Picture of the day

NASA's Earth Observatory with your latest horrifying reminder of the ludicrous size of this spill.

As always, click to really embiggen.



They even came up with time lapse video this time around.

Picture of the day

Because every so often we need a satellite based photographic reminder of just how fucked the Gulf Coast is, NASA has provided yet another stunning example of just how much goddamn oil is in the water.

And even the satellites are not able to show the full devastation. There's all those underwater oil plumes that BP says don't exist and then there's the fact that "satellite images are not a perfect tool for detecting oil on the surface of water. Outside of the sunglint area (the part of the satellite image where the mirror-like reflection of the Sun is blurred into a wide, washed out strip by waves), the oil may be imperceptible against the dark background of the water."

So there's that. And just how much oil is in the water? Recent estimates about the oil spill have doubled. Which, if you remember, was after the previous estimates had been increased tenfold from previous estimates which had increased fivefold, from previous estimates which had doubled. And they still are probably underestimating the amount of oil in the water. Just imagine the biggest number you can think of and then double that. That's how much oil is in the water. One kajillion fafillion bazillion gallons of oil.

Anyway, onto NASA's latest photos. Click to embiggen.



Take that Mother Earth. We've finally defeated you.

Picture of the day

Via the Bad Astronomy blog and the NASA Earth Observatory comes this look at the French-Italian border. That would be Corsica and the moon glinting off the the Ligurian Sea at the top, Lyon at the bottom, Marseille to the right, and Torino and the Alps to the left.

Click to embiggen.

Conspiracy~!

You might have thought that in all this hullabaloo about drilling rig explosions, oil replacing water as the main liquid in the Gulf, environmental disaster this, decades to clean up that, poor sea turtles the other, that this all somehow presented a comprehensive case against offshore drilling. It hasn't.

I mean sure, if this disaster was the result of years of lobbying against safer practices and regulation, poor oil company safety standards, and lax safety standards, you might have a point. But it wasn't. Hold on to the tops of your skulls, because I might just blow your mind. IT WAS ALL THE RESULT OF A LIBERAL CONSPIRACY!! DUN DUN DUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNN! And if you don't believe me, surely you'll believe the leading lights of the conservative movement.

Limbaugh added: "[W]hat better way to head off more oil drilling and nuclear plants then by blowing up a rig? I'm just, I'm just noting the timing here."

Dana Perino said of the spill: "I'm not trying to introduce a conspiracy theory, but was this deliberate? You have to wonder...if there was sabotage involved."

Fox Business Network host Eric Bolling falsely claimed it was "nine days before" the leak "was even addressed" and asked, "Did they let this thing leak? ... if they're going to try and pull drilling, that may be the way they do it."

Heckuva Job Brownie: "And I would not be surprised if the White House said, you know what, we might be able to, guess what, do what? Use this crisis to our advantage. Let this crisis get really bad, and then we will step in. We will be able to shut down offshore drilling."

SEE! It's all so clear now. Clearly this isn't an offshore drilling/oil company/safety/regulation problem, this is a liberal terrorist/sabotage/government conspiracy problem. I haven't done enough research, but the Sasquatch and the mole people may be involved. We may have drilled into their underground lair or something.

Sure, liberals/reverse vampires set charges on the rig and then Obama, who secretly hates offshore drilling despite all those statements and plans to support it, waited 8 days, no, 9 days, no, 12 days, no, 7 years, before lifting a finger in order to discredit offshore drilling! Obama's Katrina! Conspiracy! Spy satellites are watching us!

So in the end we have learned, like always, that corporations are never responsible for anything and that things with obvious dangerous environmental hazards aren't dangerous at all. It turns out that everything would have run smoothly if it weren't for those damn meddling kids and their overarching conspiracy to drag down our corporate betters into the mire. Isn't that always the way?

Picture of the day

Via Wired Science and the NASA Terra satellite comes a sattelite's eye view of the Gulf slowly turning from a blue mass of water into a brown sludge of oil.

From the start of the disaster on the 21st:


To the 29th:

Picture of the day

We recently hit the one decade anniversary of NASA's TERRA satellite, our beloved space agencies attempt to look at our planet in different wavelengths, different resolutions, different spectrum, and environmental factors in order that we might better learn about our planet so that we may more effectively attribute everything to God. Also: it's the most effective nude sunbather spying tool the government has ever created.

As such they have released a map of the entire earth based on images they've taken. Click to really, really embiggen.

Picture of the day

Via Wired Science comes a look at current and former Olympic venues.... from space. A Common feature? Most of them are empty and unlikely to be unused. I'm sure Vancouver will get decades of use out of their two ski jumps though.

Sarajevo

Torino. I'm not sure there's even civilization down there, let alone a cross country course

The Beijing Happy Ice and Snow Season Bird's Nest

What bankrupted Greece

Picture of the day

From Popular Science comes this look at the Dubai Air Show.....FROM SPACE. The GeoEye-1 satellite to be more specific. The Dubai Air Show is the largest airshow in the Middle East, barely beating out a rural shack in Afghanistan where an opium farmer has two beat-up WWI-era Fokker's that he keeps on display. It is the fastest growing airshow and will soon become a centerpiece of Dubai's grand plan to be a home to the largest and gaudiest everything in the world.

As always click to embiggen.

Picture of the day

NASA's nude celebrity sunbathing reconnaissance satellite, otherwise known as the Hubble, took time out of its busy schedule of hovering silently over Megan Fox's house to turn it's lenses onto our very own Milky Way in conjunction with the Spitzer space telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. What's so special about the pic? Oh nothing.....if you aren't interested in seeing our galaxy IN EVERY VISIBLE SPECTRUM OF LIGHT. Yeah, you couldn't see this stuff with two pairs of glasses on. Hey that's why we have the Hubble peeping at good looking women and sometimes the stars, because it can see that much.

Guess who's back, bitch?

The Hubble....and it's up in ur galaxiez, lookinz at ur visible light spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. This is after a repair mission in May that many referred to as NASA's "most dangerous ever". So what is the new and improved Hubble going to do besides flip it's gaze towards earth and peep at you through a window (it can do that)?

it will tackle a whole range of observations. Looking closer to Earth, such observations will include taking a census of the population of Kuiper Belt objects residing at the fringe of our solar system, witnessing the birth of planets around other stars, and probing the composition and structure of the atmospheres of other worlds. Peering much farther away, astronomers have ambitious plans to use Hubble to make the deepest-ever portrait of the universe in near-infrared light. The resulting picture may reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Hubble also is now significantly more well-equipped to probe and further characterize the behavior of dark energy, a mysterious and little-understood repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Awesome, I don't know how many e-mails I've had to read through where people bitch about not knowing the population of the Kuiper Belt. Asteroid population and health care, that's all people seem to care about nowadays. Finally I'll have an answer for them: soon, my children, soon.

Picture of the day

From the good folks at English Russia comes this look at how the dastardly Russkies have decided to use their re-purposed nuclear missile silos. Instead of launching atomic death, they're now used as launch points for commercial satellites. Now if only they could keep track of the nukes that used to be in those silos....

Picture of the day

Death Valley as rendered by NASA after the completion of a program that topographically mapped 99% of the Earth. That 1% that couldn't be mapped? Your mom's house. Click through the link to see the fruits of their labors and get all the topographical info-porn that readers have always came to this site for.

Thing Michelle Bachmann is convinced is a liberal conspiracy of the day

#117b: the Census

The Census is a liberal plot to use ACORN to round up those it deems to be "undesirables", such as Republicans, and put them into internment camps.

Last week, Rep. Michele “I’m not a kook” Bachmann (R-MN) boasted about breaking the law in refusing to complete the 2010 Census.

BACHMANN: If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up.

I think we all know what to do. Never fill out census data so the government can't keep tabs on us. Then you get the tinfoil, I'll start ripping out any teeth with fillings in them. Those spy satellites will never be able to read our thoughts then!

Remember to get Reynolds Wrap, that's the only type that shields our thoughts from the devilish machinations of Jewish bankers plotting in their bunker under Zurich.

Moon smasher

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) sent up the Kaguya satellite with one mission: take stunning HD footage of the earth and moon from orbit and globally map the moon. Mission accomplished. But little did we know of a second, more sinister, mission. After taking this HD footage JAXA decided the next logical course of action: smash the satellite into the dark side of the moon at 3,728 miles per hour. On purpose. Why? Because Japan hates the moon. The footage is above. It works better if you play Pink Floyd's Eclipse over it.

We don't know of any other sinister plans....yet. Was this just an excuse to drop drilling apparatus onto the surface? Are drills taking a nuclear payload to the moon's core as we speak? Will JAXA finally achieve its dream of destroying the moon? Or will we awake to next month's full moon only to see the phrase "Japan rules the moon, suckers' carved into its face. All I know is Japan has more interesting designs for its space program than we do. We just want scientific knowledge and to learn about the planet, Japan wants HD footage of its satellites scarring the face of the moon like a fight at a speakeasy gone wrong. NASA just put plaques and a flag up there, Buzz Aldrin never got to ram the orbiter into the Sea of Tranquility.

I bet Buzz wishes he could have.

Broken News: Paranoid anti-totalitarian employs online social networking

SEATTLE—Today the greater Seattle area was shocked to learn that area man Nick Scofield, who came to local prominence after his arrest for a nude protest of what he termed “the pervasive surveillance police state” and illegal wiretapping during the 5th inning of a Mariners/Indians baseball game last year, was keeping anyone with computer access updated of his whereabouts through the popular web application Twitter.

"Going down to shop at Standish’s Market before lunch with members of EarthFirst at Mary’s All Organic Café" was the timestamped message that greeted followers of his feed mid-morning. This was the sixth in what would eventually be 17 updates of Scofield's itinerary, location, activities, and lists of people he was meeting with, as well as references to discussions in which he'd engaged.

“I just think that this is an important tool that can be used to keep friends and family updated as to one’s daily goings-on in a way that e-mails and blogging simply can’t do,” Mr. Schofield said as he left his home to a protest against the immunity given to telecoms for conducting illegal surveillance on the American people. “I think these tools are becoming increasingly important to help people organize and speak out against the overbearing surveillance state foisted upon them by an unsympathetic government. What better way to keep your fellow freedom fighters informed than through hourly updates describing your every righteous move and detailing your next step towards liberation?"

