Grinding to a Halt

This is awesome! Just found this site via BoingBoing about what would happen if Earth slowed to a stop. Snip:

What would happen if the earth's rotation slowed down and finally stopped spinning over a period of a few decades? ArcGIS lets us model the effects of this scenario, performing calculations and estimations and creating a series of maps showing the effects the absence of centrifugal force would have on sea level.

If earth ceased rotating about its axis but continued revolving around the sun . . . the sequential disappearance of centrifugal force would cause a catastrophic change in climate and disastrous geologic adjustments (expressed as devastating earthquakes) to the transforming equipotential gravitational state.

The lack of the centrifugal effect would result in the gravity of the earth being the only significant force controlling the extent of the oceans. Prominent celestial bodies such as the moon and sun would also play a role, but because of their distance from the earth, their impact on the extent of global oceans would be negligible.

If the earth's gravity alone was responsible for creating a new geography, the huge bulge of oceanic water—which is now about 8 km high at the equator—would migrate to where a stationary earth's gravity would be the strongest. This bulge is attributed to the centrifugal effect of earth's spinning with a linear speed of 1,667 km/hour at the equator. The existing equatorial water bulge also inflates the ellipsoidal shape of the globe itself.

If the earth stood still, the oceans would gradually migrate toward the poles and cause land in the equatorial region to emerge. This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans . . . Obviously, the last connection will be broken at the lowest point of the global divide line, located southwest of the Kiribati Islands . . . The actual slowdown of the earth's rotation has been observed, measured, calculated, and theoretically explained. As newer methodologies are developed and more precise instruments are constructed, the exact rate of the slowdown may vary between some sources. Reflecting this very gradual slowing, atomic clocks must be adjusted to solar time by adding a leap second every so often.

Separate oceans would inevitably lead to unique fauna like Lake Vostok in Antarctica! See also my previous post on Terraforming.

F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished . . .

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know to disapprove. . . . At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Keep Calm and Cary Grant

It needs some redesign but I laughed when I saw it.

The Saddest Board Game Ever Made

Dana and I found this game in a free box outside a foreclosed home in a tiny down-on-its-luck town in western Oregon. Drink it in, there's so much to look at:
1. It's clearly designed for only children, sad, plump, pink-sock-wearing only children.
2. Between "around the clock supervision" and "solitary confinement," the title is clearly trying to evoke either the atmosphere of a mental institution or prison.
3. The game is not, as you might assume, a child version of solitaire the card game, rather a dull exercise in learning to read clock hands.
4. Lastly, the enigmatic subtitle:

How do you? Google has zero results.

Faerie Fort

Spent weekend making Faerie Forts with my cousin Atticus. Note the periwinkle shells on stakes to warn off intruders. I want to make a coffee table book all about this singular kid art form.

Endpaper Map #1 Bone

I'm going to start posting scans of endpaper maps, because I love them.

AAT-AT (Adorable All Terrain Armored Transport)

Thanks Nick!