Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Rob Crossan
The only level land onTristan Da Cunha is the northwestern edge of the otherwise mountainous and rocky island.

With the forecast here for snow and temps of 9 degrees for morning, The Most Remote Place on Earth at Dark Roasted Blend looks idyllic.

When Napoleon was sent to St. Helena by the British, they annexed the closest chain of islands to prevent the French from attempting to rescue him. After all, who wouldn't travel a mere 2430 km over rough and hostile seas in order to rescue the Emperor himself? Yes, that's right, the islands of Tristan Da Cunha closest neighboring land mass, the island of St. Helena, is 2430 km away.

The photos are breathtakingly beautiful.

More about the island: A long way from anywhere by Rob Crossan. Slideshow of his photos of the island at Lonely Planet.

More images, by Sue Scott.

Well hidden: Stonehenge Beneath the Waters of Lake Michigan at BLDBLOG

In a surprisingly under-reported story from 2007, Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University College, discovered a series of stones - some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon - 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan.

If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old - coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.

Lake Michigan Stonehenge set at Flickr.

AP in 2007: Mastodon? Rock brings history to surface

Bosch up: Google announces The Prado in Google Earth: Another way of looking at art. The basics, and links for old and new Google Earth users are at that link, as well as a View in Google Maps link.

Google brings masterpieces from Prado direct to armchair art lovers:

Fourteen of the Prado's masterpieces - including works by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez and Hieronymus Bosch - can be seen online in almost microscopic detail. The technology allows internet users to fly across the surface of the canvases, homing in on details that would be invisible to the naked eye if they visited the Madrid gallery in person.

... The Prado's director, Miguel Zugaza, said that among other things, he had used the images to check the quality of restoration work. He added that Google's gigapixel gallery was especially useful for paintings such as The Garden of Earthly Delights, which contained so much detail it was difficult to take it all in, even after seeing the painting many times.

Zugaza conceded that a photographic image, however precise, could never replace the original. "This shows you the body of the painting, but what you won't find here is the soul," he said. "You can only find that by looking at the original."

Read-Write Web gives the tech tour (Google Earth and The Prado Bring Masterpieces Up Close - Really Close).

"The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento ) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias)."

The Prado is a great choice. Much cooler than the Louvre.