lovethyhippie:

bootythief:

theawesomeadventurer:

evacu0:

theawesomeadventurer:

Look at my nails omfg

How did you take that photo?!?

I had to follow her for that omg.

Fuck

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ksilverful:

*ignores responsibilities, watches Kissing in the Rain*

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jamberlies:

tiny-creatures:

Chameleon by Mansour Al-Fayez on Flickr.

They used to call Steve Buscemi the chameleon.

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Western Pygmy Blue Butterfly, Brephidium exile

The smallest butterfly in North America, and possibly in the world. Wingspan: between half and three-quarters of an inch.

Photos by Flickr user stonebird:

Western Pygmy Blue, Brephidium exilis (male and female)

A Western Pygmy Blue on Saltbush

Western Pygmy-Blue Nectaring on Alkali Sea Heath flower

Pygmy Blue Butterfly on Alkali Sea Heath

Shine / Pygmy blue Butterfly, Brephidium exilis. North America’s smallest butterfly. This butterfly is on Alkali Sea Heath.

Pygmy Blue Butterfly on Woolly Seablite at the Ballona Wetlands Grand Canal Lagoon

Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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musts:

© Kurt G [1] [2] { blog }

Black-eyed Litter Frog (Leptobrachium nigrops)

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A Charley Eiseman appreciation post

Charley Eiseman is the principal author of Tracks and Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates. If you’ve been following my blog long enough you already know what an awesome book it is. But maybe you don’t know what an awesome person Charley is.

I mentioned earlier today that I’d found an object in the salt marsh yesterday that I thought might be a spider egg sac, and that I was planning to upload a photo of it to bugguide.net to see if someone (which usually means Charley, for an image like that) could help identify it.

I uploaded the image at 2:18 p.m.

Charley’s comment with a tentative ID was posted at 2:20 p.m.

This is not the first time this has happened.

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karamazove:

Orpheus (1863) — François-Louis Français

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Ladies and gentlemen,

I give you the hardest-working person at the best ISP in this, or any other, possible reality: Cyberverse Online.

Taking care of my online bits with skill and heart and integrity for more than 20 years. Literally.

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textless:

Southwest Colorado wildflowers, July 2014

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I was feeling kind of bummed yesterday.

The website I made for the voter outreach effort for Measure P was finished, and my expectations for how it would be received were clearly (in hindsight) naive, like always happens when I get deep into some obsessive project. I push through the mountain of last-minute details to try to get as close to the vision as possible, imagining how great it’s going to be, and then it’s done, but instead of the imagined thing it’s something else, the real thing, and there’s an adjustment.

Look! We’re here! We’re… here. Oh. Okay.

And there are things about this campaign that are depressing. Not just the obvious things, like the misleading ads from the opposition that seem to be getting some traction, but less-obvious things that I’ve only encountered now that I’ve gone from pushing code (which is easy, even though python’s one-way-to-do-it makes me grimace sometimes) to trying to push people (which is always ridiculously hard for me).

So, again: kind of bummed. And my head hurt (fatigue? behind the caffeine-addiction curve? eyestrain from too much computer?), and it was making me less than patient in bugging someone about his APUSH homework, and he called me on it, and he had a point.

I hadn’t been out of the house at all, practically, for two weeks. So I put my binoculars in my backpack so I wouldn’t look like the kind of person who walks through a suburban neighborhood with binoculars around his neck, which is something I’ve felt self-conscious about since I was nine. And it’s ridiculous, because I’m walking through a suburban neighborhood wearing a backpack, and that’s different how? And no one cares, anyway, and if they do, fuck them; I’m not nine anymore. Anyway, I headed out the door.

It took me ten minutes to get to the marsh. I hadn’t checked the tide, but it turned out to be high, a 5.6. I love the marsh when it’s like that.

I didn’t take photos. I wasn’t thinking about documenting. I just needed to be there, to hang out with the bugs and the lizards and the coyote brush in bloom.

