Last weekend, the family and I went to the Pumpkin Festival in Half Moon Bay, California. Believe it or not, I’ve never been to a pumpkin festival or a pumpkin anything. But since I have a nephew now, the family has half a reason to go out and explore places we haven’t seen.

My sister was actually looking for a pumpkin patch so that my nephew could take a cute picture in one. We didn’t find the patch in the festival, so we went to one that we saw on the drive in. This is a nice little patch that we went to.

Here’s a more panoramic view of Macau from my aunt’s apartment in 2005. The merge from last week can be seen on the left side of this image.

The air is nicer up there, and you can see many cityscape changes in Macau throughout the years if you had lived there. Please excuse the mismatch on the balcony railing; the turn of my camera was too much.

Had an impulse idea, so I figure I would post it here in the spirit of this Experiments section.

The idea is overlapping letterform of the alphabet, A to Z, reduce the opacity of each one, and see what comes out.

Theoretically, I thought that reducing the opacity of each letter to 1/26th of 100%, the area where all letterforms overlap would create a 100% black. But that didn’t happen, not even close. (See first image) That’s why I bumped the opacity to 10%. (See second image)

Here are what only A and B look like with 4% and 100% opacity, and the bottom right is all letterforms at 100% opacity.

Except for the tail of the Q, you can almost get a symmetry from the “blob.”

This is a typical view of Macau from an apartment building. Next week, I will show a wider view from the same location.

I found in my archives a couple merges I did way back in Macau, China, in 2005 with my first camera. This is sort of fitting because in just over a month, I will be back in Macau for a few weeks. So I’m showing you this one this week, and I will show another Macau merge next week.

This is actually a 360 view of the airport’s lobby. Aside from the grainy quality and my relative’s head being squeezed, this is a pretty good shot.

Take the letters from the word “PUZZLE”. Advance each letter once to the next letter of the alphabet (if it’s a Z, advance back to A) and you would get “QVAAMF”. Do this twenty-four more times and you get twenty-six sets of letters (including “PUZZLE”). Change one letter in each set, rearrange them to get an English word.

What is this English word?

Last year was my town South San Francisco’s Centennial, and to celebrate, a tower of lights that vertically spelled out “1 0 0″ was put up on Sign Hill, unofficially named for the giant cement letters on the side of the hill facing the city that read, “SOUTH / SAN FRANCISCO / THE INDUSTRIAL CITY”. You can see a part of the “1 0 0″ tower in the background of the Archives section.

For the entire year, I had wanted to go up there and take photos of the tower as well as the view from the top of the hill. I hadn’t been up there for years and never in the day time, so I had always wanted to go back. Finally, as the end of the year was near, I knew that the city would take the sign down. So I made some time to get up there and take some shots.

This is one of the merges I shot up there. The focus on the right was off, but the rest was fine. It’s interesting to see how the fog infamously drapes over the city on the right; it’s very typical of the South City weather.

• It’s from a natural phenomenon
• This series is based on the American version