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.

Solstice is serious business

Four years ago, at a friend's Solstice celebration, I caught a shot of my dear friends Kimberly and Sue trying so hard not to giggle during a quiet moment that they were nearly crying.



How could they explain that from their angle, they could see a cat trying to find a use for the sand in the bottom of the straw man at the center of the ritual?

The cat, apparently, had missed the memo about rituals being serious business.

Multitouch Mapping Exhibit at Oakland Museum of California

Multiotuch Mapping Exhibit at Oakland Museum of California
Originally uploaded by ideum

The Oakland Museum of California has been one of my favorite places since I first visited in the eighties. It's always been a relatively simple, lovely, open museum, with a California focus. The top floor had art from California artists, sculpture and furniture and huge, gold-framed oils showing Yosemite waterfalls in the 1800s. The second floor was a rather overwhelming but comprehensive walk through California history.

The bottom floor, my favorite, was all about the California natural history, the river otters and acorn woodpeckers and bivalves in the bay mud.

There was a gigantic relief map, and a huge whirling globe (in my icon!), and outside a koi pond with a big acrylic sculpture in it.



The green central (roof?) area sometimes hosted musical events, small festivals, wine-tastings. The lecture halls had a regular schedule of California-relevant educational events. The cafe was lovely, inexpensive for fairly good food, with a window above the pond, looking out into the peace.

Then it closed for awhile, for a deep remodeling. At first I was fussed that I couldn't attend, then I sort of forgot about it. When it half-reopened (the natural history section is due to open next year), I sort of forgot to go back.

Looking around for maps on Flickr tonight (I am a special kind of nerd) I found this little video about Ideum's interactive historic map display at the museum. OMG. The internet is indeed for (map) porn. I'm checking my schedule for the next week or so to find out when I should go to the newly reopened Oakland Museum of California.

smart, but not always well-spoken

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