapsed volcano.  In 1724 this crater erupted, then erupted once more in the 1970s, returning to inactivity in 1984.  A power plant run by steam went live in 1978.  Today, Icelandic scientists have drilled a 2-kilometre-deep well into the crater — seeking opportunities for utilising deep geo-energy.  But this drilling showed that a magma chamber is actively developing in preparation for another eruption.  This is now the hottest production well in the world, 450°C, with a pressure of 140 bars (140 times that of normal air pressure at sea level).  The drillhole was intended to be sited as close to the magma chamber as possible where the energy to be extracted could be as much as 5-10 times the energy from the current power plant drill holes.  (In the vicinity of the magma, groundwater is so hot and compressed that it becomes superheated dry steam, which liberates more energy when turbines convert it into electricity.)  Drilling of the well dubbed IDDP-1 started in March 2009, but stalled when they found they’d drilled directly into a pocket of liquid rock.  Engineers pump cold water into the hole and the rock heats it up for months.  (This technique allowed them to appraise the expected heat flow.)  The well will produce from 25 to 35 megawatts, far less than originally hoped.  Iceland is cooperating with NZ, Italy, and the US on the project and much is being learned.

What might the world look like if humans vanish altogether?

• This abandoned conference hall inside the Benghazi Cathedral was photographed 5 June 2011.  Benghazi Cathedral, designed by Italian architects Guido Ottavo and Cabiati Ferrazza, was built between 1929 and 1939, one of the largest churches in North Africa.  The building was later used as headquarters for the Arab Socialist Union.  It’s vacant and derelict, though the entire site is currently under renovation by an Italian company.
• The abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit, 5 April 2011.
• Apartment blocks in Sesena in the Toledo Provence, 9 February 2012.  Only a 45-minute drive from downtown Madrid, towering vacant apartment blocks loom over empty streets and weed-filled lots.  Apartments galore are for sale and rent, and prices are plunging.  More than 13,000 apartments were supposed to go up here to create a mini-city for 30,000 people.  But only 5,100 were built, many uninhabited.  Most commercial storefronts in the mega-development are bricked shut.  Spain’s phenomenal real estate crash and economic implosion has turned a vibrant suburban paradise for young Spanish couples and their children into a visible monument of the country’s boom gone bust.  (A few plants would help relieve that sense of parched desolation.)

• An abandoned airport stairway, left on a road near the airport, 29 September 2011.
• Swings hang in tall grass at a playground, 6 October 2011.  The city’s school closed down in the late 1990s, when the area ran out of school-aged children to teach.  The city was recently sold by ailing owner Twila Merril to Iglesia ni Cristo, a Filipino church whose intentions are a mystery to area residents.
• A tree grows from the top of a chimney in an abandoned factory yard in on the outskirts of Asuncion, 2 October 2011.

Click each image to animate.

In modern physics, space and time are unified in a 4-dimensional Minkowski continuum called spacetime, which is not a Euclidean space.  Charles Howard Hinton in 1880 wrote an essay, “What is the Fourth Dimension?” in which he coined the term tesseract.  In the familiar 3D space we live in, there are 3 coordinate axes — usually labelled x, y, and z — with each axis orthogonal (perpendicular) to the other 2.  Cardinal directions in this space can be called up, down, east, west, north, and south.  Positions along these axes can be called altitude, longitude, and latitude.  Lengths measured along these axes can be called height, width, and depth.  Comparatively, 4D space has an extra coordinate axis, orthogonal to the other 3, usually labeled w.  To describe the 2 additional cardinal directions, Charles Howard Hinton coined the terms ana and kata, from the Greek words meaning “up toward” and “down from”, respectively.  A length measured along the w axis can be called spissitude, as coined by Henry More.  In 3D, curves can form knots but surfaces cannot (unless they’re self-intersecting).  In 4D, however, knots made using curves can be trivially untied by displacing them in the 4th direction, but 2D surfaces can form non-trivial, non-self-intersecting knots in 4D space.  The Klein bottle is an example of just such a knotted surface. You can visualise the 4th dimension via projection.  For instance, computer screens are 2D; all images of 3D people, places and things are represented in 2D by projecting the objects onto a flat surface.  Depth is removed and replaced with indirect information.  The retina of the eye is a 2D array of receptors but the brain perceives the nature of 3D objects by inference from indirect information (shading, foreshortening, binocular effect, et cetera).  Artists use perspective to give a 3D illusion to 2D representations.  If a light is shone on a 3D object, it casts a 2D shadow.  One may infer that light shone on a 4D object in a 4D world casts a 3D shadow.  Consider the formulas for the circumference of a circle C = 2πr and the surface area of a sphere: A = 4πr².  One might be tempted to suppose that the surface volume of a hypersphere is V=6πr³, or perhaps V=8πr³, but both are wrong.  The correct formula is V = 2π²r³.  At right is a stereographic projection of a Clifford torus, a set of points (cos(a), sin(a), cos(b), sin(b)), which is a subset of a 3-sphere.

