Update #3 Hello again, Going through the town of Nikko was a far different experience than any other we’ve had so far in Japan. A tourist town through and through, Nikko is quite a beautiful place to visit. The town is nestled in the mountains and forests of the northern Kanto region and has an incredible array of things to … Read More
Keenan’s Trip to Japan – Yudanaka
Update #1 We flew into Japan two days ago and I have only really had a chance to catch my bearings in the last day. So far, we have mostly been in transit from Tokyo to Nagano. Right now, we’re about an hour out of Nagano, in a small village based around a hot spring called Yudanaka. People have been … Read More
Keenan’s Trip to Japan – Toyama
Update #2 The next place we visited on our trip was the city of Toyama. Once again, we took a train a little out of the city and happened to stay in a town called Etchu Yatsuo. While there, we stayed in a house called Oyatsu. It was very nice to be in a larger and more convenient place than … Read More
Geo-Joint: Avery Island’s Hottest Seller
The Geo-Joint has been focusing on foodstuffs lately, and that’s not un-geographical. The nature of the land (or sea) has an effect upon what kind of chow comes up out of the ground or water. So continuing in that vein, our nose for geography today leads to a special bump in a very flat place. The Gulf Coast of the … Read More
Geo-Joint: Digging into Coober Pedy
Sometimes the most stunning treasures can be pulled out of the Earth from some pretty desolate areas. Those prizes are usually remnants created by the conditions at those places a long, long time ago. And so it was, that a long, long time ago, the sea and the land in what we today call Australia went through a dance that … Read More
Geo-Joint: The Great Sardine Crash
Nature is messy. There are a billion sub-systems within an ecosystem, and there are so many variables that things don’t run like clockwork. However, the wonder of nature is that while excesses and scarcities of resources and populations continually occur, the overall function is to pull the operation back toward balance. The concept of homeostasis in a population says that … Read More
Geo-Joint: Hawaiian Taro Rises Again
A while back, the Geo-Joint looked at the end of the sugar industry in Hawai’i. Though sugar cane had been carried to the islands on canoes with the earliest settlers, it wasn’t a major crop until the arrival of European and American businessmen. They brought the concept of capital-A agriculture, as opposed to subsistence farming. In their eyes, Hawai’i was … Read More
Geo-Joint: Only a Mirage
Seeing is believing. Or is it? The information we take in with our eyes is entirely dependent upon the light rays that arrive at the lenses and retinas of our eyes—and those light rays can play some complicated tricks on us. It doesn’t take a lot of shadow, smoke, and mirrors to confuse our perceptions. Even an unobstructed tableau in … Read More
Geo-Joint: The Reign of Purple
Color is everywhere, at least for the 91 percent of us who are not colorblind. Even for those who can’t discern all the variations of the spectrum, there is some color available. It results from the different wavelengths of light reflecting off of surfaces. Colors of all kinds occur in nature, though some, like the green of plants and the … Read More
Geo-Joint: Lusi the Mud Volcano
Not too terribly far beneath our feet, the Earth is a very different place from the pleasant zone we live in. The deepest mines, which can reach down to depths of a mere two and a half miles, are very hot jobsites. Just another handful of miles deeper (depending upon your location) puts you at the outermost zone of the … Read More