Some New Photos

Scotia Range - Will launches a clay bird as Uncle Eric draws a bead.

I've been pretty bad lately about getting photos posted, but I've just added a couple to flickr from shooting skeet last weekend when we had family visiting and also a couple from this afternoon at the Pennsylvania Jazz Festival at Spring Creek Park in Bellefonte. Click on the photo above to check them out!

Seacom Cable Completion

When we visited Kenya in 2007, a highly-visible ditch was being dug by hand along the length of the Nairobi - Naivasha road. We discovered that this ditch was being hand excavated all the way from Mombasa to house the new fiber optic high speed internet cables that were being laid from Dubai across the sea floor to Kenya.

At the time, completion seemed like a long way off in the future, but today the link has been completed!

These sorts of cables connect all of the continents but Antarctica, making the rest of the world accessible virtually instantly.

I am a bit in awe of this network of ultra-mass-communication and how amazingly fragile it can be.

I am very excited for the myrid opportunities that the new East African Seacom cable will now open up, however a little part of me wonders how stable a shallowly-buried and well-publicized cable will be.

10 Months

Anna is now 10 months and seems to be picking up new skills every day (opening cupboard doors, pointing, bouncing, etc.). Click here to visit Kate's wonderful synopsis of what Anna's last month has been like.

A Positive ID

The aforementioned photo of the mystery orchid actually turned out to be Chimaphila maculata, Striped Wintergreen.

Good job Mom!

Can Anyone Identify This?

My botanist mother is stumped thus far. Can anyone identify this mystery orchid photographed in State College, PA, USA on 7.14.09? Lens cap for size comparison is 67mm in diameter.

The Winterton Collection

August 1896 - Damage to Sultan Bargash's palace on Zanzibar

sustained during the 38 minute bombardment known as the

Anglo-Zanzibar War.

The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University has just annouced that nearly 8,000 photos depicting life in East Africa 1860-1960, known as the Winterton Collection is now available online. The photographs are all tagged and indexed so you can sort by a number of different categories. To my knowledge, this is the largest collection of early photographs of East Africa available electronically. It is certainly the most accessible and best organized in the world. In five minutes I found photos of the Shultztruppe, Burton, Speake, Bargash, Tippu Tip, Kijabe, Mahenge, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Tabora, and Ujiji! AMAZING.

Thanks to Noel and Kate for bringing this to my attention!