#foodporn Continue reading Taiwan 3 of 3 – Food
Stress Threes
We all have our ways of coping with stress. For me, it’s inane puzzle games, and I just started a new one: Threes. It’s an iPhone game, but a friend’s friend also ported a browser clone. The game is elegant. You slide tiles around a 4×4 board and combine tiles by shoving them against walls. Combine 1 and 2, combine matching numbers to get bigger numbers. Every swipe spawns a new number and you go until you lock up the board. Continue reading Stress Threes
Early Spring Macro
Spring started early in California because of the strange and alarming drought. That means for me 1) conserving water; 2) being less cold at night; 3) macro shooting! Continue reading Early Spring Macro
Epic Beach Sunset
This is a story of luck. January 18, 2014 was a sunset that I’ll remember forever. Continue reading Epic Beach Sunset
What’s perfect pitch like?
Imagine for a moment that your friends all see the world differently. They can see everything fine, the shapes, the shadows, the textures. The colors are there too: the sky glows blue, the leaves on trees look pretty green, and the earth is a homely brown. All is well.
But wait! They look away for a moment then back at the same scene. The sky’s purple now! The trees have turned teal, and the earth’s a sickly yellow. Good thing they’re still all different colors, though, or else it’d probably be hard to see. Your friends look again and now the sky’s green, the leaves brown, and the ground blue. What in the world?! It’s like the color wheels in their heads are rotating!
The world always looks resolutely normal to you, no changing color shenanigans, so sometimes your friends ask you to tell them what color the sky actually is. You say it’s blue. They’re all amazed that you know the sky is blue and you look at them funny, puzzled by how their shifting notion of color doesn’t bother them in the slightest.
That’s what it’s like having perfect pitch. Continue reading What’s perfect pitch like?
The Life of a Photon
Chapter 1 – Chaos
Our hero’s tale begins with fusion. A collision between two atoms. An explosion. An event so violent that when the atoms meet, they converge and spew forth a fanfare of energy. This energy swirls around wildly before it begins to divide and coalesce into quanta. Each quantum is simultaneously both unique and identical to every other, and from one of them, our hero is created. A photon. Continue reading The Life of a Photon
How to win Set
To find sets in Set,
- use your naturally powerful visual pattern recognition to scan the board holistically
- If one feature is very common, systematically analyze only that subset
- continue analysis when sets are being removed and cards are being dealt
- anticipate useful cards or categories before they are dealt
- analyze new boards starting from fresh cards
- develop a method for finding difficult sets on nearly deadlocked boards
Boston: the photos I didn’t take
We all use our cameras in different ways. Do you take group shots with your friends using your iPhone? Are you an Instagrammer who takes photos of things you buy, the clothes you wear, and random sunsets with random filters? Perhaps you’re an Asian who takes pictures of your food? A globetrotter who takes photos to remember where you’ve been? A selfie fanatic? I am none of these, and I wasn’t conscious about how strangely I used my camera until now. Continue reading Boston: the photos I didn’t take