Thursday, January 12, 2006

This lake in Trinidad is like the landscape of some gnarly (and no doubt perilous) other planet.

(Thanks to Exploding Aardvark.)

5 comments:

Carol Maltby said...

That's extraordinary. I was so excited to finally get to see the La Brea Tar Pits on my first trip to Los Angeles.

soft creamy colored substance at the bottom of the hole, which Roy referred to as "mother".

I wondered what the sense of that is? Like "mother of vinegar," the gunk that is used as a "starter" for the vinegaring process?

My favorite other-worldly lake description is in Joan Vinge's novel World's End. The lake there is made of a psychotropic material that enables interstellar travel.

Carol Maltby said...

To be fair, this is in full color, broad daylight, very high resolution. 'And there just aren't that many separate items.

We're not seeing things at the limits of their resolution, not having a chance of compression artifacts or two objects appearing as one.

Nor are we muttering under our breath, "Why does this stone have this square hole in it? We'd better swerve away from it even though we said we were heading for it. We can tell people it's too dusty, even though later on we use one of the tools to get dust off rocks we decide to examine closely."

Mac said...

Carol--

"soft creamy colored substance at the bottom of the hole, which Roy referred to as "mother".

I wondered what the sense of that is?"

Let's hope it's not a Norman Bates kind of sense!

Mac said...

Nor are we muttering under our breath, "Why does this stone have this square hole in it? We'd better swerve away from it even though we said we were heading for it. We can tell people it's too dusty, even though later on we use one of the tools to get dust off rocks we decide to examine closely."

That was a very disappointing incident. For my money, that rock was more indicative of artificial origin than the majority hyped as "smoking gun" proof.

Carol Maltby said...

What bothered me most was their lying about the dust.

I would have understood if they'd said it's dusty, we have something that could scrape it off, but since we just got here we're trying to maximize our travel time.

Weasels.