Excerpts of the President's Address to the Nation, Dec. 1, 2009 in a tag cloud

Excerpts of the President's Address to the Nation, Dec. 1, 2009 in a tag cloud
Originally uploaded by allaboutgeorge.

So ... if we were to pull out *this week,* what would happen in Afghanistan over the coming year?

The Anthropology Song

Anthropology is close enough to cultural geography to count, for me. I like this song enough that I played it in the background while I did other things a few times today.

What if Earth had rings like Saturn?

I don't want to interrupt the loveliness of this idea, but there are bits from the video and the comments that I want to note:

Someone commented that this might make places under the rings where it was permanently dark. But because the earth is tilted on its axis and the sun appears to move north and south through the sky seasonally, so would the shadow move. But it's likely some places (the equator, generally everywhere between the tropics) would get some level of shade from the rings. The layer is very thin; aside from under the rings at equinox, there would be plenty of bright sun. Would there be enough insolation change to affect climate? Probably. But given the scenario, I expect the earth would have evolved this way, it's not like it would be a change from how things are now.

The person who made the animation seems to have designed it for equinox. Seasonal variations aren't addressed at all.

The theoreticals (e.g. one commenter's note that this would affect satellites) are irrelevant to me: It's beautiful.

Accra - A C C R A

I don't know the capital of every country in the world, nor do I think I *should* - but this is still fun:



When I was little, and couldn't sleep, Mom suggested I list every single state in the US, alphabetically. If I ever realized I'd missed one, I had to go back and start from the beginning. I don't think I made it to Wyoming.

I found myself, as I passed San Bruno Mountain today, where the endangered Mission Blue butterfly lives, "There are Mission Blues on San Bruno Mountain, but the California dogface butterfly is our state butterfly. Why do I know that? I don't know. I just do."

It's the sort of useless thing that helps me paint a picture of the world when people talk about it. It's a piece of the whole puzzle.

Africa from Europe on Google Streetview

From Google Sightseeing

How cool is that? That is very cool.

We're fostering a tiny puppy, switching the garden over into fall mode, trying to get our house in order, and I'm finishing a semester at school. This is Geography Awareness Week, and I think there will be a post about that before the week is up.

sense of place - Oakland Hills Fire

Oakland Hills Fire -- after
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

For some reason, as I go through my old photos, the fire photos are really affecting me. Even before I noticed them in my stack of "photos to scan," I was noticing again how the hills have grown up thicker with eucalyptus than before, and the plan to places houses farther apart and make roads wider is barely there. And I might be wrong, but I think that Oakland never did get around to making its fire hydrants compatible with the hoses of surrounding towns' fire departments.

But anyway: I'm thinking of it, eighteen years later.

sense of place - Loma Prieta quake, twenty years ago

Downtown Berkeley
Originally uploaded by Susan Decker.

Visual memory? How about visceral memory!?! This gave me a chill.

I was standing exactly where the guy with the shorts is standing at 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989.