Category: flickr

Persistent Pyramids

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Dreadfully busy, but found this somewhere and quite liked it.

Anatoly Zenkov – Persistent Pyramids

No explanation as to how this effect is achieved, but I’m guessing it is probably something to do with a temporal distortion in the space-time continuum. If you adapt your flash to fire high energy protons at the breaking waves, you will create a small wormhole which gives this interesting reflective effect. On the downside, you could create a black hole and KILL US ALL, but as long as Anatoly gets his photo, everything’s alright.

Anatoly has also risked KILLING US ALL by producing strangelets (a form of matter that some think might exist at the centre of neutron stars, which could bring about an ‘ice-9’-type transition, wherein all surrounding matter could be instantaneously converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish) by using this technique on trees, landscapes and even a person.

You can see the beautiful results here.

Expert

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A post about a photo of some beer.

“Beer stimulates each of the five senses”

So says regularly-stimulated Denis da Silva and he should know because he’s the Head Brewer at SAB in Newlands.

Here is the man himself (in green) in the SAB bar, teaching some good-looking chap about the visual side of SA’s most award winning beer during the Carling Black Label brewery tour last week.

You done now?

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Probably because I suggested that last weekend might have been the first weekend of summer, the South Atlantic, in an entirely successful bid to prove me wrong, threw one more big winter storm our way. It came through early on Sunday morning and stayed throughout the day, causing instant cabin fever amongst the junior members of the 6000 clan.

It wasn’t like that on Saturday.

We fed ducks, climbed trees, bounced on bouncy castles and generally had a lot of fun despite not smashing any plates before Daddy headed south beyond the Lentil Curtain and won some fabulous prizes in a pub quiz. All good.

Sunday was less fun and the only trip out of the safety of the house was to stock up on essentials at Constantia Village, where the vast array of homemade garden ornaments on sale by the roadside had been scythed down by the vicious northwester and were now a pile of homemade garden ornaments on sale by the roadside.

From the photographic evidence above, it would appear that in order to survive this sort of weather, you needed to be a stylised pelican. More accurate representations of South African ornithological highlights were doomed. Especially the heron on the left.
We’ve had more of the same hefty meteorology today and while I enjoy such bleak, downright elemental conditions, I’m completely ready for some sunshine now, please.

Thank you.

Today in photos

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Not all mine, either.

Firstly, a-ha’s appearance to sign copies of their 73rd greatest hits album: 25:The Very Best Of a-ha at Oxford Street’s HMV, which I couldn’t attend because Oxford Street is in London and I am in Cape Town. Initially, this seemed like a very bad thing, but it wasn’t really because I got to go round a brewery. There are no breweries on Oxford Street in London. (I haven’t verified this fact in any way, but it seems a fairly good bet).

Photo from HMV get closer

But as I say, thanks to the Ogilvy and the champion taste of Carling Black Label, I was invited on a Brewery Tour and Tasting – the beer, not the brewery – which was fun, interesting, informative and quite staggering when it came to sheer size and numbers. They make a lot of beer in Newlands. A lot. More than 1,000,000 litres a day.
And that, as I may have mentioned, is a lot.

The official photographs, from the official photographer are yet to come (and we’ll surely revisit this when they do), but I did knock a few pics off with my trusty 8MP X10 camera.
Keen mathematicians amongst you will have calculated that that amounts to a whole 3,000,000 pixels more than an iPhone 4, of course. Loving all these 0’s this evening.

Here’s a remarkable device filling the bottles in the bottling plant

It’s called a bottle filler and it spins around rather fast.
The whole bottling plant was hugely impressive (and rather noisy) as this short collection of video clips proves. It was a bit like watching the Discovery Channel in person. Except that there were no repeats.
The rest of the photos are here – blurring slightly as the day progressed. I wonder why.

ISS mess

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One of the best things about being a Dad is being able to tell your offspring amazing things.
Often, these things aren’t actually true and even if they are, parental licence allows for a huge degree of exaggeration.
I follow @twisst14, one of the twisst.nl bots on twitter, who helpfully tell me (to the nearest second) what time the International Space Station is coming over Cape Town. They can do it for wherever you’re based as well.
Forearmed with this information, I can confidently predict exactly when Alex is going to see a “shooting star” going across the sky.
The fact that I am always right fills him with amazement – a totally different reaction from that of his mother when I tell her that I’m always right.

Tonight’s ISS pass was very bright, but then so was the sky behind it and the long exposure on my camera was sadly affected by the blustery south-easter. Then Alex went a bit mad on Picasa and we ended up with the picture above. Bit retro and kinda funky, but not as sharp as the last time I snapped the ISS over Constantiaberg – so I’m calling it “ISS mess”.

Twisst tells me that I have another opportunity to spot the ISS again this evening at 21:02:58 and – judging by the snoring coming from Alex’s room – this time I’ll be watching it on my own.

UPDATE: Looked a lot better the following evening.