Saturday, September 23, 2006

Kayaking on Lake Tahoe


Jill and I went up to Lake Tahoe last weekend and kayaked down the east shore. It was spectacular! I 'd always written Tahoe off as too developed to actually have a nice Sierra experience. But thanks to Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park the east shore is really intact. The great thing about boating on the east shore is that there is no trail so a kayak is the ultimate vehicle. Lots of sandy coves and huge granite boulders coming right out of crystal clear water.

Monday, September 11, 2006

CTD on the RV Questuary


The field trip for Biological Oceanography today was on the research vessel Questuary. We left from Ft. Baker right at the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. We headed west out the gate just past Kirby Cove to deploy a CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) sensor. These sensors measure...you guessed it conductivity (~salinity), temp, and depth. Nice software to plots ctd in realtime as it sinks.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

KML Journaling


Awhile back I read a post over at GEB about how The Jane Goodall Institute blog was publishing all their content via kml/kmz. Pretty cool stuff, but I'm wondering how they update the content of each blog entry. Jill was encouraging me to journal our travels it dawned on me that I could do it like JGIB...in kml. Great, author all the content in GE. But what if you could blog the day's entry with a some specific geotags and have a script harvest the relevant info to create a kml on the fly. That's what J. Allen Glennon at UCSB has put together - a prototype for doing just this but in the context of disease reporting. Apparently he was inspired by Larry Brilliant's TED talk which you should definitely check out.