The Raging Grannies have an opinion

Okay okay one more! But I promise content just as soon as I finish dinner dishes.

srsly

1999 ad.

Now I need to get working on content. Too much fluff and image-linking lately.

Ah, Kansas

(Yes, I know this is from the Onion. But still, Kansas. And Texas. Nuff said.)

Irony

(via MoveOn on Twitter)

geocake!

Oh, the things we find on Tumblr!



Geocake!

I'm back from vacation in Alaska and will write some bloggy stuff about it very soon, as soon as I rest.

That might be as soon as the SF Bay Area gets over this uncharacteristic combo of heat and humidity.

South What?

This oil leak is almost exhausting to think about

Oil and gas stream from the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico:



Of course, this is wreaking havoc on animals and ecosystems in the area. Tuna have no eyelids, you know? They can't protect themselves from the oil. Dolphins and birds are becoming hurt, many are dying.

There are many ways to help, including advocating for an end to offshore drilling, for alternative energy sources, and by working to help clean up beaches and marshes, and to take care of animals.

Here's one:

layers on blended layers

I've had this picture of my friend Heather's yarn up in a tab for hours because I keep coming back to stare at it. It reminds me so much of the layers of the Earth.

Geography Girl

Geography Girl
Originally uploaded by brentdanley.

I love that this geography picture keeps getting new notes appended. It reminds me of my urge to decorate a family room in maps, with globes and orreries and and old navigation tools everywhere.

Now all I need is my own family room, with a house to put it in.

(Click through to the photo on flickr to add your location to her maps.)

World back-up

World back-up
Originally uploaded by Daniel Montesinos.

Randomly found while looking for old California maps. I have nothing to say about this (except that I'd spend my life having detail added).

earth-shattering kabooms!

Brian Romans, from Clastic Detritus, pointed out on twitter that in recent Icelandic volcano footage, one can see amazing shock waves propagating through the ash cloud after explosions.

Wow! The air vibrates beautifully. Have a look. It happens several times in this video.



Wikipedia says, incidentally, that

The name Eyjafjallajökull is made up of the words eyja (genitive plural of ey, meaning eyot or island), fjalla (genitive plural of fjall, whose nominative plural is fjöll, meaning fells or mountains) and jökull (meaning glacier, cognate with the -icle in icicle). A literal translation would thus be the "island-fells glacier" or the "island-mountains glacier". The name Eyjafjöll describes the southern side of the volcanic massif together with the small mountains which form the foot of the volcano. The village and museum of Skógar are also part of the region undir Eyjafjöllum (meaning "under the Eyjafjalls").

So it's Eyjafjöll that's erupting? It's complicated.

so much left to explore

(as usual, there's more to the comic if you click through and mouseover for the alt text.)

our tiny world

I had the opportunity and pleasure today to listen to a live-streamed lecture from Professor Brian Cox, at Manchester University, about the LHC, exploring space, and curiosity-driven science.

He talked about the LHC, and the math involved in research of subatomic particles, quarks, Higgs, a little about electromagnetism. He pointed out Earth in one of my favorite solar system photographs.

He reminded his listeners that it's important to know why we're doing what we're doing, and that for him, like for Sagan, one must start with the beauty and wonder, then get into the details as part of that. Richard Feynman was another scientist who held that mastery, who was delighted at the world, the universe, and for whom science was an expression of that delight.

Prof. Cox wound down his lecture with this, from Carl Sagan, who was responding to a photograph taken from Voyager, as it looked back on the solar system it had just traveled through:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.



It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

I was going to put together an Earth Day post today, and I might still -- it's a busy day, I wasn't prepared ahead of time.

But I think that Sagan had it all, right there. The rest is just detail, it's about how to do it. That's what I'll get into later.

I'm so glad someone did this

from @banger1977 on twitter:

happy tinkling lava

It's flash, so I can't embed it, but just *listen* to the cooling lava tinkle like broken glass as it falls off the face of the flow:
Awesome volcano video, not so pleased about non-embeddable flash, but heck, it's a Canon ad, no?

This (radar?) image from April 15 looks ominous:

Playing with the Devil

Playing with the Devil
Originally uploaded by skarpi.

Yahoo has very cleverly made a "yahoo editors' picks" account on flickr to organize pictures in galleries.

These are their favorites for the Iceland volcano:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yahooeditorspicks/galleries/72157623855495574

Goodness gracious

Dan Satterfield linked on his facebook page this news video of the meteor that lit up the midwest last night:



The Christian Science Monitor (which has a great photo of the fireball) says

A large flash of light at about 10 p.m. Wednesday night – described as a fireball in the sky by eyewitnesses from Wisconsin to Missouri – was most likely a meteor from the ongoing Gamma Virginids meteor shower.
It is unknown whether the meteor in Wisconsin, which was seen flying eastward at an altitude of 6,000 to 12,000 feet, hit the ground or burned up in the atmosphere.

There's more at that link.

Updates on the European ash situation

From AlJazeera, an information-filled and relatively accurate story (text story at that link) about the effects of Eyjafjallajokull's eruption:




The BBC has more too, on their site, including this important tidbit: "The UK's air traffic control service (Nats) said no flights would be allowed in UK airspace until at least 0700 BST on Friday amid fears of engine damage."

• Icelandic volcanic ash alert grounds UK flights
• Photo of ashcloud from the air, changes once an hour
• Iceland's volcanic ash halts flights in northern Europe
• Why a cloud of ash has grounded flights
• The National Post has a map showing closed airports

Today's ashcloud from space:



Because the clouds make it hard to see a visible-light photo, the Norwegian meteorological office released this one


(I'm a tad embarrassed to ask: What wavelength is this? not infrared.)

The glow from the ground:

Eyjafjallajokull volcano still erupts dramatically

My initial reaction was actually (in text, to a friend), "omg omg omg omfg geology."



Right now, several airports in Europe (specifically Norway and the UK) are closed because of ash.

Boston.com's "The Big Picture," one of the best photoblogs on the web, collected pictures of the volcano and its effects today. Some aren't the usual fare, some are especially dramatic, but I think one that most caught my eye was #11 - people in snow gear, standing on dirty snow with ski poles stuck in it, watching flowing lava from a few feet away.


(And for the sake of fun: KCBS said, on twitter: "Why we're just calling it 'a volcano in Iceland'. Try saying this: Mt. Eyjafjallajökull (ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl)" Wikipedia provides the IPA [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœkʏtl̥]) and an audio clip to unconfuse things.)

Addendum: My friend Ailbhe, in the thick of things, clarifies the current airport closure and flight diversion issues -- "UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, north Finland, Belgium, north France, the Netherlands in parts" -- and provides a link to a good reason: Volcanic ash destroys airplane engines catastrophically.

Fascinating Northridge quake coverage

I did spot one major technical/factual mistake, though.



(Have I posted this before, years ago? I should look. But it's a cold, rainy morning, and the dog is asleep on me, and that sounds like a lot of work for today.)