March 26, 2021

Time lapse of unloading and reloading a container ship

This is just to give an idea of how big the ship blocking the canal is and what it takes to unload one of those things.

My best guess says it's going to take a combination of dredging and dragging.

March 23, 2021

Volcano video du jour, partial colapse of largest cone

Ricks start to fall around the 23:15 mark, collapse happens a minute and a half or so later, pretty spectacular.

March 22, 2021

Space debris removal demonstration launches

A Soyuz rocket has launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to put 38 different satellites in orbit.

Among the payloads was a 500kg Earth imager developed by the South Korean space agency; and a pair of spacecraft from the Tokyo-headquartered Astroscale company which will give a demonstration of how to clean up orbital debris.

Astroscale's showcase will be run from an operations centre in the UK.

With the space environment becoming increasingly cluttered, there is heightened awareness that something needs to be done to sweep away spaceflight's legacy of discarded hardware.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56482726

I'm glad somebody is doing this.

March 22, 2021

Interesting article on Ravelry in The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/how-politics-tested-ravelry-and-the-crafting-community

Some of it is informative, some glosses over the bad behavior of right wingers (doxxing people, death threats, the usual for them) while magnifying other controversies on the site, but it's a decent read for those of us who use the site for patterns and problem solving.

I knew Deplorable was back, there is a disagree on every post I make, even on the kitty threads.

March 20, 2021

Iceland finally begins Reykjanes eruption

No large eathquake,no loud roar, just a glow in the sky near Grindavik.

March 20, 2021

Texas museum forced to take down Trump statue because everyone keeps punching it

A wax museum in Texas has removed its statue of former US president Donald Trump from display after it was repeatedly punched by visitors.

Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks in San Antonio, Texas, had to move the statue to a storage room because some museum visitors kept attacking it.

They punched and scratched the figure, inflicting so much damage that it had to be pulled from public view, Clay Stewart, regional manager for Ripley Entertainment, which owns the museum, told San Antonio Express-News.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-statue-punching-texas-museum-b1819422.html

In TEXAS? I shudder to think what people would have done to it around here.

March 19, 2021

Dr. John Campbell updates the third/fourth wave of Covid

March 9, 2021

Iceland earthquake swarm, over 20,000 in 10 days

I don't know how many armchair geologists have been following this, but it looks as though the lava field on Reykjanes Peninsula, 27 KM southwest of the capital city, is about to open up. It's unlikely to be explosive, more like what happened on Hawaii, and historic lava fields have been on the smaller side. The problem is that historically, once it opens up, it erupts for a century or two.

If you're keeping up with this, I recommend these videos, the man is a photographer with a side interest in geology.

Pro tip to the townies: when the ground starts shaking like jelly, it's generally time to get out of Dodge.

You can always return if it quiets down.

March 5, 2021

Lucy gets a new face

A more precise facial reconstruction has been done of one of the earliest homonins and it's amazing:

.webp

https://www.livescience.com/lucy-taung-child-facial-reconstructions.html