• If the tilt of the earth’s axis were 0° there would be no difference over time in how rays from the sun hit different regions and therefore there would be no seasons.  The earth revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit at a speed of 29.8 kilometres per second or about 100,000 kilometres per hour.  Earth’s speed is fastest when it’s closest to the sun in January, and slowest when it’s farthest from the sun in July.  [I’m guessing this may be why there is more ice at the South Pole than the North.]  Earth’s movement around the sun causes seasons but doesn’t affect temperatures during the seasons.  The reason for temperature change is the earth’s tilt, which causes the height of the sun in the sky to vary.  At present Earth is tilted 23.5°.  Without a tilt, the sun would always be just on the horizon 24 hours a day every day at the poles.  Other places would have 12 hours of sunlight every day.  Temperatures and rainfall would vary little from day to day.  The most profound impact on temperatures would be at the poles and the most profound change for life would be the change in normal weather and sea current patterns.  Constant rain would leach soil; no winters — more insect pests.  But as long as the moon hangs around, the earth’s tilt will likely remain stable.
• What if someone shoots a gun in space?  If the bullet leaves the gun barrel at 1,000 metres per second, the more massive shooter will head the other way at only a few centimetres per second.  Once shot, the bullet keeps going literally forever because the universe is expanding faster than the bullet can catch up with it, so it encounters no serious mass to slow it down.  If the universe weren’t expanding, the 1-2 atoms per cubic centimetre encountered by the bullet would bring it to a standstill after about 10 million light-years.  The universe expands at a rate of 73 kilometres per second per megaparsec (about 3 million light-years — the average distance between galaxies).  Oh – the shooter will move through space forever as well.  But if he’s in orbit around a planet, if he aims horizontally at just the right altitude, the bullet could circle around the planet and hit him from behind.  For decades, the standard survival pack for Russian cosmonauts included a gun, a deluxe all-in-one weapon with 3 barrels, a folding stock that doubled as a shovel, and a swing-out machete.  I presume no one shot any of them in orbit, however (or else lived to recount the experince).
• What if the average person could somehow be made twice as smart as now?  First, there isn’t room in a skull for twice as many dentritic connections, much less twice as many neurons and glial cells, so the only way I could see a smarts-double happening is accompanied by a serious change in human anatomy (wombs and birth canals included).  More cooling of the brain would be required along with more “trash” removal.  Is intelligence merely the ability to learn faster and remember more?  Then computers have it nailed (give up, humans).  I’d go with intelligence being more on the order of being able to put beads together in a new way and have a brand new kind of necklace emerge — but whatever.  Master new languages in a few weeks?  If we’re ALL that smart, why not a single language?  There might be more “crazy” people because there’ll be more bits that could go wrong.  Scams would get much more sophisticated.  Oh, and people with high IQs are likely to be more liberal in their social attitudes and less likely to have strong religious beliefs.  [I didn’t make that up, but someone might’ve.]

NASA has made a visualisation of ocean surface currents around the world, which looks remarkably like the 1889 work “Starry Night” by the celebrated Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh.  The visualisation was produced using a computational model to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems that transport heat and carbon in the oceans.  It simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows were used in the animation.

