I’m not going to wax contemplatively in this post on how social media brings people together, because other people are probably already doing that better and more articulately than I feel like trying to do right now. I just want to throw up some more pictures from Thursday’s walkabout.

Clicking on any of the below pictures will take you to the full resolution image.

The journalism corner of the Quad. The first J-School in the country even though Berkley and Columbia like to pretend they have a duopoly on graduate level journalism education.

Thomas Jefferson’s original grave marker sitting in from of the Residence on the Quad and covered in snow.

A view of the Lafferre Hall, the engineering building from the south.

Townsend Hall, home of the University’s School of Information Science and Leaning technology and the roads in front of it.

Here again is the picture of the columns that lead the post. License information for these pictures and those featured in the gallery at MyMissourian is below.

This Mizzou Snow Photo Gallery by Aaron Rogier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.aaronrogier.net/contact.

Pretty much feel free to use these as long as you attribute them to me, and ask politely before appropriating them for commercial use.

[link to announcement]

This new red triangle in the left corner of this screenshot has apparently been out in the world for a while hiding in places where the clearly unambiguous threat it represents resides. The message that you are near something so dangerously endowed with ionizing radiation that if you run away fast enough to escape death you will still glow noticeably in the dark. According to the International atomic energy agency this harbinger of doom has been out in circulation for a little more than two years now. As unambiguous as this sign is why is this sign not worked its way into popular culture yet? The biohazard sign and the old ambiguous radiation sign (which could alert you to an elevated risk of cancer should you not die from any other causes in the next three hundred years to a risk of immediate death with no option of merely glowing as depicted clearly in the new radiation sign) clearly mark the entrances to bedrooms of rebellious youth in many Hollywood films.

Well this symbol completely unabashed in its clarity is a copyrighted by the ISO and only available from the ISO or one of its member organizations. Or with the purchase of any device certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a category 1, 2, or 3 sealed source in the form of a sticker preaching its message to those thinking of unsealing said source of radiation. I imagine it would be completely fruitless to attempt swiping one of these off of the sealed source of radiation from radiology equipment on your next visit to the hospital, because someone’s kid probably already has the coolest and most elusive sticker in the whole world on their trapper keeper.* Still nearly 30 months after being unveiled to the world it has yet be gain any cool factor or even graze at the cultural mainstream like its ambiguous predecessor did so many years before when it became the most memorable thing to come out of Berkeley.

This symbol is so elusive that the firm which supplies radiation warning stickers to your neighborhood school and the leading site for hobbyist nuclear products do not carry this symbol in sticker or signage form. When third graders or a serial nuclear arsonist without the ability to learn from past mistakes creates a hazard requiring this signage and they couldn’t get it through their usual procurement channels** how will the International Standards Organization cope when an innocent bystander can not run away an glow to avoid death?

* I am neither condoning this behavior nor suggesting that this happened or actually will happen at any time, such an irresponsible breach of public safety would undoubtedly create a hazard as the next person to stumble upon the sealed source of radiation might open it up and fiddle around leading to their unavoidable death as they are deprived of the knowledge they can run away and glow brightly and escape their demise.

** In all fairness to legitimate nuclear hobbyists the Radioactive Boy Scout legitimate amateur nuclear supply firms.

7.  Sleep improves concentration:  If you have to turn that big pile of limbs in the yard into a neat stack of firewood, a little concentration go go a long way towards protecting your own limbs as you operate a chainsaw.

6.  Sleep isn’t mere rest:  When you sleep, your body is having a celebration not unlike an old fashioned barn raising where all these tasks it can’t accomplish while its busy being awake get done.

5.  Daytime television isn’t very good:  If you don’t have anything to do during the day, by being awake you put yourself at risk of encountering brain rotting attention span killing daytime TV.  Daytime TV can lead to thinking you can sue a rude cashier, because you saw something similar on Judge Fill-in-the-blank once.  Having watched so much daytime TV though, you forget that both sides lost.  Being on TV is no meaningful stamp of quality.

4.  Sleep reduces stress:  Stress is linked to ailments as varied as mild irritation, gnawing insecurity, homicidal rage, and all around grumpiness.  Acting on the impulses produced by any of these ailments in the wrong context could lead to wearing handcuff.  Especially in the case of general grumpiness anywhere around an airplane.  Grumpiness is taken very seriously by the TSA and DHS when national security is involved.

3.  Sleep helps to preserve memory:  Memory might not be a big deal for a lot of people.  The people who programmed computer models to predict financial market probably though so at least, and subsequently forgot to include parameters for executives involved in decision trees leading to their maximal personal as opposed to institutional benefit.  See Richard Fuld, Barbara J. Desoer, and Bernard Madoff.

2.  Naps consume time:  In order to nap during the day to catch up on sleep, one has to go through the initial wake up routine associated with their normal sleep.  Then they have to do some sort of nap preparation before the nap.  Once arising from the nap it becomes again necessary to do some sort of activity to clean up after the nap (straighten clothes, fix hair, etc).

1.  Dreams remind you that though experience is real, it is truth neutral:  Of course one can accept they really had a dream about panda’s losing the right to be called bears after a run in with some polar bears, and that it was epic.  As an experience the dream was real, even if it is lacking in a determination of truth.  Really out there dreams can make a decent reminder to keep our judgments in perspective.

http://www.starbucks.com/coffee/p97c30-italian-roast.aspx

Starbucks can be seen now to be fading like other things that seemed so hip last century but ended up gradually cheapening themselves to obscurity this century. Things like all-in-one desktop Macs (I don’t see them anywhere so they must not be as popular as the notebooks, I would so get a Mac though if they brought back the form used in the Mac SE, nine inch screen, but updated for today’s demanding uses for a nine inch desktop screen), direct mail marketing, land line phones, manned space flight, and newsworthy intrigue in Central American politics.