Born and raised in Scotland, currently living in New Hampshire. Author of several books, mostly on meditation and Buddhist practice. Fan of Scots language. Learning #dansk and #svenska. Dabbler in #Pali.
One of the best things about living in Glasgow is turning a corner and finding yourself looking up at a roof like this!
The former Ogg Brothers Department Store at Paisley Road Toll was designed by Bruce and Hay, and was built in the 1880s. It's topped by the Spirit of Commerce and Industry, who is perhaps better known as the Kinning Park Angel, the Angel of the South, or simply Mrs. Ogg.
The last photo I will share of the aurora: This doesn't look spectacular, but you can clearly see the Big Dipper standing on end, right in the middle of the shot.
It's extraordinary how far phone cameras have come. This exposure took several seconds, yet because of the digital image stabilization, the stars are pinpoints rather than blurry streaks. Hats off to the engineers involved!
For the second time this year, I've ripped a calf's ear trying to tag it. I hate having to tag new born calves. It's horrible that your first interaction with a young creature is to hurt it; and it feels dreadful to interrupt the mother-calf bonding in such a way. I can't believe this is either a humane or a justifiable practice.
Still, it is done, and the tissue sample is taken.
@simon_brooke I became a vegetarian more than forty years ago as a result of what I saw during my veterinary training. I find this disturbing, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to unfollow.
@gbhnews@jessamyn The color-detecting cells in our retinas require fairly bright light to work. At night everything is lacking in color.
If the aurora's faint there's only just enough light to slightly trigger those cells. I wasn't always 100% sure I was seeing colors at times!
Your camera works differently. It can accumulate light over time to register the colors your eye can't, or can only barely, see. The amazing thing is the digital stabilization in cameras, so it's not all a blur!
There are some amazing photographs of the aurora on Mastodon. Bear in mind that a lot of these are enhanced, even if the photographers "forget" to mention that fact. I just looked through the comments on a photograph taken from the Isle of Wight. The landscape almost looks like it was taken in daylight. This tells you it was a very long exposure, and that the human eye would have seen something very different, with not nearly as much color. Why is this important? 1/
@thisismyglasgow Good luck. As I said to someone else, wrap up warm and stay out for a long time. It's surprising how much your eyes adapt if you stay out for longer. Our retinas' colour-detecting cells are not very sensitive to low light levels, and cameras detect color much better, so take pics anyway. Also, most of the photos you're seeing are probably edited, so you're looking for subtler colours than you're seeing on pics here: maybe 5 to 20% as strong.
I just had a conversation with a guy who said, “Yeah, well I’m a capitalist.”
So I asked, “Okay, how much capital do you have?”
Boy, oh boy, does that question put things in perspective. He became a caricature of an old Warner Brothers cartoon character, trying to compose himself as he fumbled for words, all while he avoided actually answering the question.
So I simply repeated the question. I highly recommend.
@MattMerk Is it Stockholm syndrome or something? The US is full of people who act like serfs, talk like rugged individualists, and identify with the very rich.
Tomorrow I'm interviewing big-time audiobook narrator Scott Brick, who narrates the "Dune" books, and Kevin J. Anderson who has written many "Dune" books.
Do you have any questions you'd like me to ask them (I'm especially interested in questions about the language of "Dune").
@grammargirl@EJGilbert Same here. When I read Dune I took Atreides to sound like a-TRY-deez (in the film it's a-TRY-deez — don't know about the audiobook). I also read Leto as Leeto, but I think in the film it's Layto (again, no idea about the audiobook). Did Herbert give any indication of how these names were to be pronounced?
Does anyone know the story behind these tiles about Alice? I run into different ones from time to time on walls around the Southside of Glasgow, mostly in the vicinity of Queen's Park.
"European intelligence agencies have warned their governments that Russia is plotting violent acts of sabotage across the continent as it commits to a course of permanent conflict with the west."
We are already under attack by Russia.
"... explosion at a munitions factory in Wales that supplies shells used by Ukraine ... a Czech arms depot storing weapons for Kyiv was destroyed ... A huge fire at a factory in Berlin...
Just today I've started using the term "billionairism" to signify that the morbid accumulation of wealth is a form of mental disturbance, even illness, and also to signify the detrimental effects billionaires' addictions have on society and the planet as a whole.
The fantastic Norton Disney dodecahedron intrigues everyone. There are other complete examples, e.g., this one from Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt.
We still don't know what those mysterious devices were used for. Any suggestions?
@ninawillburger I can imagine these functioning as stands for something like glass vials. Modern test-tube stands have holes that are the same size, but something like this could hold many different sizes of non-standard vessel/vials for perfumes,, medicines, and so on. You'd just have to turn the stand so that the size of hole you needed was at the top. Relatively fragile glass containers wouldn't survive, while these would. I don't know if Romans had anything like test-tubes, though!
Microsoft Word's grammar suggestion is to change "Take as long as you need" to "Take if you need."
How can a grammar checker be so bad? How can a company so inept become so rich? How can such a rich company fail to invest in the software it foists on its users? (These are rhetorical questions.)
Apart from a few comma suggestions, almost all the recommendations are as bad as this.
A really fascinating article on the evolving way Europeans understood Buddhism. Europeans encountered Buddhism in several different countries, but thought they were dealing with different religions in each. Voltaire was an admirer of the Buddha, although he called him Sammonocodom (Samana Gautama).
