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St. Anthony Bridge LED Detail

See the blue LED lights? That's why the bridge is blue. Good to know eh? I think to appreciate this bridge, you need to get down under it and look up. The view of the city from the road is so impressive that the designers lowered the railings and minimized all structures on top. Many famous bridges flaunt their structure above the deck: the Golden Gate, the Brooklyn, the Sydney Harbour etc. But the St. Anthony Falls keeps her beauty out of site, deferring your eyes to the city she supports. How Minnesotan is that? When you stand under this bridge, bathed in the cool blue light, you notice that she makes no sound as the traffic goes overhead, that there are no cables or decorative bits, just massive solidness all around. This bridge makes one clear statement: I will never fail you; never.

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St. Anthony Falls Bridge from Cedar

There's a freshly paved path down here, under the bridges. You can pick it up at the Stone Arch Bridge. If you go just up just upstream of the Cedar Avenue Bridge and look, you will see this view. I'm looking forward to coming down here in the winter to see what the lights do to snow.

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35W Megalith Detail

I love all the little hip-height lights around the base of the megaliths; they really give scale to the massiveness of them.

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Megalith Pillars Below 35W

I have a lot more confidence in the St. Anthony Falls Bridge than I in old number 9340. Look at these massive monuments to modernism! True blue in every way. It's very peaceful under here too, there's barely any traffic noise and the bridge doesn't make a sound. St. Anthony proudly carries the life-blood of the city and looks good doing it.

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Rose Garden Fountain Splash

A terribly symmetric image for me, but I liked the effect.

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The Bronze Rabbit

Along the Minnehaha Creek bike trail, where it crosses Portland Avenue, there is a large bronze rabbit. It showed up in the past few years and I have no idea what his story is. I was biking past him while talking to my dad (yes, on a mobile phone, yes I know). I mentioned the rabbit, which is kind of hard to explain, so here is a pic. Also, the cottonwood trees have been dumping their cotton for the past few weeks, you can see that I managed to get a fluf in the photo: see that white spot at the base of the tree behind the rabbit? It's an out-of-focus cottonwood seed blowing by.

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Shiny New Cherry

The Spoonbridge proudly shows off it's shiny new Cherry, just back from Earl Scheib with a fresh coat of Cherry Red. This Minneapolis landmark was sadly separated over the late winter while the Walker Art Center had the Cherry repainted. It's a much deeper red than it was before, either it had faded and this is the original color or they decided to make it less "pop" and more cherry. None the less, I'm happy it's back and doing it's job: the two ladies in the picture later asked me to take their picture with it behind them. Oh, by the way, see the duck family in the pond? They're the stars from the last few days.

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St. Paul Cathedral at Sunset

As the sun sets, the St. Paul Cathedral watches over the city.

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Top of the Foshay

Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates

By Rob Stein - Washington Post Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other. The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person's husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor. "You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience," said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. "But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious." One person's happiness can affect another's for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker. Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person's emotions can influence another's -- laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period. When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing. The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks. The findings, Christakis and others said, provide striking new evidence of the power of social networks, which could have implications for public policy. Happy people tend to be better off in myriad ways, being more creative, productive and healthier. Read the rest of the story at the Washington Post: Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates Thanks for the story Larry!