There’s a lot of pretty interesting data available at the USGS website, including maps of witness reported earthquake intensity. The 5.0 magnitude quake that hit the Ottawa area generated about 50,000 reports from people that felt it.
This is pretty much awesome. Via at least three friends on the Facebook.
Mostly, this is here for my own reference. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot reading.
I really want one of these Velosynth devices to play with. It’s a smart, hackable glitch noisemaker you can attach to your bike. It’s like the super nerdy version of the playing cards in the spokes trick. Totally badass. Also, it came from Portland. OF COURSE it came from Portland.
The recent posts over on Daring Fireball about comments have gotten me thinking about just disabling them and throwing them all out here. Not on LJ or Facebook, that seems to be where comments are actually useful for me, but here it’s all just spam on older posts.
I dunno, does it matter? Probably not.
[Edit: comments are turned off now. No big whup.]
Rebecca pointed me at this article from NPR in which art historian David Bellingham posits that the Botticelli painting “Venus and Mars” depicts Mars in a state of intoxication from ingesting Datura, also known as Jimsonweed shown in the borders of the painting. Datura is a hallucinogenic and poisonous relative of Belladonna, also known as Deadly Nightshade. This sounds plausible, if in fact Datura use was known in Europe at the time of the painting. What sounds way less plausible to me is when Bellingham says that art historians overlooked the Datura in the painting because they thought that Botticelli was “probably just making a pretty frame to the painting.”
I finally got around to uploading some pictures from our last couple of camping excursions. These are all from the Hood Forest.
This one I think is crazy how green it is. Rowan practically blends right into the forest with his florescent green shirt.
So then this one is a close up of these weird rows of holes that went all the way up a tree in the campground we were staying at. I guess they were from some insect that burrowed in and ate the tree, but it’s pretty weird how regular the rows of holes are.
And here’s some dew on a plant from the middle of the river. There are others in flickr, but these are some that stuck out to me.
Laughing Squid posted about a project that’s mapping geotagged photos taken by tourists vs those taken by locals.
Here’s Portland. The blue dots are locals and the red are tourists:
