Friday, December 21, 2012

The world has ended, but this blog rambles on.


In this timezone, it’s the 21st of December already, and the world has been destroyed.

Sorry guys, but the Mayans were right.  At 12:01 am, Eastern Australian Daylight time, this section of the world was destroyed.  The planet is disintegrating along the time-zone lines like the segments of an orange getting peeled off and tossed into a juicer.  Sorry folks, it’s all over.  And they didn’t even use my method for destroying the planet.

Fortunately, the super expensive Australian National Broadband Network is extensive and robust enough to survive this catastrophe, so I am still able to blog from the cosmic void.  It is getting cold and hard to breathe out here, but there are some benefits.  For example, without a globe there is no global warming.  And, in space, no-one can hear your neighbor throw up in the front lawn after a big night out.  And the big night will last forever.  Unfortunately, the nearest place to grab a drink is now the Saturnian moon Titan.  No word from the Mayans yet on when that baby is due to go.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Odd-shaped lakes in Google Earth

I was goofing around in Google Earth this evening, performing an activity that started out as meaningful and quickly degenerated into a Game of "Ooh what's that", when I came across the following:
Note the very strange shoreline on this lake, with numerous straight line borders. The first time I saw this, I thought I was looking at some dams I didn't know about, but I quickly realized that such an interpretation made no sense.

 Instead, what I believe this image is showing is a mosaic from pictures acquired several years apart. One of those years was a wet year, while another must have been after a period of extended drought. As a result, the lake is ~90% full in some of the images, but almost empty in others. And the straight-line lakeshores are just the tile borders, which Google's new color autocorrect makes less obvious.

 I have no idea where WoGE is up to these days, but I left the co-ordinates off in case anyone wants to chase up the Reservoir.