adirondacks

We’ve been so busy this summer working on new products, projects and coding adventures (and Jesse’s been teaching!) that we didn’t get a chance to take any exotic vacations but we did spend a nice week in the Adirondacks. We went camping at Indian Lake, NY with Jesse’s family. All the campsites are accessible by boat only and ours was a small island. We hiked, swam, and cooked over a fire, and told weird stories while eating smores. It was nice! You can find the pictures I took of various Adirondacks flora and fauna here. The photos below are of bolete mushroom pores, bubble aggregations, a toad, and a coral fungus.

purple and yellow

you may notice that we’re in the process of changing our blog! it looks different now…

On the left, Purple Beautyberry (Callicarpa dichotoma) as seen at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston earlier this fall.  On the right, a processing sketch.

fall

On a recent trip to the Arnold Arboretum, we found these perfectly decaying Himalayan Hydrangeas.

megacaldera, supervolcano

The reason we decided to visit Yellowstone was because it is home to the most spectacular geothermal features in the Americas. While in New Zealand we had a chance to visit the geothermal area and also tour White Island, a live marine volcano.  We were astonished and amazed at how alien and spectacular such sites were. The colors, textures, landscape formations, and also degree of temporal variability as the land opens up at sporadicly in the form of pores and fumaroles that alternately steam and bubble.Yellowstone has a bunch of sweet geothermal features including geysers, fumaroles, bubbling mud pits, sinter formations, pools of colorful thermophilic bacteria.  It turns out this is due to the fact that it sits right on top of a giant hotspot in the earth’s crust that is colloquially called a SUPERVOLCANO (I say colloquially because the term was coined by a BBC documentary in 2005)  Yes, SUPERVOLCANO, as in doomsday sized bursts of sun blocking blackness upon eruption. Don’t worry, it’s only erupted 3 times so far and not too recently either at 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago. Apparently the region does experience 1000 to 2000 detectable, albeit mild earthquakes a year.

yellowstone

A few photos from our trip to yellowstone, America’s first national park which spans  a total of 3,468 square miles (8,980 km²) in Wyoming and is home to an incredible variety of wildlife and geologic areas (including our favorite…geothermal features, more on that later)

Insectarium

We spent last week in New Orleans for SIGGRAPH where we were artists in residence.  We got there a few days early to check out Louisiana; one of the places we visited was the Audubon Insectarium.  What is an Insectarium you ask? Well it is like an aquarium or zoo, except focused on insects.  They did not have as many live specimens as I would have liked but they had a whole room near the end of the exhibition covered wall to wall in prepared specimens, laid out in a very artistic manner.

They were drawing with bugs.  This is the part I really enjoyed.  Here are a few of my pictures:

happy holiday

There’s a thick layer of snow here in Saugerties and the temperature is a brisk 1 degree F.  Yesterday we spent sometime outside.  I took many pictures of snow covered winter branches, while Jesse built a 1 person snow dome in the back yard.  We hope you are enjoying some winter weather as well.  happy holidays!

Traditional Sights in Japan

Here are some more shots from our trip to Japan.  Click through to flickr to see more details about each one.  The images show the Chrysanthemum festival at Shinjuku Gaien, traditional structures at Engakuji in Kamakura, hiking in Kamakura, and incense and decorations at the Sensoji in Tokyo.

(oops! some of the images aren’t up on flickr yet, so you can’t click through all the images yet, should be uploading more on monday after the Bust Craftacular)

tokyo part 2

We had a week in Tokyo after the finish of 100% design to tour the city.  We got to visit a lot of contemporary buildings that I had always wanted to see.  Here are a couple of my pictures.  From left to right: Tod’s by Toyo Ito, Prada by Herzog & de Meuron, Swatch by Shigeru Ban, Nagakin Capsule Tower by Kurokawa, International Forum by Viñoly, and the Design Festa building.

Seeing these buildings in person wasn’t actually much more impressive then seeing them on paper.  We found the traditional architecture we visited much more impressive.  Some images of that coming in tokyo part 3.