I drove from Farmington to Portland this morning to catch a flight (first in a series of flights) to Dallas. I left the house at 6am when it was just getting light. It was beautiful to drive in the pre-dawn, then dawn through the rolling hills (are they mountains?) with all that fresh snow. I had to laugh, though, when I drove past the used car lot. I never thought about it, but that's got to be a pain. You can snow plow the parking lot, but someone had to shovel in between all those parked cars and brush the snow off of all of those roofs, windows, hoods, and trunks. Ugh! What a job!
I also drove past 2 mailboxes that were totally covered in snow. I guess the plowed snow had been stacked on them. They were traditional residential rural mailboxes on a post. Someone had shoveled the area in such a way that a mailman could drive up to them and put the mail in them. But it looked like they were sticking out of a white wall. You couldn't see the posts and there was snow all around them and on top of them. All you could see was their doors sticking out. There were two sticks stuck in the snow on top of the mailboxes with bright orange warning tape tied to them. I guess that was to provide a flag of sorts to help the mailman find them.
Every time I drove past a big open white spot, I had to ask myself, "I wonder if that's a body of water or a field totally covered in snow?" You better know your geography before a snowstorm around here. I never thought about that before.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Photographing snowflakes
The January 2007 US Airways magazine had an article about Wilson Alwyn Bentley, the son of a farmer and an amateur photographer. In 1885, he was the first to photograph a single snowflake. They had a page of his photos. They were beautiful!
There's a children's book about his life, "Snowflake Bentley." I'll have to check it out. If it has his photos in it, I'm buying it.
Turns out, even though he wasn't a scientist, he was the first to propose the idea that no two snowflakes were alike. "And despite the great leaps in science and microphotography since Bentley's day, his astonishing assertion about the uniqueness of snow crystals has stood the test of time." The Jericho Historical Society has a museum with his original camera and microscopes, some of his original prints, and most of his original equipment. I think I should visit Jericho, VT.
"His glass slides now belong to the Buffalo Museum of Science in Buffalo, NY where they have been turned into a digital collection." I need to look for that online. I feel a really good math lesson coming. :-)
~*~*~*~
I found the online stuff:
http://www.bentley.sciencebuff.org/
And I found this:
"The web site SnowCrystals.com presents this organizational scheme in its section “Classifying Snowflakes,” along with a visual representation."
How awesome that he had an organizational scheme. I knew I liked this guy! Don't you know that he would've loved to have had a database software?? :-)
There's a children's book about his life, "Snowflake Bentley." I'll have to check it out. If it has his photos in it, I'm buying it.
Turns out, even though he wasn't a scientist, he was the first to propose the idea that no two snowflakes were alike. "And despite the great leaps in science and microphotography since Bentley's day, his astonishing assertion about the uniqueness of snow crystals has stood the test of time." The Jericho Historical Society has a museum with his original camera and microscopes, some of his original prints, and most of his original equipment. I think I should visit Jericho, VT.
"His glass slides now belong to the Buffalo Museum of Science in Buffalo, NY where they have been turned into a digital collection." I need to look for that online. I feel a really good math lesson coming. :-)
~*~*~*~
I found the online stuff:
http://www.bentley.sciencebuff.org/
And I found this:
"The web site SnowCrystals.com presents this organizational scheme in its section “Classifying Snowflakes,” along with a visual representation."
How awesome that he had an organizational scheme. I knew I liked this guy! Don't you know that he would've loved to have had a database software?? :-)
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