Dr. Aaron Harrington, lead ACLU counsel on electronic privacy matters, was unavailable for comment. According to his Facebook status, Dr. Harrington had left his Washington DC offices early for a weekend family retreat to Vermont, where his wife and two high school-aged children would be staying at the Humble Inn Bed & Breakfast, thirteen miles northeast of Burlington, in rooms 7 and 8.

Fears over government surveillance and wiretapping have increased over the past few weeks as news stories have revealed governmental abuses of wiretapping within the NSA, the inadequacy of laws to prevent such measures, and even a sitting US Congresswoman being wiretapped.

“I just can’t believe the abuses,” remarked US Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA), who was caught up in a shady NSA probe. “I just think that if it can happen to me, it can happen to any American citizen. Actually, I don’t think that, I know that. Mostly because I helped authorize and support these spying measures and only got outraged when I found out they betrayed me and used the law I helped use to gut legal oversights to wiretap me. They only stopped spying on me because they thought it would harm any chance of my supporting new and even more invasive wiretap legislation. I fear that other Americans need to take heed, because they won’t be given this colossally hypocritical opportunity. Strike that: I know they won’t.”

Such concerns have only driven Mr. Scofield to expand the scope of his efforts. Since his arrest, Scofield has started a wordpress blog, youcantseeme, and a LiveJournal account to keep a diary of his daily life. Scofield has also joined Facebook, where he lists all his friends and acquaintances, expanded his Flickr site to include more photo documentation of his daily life, added a Google maps application to his Blackberry so friends can see where he is on a city map at any given second of the day, and has moved his Twittering beyond simple flashes of what he is doing to his exact “of the moment” thoughts.

“If the Feds want to come and take me in for opposing their Big Brother moves, then I want the world to know where I was and what I was thinking, with clear notation of most of my activities, thoughts, meeting places and known accomplices for the preceding months. So people know exactly who I am and what I stood for,” Scofield said in the midst of Twittering ‘interviewing with reporter about the oppressive nature of constant monitoring’ from his Blackberry.

When asked to reconcile his opposition to government wiretapping with the sheer volume of information he provides to anyone willing to look, whether a phonetap could ever glean as much information as any of the methods he was freely providing, and to address the whole semi-hypocritical premise of this satirical article, Mr. Scofield paused. As his eyes widened and his mouth stood agape, the full brunt of the irony hitting him, he could only remark “Oh, yeah... This whole web 2.0 thing doesn’t seem as smart or helpful in retrospect, does it?”

Quote of the day

Jane Harman (D-CA) on voting to authorize and cover up illegal warrantless wiretapping and the sense of betrayal she feels because they decided to use it to illegally wiretap against her.

HARMAN: I'm just very disappointed that my country -- I'm an American citizen just like you are -- could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years. I'm one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, but I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back. I'm thinking about others who have no bully pulpit and may not be aware, as I was not, that right now somewhere, someone's listening in on their conversations, and they're innocent Americans.

And off in the distance we hear the violent explosion of the world's first machine that measures irony. This woman didn't give two shits when she thought the government was just going to illegally spy on the peasant class, but when she finds out they used it to investigate her shady dealings on behalf of AIPAC: OUTRAGE!!!!!!!! at the betrayal of American values and gross abuse of power that she was totally aware of and supported wholeheartedly.

Don't like them wiretapping you? Well, I guess you shouldn't have voted to allow them to. Now you'll have to excuse me Jane, my sides are starting to hurt from laughing too hard.

Change comes to Google Maps

Cheney lives here

Biden lives here

Want to know how far Dick Cheney's secretive grasp extended? All the way to Google Maps aerial photos of the Naval Observatory where he lived. During the Bush Administration you could see the White House, Pentagon, Area 51, and various landmarks that looked like penises from space, but you couldn't see Dick's pad. Not until the week he moved out, whereupon you were deemed to have high enough security clearance to see what the roof of the place looked like. Did he want the homeless furnaces hidden, didn't want NASA to see him sunbathe nude, or didn't want people learning his secret Masonic grass patterns? Or was Dick Cheney such an incredibly hypocritical shit that he had Google blur out his house while he was rifling through your underwear drawer? I think it was the homeless furnace thing.

Google's official position is that it was just an incredible coincidence that somehow also sounds exactly like something Cheney would pull, but I think the spokespeople know better to speak out on Cheney lest they be transported to his ranch to be hunted for sport. So there you are, life has provided you with the thousandth visual metaphor representing the changeover from Bush to Obama. They really are gone for good.

Picture of the day

Swarming hives of angry bees trying to suck honey from Washington or millions of citizens gettin' their Barry on? We'll never know, but satellite photographers Geospace (they can see you sunbathing nude on your roof) and Popular Science (they can also see you sunbathing nude on your roof, but through entirely different scientific means) at least want to show you a big ass version of the Inauguration/bee attack. Click on the picture to see the even bigger version.