mortiz080

You know San Francisco is full of hills...  ... consequently, it's also full of stairs.  Some are ordinary, but some are wonderful and beautiful.  Here's one of my favorite places in SF, not just for the view, but also for the cherry trees that bloom in the spring, the steepness of the steps, and the freshness of the breeze off the Bay, all of which makes for a great morning run.   Running down the Lyon St steps, cherry trees in bloom, the Bay in the distance, and the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts gleaming in the upper center. Lyon Street marks the eastern edge of the Presidio, the old fort in the heart of the city.  It's the best repurposing of a former military base that I've ever seen.   The Presidio, in the northern part of San Francisco, with the Golden Gate bridge at the top left, and a  mysterious set of houses marked off in the lower right.   As a former military base, the perimeter of the base either follows natural bound...

What's "normal" changes with time.    Despite our sense that something as personal as what food you eat is permanent, in fact, our collective tastes have changed significantly over time.  I'm not even talking about national preferences (do you have mayonnaise, sriracha or ketchup on your deep-fried potatoes), but just about how what you buy in a local cafe has shifted over time.   Moo.  "Eat more vegetables and not my head," says Bossie.   As I said, I hadn't appreciated how much our commonplace and customary dishes have changed over the past 60 years.  My kids grew up eating edamame  and nori  snacks, but that's the influence of local Asian culture--I had no idea what those things were when I was growing up in a time of PB&J sandwiches, Tang orange drink, and Cheez Whiz .   In my reading, I found that several popular dishes from the 1950s were seemed a bit over the top and a bit surprising.    Th...

Far be it from me to critique...  ... the food choices of different people at different times and places.  After all, I've eaten roasted grasshoppers ( chapulines ) in Oaxaca, smoked eel ( rauchen aal ) and blood sausage ( blutwurst)  in Germany, along with haggis in Scotland.   Moo.  "Eat more fish," says Bossie.   But I hadn't appreciated how much our commonplace and customary dishes have changed over the past 60 years.  Haven't we always been a land of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?  I recognize that it's very common to eat boiled soybeans ( edamame ) these days, and it's easy to find sushi in your local grocery store.  That's a big shift over the past couple of decades.   So I was surprised when I happened to discover that a few popular dishes from the 1950s were  broiled liver pudding  and boiled calf's head with brain sauce, which seem a bit over the top.  (Although I do admit that my father enjoy...

The key is asking good questions.   But you knew that.   This week, we tried to figure out what's going on with a couple of   decontextualized images .  In this case, these were pictures that I'd taken and recently re-found.  I also found myself puzzling about what they were... ( Why , I asked myself,  did I take this picture?? )   1.  What's up with these railroad tracks?  They see very odd, yet familiar.  Why are there  three  rails?   (I'll spare you the metadata extraction task.  This image was taken at:  38.908711, -77.068983)   Link to original As many Regular Readers quickly figured out, that lat/long is at the corner of P Street NW and 35th Street NW in Georgetown, Washington, DC.   If you jump there using Streetview, you'll see more-or-less the same image I show above, confirming that the image is recent and in the correct location.  The map also tells us that...

You might have noticed...  ... that the Image search now has a set of colored rectangles just below the query area.  Here's an example with a simple query.  See those rectangles?  They're called "chips," and they modify the image query.   If, for instance, you click on the blue "watercolor" chip, you get nothing but images of roses that are done in watercolors.  Notice that the selected chip is moved to the far left of the chip-row, and made grayish.  This indicates that the [rose] query is being modified by the "watercolor" chip selector.   In a sense, the chips  are suggestions for extending or modifying the original query.   NOTE:   The color of the chips has nothing to do  with the color of the image or how the query will be modified.  The chip color is just to separate the queries, putting them into handy categories.  (e.g., "watercolor"  "glitter" and "pastel" are all conceptually relat...