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Composite Of Earth At Night
crmartin writes "Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is an incredible composite image of Earth from space at night. Actually a composite from many pictures from the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP), it's like a skeletal view of the Earth in tiny lights. If you really like it, there are hi-res images up to a 40 megabyte TIFF."
It would be neat to use some kind of tool to compare the two pics and see how much brighter/dimmer we are in 2004 than 2000.
I am Belgian (VERY bright on the map). In Belgium, all motorways are lit by lampposts all of the time (don't ask why). It does mean it has become completely impossible to see more then 2-3 stars at night. Light-pollution has become an issue and the astronomers are organising a "dark" night once a year, asking municipalities and private people to turn off the flood-lights. There are now standards on how much light a lamppost is allowed to shine upwards.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
My take. Nasa has more bandwidth than God. If any domain can take the hit... Nasa's can.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
What's telling is North and South Korea. North is almost 100% dark. See this link for a close up.
There's a really good reason for this.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the buddy-buddy relationships with other communist countries were scratched and it turned into "every man for themselves".
North Korea used to have a constant supply of oil and coal and other energy needs from Russia, but this was abruptly terminated when Russia started saying "Er, you gotta pay full price now". The North Koreans had no cash to pay with, and thus began the rapid spiralling decline of all their energy production, transport, manufacturing and most importantly, food production. Food production in particular was a double-edged sword, needing not only oil to harvest and transport food, but also petroleum products and energy to produce fertiliser for use in North Korea's poor soil. With most of the country starving, and most machinery lying idle and rusting, things have been getting exponentially worse. They now have peasants tilling fields by hand, emaciated, underfed, with no chance of anything changing, unless they join the army, where they are emaciated, underfed and using rifles.
With little or nothing to trade with, North Korea has resorted to high-profit, (relatively) low-staffing-requirements industries like missiles, nuclear power and weapons, and (possibly) any other sorts of chemical or bio weapons to fund their dismal little empire.
Thus we now have them in a position where they have nothing to lose, and a little bitter and twisted.
To the US's credit, there were attempts to try and help Pyongyang out of this dead-end situation, by offering assistance in building reactors that were more efficient and would not produce weapons-grade materials. Unfortunatley, the Clinton administration never came good with their promises, and then the Bush administration came into power and... well, you know the rest. With the likes of John "Deputy Dawg" Bolton doing negotiations with them it's a small miracle South Korea or Japan aren't small burning heaps by now. That's if NK actually do have any nukes. Who knows... the entire government is crazy and senile, so it's hard to guess what they are doing or thinking.
CAUTION: the following link is a 2MB JPEG that expands to an 8Kx4K image .. that would be about 100megabytes as an uncompressed TIFF
(it's here). With only 380MB of RAM on my box, this chokes Mozilla, but loads OK if I save it and open it with gqview..
I have a second image of North America only that's a bit more manageable in size (1024x768),
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