• One of the largest zebra migrations on the continent takes place each year as some 25,000 zebra follow the rains and cross from the Okavango Delta to the Makgadikgadi Salt Pan grasslands to the southeast.  They stop at hundreds of water holes along the way and eventually return westward back to their origin.
• A couple rows through interior space (reminds me of the movie Inception somehow).  Photorealism meets surrealist landscape…
• Green-gravel lawns [little maintenance] dress homes in a retirement community that opened in 1960 near Phoenix.  Arizona’s 65-and-over population rose 104% between 1950 and 1960.

• “Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Photo of the Day”: “Stopcicle”: A raging ice storm triggered a very strange effect on a stop sign in Ontario, Canada.  (Another person says it was Mirabel, Quebec.)  From Gizmodo: “The Ghost of Winter Traffic Enforcement?  Call it a long shot, but I’m guessing this photo was taken in the French-Canadian province of Quebec.  The word 'rue’ on the street sign gives it away.  Sure, it’s beautiful and eerie how the ice is slowly slipping away from the sign, like a moulting metal snake … but am I the only one that wants to run up and smash it to pieces?”  Via Reddit.
• I have a neighbour who plays with this effect in a very cool way.  He takes a large piece of nylon fabric — sort of like a parachute — and blows it up with a fan so it forms a dome shape.  Then he takes his garden hose and sprays water all over it.  It has to be way below zero, otherwise it doesn’t quite work right.  Anyway, the water freezes in the dome shape, he peels the fabric off and he’s left with an ice dome.  He goes inside there and does god-knows-what.  It’s pretty impressive actually.  Here’s what it looks like from the inside with some snow on it.  The creases are from the fabric impression…
• ... It had snowed on it by this point, but it’s still translucent.  You can see the nylon dome thing he made in the foreground.”

• One of the applicants to Andrew Sullivan’s The View from Your Window, 2 February 2012.
• The Faroe Islands are an island group situated between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, approximately halfway between Scotland and Iceland.  The islands form a self-governing country under the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark.  The total area is approximately 1,400 square kilometres (540 square miles) with a 2010 population of almost 50,000 people.  Viðareiði is the northernmost settlement on the Island of Viðoy, which belongs to the Norðoyar Region.  It lies on an isthmus with high mountains to both the north and the south.

• Fog rolls up along the Florida shore on 5 February 2012.  The photographer say he sees this happen about twice a year.
• The same photographer in the same helicopter on the same day, different direction.

Located in Modena, northern Italy, this museum honours the life and work of Enzo Ferrari, founder of the Italian sports car manufacturer.  The architect was Jan Kaplický, who, in 2004, won the design competition.  The site includes the house where Ferrari was born in 1898 as well as a new building designed with a shiny yellow aluminium roof made to look like the hood of a car — airvents and all.  The house is attached to the workshop of Ferrari’s father, a carpenter and mechanic for the Italian railway.  Local and national governments, the European Union and several banks contributed the €18 million, (about US$24 million), spent on the museum.  The area around Modena is known as Motor Valley, the world capital of motor sports.  Maserati, De Tomaso, and Ducati are located in Modena; Ferrari is based in nearby Maranello; Lamborghini and Pagani are also headquartered in the vicinity of this ancient town.  Furthermore a lot of smaller companies are based in the area, including racing constructor Dallara, and the manufacturer of exclusive Bimota motorcycles.

• A single tree in the evening sun.  The contour of the ground seems almost impossible.  How can something that manicured be that steep?  I’d guess the location to be Tuscany.
• Baobab trees in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania.  Some species live for 1,000 years — potentially reaching a height of 80 feet (25 metres) and a diameter of 40 feet (12 metres).
• Tinted orange by the morning sun, a soaring dune is the backdrop for the hulks of dead camel thorn trees in Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia.

While the water in the infinity pool seems to end in a sheer drop, it actually spills into a catchment area where it’s pumped back into the main pool.  At 150 metres long (3 times the length of an Olympic pool) and 650 feet straight up, it’s the largest outdoor pool in the world at that height.  It’s a feature of the boat-shaped SkyPark that perches atop the 3 towers that make up the world’s most expensive hotel, the £4 billion Marina Bay Sands development in Singapore. The hotel has 2,561 rooms and costs from £350 a night.