There were pygmy blue butterflies everywhere. They’re so cool, and so tiny. You’ll totally miss them if you aren’t paying attention. But they’re there if you look, flitting around low to the ground chasing each other. They disappear when they land, but if you mark the spot you can crank the binoculars down to minimum focus and find them, and they’re beautiful.

Actually I did take one photo there, but I’m leaving it out because it’s a closeup of what I think is a spider egg sac and it doesn’t quite go with the others. But I’m posting it to bugguide to see what Charley Eiseman thinks.

Then I walked to the beach to visit Linda and Joannie under their umbrellas, and then on east past Linden and the tomol park on Matt’s new trail, and there were savannah sparrows in the field and they let me check them out as long as I wanted, reading Sibley on my phone and ticking off the characteristics, yeah, savannah sparrow.

Then through the campground and into tar pits park, then past the CPF to the seal overlook, and on through the bluffs, past the site of the recent abandoned-well cleanup and the artist’s passage and finally my destination, which I hadn’t realized was going to be my destination when I started: the Lois Sidenberg overlook.

I never met Lois. But I’ve seen the picture of her testifying before Congress in Bob Sollen’s book, and I think about her sometimes when I visit the spot named after her. It really has the best view at the bluffs; the whole channel is laid out. I spent a while sweeping for pelagics.

I’d sent a feisty letter to the Coastal View the day before, the first time I’ve done that in a while, and I’d been reading again about the ‘69 blowout as part of deciding what to say. So I was thinking about Platform A, and I swung over to look at it. It doesn’t look special, just another in the row that follows the anticline from west to east: C, B, A, Hillhouse, then Habitat farther out in the channel, then Henry, Houchin, and Hogan. Back when I still had my boat we visited them all, because William was obsessed. Wonder where he gets that? So I know what they look like up close. But from shore Platform A was washed out, blurred by haze and distance. Fitting, I guess, for the symbol it has become.

I remembered the time I was at the Sidenberg overlook with a too-big group of third graders during one of Katie’s Earth Day events, and one girl started shouting “A’lul’quoy!”, because of the Chumash myth she’d heard in class, to make the dolphins come, and she got her friend to join in, and pretty soon all the kids were shouting “A’lul’quoy!” at the top of their lungs, and it was out of control and kind of hilarious. And then a gray whale, probably curious about all the noise, did a spyhop and fell back with a crash right in front of us, and the kids cheered.

And I remembered the time I drank wine there with Katie when I was still on the bluffs board. I miss her a lot. I think everyone who knew her does.

And then it was just the walk home. The sun was going down, and I thought to take a photo, that first one above, from the trail along Carp Avenue. And then I took a bad selfie, with my head cut off and sunscreen in the 52-year-old folds on my neck, but I’m posting it anyway because 1) hah! I’ll show you vanity, and 2) it’s actually a double selfie, because that’s me in the sign, too, with a different group of third-graders on a different Earth Day, in the photo Ted took and put on the sign without telling me until after it was done, “Hah! Hope that was okay, John.” And yeah, of course it was. Because again: vanity.

And then walking home through the suburbia, my right knee a little sore where it always gets sore if I push it too hard, and my legs tired, and a little sweaty. But my head felt fine.

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halloweden:

halloweden:

it defines the friendship

i love theavocadoqueen so much and I’ll be with her again soon so I’m BRINGING THIS BACK 

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Hey! I Ship It is not a sequel to Kissing in the Rain. We play different characters in a different plot and also we are dry the entire time (spoiler alert?)

I Ship It is a short film written and directed by Yulin as a part of a deal with New Form Digital, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’ digital media company.

http://ift.tt/1k3esPq

It’s looking pretty great though. Excited to see the final result!

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bourbakiaxiom:

Snowden and the Mathematicians

In the June 2014 edition of the Notices of the AMS (the American Mathematical Society – a three-letter entity of less notoriety than the NSA!) two math professors provide contrasting responses to the Edward Snowden revelations of the NSA surveillance programs. They have previously worked as academics in either assisting the NSA, or more generally in the area of cryptography and security, but neither have been direct employees, nor held security clearances.

