Marilyn's Photos - Aug 5 2025 - Where's Waldo Now?

 

Where's Waldo?  How old was he in 1987? It looks like it started out as Where's Wally? in the U.K. and Where's Waldo in the U.S.  The originator/author is Martin Handford. As the series goes on, Wally progressively becomes harder to find, reducing his size on the page and surrounding him by more characters.  There were 225 characters in the first book to 850 in the last book's first page.  There's a great picture of attendees at the 2011 Where's Waldo? World Record event in Dublin, Ireland - all dressed as Wally/Waldo. In 2009 a re-creation took place in Chicago, featuring all the characters hiding throughout downtown Chicago.   Waldo came to mind after I saw this dog picture in the Bing feed - find the cat in the picture.  Is there only one cat?  Are all the small-eared ones cats, or just the one with whiskers?

Here's the opposite sort of picture - a little bit of found grunge.

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Marilyn's Photos - Aug 4 2025 - Simple Math

 

It is simple math time. Here's the headline:    Easy-looking math sum leaves people confused - can you solve it without a calculator?  5+5 x 5+5  The article shows the two ways to go wrong.  In one method the answer is 100, and in the other the answer is 55. The article says to use the acronym PEMDAS - p stands for parenthesis, then exponents, multiplication and division and then adding or subtracting.   We who took arithmetic know the answer is 35 and we never learned the PEMDAS acronym. You can find all kinds of math tricks. One of the websites is  Interactive Mathematics and it has lots I didn't know about.  And these are real tricks.  We'd have to memorize them - and as I said, there are lots.  Some of them are fun - the butterfly method for adding and subtracting fractions.  Go take a look at them HERE.

Knowing how to do all of this is great  What will I use it for? We'd have to start doing some of the following every day: cooking and baking, budgeting and finances, shopping, time management, home improvement, driving, sports and games, travel, gardening (planting in rows) and so on.  The article concludes:  "Just think how often you encounter numbers in your daily routine." I didn't mean to work on a winter picture yesterday but this bridge over Wilket Creek at the Toronto Botanical Gardens seemed a perfect candidate for simplification in a watercolour image. Here's the original and the watercolour version.

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Marilyn's Photos - August 3rd, 2025 - Megaflash - what is it?

 

A megaflash - what is it? a) big news from the White House in the middle of regular news from the White House  b) misspelling of magaflash - news from MAGA in the middle of regular news from the White House c) lightning strike that's really big The picture below is from the Weather Network.  It is the longest recorded lightning bolt.  It is over 800 km long.  It is called a megaflash. That happened in 2017 and scientists were able to measure it with new technology.  The margin of error is plus or minus 8 km.   To be a megaflash, it has to be more than 100 km long.  I guess they have been measuring them for quite a while.    Here is another previously accepted WMO lightning extreme: The greatest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds during a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on 18 June 2020. The other extremes are about number of people killed by a single flash.  Yuk!

I have a maintained folders of my images that I've added to the photo of the day or put into the websites Fine Art America and Redbubble.  That means I can easily look through them.  Here's a hop through the seasons - Summer at the Buffalo Garden Walk (missed this year with our self-imposed travel ban), Autumn in the Niagara vineyards, and Winter in the RBG garden.

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Mairlyn's Photos - Aug 2 2025 - Sydney Sweenye's blue genes,jeans

 

CBC Radio has media analysis talk shows  - Elamin Abdelahmoud's Commotion each day takes on a popular culture event of the day.  He gathers other younger commentators/analysts and I get to hear "how people talk today" about various topics.  The occurrence of "um" and "like" in their conversation is rampant. I think they should get some elocution lessons to be on national radio. I did listen intently to their analysis of Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad.  The eugenics word came up over and over. It is not surprising given her pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, with the supposed play on words of genes and jeans.  Or is the interplay jeans and genes?  Along with the tone  of her voice - some called it lighthearted, others say she's in on the joke, and engaging, I can hear a confident tone that arrives at being pompous.  We shouldn't be surprised that eugenics is making a comeback.  It originated out of the notion of improving genetic quality and maintaining white supremacy.  It had a big movement in the U.S.until the mid-20th century with scientific research supported by Carnegie, Rockefeller and others.  Eugenics programs faded away.  But the notion didn't leave - there were forced sterilizations of women inmates in U.S. prisons as recent as 2020.   All this genetics talk and concern over genes is compelling.  Genetics is a universal theme.  What was in the Globe and Mail this morning?  An article that scientists have identified the specific genes to led them to propose that the potato came about many millions of years ago due to a natural hybridization between early potato-like plants and tomatoes.   Hybridization seems to be everywhere - in  the physical world and in our minds.      Here's one of Marilyn Monroe's famous lines.

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oMarilyn's Photos - Aug 1 2025 - Face-down phone

 

There's a face-down phone theory.  "The mere presence of our smartphones is like the sound of our names or a crying baby - something that automatically exerts a gravitational pull on our attention.  Resisting that pull takes a cognitive toll." There is also the "brain drain" theory - that the constant need to inhibit attention towards a smartphone, even when not actively using it, drains cognitive resources, impacting performance on other tasks.  What about Maslow's hierarchy of smartphone needs?  One theory applies Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to smartphone use, suggesting that individuals may progress through stages of smartphone needs, from basic functionality to more advanced features and uses. And finally, there's Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality: this is where the distinction between reality and simulation blurs. What if you owned the Falcon Supernova Iphone 6 Pink Diamond phone worth $48.5 million US?  You would keep it face down to see the huge Pink Diamond on the back.   However, if you owned the Goldstriker Iphone 3Gs Supreme, valued at $3.2 million U.S. you would keep it face up as the diamonds - 130 of them - form a bezel around the face of the phone.  Turn it over and the 112 grams of 18-carat rose gold show off the Apple logo with 53 diamonds.  There are more strange and expensive smart phones HERE.  Will there be a time when there isn't a phone in the smartphone.  When it isn't called a phone? Brain-computer interfaces are already with us...   This is an interpretation of the August Restaurant sign a nice start to the month.

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