Looking For Shit on Google Earth

Naturally, shortly after reading about Fretwell and Trathan’s success locating emperor penguin breeding colonies by searching satellite imagery for Antarctic skid marks, I fired up Google Earth to have a shot at shite-site sighting myself.  Generally, Google Earth’s coverage of Antarctica is fairly low res, understandably.  So I was actually slightly surprised that plugging in the coordinates provided by Fretwell and Trathan yielded astonishingly good results.

Amazingly, a few of these are even among the newly discovered sites noted in the new study.

In fact, one wonders if there might yet be undiscovered colonies waiting to be found by intrepid Google Earth explorers, as has already been done with Roman villas, impact craters, and Cannabis plantations &c.

Next up: Google Earth, guano mining and seal hunting.

Fluvial Mudstones are the new Candy Girls

I once wrote a paper entitled “Applying the Principles of Stratigraphy in an Analysis of Melodrama.” Sadly, this was long before There Will Be Blood came out.

This video by Grizzly Bear reminds me of that paper, for several reasons, but, I’ll spare you the golemy details.  I dig the layers of metaphor though, puns possibly not intended.

Anyone recognize the location?  Anza Borrego or something?  And presumably those flags in the first scene are a paleo site right?

Props to Radov for leading me, indirectly, to this video.

Photo from cigarettesandredvines.com

O RLLY?

I know, I know, huge methane plumes on Mars (!!!) it’s hard to keep one’s head on straight.  I feel a bit woozy myself.  But I really expect more from the New York Times than this:

“Bacteria May Be Source of Methane on Mars — Kenneth Chang 1/15/2009“

Normally when I see a headline like that, I assume the headline writer has been hitting the black label a little to hard again.  Unfortunately, that’s not the case this time here’s the second sentence in that article:

Subsurface Martian cows appear unlikely, but scientists are seriously considering the possibility that bacteria are generating the methane.

Well, first off, of course cow emissions are bacterially* generated, but whatever.  Even *if* the Martian methane is of biological origin (and don’t forget there is loads of abiotic methane elsewhere in the solar system) it’s a tremendous leap to attribute the methane production to bacteria.  “Bacteria” is not a generic term for microbes, it refers to a specific group of unicellular organisms that have been on Earth for billions of years.

The discovery of bacteria on Mars would have tremendous implications for the interplanetary dispersal of organisms and possibly even for the origin of life itself.  But the presence of methane alone does not yet confirm the presence of life on Mars and it certainly doesn’t indicate that any hypothetical Martian microbes had a common origin with life on Earth as the presence of bacteria would.  Lets wait for some more facts before we start making a interplanetary leaps to conclusions, please!

POSTSCRIPTO: *It occurred to me that actually methanogens (microbes that generate methane) aren’t even technically bacteria–they’re archaea! Any speculation that bacteria are responsible for the methane plumes on Mars is basically totally without merit. I’m sure we’ll see a retraction in the Times tomorrow.

Fun with Fake Tilt-Shift

Tilt-shift is a relatively sophisticated photography technique that allows photographers to play with perspective creating dizzying, fantastic images that confound our expectations about scale.

Tilt-shift maker is a fun, and easy to use website that allows you to simulate the effect (albeit imperfectly) on your own photos or things you find on the web.  I knew there was a reason I was taking so many photos of rooftops while I was in China… (click for larger versions)

GEOLOGY FAIL

This post by an anthropogenic warming skeptic over at HuffPost contains a number of yowlers but this perhaps is my favorite:

Major solar minima (and maxima, such as the one during the second half of the 20th century) have also been shown to correlate with significant volcanic eruptions. These are likely the result of solar magnetic flux affecting geomagnetic flux, which affects the distribution of magma in Earth’s molten iron core and under its thin mantle.

Time’s Spiral in Arrow Canyon

On an autumn afternoon, Earl Wadsworth climbed up to the top of a ledge in a remote slot canyon in Nevada.  With a knife or a nail or some other tool Earl scratched a large cursive “E” into the limestone wall.  After some consideration the graffiti-artist gave up on the formal script and printed his full name across the rock.

Just below he added the date: “November, 14th 1920.”

Eighty-six years later, to the day, I found myself on the same ledge admiring Wadsworth’s handiwork. 

To think: i spen’t much of the summer in a Sudan equideme

Treasure Heap

The blogohedron (i’m already beginning to overuse this) sports an unquantifiable galaxy of glinting facets, let’s take three for examples:

Cabinet of Wonders – which reminds us that the wunderkammer of the web is still pretty stale compared to the worldwide absurdity of the actual material world

and,

Camera Trap Codger – the best of California paparazzi plus thoughtful exegetic explorations of the feudal German worldview, and stuff

and also,

Strange Maps – which I just discovered today and you already knew about for, like, ever, but anyway post 312 is providing some serious effing perspective.