A big, dramatic sky after a fresh snow matches the mood of St. Lawrence’s chapel.
April Fool’s Snow
April Fool’s Day played a prank on the reemerging plants of the North Country, dropping ice and snow onto green grass and growing buds.
Schlenk Line in Development
This is my Schlenk line; there are many like it, but this one is mine. The double-manifold design allows my students and me to expose samples to either vacuum or inert gas (argon, in this case.) Every line has little tweaks and customizations made by the scientist using it, and is thus inevitably a work-in-progress. This particular line very much needs a full-time vacuum gauge as its next addition.
Tiny Vent Thermal Oasis
This tiny warm spot near both a vent (for heat) and a downspout (for ample rainwater) continues to have green grass while the rest of the campus is locked beneath a blanket of snow.
Saturday Morning in Normandy Village
A Saturday morning rain left streams of water through Berkeley’s Normandy village and smudges on my camera lens, but when it was done, the sunlight perfectly spotlit the entrance to my apartment beneath a blue sky.
Richardson Through Trees
The classic winter picture of clean, fresh snow and bright blue skies seems much easier to come by, ironically, under less-wintery conditions near the beginning or end of the season. Under the snow at the edge of the patch in the foreground, you can see that the grass is still green.
3D Printing Materials
In addition to photography, I’ve been exploring 3D printing in the past few years. I’ve found that it’s a great route to making small objects to support my science work. In this case, I was developing a holder to support a 12.7 mm pressed solid sample pellet inside the space normally occupied by a 10-cm pathlength liquid-handling cuvette. The result is this odd rectangular shape that unlocks to hold the “too wide” pellet diagonally—thanks, square root of two!
In these forms, I was working with a variety of materials, including glass-reinforced nylon, lost-wax-cast brass, and a bronze/steel powder combination.
Cars Resting on Saturday Morning
Berkeley’s Normandy Village was constructed as a sort of “Disneyland version” of a French village, but being constructed in the early twentieth century, it included covered car parking spaces. The challenge, of course, is that the size of the average automobile has grown substantially in the past 100 years. “Compact” and “mid-size” cars barely fit; only the Mazda Miata at the left size of the image looks properly at home in its bay.
Small Town Clouds
Warm weather is finally returning to the North Country, and “drone weather” with it.
Noir Fire Escape
The back stairs of our sabbatical apartment in Berkeley’s Normandy Village has a vibe that suggests I should be chasing a Soviet spy down them.
Framed Gazebo
On a winter’s stroll through the forested grounds of Mohonk Mountain House, a snowy gazebo makes the perfect place to stop and enjoy the sunshine.
Science Side of Campus
There are plenty of historical reasons (including the original St. Lawrence University’s acquisition of the adjacent agricultural college), but the clustering of the school’s STEM-focused buildings on one side of campus—the arts/humanities at the other extreme and most of the social sciences in the middle—has resulted in a literal mapping of the academic spectrum onto physical space.
Rider with Birches
Warm evening sunlight, a chestnut pony, and bright white birches make a perfect combination.
New Jersey & New York
While the distant New Jersey countryside looks comparatively two-dimensional, the structure of Manhattan and Hoboken are so vertical.
Sundial Overlooking the Valley
From its perch in the hills above New Paltz, Mohonk Mountain House has an exceptional view on clear days.
