By the dock of the bay

Fishing is one of mankind's oldest professions, to be sure.

Orbital

It's an orbit joke - right? Say hey have you heard of the rogue captured? Jah, it's a shame.

Eyes of a Robot

It's cool visuals, but not realistic. There's no way we could ever smash all the cameras they'll deploy. In the sky, on the sides of buildings, on street poles, on power lines, etc. Drones flying overhead. Satellites far above. Cameras everywhere.

Curiosity, on Mars. Not sure how this photo is made, since Curiosity is all alone on Mars.

Foreign Dispatch

You can see where totems got their inspiration in the mirror form of still lakes and sea shores. When the water is as glass, reflecting everything above, like the green here of Summer, near full Moon, the full skeletal reproduction is seen by all, and copied by most - why not? Success is leached.

Another's Flag

I believe in these things, somewhat truly: The United Nations - shouldn't we all belong to the same nation? We're all the same people, let's organize and conquer Mars.

Control the water, control the planet.

Redshirt originals all, yeah.

Our Friend the Atom

Let us follow the human understanding of the Atom. Ja, man?

Here's all the conditions upon the Earth. What happens to minerals exposed to such?

Primary colors.

Sky's not the Limit

Click for big - Asteroid mining as a maybe real thing by some rich dudes who've started a company. If you're super rich, why not? And if the crazy idea actually works, well, then you might become the richest men who've ever walked this precious metal barren planet. Richer than Crassus.

For you see, Earth differentiated - meaning, it melted. And most of the heavy stuff sank down deep into the planet. Far from our machines. And so we simply scrape around the surface - all the gold, silver, tin, iron, etc ever dug up but a pittance of what actually exists on Earth. But we'll never be able to get to it.

And so, space. Most of the time asteroids did not differentiate, and thus the precious metals are sitting in discrete chunks close to the surface. Some asteroids are almost entirely iron. More metal than mankind has ever know sits in just one or two 500M asteroid. Read this if you can:

I'll summarize the entire idea (which will eventually happen if we continue to advance as a technological species): 1. Find some good target asteroids. There are two general classes - water rich, and metal rich. 2. Get to them, and drag them to a Lagrange point. 3. There, mine them of water and metals. 4. Send some of the metal back to Earth for a very large price. Use the rest to build your space mining infrastructure to you can mine ever more asteroids.

Soon enough with this scheme and we'll have entered some post-scarcity wonder world of flying cars and giant space stations.

Also too: Underground cities in case some mad Gazillionaire decides to rain asteroids down upon the planet.

Our Beautiful Apocalypse

A glacial whirlpool, beautiful but deadly. A living dagger to a glacier as its life force is drained away. Happening every day, across the planet.

Methane bubbles waiting to break the ice. Once we get a bit warmer, all sorts of gasses will be released and tipping points reached across the board. Our end will be collective.

Greenland and the clouds around her. Which will change every day it gets warmer and warmer, and more ice melts into the sea, until another tipping point is reached.

We walk on thin ice, loudly.

Titanomachia

Titan (and Mimas - the Death Star moon)! Second biggest moon in the Solar System, and maybe first in our hearts (tough choices). It is one of two moons with an atmosphere, and a very thick one at that. Nitrogen based, like Earth's. However, Earth has no views like this:

An excellent art piece as well. For reference, Titan is bigger than Mercury, and far more interesting, though that's an opinion I suppose. What Titan tells us - and all the other cool moons, but especially Titan - is that moons can be quite diverse, and that large planets can have quite many of them, acting like mini "solar" systems. Saturn to date has a confirmed 62 moons, with more likely to come. More art:

I can't tell you all their names correctly, except Titan at center, occulted. Each moon can exert a gravitational influence on the other moons, and I'm sure one day we'll discover a moon with a moon. It will be cool. For now, appreciate Titan:

False color Titan pics showing the changing cloud formations. It rains on Titan. There's lakes:

More false color. "False color" means scientists have assigned colors to the image based on the data at hand. It's accurate for what it is, but also subjective to a degree, though also close enough. For the record, just about any cool color space shot you've seen is false color to some degree. Here's the real deal:

More lakes! The fishin' ain't so good though, one assumes. As the liquid on Titan is methane, and the mountains and valleys and boulders and rocks are ice. Wicked hard ice - the temp on the surface is around -200 degrees Celsius. Cold as heck. It is truly an alien world, but oh so familiar:

Titan seas, with islands. One day our robot children will vacation on the shores of Methane Sea.

