Basking Shark, Red Sea

Now I feel like I really must go kayaking in the Red Sea.

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,

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.

Pin the tail on the city

Tehran and Milad Tower (HDR)
Originally uploaded by arash_rk.

In response to a general question about how many people in the west (more specifically, Americans on twitter who turned their icons green) could even find Tehran on an unlabeled map, my friend Rick came up with a challenge meme, of a sort, suggesting folks start with a fully zoomed out, unlabeled google map, then zoom in toward Iran until you think you can click on exactly where Tehran is, then click, and announce what city you ended up on, if not Tehran. (If you ended up right on Tehran? Woohoo!)

So, where did you end up? If it was Tehran, how close did you zoom in before you could be precise?

Where do you come from, and what's your geography background like, or your knowledge of central Asia?

I ended up about 100 km northeast of Tehran, from just far enough above the surface that what I thought was city was bare rock.

buuz!

Buuz! Mongolian mutton dumplings for all
Originally uploaded by The Nomad Within.

This is really a beautiful article in The Atlantic Monthly:
The Hearty Food of Mongolian Winter.

Perhaps as much as with any National Geographic story, I felt like I had a sense of what hanging out in a Mongolian home is like.