The rest of the country has been broiling for weeks but here in the Pacific Northwest, summer didn’t arrive until July 6. Super-long days here provide a luxurious “golden hour” that lights up the path of my daily walk spectacularly. This walk is near Larsen Lake in Bellevue, Wash.

Nikki Graziano is a photographer who’s also into math. Courtesy of Wired.com, we learn how the graphs of mathematical functions are mirrored in nature. Graziano, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, “overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos,” Wired says. To her, it’s simply a demonstration of “how awesome math is.”

Who could argue with that? You can see more of her “Found Functions” photos at the Wired.com article and at her own site, nikkigraziano.com.

From a bulletin board for the Communication and Media program at the University of Minnesota. The funny part is that the “B.S.” bit was taped onto the Scientific & Technical Communication label — someone went out of their way to let you know.

MINNEAPOLIS — My niece, zRose25, took this photo with her iPhone 3GS at Cupcake, a Minneapolis lunch spot near where she works. The cupcake was delicious.

MOUNDS VIEW, Minn. — Snow day means watching movies in my family. Besides our excursion this morning for the first showing of Sherlock Homes (rollicking good fun), we watched Love Actually, one of my favorite movies, and The Holiday.

My geek pals and I welcomed 2006 with a daylong (and it was a long day!) screening of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in the living room of my loft apartment in Santa Cruz, Calif. I loved that apartment.

My friend Ernie is spending the academic year in Italy teaching math to American high school students who are spending a year abroad. You can read his informative and funny adventures on his blog. His recent trip to Copenhagen (I love how cheap it is to travel within Europe) coincided with the world climate summit. As part of that event, he took this picture of an ice-sculpted polar bear outside the pavilion set up by the World Wildlife Fund to portray global warming’s effect on the polar bear habitat.

Subscribe (RSS) to Ernie’s Italian travelogue. He updates it regularly with lots of interesting photos and his own offbeat perspective.

I took this picture (unretouched) with my iPhone outside Blue C Sushi in Seattle’s University Village. I found the light bouncing off the blue stones mesmerizing.

From “The 30 Creepiest Vegetables on Earth” at the Environmental Graffiti blog is this entry — made entirely of terrestrial veggies — that explains why eggplants creep me out so much.

Creds to Junkie1 for finding this grotesquerie.

Photo by The Associated Press

Supersonic plumes of water jet out from a moon of Saturn in this stunning shot from the Cassini probe.