Taughannock Falls

Last month my wife and I took the kids to Ithaca, NY to visit my mother. My sister came up from Charlottesville. We visited Taughannock State Park. We hiked the Gorge Trail, three-quarters of a mile one way up Taughannock Creek to Taughannock Falls. My mother claimed that there were rim trails, but that they had been closed because the rim tends to collapse and it can be dangerous. Abundant signage warns folks to stay on the trail to avoid being harmed by unpredictable avalanches. The talus slopes (can’t resist the chance to use a word from geomorphology) of both sides of the canyon showed ample evidence of recent cliff failures. There are also plenty of areas where the talus, or debris field, was covered over with mature forest. Somebody claimed that Taughannock Falls is the tallest waterfall east of the Mississippi. When I looked it up online, I found that there are several places that make such a claim, and an interesting debate on exactly how you measure the height of a waterfall. Taughannock Falls is listed at 215 feet, and it appears that most of it is unobstructed. Of those making the claim, I am most impressed with Fall Creek Falls in Tennessee.


Trail map carved out of SOLID WOOD.


This is the first cascade on the trail. Educational signage explains that this is a limestone slab supported by shale. The shale is erodible and the limestone comparatively resistant. The shale erodes constantly, and, when enough of it is washed away, the limestone breaks off in larger pieces. Toughannock falls was located at the park entrance near Cayuga lake at the end of the last ice age. Since then the falls have retreated 3/4 of a mile due to this erosional process.


Cliff face, mostly shale, with some sandstone strata. Interesting how it comes off in rectilinear patterns. A simple description of the local formation layers can be found here. This creek flows into Cayuga lake, which is 435 feet deep. The actual depth to the carved rock is much deeper. The lake bed contains up to a thousand feet of glacial sediment in some places.


Two-photo panorama of a recently-augmented talus slope and cliff face with little boy for scale. After I took it I said, "OK now let's get down from there."


Most of the trail looks like this. As the signs indicate, the park personnel would really honestly prefer that you stay on the trail.


First view of the falls from the trail. This is another two-photo panorama stitched in PhotoShop. It was taken from a bridge that crosses the channel. Check out the huge talus slope on the right, the relatively small people, and the observation deck. Also the pattern of cliff erosion looks like temple carvings from other worlds.


Another view of the cascade.



Zoom in on the cliff face. I believe the white streaks are granite layers.





Rocks of various sizes and shapes in the channel



Children skipping rocks by the creek. Plenty of rocks to choose from. Trees, shrubs and grasses grow in the debris of past avalanches.


From the observation area, looking back at the bridge that takes the trail across the creek.

Cool Map

I love maps. Check out these. Artist and programmer R. Luke Dubois used information from millions of online dating sites to create county-level maps of the United States based on words most often used in profiles. In an interesting twist on the red state/blue state dichotomy, Dubois uses the colors to represent men and women, and the brightness of the color represents the frequency of the word. North Texas and the state of Wyoming has a lot of lonely men, while the lonely women can be found in the South Carolina low country. Also interesting is the brightness flip between the "crazy" and "shy" maps. The northern plains are shy, while the coastal areas are crazy.
Dubios has another set of maps where he places the words themselves onto the map surface according to the spatial location at which they occur in the dating profiles. These are really interesting at the regional level: artistically geo-referenced local vernacular expression. "Gaslight," "Codder," and "Drinks" appear in the Boston suburbs. "Fastball," "Jailer," and "Irrigation" show up in Eastern Nebraska.

Private Satellite Images Used to Investigate War Crimes

Something on the PBS Newshour last Thursday caught my attention. A private company, Digital Globe, has obtained satellite images that document the destruction of a village in an area of Sudan where no journalists are allowed. The images were made public online by the Satellite Sentinel Project. The celebrity George Clooney actively supports both the Satellite Sentinel and Digital Globe. The story points out that commercial satellite imaging entities can make information available that until recently was the sole province of governments. Unfortunately it does not explore the ethical implications. They imply that digital globe is just giving the information away for the good of humanity. Commercial (and government) satellite images are very expensive to produce, and a discussion of what the Satellite Sentinel Project paid for the images, or what Digital Globe typically charges their clients, would have been interesting. The piece could have brought up the issues of personal privacy (there seems to be no place on the globe now that is not being photographed), and the privileged status of the information: who is obtaining it and for whom? But maybe I ask too much. The report was particularly interesting to me because I am taking a remote-sensing class, wherein we are learning how to interpret satellite data, and a class in ethics and philosophy in geography, where we recently discussed celebrity activists.

