Bridge near Dallas

A bridge, mostly causeway with a small suspension in the middle, across a large artificial lake outside of Dallas.

Amphitheater near DFW

An amphitheater on the edge of a small pond near the Dallas Fort-Worth airport. The swooping pathways around the rows of seating put me in mind of a soaring crane.

Dallas suburbs

Another tight-gridded suburb, looking nearly more textural than urban to me.

Dallas suburbs

Ranks of houses all nearly the same, in this tight-packed suburban development outside Dallas.

Closeup of seashell

More macro photography of this seashell.

Closeup of seashell

Playing with macro photography: closeup of an seashell with some interesting structure on its surface.

Green wall, Heathrow Airport

I love green walls, like this lush specimen found in a gate waiting area in Heathrow Airport Terminal 3.

Grumpy backpack, London

Backpack Monster Is Not Pleased To See You. 'Nuff Said.

Floppy disc memorial, IET, London

In a hallway on an upper floor of the IET building, one wall is covered with sort of memorial shrines to great inventions in electrical and computer technology. Finding this floppy disc here was both delightful (it certainly deserves its place) and nostalgic, throwing me back to the days of my childhood when I would check out floppies from the library and bring them home to copy DOS freeware games onto our computer, ASCII graphics and all. My favorite, for reasons that I cannot any longer understand, was one about mowing lawns.

IET Technology Display, London

The IET is sort of the British equivalent of the IEEE: a scientific society for electrical and computing folks. This glitzy techno-display hangs from the ceiling near their entryway.

A tangle of cranes, London

A visually tangled up bunch of cranes around a construction site on the South side of the Thames River in London.

Millennium Bridge at night, London

The Millennium Bridge at night is beautifully lit, its spires hovering in their tinted glows. It's also famous in the complex systems community for its emergent resonance problems, so seeing it in person gave me quite a nerdy thrill.

Millennium Wheel at night, London

The Millennium Wheel at night, all lit up in warm colors.

Millennium Wheel, London

Speaking of goofy landmarks, I have always found the Millennium Wheel rather silly and random. I mean, it's just a big ferris wheel in the middle of the city, surrounded by tall towers that can presumably give a better view.

Transgender walk sign, London

Another modified London walk sign, this one with a transgender symbol.

Lesbian walk sign, London

A number of walk signs near Trafalgar Square have apparently been replaced with LGBT symbols, in an oddly subtle statement of official approval and acceptance. My first thought on seeing this was that it was a really cute act of graffiti, but it is apparently something actually done by the city itself.

Park Tower Knightsbridge, London

I loved the composition of this perfectly round building with nubbly rows of windows.

Reflected rainbow sculpture, London

A domed sculpture of shifting rainbow colors, reflecting in wet pavement after a brief rainstorm.

Skating at the National History Museum, London

Beside the Natural History Museum, a crowd of skaters in what is apparently a pre-Christmas tradition.

Natural History Museum, London

Near Imperial College, the British Museum of Natural History bulks elegantly along the road.

Brutalist Ministry of Justice building, London

Another more modern landmark: the Ministry of Justice building, on the road between Buckingham Palace and Parliament, is a remarkable Brutalist structure of dark concrete and glass, bulging inelegantly at the tops of its towers.

DeLorean Time Machine, London

Shifting to a much more modern landmark, I spotted the DeLorean Time Machine from Back to the Future proceeding in apparent random anonymity down the same road as the horse guards.

Horse guards on the road, London

In one of its celebrated bits of archaism, horse-mounted guards of the queen troop through the streets of London following a changing ceremony.

Crowds outside of Buckingham Palace, London

Crowds packing in around Buckingham Palace, presumably to see the changing of the guard.

Wellington Arch, London

Looking up from beneath Wellington Arch, at the curving pattern of its tiling.

Wellington Arch at dawn, London

The Wellington Arch, celebrating English victory in the Napoleonic Wars, is yet another statue topped with a Winged Victory, actually quite close to the Victoria Memorial. I guess the Victorians really loved their Victories.

Parliament, London

Another view of Parliament, stark in its collection of little pointy towers against a rich and complex sky.

Parliament at dawn, London

The British Parliament building, hazy in silhouette in the dawn.