Dr Keith Devlin from Stanford University is probably best known to Americans at That Math Guy on NPR. He worked with the NSA post 9/11 on the NIMD project, and his main concern, apart from the betrayal of trust, is that the NSA data gathering severely weakens US security. He now feels forced to break ties with the NSA, and does not recommend the agency to his student for employment.

In contrast, Prof Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota, does still recommend the NSA to his students. Having misgivings, and urging some reforms, he sees the agency as important for protecting US interests and global information systems. A major line of his argument is that it is inevitable that privacy is being eroded, and hence it is better that the NSA be ahead of others.

Despite his guarded support to the NSA, Odlyzko raises some of the more critical opinions:

“My carefully considered view is that our society has become preoccupied with terrorism to an absurd and harmful degree. That is what has driven the intelligence agencies to the extreme measures they have taken.”

“The moves taken in the name of fighting terrorism, including the intrusive NSA data collection that has recently come to light and more generally the militarization of our society, are not justified by the dangers we currently face from terrorism. In fact, these moves will likely inhibit our ability to deal with many of the other threats and probably will even inhibit the antiterrorism campaign.”

As Western politicians use IS extremism as the latest excuse for another round of drastic reductions to our liberties and increased powers to intelligence agencies, it is worth considering these thoughtful critiques of accepting politicians’ knee-jerk and unbalanced measures.

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windandwater:

Wildflowers in the Grass

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jossblanchard:

Le soleil sous le parapluie

The sun under the umbrella 

© Joss Blanchard 2012

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Because the old one is one I’d been using since the first time some social media site wanted a profile pic, and I used a photo down at the beach that my wife took because I looked happy in it (because I was). And then it was mostly laziness (not wanting to have to go through that whole taking-another-photo thing) and consistency (yeah, this is that same person because look: same avatar).

But then 15-ish years go by, and it starts to look less like laziness or consistency and more like vanity, because of course I don’t actually look like that anymore. And I don’t want to appear vain.

So: New me. Just like the old me, only wiser.

Wise enough to realize, for example, that replacing the pic because I don’t want to appear vain is itself a vain act (because: caring what people think).

There’s no winning this ongoing-march-of-time thing.

I was having an interesting exchange with a mutual follow who was lamenting the passing of the years and the effect it has. And it reminded me of the other day, when my 80-something neighbor across the street shaded her eyes and peered at me during a conversation we were having and blurted out, “My god! What happened to you?” Referring, it turns out, to the gray.

Life, Margaret. Life happened to me.

Is why.

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“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”

– Khaled Hosseini (via mysharona1987)

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poboh:

Moonlit Lake, Louis Douzette. Germany (1834 – 1924)

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stuart-pothead:

holy shit bruh I love kini zamora

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loodletooboodleroodlesoodle:

mangomartyr:

loodletooboodleroodlesoodle:

santullianal:

This honestly made me tear up. Imagining how great he must have felt that his planned worked and choosing that risk paid off.
I also feel like him and the model have such good chemistry, they’re always so kind and loving to one another.

Holy shit what did he do?? That’s rad as hell!

Since the runway was going to have simulated rain, he wanted to make the outfit become colorful because of it rather than deflect it. He sewed dye into the seams and once the rain hit it the dye ran! Very simple but super effective. He was one of the two winners of that challenge.

Absolutely brilliant. Holy shit.

It was fun to see it work after the build-up they gave it during the episode. And I was glad the judges rewarded it for the effect during the runway show, when the transformation happened, despite the fact that afterwards, absent the transformation, it was pretty ho hum on its own just as a dress.

So I was also glad (even though it was cheating, kind of) that the judges gave a co-win to Kini. Because his dress was amazing as a dress.

I don’t care for the manufactured reality-show drama as much. But when someone pulls off something really creative or beautiful it can be breathtaking, which I guess is why I’ve stuck through watching this show through most of a dozen seasons.

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