Link-O-Rama

One of the nice things about where live is that there are a number of state parks nearby. We've visited Moraine Hills State Park a number of times; last weekend we went to Chain O Lakes State Park; and today we briefly visited Glacial Park. Since one of the hot topics in technology right now is hacking Google Maps to create your own custom map, I decided to give this a shot. You can see the state parks that we've visited here. If you click on the red markers you should see a picture we took at each place. Doing this type of thing is still very new, but there are already some amazing applications of it. This one combines Google Maps with real estate listings.

Recently Wendy and I watched The Corporation. It's a very interesting, but somewhat disturbing documentary about the effects corporatization has had on our lives, on society, and on the planet. It does run a bit long (2.5 hours), but it is very well done.

Finally, one of the most incredible engineering failures/environmental disasters of all time took place at Lake Peigneur in Louisiana on November 21, 1980. You can read about it here, here, and here. One of my coworkers saw a program on the History Channel recently that covered this event and interviewed people that were there. In a nutshell, here's what happened:
- Texaco had an oil rig set up at the edge of a lake. The lake covered about 1300 acres, but was very shallow, only 3 feet deep.
- After drilling 1,228 feet, something started to go very wrong. The oil rig felt like it was going to collapse, so the workers abandoned it and headed to the shore.
- They watched as the lake started to turn, and a giant whirlpool formed that began sucking everything in the lake, including the oil rig, down a huge crater at the bottom.
- The lake was connected to the Gulf of Mexico by a canal. As the lake started draining, the canal lowered and began flowing in reverse. Water from the Gulf of Mexico actually started pouring into the lake in a 50 foot waterfall.
- Barges in the canal couldn't overcome the reversed water flow, and so they too got sucked down the lake.
- All of this mayhem was caused by the fact (unknown at the time) that the oil rig was drilling right above a salt mine. The drill punctured the roof of the mine, water flowed in, dissolved the salt pillars, which caused the mine to collapse, which caused more water to flow in, causing more salt to dissolve, etc.
- There were workers in the mine, but all of them managed to escape. No one was killed.
- The list of things sucked down the lake includes: 2 drilling rigs, 11 barges, 40+ acres of land from an island in the lake, a house trailer, a tug boat, and more.
- The lake, which was originally 3 feet deep, was now 1300 feet deep.
- Eventually, 9 of the 11 barges sucked to the bottom of the lake popped up to the surface like corks.

I can't believe I had never heard about this until now.