Rivers of methane emptying into methane seas. It's like Earth, but will never be like Earth. Titan is highly inhospitable to us, and so it will be left to the robots. Check out this amazing pic:

The surface of Titan, as seen by Huygens - a probe shot from Cassini during its early years. Another feather in the cap of this amazing science mission. Those are little pebbles of ice. Rounded from some type of erosion, be it liquid or wind. Titan has all the weather we have on Earth, except it's methane raining down from the orange clouds. So cool.

Is there life? Seems hard to imagine, but every year we find life on Earth in the strangest of places - super heated volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean; 6 miles below ground deep in the bedrock; way, way high in the sky, floating bacteria living forever in the clouds. Life is everywhere on Earth, and it seems it has always been so - evidence of life now goes back to just a few hundred million years after the creation of Earth as we know it - which is not the original Earth, not by many iterations.

Perhaps some form of life similar to life on Earth exists on Titan. Or perhaps a life unlike life on Earth exists on Titan. Or, more likely, life does not exist on Titan, at least not on the surface. It is possible Titan has a vast underground ocean of warm liquid water, and imagine what kind of sealife might evolve there. Gnarly stuff, like everything in the ocean. One day we'll find out - we need to send out the bots in our name.

Lord of The E Ring

It's Enceladus! An amazing moon of Saturn that we've learned a ton about in the past ten years, thanks to the wonderful Cassini probe. It's the brightest object in the Solar System for starters (apart from the Sun, of course). Why? Because it's completely ice and highly reflective. But see those blue stripes at the bottom?

The so called "Tiger Stripes" are areas on the Southside of the moon where the ice crust is weakened, allowing liquid water to rise to the surface. Liquid water, you say, that far out into space?! But it's so cold! True, but thanks to tidal friction caused by the massive Saturn and the other moons around it, Enceladus is squeezed and stretched with every orbit and this creates enough friction within the moon to generate heat. Heat enough to not only create a global subsurface ocean, but warm enough to create CRYOVOLCANOES.

Like Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park, geysers. But on a scale far, far bigger - these geysers, or water volcanoes, shoot an enormous amount of water into space, where it instantly freezes. Some falls back onto Enceladus, creating new layers of ice crust. The rest goes into orbit around Saturn, creating the "E Ring":

As seen here. Amazing, yes? And so we begin our tour of the Solar System's moons. Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting moon(s)!

For Gondolin!

Ancient Greek war mask, with form fitting face behind. War has led to a good percentage of human evolution - both in body and technology. Death is the ultimate motivator. For Gondolin! For your dreams!

The 3rd leg of the grand stream, draining Gondolin of stagnant waters and all possibility of flooding. Little round rocks collected for weeks, piled in stacks, laid across the established channel. Erosion prevention is the aim. Beauty a secondary concern.

But it is a concern. Beautiful, is it not?

The water must flow.

Merry New Year!

Note the movement from the sunset below. It's days respectable. This is Halloween sunset above.

Here's the stream of which I spoke before. Check it out:

Managed and manicured. Let my water go - I try and help.

Librarian Laughs

Poor Uranus. It's a lovely planet - an Ice Giant with more water than all the water on Earth times 1000 or even more. And yet, forever a joke, because of its name. Do you think this joke will ever pass? Doesn't seem likely does it. As such, I propose we change Uranus's name to something cooler. How about Caelus?

