I have posted a set of photos of some of my Christmas decorations here: Christmas Decorations.
On The Large Hadron Collider
I have to admit that even after reading several articles about it, I still don’t understand enough about the Large Hadron Collider to write an intelligent-sounding post. Physics, chemistry, astronomy — and anything that smacks of having even a distant relationship to math or calculus — don’t get past the internal censors in my head. I have enormous respect for people who do understand this stuff … I’m in awe of them, really … and this colossal experiment apparently has significance to these sciences that will be felt for many, many years.
So, here are a few related articles and sites that I came across yesterday:
From Computerworld:
Collider test called a ‘great milestone of mankind’ – “Today’s successful test run of a massive particle collider is being called ‘one of the great engineering milestones of mankind.’ On Wednesday morning, just outside of Geneva, scientists shot a particle beam fully around a 17-mile loop in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Twenty years after development of the collider began, a particle beam made the full journey around the accelerator for the first time. It’s a forebear to the time when scientists will accelerate two particle beams toward each other at 99.9% of the speed of light….”
Also from Popular Science:
It’s Christmas for Physicists! – “If you somehow managed to avoid seeing the comic, listening to the rap or reading anything in the all out media blitz, then let me be the first to tell you that earlier today the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most power particle accelerator, began operation. Scientists hope that the experiments conducted in the $9 billion dollar accelerator will help them discover the mysterious Higgs boson. The Higgs boson, colloquially referred to as the ‘God particle,’ is the hypothetical particle that imbues matter with mass, and finding it (or not finding it) will have profound implications on the world of physics….”
And from the Boston Globe’s consistently excellent photography blog, The Big Picture, a series of images of the collider inside and out, here:
“Snail on the Run!”
Have you ever spent two hours on a Saturday afternoon chasing a snail around your back yard?
I thought not….
Well … I have. A few weekends ago I splurged on a new lens for my Sony A100 camera …
… and as I was crawling around my back yard trying to figure out how to use it properly, I spotted this tiny creature resting on a dried up leaf….
It started to move …
… and you’d be surprised how fast a snail seems to travel at this magnification.
The focus on these shots is not great, and I’ve learned a lot more about using the lens since that first day, but I got a big kick out of how close I could get to something that was smaller than a small shirt button and still capture very good detail.
The poor thing must have been camera shy, something I can certainly relate to, so I was careful not to use any flash but it tried to race off the leaf anyway …
… yet the only way out of sight was through a whole in the leaf …
… where it got stuck …
… so I set the camera aside, split the leaf to release it’s head, and off it went, disappearing into the forest…. I mean, uh, pine bark.
The lens is fantastic, definitely the best purchase I’ve made for the camera. I’ve gotten a lot better at predicting how it will react to light and focus at these close distances, so you can expect a huge quantity of photos of very small things — especially buds and bugs — to start appearing here and on my Flickr account pretty soon. I’ve also got a massive set of closeup shots from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, taken over several weekends, that impress even me — and that’s pretty hard to do….
From our friends over at YouTube, here’s Paul McCartney and Wings singing that classic, “Snail on the Run.” (It may sound like they’re saying “Band” — but they’re not.) Is the song stuck in your head yet?
Oakland Cemetery Tornado Damage Update
The Historic Oakland Foundation now has a page up on their web site describing some of the damage to the property with a few photographs from the grounds, here:
Historic Oakland Cemetery Badly Damaged
As they state and as I discovered on Saturday, the property is currently closed for the reasons described in the article.
