Category: Interesting

On Wednesday, Sept. 28, a thunderstorm rolled through my area. The storm knocked the power to a lot of east Dallas out after it rolled through, and the outage lasted for 3 hours.

Since the power was out, I went outside and played with the camera. I am amazed at the kinds of shots I was able to create.

This is looking down my street at, get this, 8:42 PM at night. The sun had set around an hour ago. I got this much light with a 16 second exposure time and ISO-400 equivalent sensitivity. (I can automatically change the emulated film type on this camera.) Part of the brightness is lightning in the distance. It was all cloud lightning.

The clouds are breaking, and stars are showing through. Stunning. Same settings as above.

A neighbor’s car passes down a nearby street.

A few nights earlier, I got this shot of my son playing with one of those green lights. This was given to us by some of my neighbor’s family evacuated Hurricane Rita from Houston.

This is a 5 second exposure with a flash at the end.

Last summer my mother in law gave my wife and me a gloxinia plant. This is a nice flowering plant that is related to the African violet.

The way you raise this plant is most unusual. After its flowering is done, the plant starts to die off. When it is done dying, you throw it in a closet and forget about it until next spring. In the spring start watering again, and you get another round of plant and flowering.

This is what I have growing in my office:

The flower is vibrantly colored and has a nice smell.

The broad leaves are fuzzy.

These are buds that should bloom in the next few weeks. This little plant will be a spray of color before it is finished.

A purported motorcycle ride through the Chernobyl area, documented at http://www.kiddofspeed.com/, is a fake. It turns out that the lady took a standard tour that anyone could take. Details of the fakery are at http://www.uer.ca/forum_showthread.asp?fid=1&threadid=8951.

A great panoramic shot of Pripyat is at http://www.web-axis.net/~pulse/chernobyl/prypyat-panoramic.jpg.

A coworker and I were just discussing the direction of water flow in toilets. He didn’t know that the oft-repeated grade school tale of southern hemisphere toilets swirling in the opposite direction is a myth. See http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html.

www.snopes.com is a great resource for other myths. Teeth do not dissolve when soaked in a soft drink. (My 2nd grade reading teacher actually tried that! Now I know why it didn’t work.) Nova does not mean “doesn’t go” in Spanish. Poinsettias are not poisonous.