Indian Ocean

De Havilland Canada Twin Otter

Cool picture of a cool airplane on the beach in The Maldives. We've been there before. The flight log shows it operating out of Male Int'l, so let's take a look:

Two populated islands in the Malé Atoll
Male / Velana International Airport

Okay, there's the jetport, but where do the seaplanes dock?

Maldives Seaplane Docks

That's a bunch of seaplanes.

Maldives Seaplane Terminal

Might be the biggest seaplane operation in the world. They have docks for 55 seaplanes.

Where are The Maldives? Middle of the Indian Ocean, that's where:

The Maldives & Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean

For Patrick O'Brian fans, Mauritius and Reunion are in the lower left corner.

It's hard to get a handle on the scale of The Maldives. There's a zillion tiny islands spread over a zillion square miles of ocean. This political map gives an overview:

Atolls of The Maldives
Roughly 500 miles top to bottom

Note that an Atoll is not the same as an island. The two islands shown above are part of the Kaafu administrative area / Malé Atoll:

Malé Atoll
The placemark is on the airport

Bonus: I'm poking around looking at The Maldives and Tam turns me onto this BBC report about Diego Garcia. It explains why we don't hear much about the place. The report has several pictures, but nothing recent.

A post I started back in July 2014 but never published:

A Malaysian airliner got shot down in the Ukraine this morning, which reminds us that there is a new conspiracy theory circulating that the Malaysian airliner that disappeared a couple months ago was diverted to Diego Garcia by the CIA. Irba tells us that Diego Garcia is basically a ring of skinny islands around a big lagoon, and the lagoon is fresh water. That seems improbable, so I do a little checking.
    Diego Garcia gets a hundred inches of rain a year, which is a boat load. Oregon, the rainiest place in the USA onlty gets about thirty some inches. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, and as such is very porous so rain water soaks right in. Since it is going into this porous rock, there isn't a lot of mixing going on, so it basically collects on top of the salt water that has soaked in from the ocean. This fresh water can be extracted via shallow wells and as long as you don't take too much out of any one spot you can get all the water you need. I mean a hundred inches of rain a year is a stink load of rain.

Quote

Found this line at the end of a story about fertility and population by Russell Clark:

Extrapolation without analysis is the bane of modern economics - it is such simplistic thinking. Mentally, it makes economists children, not men.

Second time this week I have encountered someone bashing economists this week, and it's only Tuesday. 

Via ZeroHedge

Hurricane Helene

Power Outage

Been hearing a lot of noise about how bad Helene was, but it was confusing because many of the reports came from places I have never heard of, so I went looking for a map. It looks like Helene had it in for Appalachia, which is kind of weird.

Doonesbury

Doonesbury September 29, 2024

This comic showed up in the Sunday paper. I used to enjoy Doonesbury, but sometime in the last ten years he became afflicted with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and he hasn't been any fun since.

I'm posting this one because he's accusing Trump of all the things the Biden haters have been saying about Biden for the last few years, which is kind of weird. One, I have never heard anyone accusing Trump of these things before. Okay, I don't listen to any of the main stream / liberal media, so maybe they have been saying this stuff all along but I just didn't hear any of it. The other is that I have been hearing accusations that the Democrats are out and out lying about all kinds of things.

None of these rumors and inuendo has any bearing on whether he can do the job. Anyway, this comic was like getting hit in the face with a dead fish. Wake up Pergelator! Smell the stink!

While we are talking about propaganda, the default screen on Microsoft's browser is covered with news stories which annoys me to no end. First of all, I don't need any more news, I get plenty from my regular sources, I don't any more distractions. The other is Bill Gates. I don't like and I don't trust him and I certainly don't want to hear anything he has to say, and you know just his looming presence is enough to sway what's showing up on the screen. Google may be guilty of many things, but at least the home screen is just white space. Yes, I know it's my own fault, I said I was going to install Linux, but my head needs to be in the right space to tackle that. Basically, I'm not yet frustrated enough with Windows to take that step, but it's coming.