If you’ve enjoyed my writing and photography on this site and have ever thought about supporting it, please consider making a financial contribution to Oakland’s rebuilding efforts instead. The address for donations (also listed at the end of their article) is:
Historic Oakland Foundation
248 Oakland Avenue SE
Atlanta, GA 30312
Here are a couple of photographs I took back in November, 2007, while researching the Cemetery’s history, showing the Fickett monument:
Here’s that same monument now (photograph from the Foundation’s article):
If you’ve been following my series of articles on the Cemetery or have looked at any of my Flickr pictures of the property, you know I consider it a treasured historical and community resource unlike anything I had ever seen until I started learning about it. If you’re able to make even a small donation to helping the Cemetery’s reconstruction efforts, you’ll be honoring the memories of those who are buried there and you’ll also be recognizing the critical significance of Atlanta’s few remaining truly historical sites. Give Oakland a bit of help and I guarantee you that the next time you consider the meaning of some place of history or community that matters to you, you’ll look at it with a greater awareness and understanding of what these places really mean to our lives, our neighborhoods, and our place in this world.
I’ll be resuming my articles on the Cemetery and the neighborhood’s history within a few days….
Exploring Place: Oakland Cemetery, Part Three – Atlanta Tornado!
Nearly every evening last week, I worked on what was to be the third article in my series on Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery, based on the Exploring Place: History class that I took in 2007. (The previous article in this series is here, and all my articles on Oakland are here.) This middle segment of the class was the most substantial, because in it I extended my Oakland research into the surrounding neighborhood streets, exploring history as it played out on Decatur Street, Boulevard, Memorial Drive, and Martin Luther King Drive. The old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills and the Cabbagetown district were part of that research, and I had started writing about them in that article.
The article remains unfinished. Little did I know that Atlanta would get hit by one of the few tornados this region has ever seen, on the evening of Friday, March 14, and that the tornado’s path would take it through the very areas I was writing about. The map below was supposed to be part of the original article, as a way of orienting the geography of the article in the same way it helped me organize my research.
If you look to the right of Oakland Cemetery on the map above, you’ll see a section bordered by Boulevard, Decatur Street, and Memorial Drive (highway 154). This is the area in my neighborhood that sustained the most damage; this is where the Cabbagetown district is located, and the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill property is in the space where Boulevard and Decatur Street intersect, just above Carroll Street SE on this map. My home is less than a mile from this spot … and yes, an incoming tornado really does sound like a freight train. I hope I never hear that sound again.
I had the bright idea yesterday morning of heading over to Oakland Cemetery to take a few pictures of the damage to the Cotton Mill building. Hard to believe that it never occurred to me that the Cemetery itself might have sustained some damage, and I imagined just walking onto the property up to the northeast corner that I was so familiar with, and zooming in on the mill buildings.
Until I got there, that is, and saw this:
These trees had been knocked down just inside the entrance gate (at the intersection of Oakland Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, just above the “e” in “Memorial” on the map). A security guard was keeping people out … well, everyone except this dude with a camera who failed to come tell me how to sneak onto the property.
In any case, I wandered up and down Memorial Drive and Oakland Avenue, taking pictures over the brick wall that surrounds Cemetery. This shot is one of several I took of the Confederate Memorial, looking so strange with the trees that used to surround it now down on the ground.
Not far from the Memorial lies the Confederate section of the Cemetery, where several of the giant trees are either uprooted or shattered near the base of their trunks:
Some areas are just a chaos of twisted branches; it’s hard to even remember or describe how these spots, for example, looked before Friday evening:
The rest of the pictures I took of the damage to the Cemetery are in a Flickr set that I added this morning:
Oakland Cemetery Tornado Damage
I didn’t venture into the Cabbagetown neighborhood (I don’t know if I would have been able to anyway), and even though I walked Decatur Street to the north of the cemetery, I decided not to take any pictures of the private businesses or private homes that sustained damage. There is plenty of coverage of that; you can take a look at the Atlanta tornado article on Wikipedia for list of local news sources.
Damage from the tornados and from a series of powerful storms that repeatedly swept across Georgia Friday and throughout the day Saturday is expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with many people suffering tremendous damage to or total losses of their homes and businesses. The American Red Cross has, as always, a highly visible presence providing folks with assistance throughout the state; if you want to help, consider making a donation here.
