The National Memorial For The Mountains, all about mountaintop removal for coal.

At least when they clear cut trees, something grows back. In the Appalachians, they clear cut the mountains.

Includes Google Earth tours.

My housemate lent me her season 5 DVDs of ‘The West Wing.’ She had loaned out 1-4. This was after talking about politics for a while.

She said she’d been in the Sorkin-alternative-universe for a while, and it felt nice to have a real President. So I started watching.

The first couple episodes, I kinda felt that way. Forget the torture, the two wars that seem to have been forgotten except for use as a political football, the House sex scandal that only seems to drive Republican apologists into a further cognitive-dissonance tizzy about Bill Clinton or some such shit…

The Republicans in ‘West Wing’ aren’t evil. Well, much. But at least you can let them look after your kids.

So for the first couple episodes, I was glad to turn all that off and fill my mind with the idea of President Bartlett and his staff of sane people. Competent people.

And then, after a couple more episodes, I just got very, very sad. Like the kind of sad where the abusive dad gets custody because the mother’s a heroin addict. That kind of sad. That the United States of Sorkin were a last-ditch effort to inject something thoughtful into politics through television.

Now I can’t bear the thought of watching any more, because it’s so obvious they failed.

(I’m well aware, by the way, that this kind of ‘blog entry is why I have so few readers.)

I go through phases where deja vu happens a lot. It goes away for a long time and then returns sometimes, and sometimes not. Deja vu is almost like the opposite of depression, actually.

Often I have trouble trying to figure out if it’s meaningful. Like, does it Forwarn Imminent Disaster(tm)? Or does it simply mean my mind is finding patterns deep in memory, and putting them over sensate reality like a template? Does my memory somehow spraypaint a stencil onto what’s coming in through the senses? Or am I touched?

These kinds of questions used to fascinate me, because they seemed so open-ended and full of Potentially Very Important Realizations. Yes, I’m mocking the concept. Now, I don’t care so much about what they mean in the abstract as much as what they mean in the here-and-now.

I was looking at Google Earth. There’s an entry on BLDGBLOG which talks about Skara Brae, an archaeological site in the North Sea. The town was buried under sand, and when the sand went away six thousand years later, it popped back into human consciousness. A bit like deja vu.

Trying to find it on Google Earth, I ended up by accident looking at a section of eastern Europe where there are many, many small forests, separated by croplands. Only, initially, the high-res image hadn’t loaded, and for about ten seconds I thought I was looking at a system of lakes, with a lace-like fabric of land amongst them. More detail came, and it was apparent what my mistake was. However… I had made this exact mistake before in a dream years ago.

And remembering the dream, it contained the lack of a clear picture, the view from above, the lakes-to-forests-again dynamic, and even the shapes of the forests were the same. But the details such as it being on a computer, or that I was looking at satellite images, or that I’d ‘blog about it… These things were obscured, filled in. It’s as if I was looking only at some parts, and couldn’t yet understand others.

Does the dream mould to fit reality, or does the present mould to fit the past?

More mundane memories and their current-moment machinations are subject to this question as well. Who really remembers? Who would want to?

Want.

Latest Computer Technology

A 6×17 digital panorama (uncompressed) represents about 950 MB. To process and store such large amounts of data Seitz created a state-of-the-art computer system. Data is transferred by gigabit ethernet from the sensor to the storage device. The portable storage device is itself a computer with most advanced characteristics in processing, disk space and memory features. Additionally, the camera and handheld control unit take advantage of the latest IP network technology, making it possible to connect the camera to a network and control it remotely.

That’s a 6 centimeter scanning sensor. The rotating one is pretty cool, too.