Excellent Blog Awards

I received my E over a year ago from George, the Decrepit Old Fool, but I apparently neglected to pass the award on as requested. I am certain that I would have chosen a completely different set had I attended to this right away. The list below suggests that I have become a bit more focused on geology, which is only partially true. There really are quite a lot of excellent geologists who are also excellent bloggers.

Ron Schott
Volcanista
Clastic Detritus (Brian Romans)
Lounge of the Lab Lemming

Evolution... not just a theory anymore (Greg Laden)
De Rerum Natura (Reed Cartwright)
Grrlscientist (Devorah Bennu)
Imnakoya's Grandiose Parlor
Loomnie
Cup O'Joe

The "Excellent Blog" Award appears to have originated with Project Mommy, a blog written by Shannymar about her daughter Kayla. Brandy Betz, creator of Moue Magazine, described the spirit of the award when she passed hers on back in February of 2008.

I will have more to say about each of my excellent bloggers later. If you have read this far, please do yourself a favor and support Grrlscientist Devorah Bennu in her campaign to blog an expedition to Antarctica. She has 715 votes and is only a few hundred away from winning.

Art and Science

Nori Jung is shown above standing in front of a map which I made with one of my students here at Valdosta State University. Nori created her own artwork on her popular television program, Norivision, using our map as inspiration. The map combines a LIDAR raster image based upon measurements using a laser taken from an airplane with our field measurements. The points on the map are our field measurements and the contour lines were drawn using the raw elevations and differences between the LIDAR pixel values.

Stone Mountain Concept Cache

My concept cache of Stone Mountain is up. Concept caching promotes spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth's surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Photographs and GPS coordinates are "cached" for viewing by core concept and by region. Stone Mountain is cached under "igneous processes" amd also under "mass wasting and slope processes," perhaps more.

Crisis in Darfur

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has collaborated with Google Earth to document and display the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. The "Crisis in Darfur" multimedia archive combines text, maps, photographs, videos, and other visual materials. To make full use of the interactive features of the archive, it is necessary to download and install Google Earth. All of us should do that anyway, and introduce our students to it if we teach.