Geology
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A perfect storm in midair
They might have split up or they might have capsized They may have broke deep and took water And all that remains is the faces and the names Of the wives and the sons and the daughters. — Gordon Lightfoot, from “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” A storm on Lake Superior drowned the Edmund… Continue reading
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Looking over St. Louis
Got these shots of St. Louis and the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers while flying to Austin by way of Chicago two Fridays ago. You can see the Gateway Arch, right of center, Busch Stadium, the Edward Jones Dome, the City Museum, and lots of barge traffic on the river. I actually didn’t… Continue reading
2008_03_13, aerial, bos-ord-aus, Busch Stadium, Canon Powershot 850is, City Museum, eads, Eads Bridge, Edward Jones Dome, Gateway Arch, Illinois, infrastructure, Martin Luther King Bridge, mississippi, Mississippi River, Missouri River, Photography, Poplar Street Bridge, St. Louis, ual, united, united arilines, windowseat, windowshot -
And porn soon followed
Says here that sex came along at least 365 billion million years ago. Continue reading
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Magma roots
The problem with “grass roots” as a metaphor is that it reduces its contributors to the miniscopic. Not microscopic, because then you couldn’t see them without a microscope. But miniscopic, meaning they’re small. You have to get down on all fours to eyeball them and say hi. So I’ve been thinking about alternative meaphors where… Continue reading
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Visting a Late Lake
Not long ago as geology goes — nine, ten, twelve millennia — one of the world’s largest lakes covered most of Minnesota, plus much of North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and a corner of South Dakota. It’s called Lake Agassiz, named after the scientist Louis Agassiz, who figured out the Ice Age (continental glaciation, basically),… Continue reading
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Coal ranching
On Tuesday I got my first good look into the coal mines of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. This is literally where the deer and the antelope played, until the human appetite for power began eating it up. Featured are the Jacobs Ranch and Black Thunder Mines. The latter is featured in John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers.… Continue reading
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A portrait of the Swiss Alps
On departure from Zürich to Paris yesterday the ground was shrowded in gloom and haze, but above it the sky was clear and crystalline. I sat purposely on the left side of the plane to get a view, even though I knew I’d be photographing the scene against the sun, which would be low in… Continue reading
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Long Tail vs. Wrong Tale
After Murad Ahmed wrote Citizen journalists told to stop using Twitter to update on Bombay attacks in TimesOnline, and David Stephenson blogged a similar concern, Bruce Schneier responded with Communications During Terrorist Attacks are Not Bad. Specifically, This fear is exactly backwards. During a terrorist attack — during any crisis situation, actually — the… Continue reading
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Going from San Francisco
Got some nice shots of San Francisco and Marin on Sunday, as we flew off to Chicago on the first leg of the trip home from Thanksgiving in California. Actually, my kid shot most of them, since he had the window seat. Shot some other stuff too, which I’ll put up later. Mount Tamalpias (better… Continue reading
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Whetlands
These are a few among the many salt ponds that ring the south end of San Francisco Bay. Once considered and agricultural innovation and an economic boom, the practice of “reclaiming” wild wetlands for industrial purposes is now considered ecologically awful by environmentalists, especially here on the West Coast of the U.S., which has precious… Continue reading
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Just in case cheaper gas starts looking attractive…
OPEC Orders Cut in Oil Production. Continue reading
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Falling around
Fall in New England is a visual cliché of the first order, and exactly as advertised. Only better this weekend, because it’s been unseasonably warm, as well as clear and perfectly gorgeous, complete with full moons each night. We’ve been out at a church retreat at Otter Lake, New Hampshire. And it’s been a healthy… Continue reading
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Grand Icing
From the air there’s a strange kind of vast sameness to the Grand Canyon. It’s a carved up layercake of variously colored rock that’s less dramatic viewed from above than from its edges or its insides. There’s one anomaly, however, that stands out for me every time I see it: the Uinkaret Volcanic Field, which… Continue reading
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Starring Southern Utah
In September I took two flights across the country that featured lots of clear views of the sights below. I think I took 700+ pictures on each of them. I’ve been posting them to Flickr in slow motion, trying to minimize the labors involved in tagging and captioning them. It helps that many of these… Continue reading
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Giving good wait
I’ve been reading John McPhee’s Giving Good Weight, the title essay of his book by the same name. That last link (to McPhee’s own site) calls it “a story of farmers selling their produce in the Greenmarkets of New York City as told by a journalist who went to work for an upstate farmer, and… Continue reading
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Um, wait a millennium…
Joe Biden might not have been lying when he said global warming was “caused by man”, but he was at best only partially right. The globe has been warming for the last 20000 years or so: ever since the last ice sheet began to retreat, leaving Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod, the Great… Continue reading
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I shot more than 500 pictures out the pitted and blistered windows of the United Airbus 320 I took from Chicago to Orange County, day before yesterday. The shot above is one of them. It’s part of this series here, all of Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. What I’m hoping is that somebody somewhere… Continue reading