Get under the pool table, dude

It goes dark, but listen to the end, or almost to the end. I'm not sure I'd be as copacetic.

ferocious weather

Well - not really ferocious. We just so rarely get tornados, that when we do, it's a bit startling.



Our tornados in California are almost never as high as 2 on the Fujita scale, and are usually 0 or 1. This one touched down, but well away from where it could do damage.

I keep thinking, "Now I'm going to write about this wacky week of weather," but then we keep having more days of it, and I think, "As soon as it's done ..." Rain is in the forecast, but it looks like the wildness is calming down. Perhaps it's time.

Frozen Earth

A walk around Higham, Derbyshire, UK, by Grace Elliot. I assume this video was made just this week, during the Big Freeze. (It was uploaded yesterday.)



This makes me want to explore parts of my world more like this - not in video, but images ... lots of them. It feels more like stopping to look.

Google maps has a satellite view clear enough for you to follow her around, if you want a little fun.

Geologists rock!

Might be that a certain road crew should take geologist Vanessa Bateman out for coffee.

The video gets interesting at about 1:00ish.



I'm really not sure I wouldn't have flipped the hell out, watching this. Then I'd have asked Bateman to follow me around and be my body guard.

(via agweb, thanks to Silver Fox for the story, thanks to @caroldn for the new title)

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.

Another student presentation - uses of the rainforest

The Spirit Bears

I'd never even heard of the Sloth Bears of Sri Lanka. Wow.



The subsequent parts of this documentary are at http://www.youtube.com/user/neofelisman

There's more to this than Sloth Bears, of course. There are vultures, leopards, deer, buffalo, the aboriginal Vedda people, hornbills,

Food Fight - US-centric war history through food

Earth's physical forms

This educational video might help a bit for homeschoolers and other new-to-geography learners.

Geography as a fascinating and relevant subject

The youtube account holder is "geogfilms," so I expect enthusiasm and lack of objectivity. ;)

white-hot meteors

An amateur astronomer set up his basic little digital camera to record some of the Perseid meteors last night:



The fog came in for us, and we saw none. This is the San Francisco Bay Area, where fog on summer nights keeps us cooler in the daytime, but makes star watching a real pain sometimes.

This little video makes me want to go somewhere more remote and clear, next August, and set up the camera with the 16 gb card in it, then drink hot cocoa and watch the skies.

Poor Japan

Here it is all dark and wet as a couple of Asian typhoons swing by, and as some folks are still trembling from a quake a few days ago, and whacko:



But as hard as the shaking looks, it was only 6.4, and there was no major damage (reported as of now, a few hours later, anyhow), and the tsunami was small.

Mind you, within twelve minutes away from this quake, a 7.6 whopper, probably an aftershock of the 2004 quake, shook the Bay of Bengal between the Andaman Islands and Burma. Tsunami-watchers waited nervously, but none materialized. The quake was more than 30 km deep, fortunately.

Sierra Nevada watershed

Three years ago, I took this video at the Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model visitor's center in Sausalito, California.



It illustrates with LEDs the storage of fresh water in snow and ice in the Sierra Nevada, and its flow down the slopes, through the valley, and out to sea through the Delta and San Francisco Bay.

If climate change warms up and dries out California in the summer, as models currently predict, less water will be stored as snow over the winter, leaving less fresh water to flow out to sea and through the Delta in the summer. Not only will this mean less fresh water for immediate human use, but less for agriculture, wildlife, and fresh/salt balance in the Delta.

traditional map skills

With so much emphasis in modern geography training on GIS, aerial interpretation, and other important skills, some basic traditional map skills such as orienteering have gone by the wayside.

Here are some traditional uses for maps that you might have forgotten about.

Natural wonders

The youtube page says, "investigates unique deserts, coral reefs, waterfalls and other atypical natural phenomena." How are these atypical? I don't quite get it. Do they mean "special"? At any rate, these are neat, within a basic educational film.

Give geography its place

What use is geography? (school recruitment video from the UK)

*splash*

I'm going to call this geography because the view of the earth from the falling rockets is amazing:



I wonder (and one of you must know): How small is the bit of ocean do the engineers know the rockets will fall into? How far away are the retrieval ships, for safety?

I love the splash at the end, and how the cameras keep working.

oooh, waves! low pressure systems!

careers in geography

(This is part 32,208,498,408 or so in a series of videos that I try not to post more than once every couple of weeks, because they aren't mind-bendingly interesting, but seem to have some good information.