bizarre chemical reactions!!

Funny River Fire

I hear you people are missing Alaska. Well, unfortunately it has burned down. We have been suffering from a huge fire, called the Funny River Fire, for over a week now. The fire has burned close to 200,000 acres of forest and wildlife preserve so far, more land than all the fires in the western U.S. for the year.  We had a record breaking warm May with no rain at all until the last couple of days. That has helped slow down the fire but it's still less than half controlled, or "contained" as they firemen say. The picture below shows the outline of the fire compare to the size of NY City.

Here's a satellite image of it when it was smaller.

Here is what it looked like from the other night when i was walking the dogs down by the ocean:

That is all smoke with a pyrocumulus cloud bursting out of the top. That smoke came over to anchorage and blotted out the sun. It dropped ash all over our cars, and made it hard to sleep.

The fire, like almost all huge fires, was started by people who didn't listen to the scientists who called for a fire ban. It's in a wildlife refuge, so countless animals have died. But the firefighters did rescue some wolf puppies who had been abandoned by their mother.

Worst Superhero EVER

I don't know if this is appropriate but i have a bunch of comic book friends, one even worked on the new X-men movie, so i'm always making fun of superheroes.

Worst superhero ever: Femoral Artery Man. He's just like the Hulk but when he gets really stressed out  he involuntarily turns into a femoral artery. Definitely a superpower worth hiding.

more funguses

Fungi really are off the hook.  (Adam, apparently slime molds are no longer considered fungi.)

I think of nature as plants and animals, plus a bunch of microscopic stuff.  Yet there's this whole other kingdom that diverged from plants and animals a billion years ago---i.e. way back at the dawn of life.  Also: taxonomically closer to animals than plants.

These look more like science fiction or even abstract art than real-life organisms!

beautiful efficiency

You can do a lot with a tiny studio.

Quality vs Quantity

Three fencing masters versus 50 amateurs! Who will win?!?!

Alien Fungus

Yo dawgs, these fungi are off the hook! I thought we had some weird fungi up here, with slime mold being easy to find but these look like they are from a science fiction movie

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/05/fantastic-fungi-steve-axford/
 

adam + alaska + animated gifs + archipelago

I'm six months behind on my RSS feed, so this is one that Adam posted in November...just reminded me of our trip and made me very wistful.

The post this is from is incredible throughout.  The pictures of the "Chiswell Archipelago" toward the end are very striking.

Incidentally, "archipelago" is also one of my favorite words.  It is very pretty to me: it has all vowels except the ugly U; all six of its consonants are different, with no boring, excessively common S's or T's; I tend to like words that start with vowels; and there is a nice balance of five vowels and six consonants!  (Here's how to pronounce it---until about five years ago I accented it as "ark-i-pel-A-go" rather than the correct "ark-i-PEL-uh-go.")  Also I like the concept it means.

I miss Alaska.

NEW FORMAT FOR THE WORLD CUP

'nuff said

Combining Fire and Sound

Fire has the potential to be an awesome music visualizer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2awbKQ2DLRE

new author

Hey guys...I invited Adam to be a co-author on this blog because he sees lots of cool stuff too. You will start to see some stuff posted by him.  Of course you should check out his blog too!

pencils down

From Orion:

This aptitude test for Google Labs is a bit jokey but it looks also like there are some serious questions on there.

order from chaos

KLEIN: Okay, if you try to imagine never having seen skating, never having been to a roller rink, maybe back in time before it was invented and you heard someone propose the idea, like a friend came up and proposed the idea, I have a great idea of a business I’m going to build this huge arena with a hard wooden floor, and around the perimeter a naked iron handrail, and invite people of all ages and all abilities to come down and strap wheels on their feet and skate around and try to enjoy themselves. We’re not going to like make sure they qualify in their abilities, we’re not going to put helmets on them or shoulder pads. And we’re not going to give them really any instruction.

DUBNER: Now, you might think that’d be pure chaos, wouldn’t you? Sure, that’s what you might think…

KLEIN: You’d expect it to result in catastrophe and collision. How are a hundred people making their moment-by-moment decisions make their own pattern of skating such that all hundred patterns do not collide and intersect. It’s a very complex problem but as it turns out it goes quite, you know, swimmingly as we know. And so if you had to sort of pitch this idea to someone investing in it, you’d have to explain how you think this is going to work. And it’s in that explanation that I think we can enhance our understanding of how things work in society generally. I think the main thing to understand is that people are, you know, looking out for themselves. I’m not saying they’re selfish, but they’re basically looking out for themselves, and most importantly they don’t want to get hurt by colliding with anybody. Now one of the important things about collision is that it’s very mutual. So if I collide with you, you collide with me, and in promoting my interest to avoid collision with you, I simultaneously promote your interest in avoiding collision with me. And so there’s this basic coincidence of interest there, which really is at the micro-structure of how this whole thing works out.

An interesting but long Freakonomics podcast about "spontaneous orders," how in some situations you don't need formal rules/referees/police but rather order can emerge spontaneously.  Also, Ultimate Frisbee.

anybody out there?

leave a comment to let me know you're still reading...

Aningaaq

may a moody baby doom a yam?

A classic...Weird Al parodying Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues video (though the music is instead based on Dylan's Tombstone Blues).

"The Intelligent Plant"

Long piece about possible plant intelligence.  Not sure anyone but Orion/Mama will have the patience to read the whole thing, but very interesting I think.

yes that is an animal

Nature is stranger than science fiction.