Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Two men and a great big chainsaw, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

That’s what it took to clear up all the trees that Hurricane Irene dumped back and forth across the road that leads to our house. So now we could leave if we wanted to, but we don’t.

We charged up all our hardware before we lost power, so I sit here posting the photos from my iPhone into my Flickr account via my little Sprint wifi hotspot, by the light of a fireplace fire and one wax candle.

We’ve go plenty of food and water but come tomorrow we will probably venture out to get some more electricity.

The Northwood NH Fire and Rescue team are super people, in the best sense of the word. These men made their way down the long dirt road to our house, chopping up great big trees as they went along.

The man with the chainsaw remembered the last time they came out, after the microburst storm in 2006, when he helped to remove a truly enormous tree from my neighbor’s house. Compared to that, Hurricane Irene was not so bad.

We have no lights or fridge until (probably) tomorrow but big wooden matches will still light the propane stove. So we had hot dinner, with toasted marshmallows to follow.

And we had to eat up every bit of the ice cream melting in the freezer. I blame it all on Hurricane Irene!

Dave Winer playacting in front of huge snowpile, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Another reminder of why we read Dave Winer’s blog Scripting News: this spirit-lifting quote from a recent post Indirect business models FTW.

One of the really amazing things about New York City is the extent to which the city anticipated its own growth. It built elevated rail systems to neighborhoods that didn’t exist. A grid that went into the Bronx when the city barely made it to 14th St. A huge city park in the middle of nowhere. Tech guys have to think like that. So few do. Seriously.

Liquid galaxy coming soon from Google, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Hallway display at Google. Big screens, big VR-panorama scrollable city images that look 3D but sides of buildings etc. are based on projections from Google Earth data, not on street view. If you look closely you see cars are very flat.

I asked if I could take a picture and was told ok. I think they set it up Sunday morning while we were in the 10 a.m. Sci Foo session, because I surely would have noticed seeing this before. The name of this wonderful toy is Liquid Galaxy.

I miss Sci Foo already. Thank you, O’Reilly team, Google team, Timo Hannay team, and everybody I met there for being amazing. I told Cat Allman the best part was introducing wonderful people to other wonderful people they needed to meet. She said, “I love that too.” Of course she does, that’s what Sci Foo is really about.

Here’s looking at you, squid!, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

“May I photograph your squid?” One of those things heard at SciFoo, rarely heard in other places.

William Gilly was showing the insides of a Humboldt squid to interested folks.

Data Visualization Show and Tell, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Session I’m organizing, for which I should be finishing up my own talk. Bye!

Chris Lintott gave a great talk about Galaxy Zoo at last year’s session but had a schedule conflict with this week’s slot.

Who’s who on the poster:
* Rick Cavallaro of Sportvision.com
* Debra Lieberman of HealthGamesResearch.org
* Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik neuroscience and magic
* Bradley Voytek Brainscanr.com
* David Rothenberg NJIT musician showing sonograms
* Adam Nieman Futurelab, concrete imagery
* Aaron Koblin Google Data Arts team
* Yossi Matias also of Google who will talk about really massive data sets is
not on this poster but also recruited to speak.

Tags: scifoo2011, scifoo, #scifoo, #scifoo2011, #amitaggingthisright?

Mountains from above, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

I love the yin and yang balance in this photo. Earth below, sky above. Snow below, clouds above. The future below and the present just … riding in an airplane to get there, waiting.

Too red or not red enough?, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Fourteen people are coming to lunch today. The entire half-salmon has already finished grilling, now it’s the turn of a marinated flank steak to join our really, truly enormous sausage.

Plenty of good things for the vegetarians too.

But I love the primordial look of this family grill. Half a big metal drum rests on NH lake rocks. Rocks and bricks inside it hold up the actual charcoal. The grid is two overlapped shelves from some long-ago stove. The chefs are people who, as children, were themselves fed food from this very grill.

I love NH.