Smile!

Smile! It's Almost the Weekend!

Libraries

Kansas City

Seattle


Beijing, China. National Library
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Iwaki Museum of Picture Books for Children, Fukushima, Japan

 

A 15th Century Cathedral Transformed into a Modern Bookstore, Netherlands


Florence, Italy
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Central Library in San Diego by William Pereira photo by Darren Bradley
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Carved Tudor style rose on Georgian arched ceiling ~ Boston Copley Public Library ~ Boston, Massachusetts pic.twitter.com/9zO7fkiGfp


Stockholm, Sweden

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Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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Library of Parliament, Canada

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Interior of Canada's Parliamentary Library

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Monastery Library, Austria


Book Igloo
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Another Book House
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Tower of Ice

This is what happens when a fire hydrant bursts in freezing weather (this was in the UK)

A Puzzle

Do you love a good mystery? Enjoy a good puzzle? Cryptographers have been working on the following puzzle, but sometimes, with puzzles, it's the easy solution that gets missed, so maybe someone out there, reading this, can see something that the experts missed. Should we hand it over to a 12-year old?

Mysterious notes have been found in a Western University (London, ON) library, tucked into random books. The 15 notes found so far are all different but similar. Each note is in an envelope. The font used is similar but not the same as Wingdings and the front of each note also has a picture of a common household item such as a table on it with a web address printed on the back which links to an empty blog. Each envelope contains, in addition to the note, some sort of small item, such as a gem or a feather with 2 little blobs of paint on it. 

Professor Mike Moffatt, an assistant professor of business economics and public policy, who has taken on the challenge of finding out more, has had the notes analyzed, with no success and has also offered $100 to the person who can crack the code. 

One of the student theories is that these notes were once part of a scavenger hunt. What do you think?

Best On-Line Ad Placement Ever

This is a screen shot that was tweeted the other day and it made me smile, once I figured it out. 

(full disclosure: I giggled out loud)

Moments of Warmth

This is a commercial, but a clever one. Too bad there might be an ad before the commercial, but you can skip it.

Ego Eradicator - Breath of Fire

Want to feel amazing? Sharing this meditation from Gabrielle Bernstein:
(you might want to start with a shorter time than the recommended 3 minutes though - you don't want to inadvertently hyperventilate and keel over in a dead faint! Start with 30 or 60 sec. and work up if you like it)

Now, catch your breath!

More Murmurations

Remember this post on starling murmurations last October? I just looked it up again and realized I had spelled murmuration incorrectly in the title. Fixed now, but I sure wish somebody would let me know when I goof.

Anyway, yesterday Margaret Atwood, who you may know is interested in many many things, but especially birds, tweeted this video of starlings in the UK last July.

Tweeted Cuteness

One week old

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Bath Time

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fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net

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Owl in Flight

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Galapagos Tortoises - young and old
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Happy Pi Day 2014

3.14: Pi Month and Pi Day today!

Consider a pizza pie with radius z and thickness a. Then, its volume is "pizza" (or pi*z*z*a)

More Goats

This is a dam in northern Italy. See those black specks on the wall? Let's have a closer look.

What on earth are they? That one on the left looks like an animal. 

Goats!!!

Looking quite comfortable. Are they eating something??

Maybe munching on moss or lichen growing on the surface of the dam. 

See also this post from last October? Goats in seemingly impossible places.

Posted with thanks to Karen for pointing me to this website.

Top: Tuesday, March 11

Bottom: Wednesday, March 12

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Apparently some people aren't willing to wait for summer. This last photo was also March 12:

Surfing Lake Ontario
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Spring?

Ice is melting in Toronto Harbour after a couple of balmy days, with above freezing temps, but winter returns today with a big snowstorm.

Here's an Idea...

This video is a couple years old, but new to me. You may have noticed a few errors in the video: for example, substitute orangutans for gorillas and constrict for dilate, but it's hard not to get caught up in this guy's (Mark Rober) enthusiasm and excitement.

Oregon and Iowa Eagle Update

Spring has arrived on the west coast.

Portland, Oregon

and meanwhile, in Decorah, Iowa, the eagle parents are proudly incubating 3 beautiful tennis-ball-sized eggs deep in the nest bowl and coping well with the wickedly cold and snowy winter.

See that eagle talon? The eagles are very careful to step delicately around those eggs. Here's a close-up of one: you can get an idea of the size of it.

Here's what the nest looked like the other night. Crazy!!

About once an hour she gets up, shakes the snow off, re-positions the eggs and settles down into the nest bowl again.

Here's a sentiment most of us can sympathize with: