Cute Baby Pictures #2

Here at Scribble Central let me assure you that we are far too busy collecting obscure but fascinating bits of ocean science to pay much attention to page stats. Nevertheless it’s distressingly difficult to ignore one post’s reigning popularity.
That would be Cute Baby Pictures #1. It’s just resoundingly, devastatingly, congenitally popular. Just last week [...]

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In Case You Forget to Hit Record When the Shaking Starts

Californians live busy lives – always beating traffic, etching tiny shapes into silicon, investing, divesting, protesting, cross-dressing, grape-squishing, etc. They don’t have a lot of spare time to worry about the Big One – that final great San Andreas earthquake that has been building for 300 years and is forecast to make the 1906 quake [...]

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Worst Wednesdays: Crevasses

Some perspective:
As you stand in the still cold air you may sometimes hear the silence broken by the sharp reports as the cold contracts or its own weight splits it. Nature is tearing up that ice as human beings tear paper.
Cherry, on finding crevasses in the dark during the Winter Journey:
We began to realize, now [...]

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Worst Wednesdays: The Beginning

I really didn’t plan it this way, but it turns out that while complaining about outdoor magazines I’ve also been reading perhaps the great book about a group of men going somewhere and either nearly dying or actually dying. It’s The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who was the youngest officer [...]

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New Amphipods Suggest Iceland Kissed Greenland 40 Mya

Iceland has its first and second endemic animal species on record and they’re both amphipods – little crustaceans that are sort of like krill … in the same way that krill are sort of like shrimp. (Readers who know their small marine critters are invited to chip in with details.)
What’s neat about them is [...]

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Cell Phones Get Derivative

Israeli mathematicians are taking math to where the kids are – their cell phones. The Institute for Alternative Education at the University of Haifa has unveiled downloadable graphing tools for cell phones.
You can fiddle with coefficients and watch what happens to the associated parabolas and hyperbolas; you can work on your graphical problem solving. [...]

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Extremely Bland: How Outdoor Mags Ruined Outdoor Writing

July’s Outside magazine featured a story of survival. That was it: a guy trying to survive. Thayer Walker, the author, dropped himself off on an uninhabited Panamanian island and allowed himself to starve for three weeks. At the end, he picked up the phone, called a nearby resort, and a boat came to pick him [...]

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Carnival of the Blue, Act II

Last month, the good folks at Blogfish organized a carnival of ocean blogs, wherein we saw all sorts of neat things including video of tiptoeing invertebrates and French fishermen mooning Oceana activists. Little did I know the carnival is a monthly thing, like a spring tide. And here we are in July. Head on over [...]

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Dams the Land as Well

The largest dam in the world is the recently finished Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, China. It’s more than 600 kilometers long and holds about 40 cubic kilometers of water.But it also stops an average of 151 million tons of sediment per year from making its way downstream, new research in Geophysical [...]

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