Land
A House That Will Outlive Its Country
This is a fascinating blog post series diving into what it takes to build houses that last a long time - and we're not talking mere centuries here, but an entire millennium.
Sure, we have some buildings around that are over a millennium old, but they're incredibly rare exceptions and have basically been rebuilt over time - whereas this is an examination of what it might take to get a single structure to stand that test of time.
The author does try and design for repair, though, as well as the rather nasty problem that a lot of houses are torn down because they don't look nice anymore, rather than because they're structurally unsound. And, most important of all, it touches on the real hard question - should we be designing buildings to live even a fraction of this length of time?
Mapping From Video Alone
This is a wonderful writeup from Andrew Middleton about how he managed to create a topographic map of Molokini Crater in Hawaii purely using video of the island - just one video, in fact.
A ten-year old video taken out of a helicopter by a tourist is all that's needed to stitch together a full 3D model of the landscape using modern technology, which Andrew then proceeds to effortlessly turn into a GIS raster, the perfect basis for making a map.
While a lot of inland areas in the US have LIDAR coverage these days, making this technique unnecessary, it does make me wonder what places we could go map in this fashion - places where it's very possible to circle a drone or a helicopter around the whole thing but a bit too much effort to call in a LIDAR survey plane.
Sea
They Didn't Nickname It The Doomsday Glacier For Nothing
Antarctica, in case you haven't heard, has a lot of ice. A large amount of it is in glaciers, and no Antarctic glacier is bigger than the mighty Thwaites Glacier, which is over 120 kilometers (75 miles) wide and about the same size as the UK in terms of area.
And unfortunately, that glacier is melting faster than predicted. The sea ice shelf in front of it is the thing that's melting first - and sea ice melting is a little less apocalyptic, since it's already displacing its own mass in water weight and won't cause sea level rise when it melts.
However, that sea ice is what hold the glacier back and keeps it from melting into the ocean, and with it gone, the glacier will be free do just that - which is a problem, as the water in this single glacier alone would raise global sea levels by an entire metre (3 feet).
The studies are at least helping us understand how tidal action is speeding up the melting process, but it may just be a case of us knowing more accurately how much time we have, rather than being able to stop it.
Now, Where Did I Put That Raindrop?
Way back in Issue 3 of Tales, we covered a neat tool that let you click on a map of the US and see which rivers and ocean a raindrop would work its way to over time based on the watersheds. Well, that tool is back and it's bigger than ever, with full global coverage.
Pulling together all this data seems like it was a mammoth task, and there's a page up with some of the background information, as well as some of the favourite paths from the people who worked on the project.
Just be careful if you're clicking around the slopes of Triple Divide Peak - the only place in the world that can be said to drain into one of three different oceans.
Sky
It's Dowsing, But In The Sky, And This One Actually Works
Many people have heard of dowsing - the practice of using two metal rods to find where water is under the ground - but that, sadly, does not actually work (turns out there's water almost anywhere you dig, so it just seems like it does).
But what if you strapped big metal water-detecting rods to an aircraft? Now that sounds like science!
OK, so they're not dowsing rods, and in fact they are an electromagnetic detection system that works out where water is under the surface by how it affects the EM fields that the system emits.
It's particularly useful in this age of shrinking aquifers and disappearing groundwater, and can detect water up to 1,000 feet (300 metres) below the surface. You do need to have a geologist handy, though, to make sure you're not just picking up some weirdly magnetic rocks instead.
It's A Twister! In Fact, It's 1,249 Of Them!
December 2021 was a particularly windy and tornado-filled month in the USA, unfortunately climaxing with the tornado that swept across multiple states and killed 93 people.
Now, though, you can see the locations of all the tornadoes last year on a handy map, which I find an absolutely fantastic way of visualising where the infamous "Tornado Alley" really is. Of course, Tornado Alley itself is steadily moving eastwards - something I'm happy about as it moves away from Colorado, but it's unfortunately at the expense of others.
Space
It's Finally Up There And In One Piece
After over a quarter of a century in development, the James Webb Space Telescope is launched, unfolded, and preparing to do some science. Three hundred and fourty-four single points of failure were present in its design - a necessity to squeeze a telescope the size of a tennis court atop the Ariane launcher - and now, all of the deployment ones are complete.
The Ariane launcher was actually so accurate with its boost of the JWST towards its new home, the Earth-Sun L2 point, that they saved a good amount of maneuvering fuel - the consumable that limits the lifespan of the mission - and it should last for a good chunk longer than the ten years they planned on.
Now the telescope's cool side has to cool down for several months so it can actually see anything - the perils of infrared astronomy mean that heat is your enemy - but once that's done, it'll be ready to peer into the early universe, while we hopefully start building its ridiculously large successor LUVOIR.
Silicon
It Seems The Millenium Bug Is About 22 Years Too Late
There are a whole bunch of Honda cars that woke up at the start of this year and went "ah yes, 2002". There's no convincing them it's not 2002, Honda doesn't have a fix, and the days of the week aren't even on the same dates, leaving owners truly in the lurch.
The problem traces back to the GPS epoch rollover - where every 1024 weeks, the week counter rolls back to zero. Now the GPS epoch didn't roll back that recently - the last one was in 2019 - which makes this especially puzzling, but the cars did roll back exactly 1024 weeks.
Moreover, Honda say that the clocks will fix themselves come August (32 weeks' time, in case you're wondering), so there's some seriously strange calendar logic going on in these cars that I'm sure relies a bit too heavily on binary precision. In the meantime, Honda drivers can just continue to assume that it is still March 2020.
Heists
I Swear There Was A Bridge Here Yesterday
It seems someone is very light-fingered in Akron, Ohio, as they managed to nab an entire, 58 foot long pedestrian bridge right out of a park. They are also apparently not very intelligent, though, as they were found with the bridge on their property just one county away.
Sadly, they did not manage to remove the bridge from over a river while everyone slept - it was removed from the river in 2004 and had been kept on the ground awaiting reuse since then, so the thief in question just somehow stole a giant object rather than also craning it off a river.
The perpetrator in question has been charged with felony theft, and the bridge is being shipped back to its rightful home. Of course, this particular bridge-stealer is no George C. Parker, but I personally hope that the bridge might get to be back over a river soon now it's had all this publicity.
And Finally
Sing A Song Of Snails
Once upon a time, we thought humans were smart because we were tool users. Well, it turns out we're not quite so special, and quite a lot of other species use tools to, especially birds. You know, the things dinosaurs evolved into. THEY'RE COMING FOR US. (Ahem)
Anyway, here's a wonderful example of this - a discarded beer bottle that has been used by song thrushes to smash snails for at least 60 years, based on when its manufacturer closed down. It's quite possible the birds were using this to crack open snails when we first landed on the moon.