Timing Error

ICE, ICE, BABY...

Yeah, bad title. But cool news: ice on Mars, the nearest thing Earth has to a backup hard drive.

BEAUTIFUL: BLACK ROCK CITY MARS, LLC

Black Rock City on Mars. Elton John in the upper left hand corner.

My new favorite wallpaper via io9.

SHE'LL MAKE A FINE REPUBLIC...

...given another thousand years or so: Ganvie, Benin.

I love anything that remotely reminds me of Venice.

via A Welsh View. H/T Neatorama.

FROM A THOUSAND ISLANDS TO A THOUSAND WORLDS

Dug up some good information on all those dwarf planets in the Opik-Ooort Cloud.

Dwarf planets rock for three reasons:

1. Less gravity (easier to watch your wieght)
2. Less crowding (people don't like the cold)
3. Less property taxes (until we figure out how to collect them)

I want one for christmas.

ALL THESE (THOUSAND) WORLDS...

From IO9:

It turns out that there may be many other dirt-and-water planets lurking at the edges of our solar system in places like the Oort Cloud. These planets, which could be roughly the size of our own, would contain all the elements we need for life. They're just sitting in a cold, dimly-lit part of the solar system, waiting to be defrosted and colonized.

To paraphrase 2010, "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS...ONCE YOU CLICK YES ON THE EULA."

Biological Bolt Holes

Interesting development. Part of a broader trend:

A mountainside near the town was chosen as the home for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a "doomsday" seed bank that will store backup copies of as many as three million different crop varieties in case of a worldwide catastrophe.

Brain Land

A continuation fo my fascination with all things cartography.

Source via Neatorama
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Freaky Deaky Dutchmen

Nextnature looks at some potential geoengineering over in Holland. They're the guys behind the island building in Dubai.

BTW, Nextnature is a great blog; fair warning, today's top post is moderately NSFW (nips without the pasties, and all)

Waldseemuller Map

I love maps. I get the same electric feeling looking at an ancient map that I did as a kid, flipping through the Sears Catalogue (especially towards the back). Thanks to the Atlantic for this story on the Waldseemuller Map.

LoC entry.

Man, you could write a whole world, based on this thing. Love it.

Man made islands

Venice, which sort of grew in place:

and Qatar's the Pearl:

Both enclaves that are easily defensible in a primtivized and reprimtivized world.