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Thursday, November 3, 2005
Geoblogging 
| | So I tried something new here. On my trip last week up to Oakland and back, I took the customary series of pictures of the scenes below. But this time, I annotated many pictures in each series, some with descriptions and links. (Thank you, Google Maps.) |
| | In other words, I blogged the trips at Flickr, rather than here. |
| | The first was LAX-OAK. It involved quite a few discoveries. Malibu Bluff Park, for example, which I didn't know existed. Los Angeles' immense sewage treatment system, just off the end of the runway, next to the Pacific. And mysteries like this arrangements of ponds and quarried holes (maybe one of ya'll knows what that is), next to Highway 680 in the East Bay, across from the Sunol Valley Golf Course, near the intersection with Highway 84, in what I discovered is the Vallecitos Valley. There are the communications facilities atop Sunol Peak, a peek down into the upscale valley through which Palomares Road threads itself, and a new house, just built, overlooking the same valley. I spotted a huge block of what seems to be serpentine jutting out of a valley near Mount Hamilton, and took the opportunity to discuss its likely origins at some length in the descripton below the shot. I spotted Meek Park, with its victorian mansion, which, with McConaghy Park and Cherryland Park, are what remains of the vast orchards that have been replaced by the suburban neighborhoods of San Leandro. |
| | The second was, naturally, OAK-LAX, shot on the return trip. Though the route was the same, the course was much different. On this trip, I got an excellent look at much of the best-exposed section of the San Andreas Fault. Heading south, it first appears in farmland in the nortnern reaches of the Cholame Valley, which it also defines. All but invisible from the ground, it runs like a scar down the valley and past Soda Lake into the Carrizo Plain, where the stream offsets manifest the rightward motion of the two adjacent tectonic plates, in respect to each other. In some places the hills on the North American plate are stretched like a wrinkled blanket by the drag of the Pacific plate, buried under a flat desert of alluvial fill. As John McPhee put it so perfectly in Assembling California, the rocks beneath the desert are "as different as two primary colors." My last shot of the fault in this series is here, but earlier this year I got an excellent series on the rest of the fault-scarred Carrizo plain, from the airplane of Doug Kaye, who was down for a visit. |
| | Anybody else see a group-authored book in this kind of thing? |
The short answer: no
Snark tail
Mine tailings
| | That and most of the older pieces here (scroll down) were written for bloggy purposes before there were blogs. I'm not sure if that piece was one of them, but I recall writing four spec articles to pitch myself as a writer for E-Week. I didn't get the job, so I put them all up on the Web anyway. Except for the pieces written for Linux Journal (and one for Upside), none in that collection ran in any magazine. They were all written for the Web. |
Cluescore
| | In shelfesteem, wilfredivans writes, how would techies describe a dog. It's a Cluetrain book review that features a positive reaction to one of my favorite lines: A veterinarian using TechnoLatin might say that a dog serves as a platform for sniffing, is an open environment for fleas, and that it supports barking. I don't think I've heard anyone else remark on it. |
| | Got a lunch-money-sized check for some Cluetrain book sales a few days ago. Nice to know it's still rolling. |
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