Victoria Memorial, London

Looking up to Winged Victory atop the Victoria Memorial, at a slightly later morning time, shifting from the red and dark of dawn to day and a bright blue sky.

Victoria Memorial at Dawn, London

The Victoria Memorial, near Buckingham Palace in the center of London, standing out in silhouette against the dawn sky.

Mist on Green Park, London

Moving to a different part of England: mists hovering just below the orderly arrangement of trees in Green Park, right in the heart of London.

Foggy Devon woods

Peering out of the woods, warm yellow sunshine illuminates the mists enshroud a tree in the midst of a field.

Foggy Devon woods

Streams of sunlight through the morning fog.

Foggy Devon woods

Sunlight peeping through the early morning fog in a wooded Devon valley.

Shuttaford Farm, Devon

Another absolutely prototypical sort of Devon view, when one has a gap to look beyond the hedgerows: Shuttaford Farm, nestled in welcoming rolling green hills that might as well be Hobbiton.

Devon road

I truly love the deep hedgerows of Devon, where I go these days to visit the English part of my family. These solid walls of shaped trees and bushes stand taller than a person, segmenting the fields into a world of secret gardens.

Stonehenge map

The map of sites around the Stonehenge trust has a lovely design, with raised markers for the most significant sites. The blue box in the center is the stones, and all the scattered red-brown dots throughout the map are various barrows, the most significant clusters of which get their own boxes.

Model neolithic village, Stonehenge

Near the visitor center of Stonehenge, a model village has been constructed, with mud and thatch huts showing what life would have been like for people at the time the site was first constructed.

Air war memorial near Stonehenge

History upon history: beside the road in the grove between Stonehenge and the visitors' center stands a stone memorial a hundred years old, recalling a dead aviator from just before the First World War. Curiously, Stonehenge also hosted a military air base around this time, since cleaned away.

To the Stones, Stonehenge

Twenty years ago, it was this road that was the highway, A344, bustling cars right past Stonehenge, within a scant few meters. Now the flow of traffic has been diverted and the new visitors center stands a mile or so off, where people pack into buses offering to take them simply "to the stones."

Raven near Stonehenge

Another view of the raven, showing better the remarkable encrusted formations around the base of its beak.  I don't know whether those are normal or a sign of some disease, but I certainly find them quite visually fascinating.

Raven near Stonehenge

A wonderfully crusty old raven, perched on a fence near Stonehenge and contemplating the passers by.

Barrows on the fields near Stonehenge

What I had never grasped before my visit is that Stonehenge is actually only one very small part of the neolithic complex on the Salisbury plain. In every direction, past grazing sheep and peaceful fields, one sees grooves and lumps, like this complex of barrows.

Stonehenge

Around the curve of the stones. You cannot go anywhere closer to them than this, which is good both for preservation and for being able to take photos like these, which do not show the hundreds of people thronging along the walkway at this distance.

Stonehenge

A closer look at one of the "gateway" forms of slabs around the Stonehenge circle.

Stonehenge

One morning in Britain a year and a half ago, I accidentally visited Stonehenge. I was driving from London to Devon to visit my relatives there, and from the fog beside the highway suddenly arose the misty outline of the stones. Startled, overjoyed, and in no rush to arrive at my destination, I pulled off at the turn and walked out to gaze in contemplation on the weathered prehistory of my ancestors.

Sunset, Iowa City

Clear, wide skies at sunset, punctuated with scattered clouds, above a neighborhood I walked through one evening along a ways from our house in Iowa City.

Patterned Clouds, Iowa City

A bending ribbed sequence of clouds, drifting past in remarkably durable formation as they patterned the sky above the fairgrounds one evening on the outskirts of Iowa City.

You are having an intergalactic conversation with the fence, Cambridge, MA

I don't think that I can even pretend to understand just what this means, and I don't care. The owners of this art-house near Central Square in Cambridge have clearly created a set of images and sculpture quite meaningful to them, and I am content to simply appreciate it.

Sidewalk mosaic, Cambridge, MA

Two old-timey children, picked out meticulously in small sepia-toned ceramic tiles in an apparently random tile of sidewalk in Cambridgeport.