Sand, snow, sea, sorrow, and strangeness

To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower . . .

. . . take not only Blake's advice, but now that this is 2009, follow random people on Twitter and you never know what you might find. EarthVitalSigns, part of NASA, just tweeted the depressing Man's Greatest Crimes Against the Earth. These include activities such as wanton slaughter, toxic waste spills, and deforestation. The gallery stays away from the effects of climate change (coral reefs decaying due to increasing carbon dioxide in the oceans, terrible floods in Bangladesh, that sort of thing) and go for tragedies so obviously direct results of human activity that nobody could argue with them. (On a selfish note, for a story I'm writing. I have dim and distant first year Environmental Science memories of something like a massive mud flow into the oceans, due to someone mucking about with a river or something, which can actually be seen from space. Does anyone remember anything more about that?)

Below this picture gallery on the Discovery galleries site was . . . strange fruit. At this point I was glued to the screen and clicking continued from there. What sand grains look like magnified 100 times - and where they came from. An underwater gallery, whose web address would seem to suggest there's a video to watch, too. There are a lot more picture galleries to investigate. That Discover Magazine is a black hole to get sucked into - have you seen their article about time?

And my favourite - snowflakes. I tried to follow the link and was infuriated when "Firefox prevented this site from opening a popup window" and googled their investigator, Libbrecht at Caltech. Here he is.

That was another random post straight out of the blue. Which is Twitter for you. Cheep cheep.