The MIT Museum, founded in 1971, is part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. It hosts collections of holography, technology-related artworks, artificial intelligence, architecture, robotics, maritime history, and the history of MIT. [Source: Wikipedia]
Sunday/ Boston architecture 🏙
Here are a few pictures of buildings and artifacts that caught my eye.
Saturday/ the Harvard campus 🎓
Friday/ arrival into Boston 🛬
It was a direct flight to Boston, just over 5 hours of flying.
At Boston Logan airport, the Silver Line bus took me to South Station on the MTBA’s* Red Line. I went four stops to Central Station, close enough to walk to my hotel.
*Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
Thursday/ my bags are packed 💼
I’m leaving for Boston in the morning to visit for a few days.
I have been there before, a lifetime ago.
Wednesday/ mushrooms 🍄
Tuesday/ written in 1895 🖋
Monday/ Veterans Day 🎖️
Happy Veterans Day to all military veterans of the United States Armed Forces.
Sunday/ a little architecture 🏙
I took the No 8 bus to Westlake Avenue and walked from there to the Amazon Spheres, and back up to Capitol Hill.
Saturday/ squares ⬜
Here’s a sneak preview of the public art installation at the junction of 14th Avenue and Madison Street on Capitol Hill.
(Is it a time machine? Can I enter the big square and emerge four years into the future at the far end?).
Even though it’s only 5:20 pm in the picture, night has already cast its inky blacks.
Friday/ indoor pickleball 🥒
Thursday/ stamp therapy ✉️
I still have shoeboxes full of South African stamps on paper cutouts, and I dunk them batch by batch into water to separate the stamp from the paper.
Those that have nice postmarks on (place name and date), I keep on the paper, though.
Below is such a page.
Some of these postmarks belong completely to history.
The cities and towns that they denote have been renamed in recent years.
Wednesday/ the morning after 🤯
Without question, the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election brought a devastating sense of loss to all of us who had hoped reason would prevail.
I cannot fathom how anyone could believe that this vile, repugnant man— the sore loser of the 2020 election— is fit to once again serve as President of the United States.
I’ve also promised myself that this will be the last post I make about politics for a very long time.
Tuesday night 🌃
I’m going to bed.
It’s going to be a new world tomorrow.
Monday/ voter turnout is key ❎
Happy Monday. So here we are, with Election Day tomorrow.
About 50% of likely American voters have already cast their ballots. The rest will all vote tomorrow.
(New Hampshire, Alabama and Mississippi do not allow general early voting—an eligible reason is required to vote early, by mail).
Only about 2/3 of eligible American voters vote in presidential election years, and only about 1/2 in mid-term elections.
The turnout percentages have gotten bigger in recent cycles, though.
From pewresearch.org under a page heading ‘1. Voter turnout, 2018-2022’:
The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades.
About two-thirds (66%) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate for any national election since 1900. The 2018 election (49% turnout) had the highest rate for a midterm since 1914.
Even the 2022 election’s turnout, with a slightly lower rate of 46%, exceeded that of all midterm elections since 1970.
While sizable shares of the public vote either consistently or not at all, many people vote intermittently. Given how closely divided the U.S. is politically, these intermittent voters often determine the outcome of elections and how the balance of support for the two major political parties swings between elections.
Overall, 70% of U.S. adult citizens who were eligible to participate in all three elections between 2018 and 2022 voted in at least one of them, with about half that share (37%) voting in all three.
Sunday/ back to Standard Time 🌇
We set our clocks back one hour last night. Daylight Saving Time that had started in March, ended.
So all of the United States is now back on Standard Time, and the sun sets a whole hour earlier than it did on Saturday.
Saturday/ unity makes strength 🪙
It was November of 1899 in colonial Africa— in what is called South Africa today.
The Second Boer War had already started, on October 11.
The British government had rejected an ultimatum issued by the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
The republics had demanded the withdrawal of British troops from their borders, primarily due to growing tensions caused by the discovery of gold in the Transvaal (Johannesburg today) and the influx of British “Uitlander” (foreigner) miners who were denied political rights by the Boer government.
The mint, where the republics produced gold coins for 1899, soon learned that the Kruger Pound dies for the 1899 coins were intercepted by the British in then-Lourenzo Marques in Mozambique (Maputo, today).
On the 2nd day of November 1899 at 10.30am, a single figure 9 was stamped at the bottom of the President’s bust on an 1898 coin, slightly overlapping the design. The coin is known today as ‘the single nine counterstamp’ or simply the ‘Single 9’, and is South Africa’s only one-of-a-kind coin.
Friday/ look ma, no hands 👐
November is here. Happy Friday.
Thursday/ Halloween 🦇
Wednesday/ a sinking ship 🛳️
Some 50 million voters have already cast their ballots for the 2024 US Elections (one third of the electorate).
I came across this stamp in my shoebox with on-paper stamps today.