Another sign that our times are progressive and getting better. Within my lifetime there were once banned books in America, land of Freedom. Ulysses, all of Henry Miller's work, Catch-22, The Grapes of Wrath, Naked Lunch, and let us not forget The Canterbury Tales. Yes, banned in America in the 1870's due to the awesome Comstock Law. But today, as far as I know, there are no banned books. We're free to read all the crap we want. But don't, because, really, who the hell reads anymore?

Tunnel of DOOM

An ice tunnel under a glacier in Greenland. Beautiful, but it presages a looming disaster. These tunnels form from meltwater, and quite efficiently drain water from the glacier. This also causes the glacier to slide far faster than normal, sliding towards the sea. The disaster scenario is as such: When enough fresh water pours into the North Atlantic, it subsumes the Gulf Stream, breaking the current. This ocean current is a major contributor to the weather of the Northern Hemisphere. It's loss would cause worldwide weather to go crazy for many, many years. Ice ages, massive floods, crushing droughts, monster hurricanes, tidal waves, tornadoes everywhere. Many, many people will die.

This is a possibility. And yet we do little to prevent it, hostage as we all are to insane Republicans. Who worry not, as they'll no doubt blame Liberals when the shit hits the fan anyway.

DOOM.

Aquadogs (What a country!)

What a country! What a world. This guy gets an idea - hey! Dogs underwater are funny. People love their dogs. Maybe they'll pay me good money to take pictures of their dogs underwater. And verily it was so. FSM bless America. Enjoy.

Cute but terrifying in a "doll come to murderous life" kinda way.

Aw gosh aw gosh I'm in it now!

What are you thinking of?

Work like parachutes.

Like dogs in general, mostly cute and awesome but just below the surface, sometimes revealed, wild monsters of fang and claw.

Protip! No matter how well you know the dogs and how cool said dogs might be, never stick your hand in between two of their mouths when they're set on something. Only scars will result.
Also too, cuz it's cool and apropos:

This is the baby from Nirvana's "Nevermind" cover. All grown up! Time, man. It doth fly.

A memory of a dream remembered

Shamelessly stolen from l.e.s.t.e.r. Ex post facto OK, brah?

This was the dream I lived, twice. On a lake with a canoe and a keyboard, a hoe and boots for working and hiking. A dog - Kennedy (above) - by my side through the woods deep and wide, over beaver dam into the Wastelands, no where was off limits to a boy and his dog in the Summer of 99. Good times. But just a dream, and in that dream fashioned another dream, far off into the future, one day to build a castle of stone and wood high on a mountaintop. Lo! And so it has come to be, a sizable financial commitment to an idea birthed in the heat of fantasy lived, for a season or 4.

Check it: I used to canoe way out to the other side of the lake (a mile or so) where there was this sweet little island of cliff and pine. I made a soft seat of the fallen pine needles and spongy ground between three pines overlooking the lake and mountains, and read Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces". From late spring to early fall almost every other weekday afternoon, weather permitting, of course. It was magic, and I reminded myself then to remember it, now. And so here it is. Thanks for the pics, l.e.s.t.e.r.

Just a sip

Surprisingly, water tornadoes don't suck up to much water. Who knew? Science, that's who. The cloud you see in a water vortex is condensation due to the extreme pressure/temperature difference within the vortex and without. It does kick up a lot of water on the outside of the funnel, and so too any poor water creature caught in the path - hence raining frogs. But just a sip of water upwards, as the tornado is a downward event.

Imagine you were a sailor some 10,000 years ago, in a small craft of handmade design, and you came upon a waterspout. Angry Gods, right? And that's where science precisely sets us free - what was once mysterious and full of evil portent can be explained naturally. Anything and everything can be explained rationally if the eye of science is turned upon it. Eventually. And it is confidence in this process - science - which sets us free from all prior dogma and belief. This belief - in the scientific process - is our salvation. Ramen!

Fuck the Ocean (LOL)

Like, right? Why would you be swimming in the ocean or lake anyways? It's your own fault! Do you realize what lies beneath the surface of ALL oceans and lakes?

In the deep dark waters strange monsters lurk.