My Google Earth Street View Experiment

I was very impressed with Jon Rafman's collection of Google Earth street view image captures (here). My first response was "Oh man I have got to try that." Up late for two nights, the house is a wreck and I am way behind on school work. But this project has a geographical and artistic component, so I justify (rationalize?) it as being part of my status as a lifetime learner. But really I am just a Google Street View addict trying to one-up an established artist.

By no means do I think my images are as riveting and interesting as Rafman's. In two days since I started I have explored Tallahassee, the Florida Panhandle, the Atchafalaya River corridor in southern Louisiana, Stuttgart, San Luis Potosi Mexico, Northwestern Canada and Lisbon. I get a kind of rush when exploring, looking at all the cameras on the screen lined up like beads: so much to find! So many unexplored niches, so many places no one has ever seen...world here I come!

I do in fact believe that most of Street View is unseen. The images are fed into the system and processed in batches. Among the viewers, there are probably very few like Rafman and myself, that is, trolling for images to capture and re-present as art.

What is the point? I try to stay away from slum-tourism. Rafman presents a lot of prostitutes and people with guns. I am collecting my images with the knowledge that Rafman has already done it. I am trying to capture something a little different, but really just trolling for anything that can be viewed as an interesting composition. And if I happen upon somebody with a gun, it is definitely going in the collection.

Rafman has some interesting commentary on his website, I encourage you to poke around over there.

And without further ado, here is my two days worth of Google Street View (click inside any image for a larger format version):




A house for a car. Humans enter in rear.






Yin and yang.








Notice parrot in cage on counter.




Man with camera looking directly at camera. In Stuttgart, the GE camera person takes the unit off the car and walks around. And they don't blur faces.

Architectural animations from Cornell

Multiple animated approaches to a cave-like entrance to a building on the Cornell campus. I am not sure, but I think this must be some Autodesk software. When I was in Landscape Architecture school, we used Sketch Up for animations. This looks really nice. I don't know how I feel about the cantilevered floor, it looks spooky. The automobile approach has a distinctly airport-like feel. The architectural "surprises" that are revealed inside the "cave" in the pedestrian approach are pretty neat. Watch it here.

Food Deserts in Mississippi

The PBS Newshour had a good piece about food deserts in the rural south that began with a visit to a small town in Quitman County, Mississippi. One small grocery store with no fresh vegetables, no other food for twenty miles in any direction (except fast food). The local McDonald's doesn't offer salads, only burgers, nuggets and fries. Watch it here.

Seen Around Town

Here is a collection of photos I have taken while driving and walking around Starkville, Mississippi. Click in the image for a larger version.


The really interesting thing about this intersection is that, the ambiguous directional signals aside, straight on through is a legal move if you are in the right hand lane. At least I think it is.



2009 Subdivision of the year, compared to WHAT? This place has an 8-foot wall around the entire neighborhood, plus a gate and a guardhouse.



Cool inverted pentagrams on a downtown building, perhaps a Masonic symbol.


Inverted pentagrams in context. Sadly, this building on Main Street is now empty.



A concrete wall in front of Cadence Bank bears the ghostly inscription "BANK OF COMMERCE"


The Entrance to Cadence Bank.


Cadance Bank.I like modernism, and I love this building. Bauhaus anyone?



The Regions Bank building is directly across from Cadence Bank, and the two are having some kind of twentieth-century conversation. "Let's take the classical motif of the arcade and stretch it vertically four stories. Now we have post-modernism!"


Majestic lions guard the entrance to a residence from their juniper nests.


Oak leaf and laurel motif in the Oddfellows Cemetary



Blue foamy water flows from the a car wash into Hollis Creek at Acadamy Road.



The architect who built this office cluster put his name and number on a little sign right next to the broad flume that delivers the parking lot surface runoff directly into Hollis Creek.