Another's Newscaster

Flat Stanley is giving the sports from a stump in the middle of my frozen stream. Here's the rest of the winter news to come:

Both pics redshirt originals, unlike most pictures posted here.

Bear Crimes

Bears aren't all picnic baskets and hilarious dancing. They often don't know "No" means "No".

Polar bears are drunk most of the time, and why not? All the ice is melting, and they're dying for lack of hunting grounds. Might as well get trashed.

Damn the consequences! At least today.

Shells

Let me drop some more perspective on you. Here's our old friend, the Oort Cloud. Picture billions upon billions of icy little comets tumbling around in a vast sphere, such that our entire solar system is enshrouded in a cloud of ice. A shell, like the electron shell.

It's big - extending almost a light year in all directions from the Sun. And then as you see, far closer in, is another sphere, or shell, of icy bodies, but also rocky bodies too - like Pluto. The Kuiper Belt, another shell - also like the electron shell.

So again picture this from far away in space, looking towards the Sun. First a giant cloud of white ice, floating lazily in a vast sphere. And another sphere of ice and rock far within that, and then tucked inside that shell are planets, and a star.

Every star with planets probably has something similar. And so now look up into the dark sky and picture every star you see as a white egg of ice shells, within beats the bright nucleus of a galactic atom. Together these atoms join with vast clouds of gas to create galaxies, and galaxies join other galaxies strung along in necklaces of dark matter, grouping in vast clouds of millions of galaxies, stretching.... forever?

Is a shell forever?

Where's your Global Warming now?

Snow Demon

Of course, as soon as it gets cold or snows in the Winter, your witty Wingnut will mockingly ask "What happened to Global Warming"? I tell them that Snow Demon is unpredictable and easily offended. And boy has he been offended this Winter!

Portland ME after 30 plus inches in early February.

Skiing to work! Up here in Gondolin it started snowing in early December and hasn't really stopped. Producing scenes like:

Redshirt photos. So yeah, funny story - Global Warming can cause all kinds of different weather conditions, including increased snowfall amounts. Warming temperatures worldwide will cause more extreme variations of weather in different locales, but yes, there could be far more snow in certain areas because of GW. Good luck trying to explain this to Mr. Wingnut. But then, maybe I will. Tomorrow.

Until then, pray with me to the Snow Demon to accept our offerings and mercifully stop sending snow. My back beseeches you!

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.

Defenders of the Poles

Send back your War Machine, man!

Santa exploits his elves, just like Keebler. In fact, Santa and Keebler are both members of the EBB. Co-incidence? I think not!

We, the Defenders of the Poles, shall expose these gross injustices of justice and root out the corrupt elfsploitation that is all too rampant in the cold nether regions of planet Earth. Join us! The link is in the upper right.

Poles (North and South), Represent!

I hope the Russians love walruses too

Fashion Walrus is ready for his closeup.

Ready for some sun! Your Russian Navy at work in the Arctic. And in the Antarctic?

Bust o' Lenin, chilling out. Never forget, comrades:

For men and walruses.

Bonus question: Any common derivation of Rus (tribe of, founders of Russia) and wal-rus? They're both from the cold part of the world. What if they're like related or something? Weird!

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)!

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.

Otzi Doodle Do

This is a meme I fully support. Incorporate as much of the ancient past as we can, as feasible, as recommended. No need for human sacrifice, but the art of our ancient grandparents is sacrosanct. Can there be anything more noble than the first displays of symbolic thought? Of the first light of humanity? Nay, says I. 

A reconstruction of Otzi, the dude who got shot by an arrow and stabbed by some knives yet managed to die up the side of the mountain, obviously fleeing. What Otzi did, who will ever know? Maybe he was a murderer. Maybe he was a hero. It's long, long in the past - circa 5500BCE. But what do the lives of that time matter today?

Spare some change?

Iced Cream Man's Lament

You might think all iced cream men and women would generally be happy folks, since their work often involves bestowing joy and frozen treats to the people. But I'm sure it's not all Harbor Bars and laughs. Rather, like with almost all jobs, the monotony and stupid people ruin everything, slowly but surely until even aye, dispensing a swirl cone no longer stirs the heart with delight, but rather dulls the soul with crushing sadness.

Or maybe that's just me. Any iced cream people out there want to speak up?

Go Bruins!

I've jumped on the Bruins bandwagon, cause why not? Who doesn't enjoy a post championship celebration slash riot? The Usual Sullys will be out in force, smashing up shit just for the sheer primal enjoyment of it - like a destructive Carnival. And I'll be out on the fringes, watching. Laughing. Anything for the Lulz, y'all.

Some say in ice

Our brains are hard wired to see patterns, shapes, faces. What did you see here, the first time you looked at it?

How about here?

But then sometimes our brains, via our eyes, are presented with something that makes no sense, too abstract, too absurd, and it bypasses that identification channel:

And the absurd is a liberation.  Or a fortress, of solitude (yes, the google's source for Superman puns!).

Or a theory turned into visual metaphor:

This is Freudian, literally, to the Extreme. Not sure if it's correct, or even close to correct. Yet, there's something here that makes sense to me - do you have another voice in your head? One which often says things like "I'm not sure that's a good idea", or "Maybe we should sleep for a couple of hours before driving" or "Maybe you shouldn't eat that piece of cheese on the floor". Etc. I believe - hope! - we all do, and if so, I ask you: What is that voice? Or who?

Are we all schizophrenics? Or, is the idea of different personalities, different perspectives within the same "individual", the truth? Or a closer approximation thereof.