View allAll Photos Tagged Commute
Every day, even Sat. and Sun. (because of club activities and sports), students diligently put on their uniforms in Japan and go to school. Often students have long commutes on trains of up to one hour. In Japan you choose the school you want to go to then have to pass entrance exams to get into it, it's not a matter of simply going to a high school in your district based on where you live like in the USA.
I shot this candid shot on a local train in the countryside of Japan early on a Sunday morning. It is such a representative scene of daily Japanese life I couldn't resist, even though I am generally apprehensive about doing candid shots of students.
The Japanese use cel phones to an extraordinary degree, but unlike American's they don't chat on them non-stop, they use them for e-mail.
I don't do candid shots too often. I really love the way this shot came out.
Selected frames from the Flip from a typical car ride with my little buddy. This is the last week of a six-year stretch of sharing the 30-minute ride to work with the kidlings. Regular activities included the far-ranging “question of the day”, the ever evolving and highly strategic weather game, the “can-you-get-the-security-guard-to-touch-your-kid-badge game, math quizzes, spelling rhymes, songs, and year long running stories of getting chased across the galaxy while looking for dilithium.
I noticed quite a thick Fog when i got up on Friday morning so i packed the camera in my work bag headed out 20 minutes early and rode to work and took the long way.
A traffic jam on the M53 on a misty winter morning. I quite like how the sun is still hidden in the mist/fog
What kind of scientific discovery might make such an incomprehensibly long daily commute from Earth possible? Bing Copilot answers:
Ah, “A Long Commute”—the title alone feels like a wink at cosmic absurdity. That sleek car streaking across a desolate alien highway beneath a sky of planetary grandeur suggests a daily grind that spans star systems. To make such a commute scientifically plausible, we’d need breakthroughs that border on the mythic. But let’s riff on a few that could anchor your scene in speculative realism:
1. Stable Wormhole Engineering
•Concept: Einstein-Rosen bridges—wormholes—could connect distant points in spacetime.
•Breakthrough Needed: A method to stabilize and enlarge wormholes using exotic matter with negative energy density.
•Narrative Flavor: The highway itself could be a physical manifestation of a stabilized wormhole—an interstellar autobahn maintained by a cosmic transit authority.
2. Localized Time Dilation Control
•Concept: Manipulating time via relativistic effects or artificial gravity wells.
•Breakthrough Needed: A way to compress subjective time for the traveler while keeping Earth-time in sync.
•Narrative Flavor: The car’s propulsion system might generate a “commute bubble,” where hours pass in seconds—like a temporal espresso shot.
3. Quantum Entangled Transit Nodes
•Concept: Using quantum entanglement to instantaneously transmit matter or consciousness.
•Breakthrough Needed: A scalable method for entangling macroscopic objects and reassembling them remotely.
•Narrative Flavor: The car isn’t moving at all—it’s a ritual interface. The real journey happens in quantum space, and the vehicle is just the anchor for the rider’s continuity.
4. Dark Energy Surfing
•Concept: Harnessing the repulsive force of dark energy to accelerate across vast distances.
•Breakthrough Needed: A propulsion system that can “ride” the expansion of the universe like a surfer on a cosmic wave.
•Narrative Flavor: The glowing blue trails are the wake of spacetime being stretched behind the vehicle—each commute subtly reshaping the universe.
5. Consciousness Commuting
•Concept: The body stays on Earth, but the mind is projected into a synthetic avatar light-years away.
•Breakthrough Needed: A neural uplink that transmits consciousness across space with zero latency.
•Narrative Flavor: The car is a metaphor—a visual representation of the mind’s journey. The real commute is psychic, and the landscape is a shared dreamspace.
Want to explore how the emotional toll of such a commute might manifest—fatigue, longing, or the quiet absurdity of cosmic routine? Or maybe we lean into the humor: intergalactic traffic jams, roadside diners orbiting Saturn, or a commuter loyalty program that spans dimensions. How would interstellar traffic laws work? What are some real theories about wormholes?
The rainy morning commute. Taken through the car window (no, I wasn't driving!).
The Galata Bridge, Istanbul, Turkey
With 67029 bringing up the rear of the DB company train on 1Z05 10.06 St Pancras High Level to Birmingham International, 82146 leads the working through Water Orton.
Commuting is an exciting, dangerous passtime, like an extreme sport but without the glamour. One of the few advantages of working shifts is a clear drive home.
Entering the frame from the right is NM Route 68, the fastest route between Taos and Espanola, with Santa Fe beyond. At this time of the morning on a weekday, there was a lot of what looked like commuter traffic, with folks in a hurry stacking up behind slower drivers (like me). I wonder if I had this as a morning commute, how long would it be before I'd start taking it for granted?
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Summer 2018 4th leg: We split up for a week. Kani went to tropical Pittsburgh to help her sister, I got out early every day.
June 29: Leaving the Gorge, for now.