Lateral Lines

The Atlantic has a new blog feature called The Current and I caught a link to this YouTube clip today with the following commentary:

The pilot's handling of the crab was by the book. So was what he tried to do 38-40 seconds into the clip: "kick in the rudder," which means quickly swinging the plane's nose around so that, at the instant it touches the ground, it is pointing straight ahead along the runway's axis. Kick out of the crab too early, and the plane will drift sideways off the runway before it touches down, risking a crash on the tarmac. Kick out of the crab too late, and the wheels will still be pointed sideways when they strike the runway, also likely causing a crash.

The pilot crabs the airplane's gear down toward the runway, and kicks the rudder in just barely in time. When everything goes wrong, he does one last thing exactly right: engines are immediately and instinctively thrown in full power to get the airplane as far as possible away from where the danger is: close to the ground

Here's the vid, which is both scary and awe-inspiring:

Via Flickr by imjan.

A nice collection of nature desktop wallpapers over on Flickr.

The one of Glacier National Park in Montana, is also very striking.

Some gorgeous pics of lighting playing in the sky (click the pic for more):

I'm posting this because I think it's fundamentally wrong and certainly not something I want my tax dollars being spent to do: spraying villages with RoundUp at concentrations that are illegal in the US:

The tiny indigenous Kofan community of Santa Rosa de Guamuez in Colombia had it hard enough with pressures from settlers on their reservation, without Roundup Ultra containing Cosmoflux 411F, a weedkiller that is being sprayed on their villages in a concentration 100 times more powerful than is permitted in the United States.

Aurelio, a Kofan village elder, shows us around his village. The Kofan have been here 500 years. Now it looks as though their time is up. Pineapples are stunted and shriveled. The once green banana plants are no more than blackened sticks. The remains of a few maize plants can be seen here and there, but the food crops have been devastated. There is hunger at Santa Rosa. He is close to despair.

Colombian babies and children are falling ill. Peasants, already miserably poor, are getting hungrier. Indigenous tribes are being torn apart and whole communities pushed into exile.

The argument is there to be made that somehow these people are in cahoots with the Drug Lords and there may be some of that in places.

Thing is though, when the chemicals we're paying to drop are making kids chronically sick and what's below becomes their class art project, we might want to re-think how we are allocating funds to this project (It started back in the Clinton years and carried through to the Bush Administration so it's not a partisan thing - despite the title of the linked article):

In the coolest photo you may see today, here's 1,301 flourescent light bulbs, planted in the ground and lit exclusively from the magnetic fields generated by the power lines above. Clicking the photo takes to over to Gizmodo for more - and bigger - pics and more detail on this art project:

Via Flickr by simonwgiles.

This photo is part of an amazing set of photographs of the Antartic Penninsula.

It's definitely worth the look if you have the time. There's a combination of color and black and white photos. One titled Whaler's Grave is another one of my favorites.

And said in a way that only XKCD can say it:

So true...

Via Flickr by Lensecap.

There's no caption on this photo over at Flickr but I'm guessing, based on others in the set and the tags assigned that it's in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York.

Nice!