Ethel got a tripod for her camera.

What this means to Ethel is that she can now set up the camera and be sure that it stays absolutely still while she plays with F-stop and apeture settings in order to take pictures like this one that she got yesterday, of a bee on a brittlebrush bloom out in front of the house:


                           

It also means that she gets to play games like "let's spend hours trying to catch the bee in between two blooms". She didn't manage to do that, but she did manage to avoid doing any more landscaping while sitting on the stool with her camera pointed at the honey bee :)

She also got a lot of really cool shots, like this one of the splash of a single drop of water in the basin of the fountain in our front yard:

                           

I reckon we're all different (well, really, we're "all the same about different things", as I've heard it said). I don't know what you think of when you look at this picture, but what I think of is - how incredibly complex this single splash is; how many different things are going on as the result of a single drop of water hitting this surface. I see all of the ripples going out, and then I see the different crests on the crown of the splash wave, and I see the tiny droplets heading off into all directions...

...and then I step back and think of how many drops of water are doing this in that basin at the same time, and then I think about how there are three different basins in this fountain...and all of that activity is going on, all the time.

And while that's happening, there are millions of fountains all over the world, with billions of drops of water all hitting the surfaces at the same time, each generating its own little fractal geometry...

...and while that's going on, there are bees on flowers - and the bees have all of their parts, and the flowers have all of their parts, and the supporting stems and leaves...

and ALL OF THIS IS GOING ON ALL THE TIME - plus all of everything else that's going on, all over the world - and that's just on one little planet. Then there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, most of which (its starting to seem) have multiple planets...

...and there are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in our galaxy.

Modeling that sort of thing takes an awful lot of processing power, but I reckon that He's got plenty of CPU to handle it all.

...I mean, isn't that what is really happening? It's all software; all bits of space-time being told what kind of matter or energy they are on an ongoing basis, having their bits set (so to speak) to keep the model consistent.

Wow.

I can say it backwards - woW.