cinnamon thoughts. » Earth

Iceland’s Volcano Eyjafjallajökull

Daniel Gattermann — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:32:09 +0000

It was nice and quite in Iceland back in 2007. Now — in addition to water spewing geysers (picture) — the volcano Eyjafjallajökull is shooting large amounts of ash, smoke and steam into the atmosphere forcing many European airports to cancel flights. It first erupted in March and boston.com has several stunning photos of the event last month as well of today’s activity.

View the pictures
More photos of ash, lava and lightning.

GPS Coordinates — Copy Your Location

Daniel Gattermann — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:36:57 +0000

Do what your iPhone’s Maps and Compass apps can’t and copy your current coordinates to your device’s clipboard and use them anywhere. Your device will use GPS, wireless LAN and cell towers to get the most accurate coordinates, just as Maps and Compass on the iPhone do.

After a successful location process you will see your coordinates in a text box, ready to be copied to any app. As an added bonus a zoomable map will display the region you’re in.

Share your location on Twitter, via mail or text it to a friend who uses it within Maps to see your whereabouts.

You can read the full instructions or start using GPS Coordinates by pointing your iPhone or iPod touch to:
→ http://gpscoords.cinnamonthoughts.org/

Bird from the Future Drops Bread and Stops LHC

Daniel Gattermann — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:09:01 +0000

A bird apparently dropped a pice of baguette on a part of the Large Hadron Collider which shut down the whole operation. It had to be a bird from the future preventing the total apocalypse if you believe this article from the New York Times:

[T]he hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one [...]

Yeah, right.

Chaiten Volcano—Amazing Pictures

Daniel Gattermann — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:50:31 +0000

Photos of the 2008 eruption of the Chaiten volcano in Chile—its first eruption in about 9000 years. Be sure to scroll at least down to the sixth picture!

Cases of electrical storms breaking out directly above erupting volcanoes are well documented, although scientists differ on what causes them. Picture taken May 2, 2008.

Full article at boston.com

GeoMapLookup for iPhone is Apple.com’s Staff Pick

Daniel Gattermann — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:17:02 +0000

My updated GeoMapLookup — a website to geolocate a host, domain or IP address with Google Maps integration — now sports a newly created iPhone and iPod touch version which was chosen as Apple.com’s Staff Pick and featured web app for February 26th 2008.

GeoMapLookup is a web app to display information about the geographical location of your current IP address or any hostname or IP you enter. It provides a link to show the location using the native Maps application on your iPhone or iPod touch.

You can also visit GeoMapLookup on your Mac or PC to get a version with an integrated Google Map or from your iPhone or iPod touch to get the mobile version.

To use GeoMapLookup point your mobile Safari (or standard desktop browser) to: http://geomaplookup.net/
GeoMapLookup on apple.com

Prepping a Space Shuttle for Launch

Daniel Gattermann — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:52:15 +0000

Prepping a Space Shuttle for launch is a lot of work. “After looking at the pictures you will know why there’s a good period of time between shuttle launches.” (link)

What Our World Should Look Like Today According to the Past

Daniel Gattermann — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:45:27 +0000

Retrofuturo — or IL FUTURO VISTO DAL PASSATO as Fabio Feminò puts it — is a 35 page series of mostly pictures and magazine covers from the past (up to 80 years old) showing how the people living then thought our world would look like today.

It includes classics like flying cars, enormous cities, moon bases, laser beams and all those good things. Until now I haven’t had the time to read the whole (Google-translated) article but the text looks interesting as it provides a lot of details about the pictures shown.

Read the article translated by Google (Italian original)

Some Planets and Stars Compared in Size

Daniel Gattermann — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:31:45 +0000

This is a follow-up to my previous post Even Our Sun is Tiny but this time a video (via digg) shows you how small we really are and which monstrously large objects are “floating” around in our galaxy.

A size comparison¹ of the Sun to VV Cephei A (the supergiant of the binary star system VV Cephei) can be found at Wikipedia. VV Cephei A is 1600-1900 times the size of the Sun and 275,000-575,000 times as luminous.

Distance between Earth and Sun: 149,597,870 km²
Max. diameter of VV Cephei A: 2,645,750,000 km³

If you imagine the Sun as a one millimeter dot, VV Cephei A is nearly two meters in diameter.
Earth imagined as a one millimeter dot makes VV Cephei A 207 meters in diameter!

Even more interesting facts.

alternate link; SVG format ↩
149,598,000 km is one astronomical unit ↩
The video states a different size for VV Cephei (which actually is the name of a binary star system). The above value is the best I could calculate for VV Cephei A. ↩

NASA’s Visible Earth

Daniel Gattermann — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:40:52 +0000

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date says NASA and provides us with very high quality pictures of our planet (up to blazing 21600*10800 pixels); also night shots are available.
If you hadn’t enough download an — also high quality — eight second video of the spinning earth.

These NASA pictures can also be integrated into Google Earth.