Another inclement weather delay-so far that's two out of three classes. I wondered what was up with that, so I called Ma Nature and after some grousing about being really busy and running late for a typhoon she had scheduled in Bangladesh this morning, she finally agreed to a quick interview:
SP: What's up with the inclement weather on Fridays lately? Do you have something against GIS classes?
MN: Actually, to be perfectly honest with you, I loath them. I am strongly opposed to GIS and will do everything within my power to prevent the timely assimilation of knowledge about it. Also, I just enjoy sitting back and watching y'all fools driving forty miles to class over ice-encrusted highways. It's better than roller derby for pure entertainment value.
SP: Ah, I thought so. What happened last Friday? The weather wasn't too bad-we actually got to have class on time.
MN: Oh, I apologize for that. That was the morning that I had accidentally set my alarm to go off at 4:00 PM instead of 4:00 AM and overslept. I never can keep up with whether the little red dot is supposed to mean AM or PM. Plus, since I turned 753 million last August, I can't see as well up close as I could back when I was only a few million years old. You'd think that they would find some way to make those little dots less confusing for us older folks. Anyway, listen to me, I'm rambling again. Sorry-my bad.
SP: At least you're being sort of creative about it-snow the first time and ice this time. What do you have planned for next Friday if you don't mind me asking?
MN: Well, I usually try to keep information like that kind of secret, you know. The only person that I've ever talked to on a regular basis about stuff like that was Bob Caldwell, but since he retired, I've been playing it a little closer to the vest. That Jay Siltzer guy just doesn't get it, and that Julie Wunder chick, well, she's a just a bit too wide-eyed to suit me if you know what I mean-looks all the time like she just saw a damn rat or something. But anyway, I'll try to brew up something unique just for you, Mr. Smarty-Pants-Redundant-Weather-is-Boring-Man. We haven't had a good plague of locusts in awhile, or maybe I could turn a seventh part of the waters to blood. On second thought, scratch the blood thing-you'd probably love that. You'd be over there in your little class making one of your little fancy mappy-things to show which watershed basins were affected and which weren't. And you wonder why I don't like GIS. How do you feel about ball lightning? All I can tell you is you'll just have to wait and see what I'm going to smite you with, just like everybody else. Now, like I said, I've got work to do. My typhoon is already running an hour behind schedule because of Mr. Curiosity here, and when I'm done with that I've still got to brew up something interesting for the Superbowl- Peace Out!
SP: What's up with the inclement weather on Fridays lately? Do you have something against GIS classes?
MN: Actually, to be perfectly honest with you, I loath them. I am strongly opposed to GIS and will do everything within my power to prevent the timely assimilation of knowledge about it. Also, I just enjoy sitting back and watching y'all fools driving forty miles to class over ice-encrusted highways. It's better than roller derby for pure entertainment value.
SP: Ah, I thought so. What happened last Friday? The weather wasn't too bad-we actually got to have class on time.
MN: Oh, I apologize for that. That was the morning that I had accidentally set my alarm to go off at 4:00 PM instead of 4:00 AM and overslept. I never can keep up with whether the little red dot is supposed to mean AM or PM. Plus, since I turned 753 million last August, I can't see as well up close as I could back when I was only a few million years old. You'd think that they would find some way to make those little dots less confusing for us older folks. Anyway, listen to me, I'm rambling again. Sorry-my bad.
SP: At least you're being sort of creative about it-snow the first time and ice this time. What do you have planned for next Friday if you don't mind me asking?
MN: Well, I usually try to keep information like that kind of secret, you know. The only person that I've ever talked to on a regular basis about stuff like that was Bob Caldwell, but since he retired, I've been playing it a little closer to the vest. That Jay Siltzer guy just doesn't get it, and that Julie Wunder chick, well, she's a just a bit too wide-eyed to suit me if you know what I mean-looks all the time like she just saw a damn rat or something. But anyway, I'll try to brew up something unique just for you, Mr. Smarty-Pants-Redundant-Weather-is-Boring-Man. We haven't had a good plague of locusts in awhile, or maybe I could turn a seventh part of the waters to blood. On second thought, scratch the blood thing-you'd probably love that. You'd be over there in your little class making one of your little fancy mappy-things to show which watershed basins were affected and which weren't. And you wonder why I don't like GIS. How do you feel about ball lightning? All I can tell you is you'll just have to wait and see what I'm going to smite you with, just like everybody else. Now, like I said, I've got work to do. My typhoon is already running an hour behind schedule because of Mr. Curiosity here, and when I'm done with that I've still got to brew up something interesting for the Superbowl- Peace Out!
Finally got to class, went over chapters 3 & 4 in The Enormously Expensive and Increasingly Demanding and Progressively High-Maintenance Cartography Textbook (heretofore known as TEEIDPHMCT for the sake of brevity). The lecture covered among other things, the exploits of some old Greek expatriate dude named Eratosthenes (who somehow fairly accurately measured the circumferance of the Earth in 250 BC by using the sun, a fencepost and a hole in the ground when I probably couldn't accurately measure the circumferance of a basketball in 2008 AD with a Stanly tape measure, a laser level, surveyor's transit, set of inside calipers, trigonometry textbook, and a computer with a Pentium 4 processor/ 64 gig hard drive.) I reached the conclusions that (a:) I hate show-offy people like Eratosthenes; and (b:) George Bush apparently wasn't around pushing his No Child Left Behind educational policies in ancient Greece/Egypt. (A fence post and a hole in the ground. Damn.) We then went over such fun things as geodesy, ellipsoids, geoids, authalic spheres, rhumb lines, datums (both horozontal and vertical, and probably more but that's about the time that my brain overloaded and short-circuited, my eyes rolled back into my head and I started grinning and drooling. Then Pete told us about the test next week. Uh-oh.
We did get to have some fun, though-we finally embarked on our long-awited campaign of world domination by symbolizing the whole African continent. (I'm pretty sure that it wasn't legal according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, but hey- I could, so I did.) I started out by symbolizing the major cities, then the countries, the human populations and even the wildlife. By then I was so jacked up on the whole adrenaline rush of all that wanton symbolism that before I realized it, I had also symbolized all the rivers, power plants and diamond mines. Still looking around for more victims, I didn't stop until I had symbolized the topography of most of the Great Rift Valley. By then I was pretty tired and kinda hungry, so I stopped symbolizing and went to eat a sammich.
