Forum Federato

People are telling me that I’m wrong about the train that I’M LITERALLY RIDING ON AT THIS MOMENT.

I really wanted to like this.

The lack of luggage space is actually worse than a 737, and there’s no checked baggage. This is a dealbreaker if you’re traveling with anything close to the maximum allowed baggage.

Checking out the “NextGen” Acela train. Definitely less scruffy than the original. Seats seem a bit more comfortable.

But:

- Actual direction is opposite from the seat map (so my booked forward-facing seat faces backwards)
- Window shade keeps lowering by itself (so much for my window seat view)
- Periodic feedback on speakers
- Extremely limited luggage space. Overhead racks are full in a half- full car.

@SRLevine @ai6yr @river It also occurs to me that we're among relatively few species whose anatomy permits mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This is why opossums aren't able to get certified in CPR.

@SRLevine @ai6yr @river I think I'd still want an Ambu bag. "I never thought the raccoon would eat *my* face".

Based on the style and period, you might guess this was a minor work of Eero Saarinen's (it shares many design elements with his arirport terminals of the same era). But, in fact, the architect was the less well known William Tabler, who had many commissions from Hilton. This was one of his most distinctive, I think.

The Washington Hilton, completed 1965, was designed by architect William Tabler. It's notable not only for its distinctive exterior, but also for the prominent events hosted there. The hotel is or has been home to the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, the National Prayer Breakfast, the Shmoocon conference, and the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, among many other things.

It has extensive back-of-house facilities and security features to accommodate high profile VIPs.

The result here is about 170MP in 16x9 format, which is sufficient for very large prints that retain a great deal of detail (I've printed this at 6 feet wide).

Mid-Century Modernist architecture, and Brutalism in particular, is easy to dismiss as being superficially lifeless and uninteresting, but at its best (and with the right eye) these buildings can be seen as sculptures in the landscape. I don't always appreciate them, but they're often more interesting than they first seem.

This is a fairly conventional architectural composition, emphasizing the curved facade. To get a high resolution capture of the wide structure, this was made as a stitched composite of two captures with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens. The Phase One back was shifted left and right by about 12mm.

By using shift movements at a fixed perspective, the two captures can be stitched directly together into a panorama without needing to transform the frame geometry (as you would with panning).

Washington ("Hinckley") Hilton, Washington, DC, 2023.

More pixels than required at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53007102796

#photography

I don't live my life in a particularly exemplary way. Except maybe as a bad example.

- mentioning a reason I might upgrade my phone
- mentioning I flew on an airplane to see a total solar eclipse
- posting a photo of a construction site
- posting a photo of a tall building
- analyzing a presidential executive order on a topic on which I possess specialized expertise
- making a pun
- owning a fairly nice camera
- living in a country that needs a lot of work right now
- having too many followers
- seeming like the sort of person who probably doesn't include alt-text.

Yep, not possible for me to go a full day here without getting scolded by a stranger for some assumed offense or character flaw. (In this case, "buying a phone that meets a need I have").

Neighbor put a rather sad-looking old guitar out with the trash. Guy just walked by, did a double take, looked it up and down, picked it up, and continued his walk while playing it and singing. Both were out of tune, which did nothing to diminish the joy.

That Banksy (which just got painted over) of a judge beating a protester is a powerful piece of street art, but I can’t resist pointing out that British judges don’t use gavels.

Someone I dislike and deeply disagree with was shot today, and that only reinforces my conviction that we need to something about gun violence in this country. Enough!

One reason IMSI catchers aren't often used in the US to ID people at protests and other mass events is that the government has other capabilities for doing this that are more powerful, less cumbersome, and that generally require lower legal hurdles to use. Cell site "tower dumps", in particular, can readily identify all phones within a small area retrospectively, without needing to set up special equipment, from existing carrier records.

The skyscrapers along Park Avenue in the 40's and lower 50's are all minor engineering marvels. They're built atop the rail yard for Grand Central Terminal (an early adopter of the modern real estate concept of "air rights"). Many of the newer buildings are much taller than was anticipated when the terminal was constructed more than a century ago. This heavily constrains their foundations and anchor points, leading to unusual load-bearing designs such as the steelwork shown in the photo.

Captured with the Phase One IQ4-150 Achromatic back and the Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 HR Digaron-SW lens, which, unusually for large format lenses, employs a floating element integrated into the focusing helical.

This view is literally a construction site (to become the new JP Morgan building), but abstract at the same time. We see the new skyscraper, and the buildings in the background, essentially as a Mondrian-esq deconstructed tangle of lines and rectangles.