Photo Trip to Center City Philadelphia yesterday.

     Ok, so not exactly the brightest idea I've had in a while. Since I have the week off for the bi-annual plant shutdown, I decided to head downtown to work on some projects I've had in my head for a while. Unfortunately, I picked the hottest day in over a decade (official high 102 degrees).

     I started off the afternoon at the querilla skateboard park in South Philly, but there was nothing really going on (no great surprise,) so I headed up to center city. I had no idea how much they've done around the art museum. It's actually a really nice place to hang out.

     I wandered around the Waterworks/Boathouse Row for a while, a little before dusk, and then wandered a little bit down West River drive, figuring on shooting the obligatory Boathouse Row from across the river shot. I found a decent place about 45 minutes before it was going to get dark, so just hung out for a while watching the cars/cyclists/joggers (!?) go by. Thank goodness there was a breeze. I got a few decent shots in increasing degrees of dark, and then headed back toward the museum. Out the corner of my eye, toward the Waterworks, I kept seeing what seemed to me to be flashes of light, but I wasn't entirely sure. After working my way around to the north end of the 'Works complex, I set up my tripod for a 30 sec. exposure of the rest of the building. About halfway through, a very nice older gentleman showed up with his grandson, and his point-and shoot with the really annoying strobing orange redeye reducer and flash... totally buggered up my shot- thank goodness for digital. I also noticed that the flashes I had seen were people taking pictures of the building, and not turning off the flash. For anyone not familiar with it, The 'Works is a quite attractive Greek Revival building complex on the bank of the Schuylkill river, off the north side of the art museum (I will be posting photos soon- they're currently in post). The way the buildings are lit up at night offers a spectacular range of contrasts in shadows and shapes, which would be totally destroyed by camera flash.

I was asked a question the other day...

About midway through my shift, a coworker picked up a scientific calculator, and started asking me some math questions.... square root of 80 (didn't know off the top of my head, beyond 8.- something), what's pi (surprised I knew it to 5 decimal places), etc. I then threw a couple more in, like what are the sine/cosine of 45, etc. Another coworker chimed in with, "what's two plus two?"

Both the original coworker and I looked at her and said, "five."

Later in the evening, she asked me how that equation works. I tried, in vain, to explain that except in the cases of geometry and the straight arithmetic we were taught in elementary school, there are usually extenuating circumstances in the middle that tend to change the answer from what is expected. This reminded me of an old Sidney Harris cartoon from the New Yorker which has always been one of my favorites: