Water from Nothin'

Fog collection in the Atacama Desert, Chile - Nicole Saffie

The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, which is why the ALMA radio telescope project is there. Fog collection is a one way to collect drinking water out of the atmosphere that doesn't require any energy. Getting a usable amount of water out of the air in the desert is a pretty good trick. But if this is a desert, then what are all those clouds doing there? I think they must be right on the western edge of the desert, that horizon looks like the Pacific Ocean.

Via Posthip Scott

Giant Sinkhole in Chile

Sinkhole in Tierra Amarilla, Chile

Giant sinkhole appeared over the weekend in the Atacama Desert. There is an underground copper mine in the neighborhood that might have something to do with it. Sinkholes are just weird.

Just for grins I tried locating it on Google Maps and from the relative positions of the buildings and roads, I think I found it.

Sinkhole location in Tierra Amarilla, Chile

Pic of the Day

Diego Salvatierra at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, May 26, 2012. It might be the world’s most ambitious astronomical project.

Diego gets his picture here because he was intrepid enough to make the journey to the back of beyond, and because he got five antennaes and a mountain to be in the picture with him.

Big Telescopes in Chile

A photo of one of the VLT optical telescopes at work.  The four bright lines are the most powerful lasers ever put on a telescope and are used to provide a "synthetic star" that can be used to correct atmospheric distortion in the telescopic image - a technique called adaptive optics.  Image credit: ESO/S. Lowery. 

Somebody wants to build a hydrogen plant on the coast of Chile just 60 miles south of the VLT on Mount Paranal. The observatory people are just a little teed off about this, claiming that the lights from the plant would compromise their view of the sky. The Silicon Graybeard has the story.

Locations in Chile:

Atacama Desert, Chile
Blue markers are observatories
Orange Markers are mountains
Northern Red marker is location of proposed hydrogen plant
Southern Red marker is a copper mine

Christ the Redeemer

We just finished rewatching Kleo. We pulled up Netflix the other night looking for something new to watch and we see that there is a new season of Kleo available. We remember watching it before, but not well enough to pick up where we left off, so we decided to just start watching it again from the beginning and see what happens. Maybe our memories will be jostled and we'll say 'oh yeah, I remember this'. We did remember bits and pieces of it, but not enough to get bored so and we ended up rewatching the whole thing. It's pretty great, it's a quirky little show, full of oddball characters, curious settings and bright colors.

Kleo is an East German assassin employed off-the-books by the Stasi, the East German Secret Police. She is sent to West Berlin through a tunnel to kill a man in a nightclub. She returns to East Berlin and shortly thereafter is arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison on vague charges of treason.

At the time of her arrest she is pregnant. On arrival in the prison she gets in a fight with a girl gang and gets the stuffing kicked out of her and she loses the baby. Not only does she lose the baby her organs are so damaged that she will not be able to ever have a child. Now she has another reason to seek revenge.

Just recently I realized that most women's greatest desire is to have children. This might be because this desire is similar to breathing - it's such a fundamental part of us that we don't even think about it. I know that when I was younger I didn't want to have kids. It wasn't until I was in my early 30's that this changed.

But back to our story. Kleo is in prison, it's 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down, all political prisoners are released, Kleo among them and she wants to know why she was sent to prison when, as far as she knew, she was just doing her job. So she goes looking for answers and at every step of the way the next person she encounters would rather kill her than tell her why, but she being an assassin, she kills them instead. 

Eventually she learns that the whole thing is about a secret pact East Germany made with President Ronald Reagan that would keep the East German government propped up with loads of cash. What? Why you might ask? Because the plot requires a secret that a whole bunch of people are willing to die to protect, that's why. It doesn't make any sense to me, but who knows? There has always been all kinds of skullduggery going on, so yeah, sure, why not? Whatever, we'll pretend Reagan made a secret pact with Erich Honecker. Was it really secret? Britannica has this to say:

"Under Honecker’s rule, East Germany was one of the more repressive but also one of the most prosperous of the Soviet-bloc countries of eastern Europe. He allowed the growth of some trade and travel ties with West Germany in return for West German financial aid."

Eventually we find that the secret is in documents contained in a red suitcase, so for the rest of the show we are chasing this red suitcase."

Note with coordinates

A few seconds before the end of episode 7, Margot Honecker (aka The Purple Witch) hands the above slip of paper to Ramona, another secret Stasi assassin, who just happens to be nine months pregnant.

Hiding Place for the Red Suitcase
Episode 8, 27 minute mark

Episode 8 has Kleo and her sidekick Sven finding the suitcase in the base of the above statue. I asked Google Lens to identify it and while it found a bunch of very similar statues, it did not find an exact match.

Christ the Redeemer

There is a similar statue in a similar location on the Chile-Argentine border, but you can see that while there are similarities, it is not the same one. Which makes me wonder - where did they find the statue for the show?

Central Chile, South America
Blue marker is from coordinates on the note
Red marker is the location of the statue

Anyway, because I gotta be me, I plotted the locations of the coordinates from the note and the actual statue on Google Maps.  The coordinates that the Purple Witch gave to Ramona point to the middle of the Atacama desert. No statue there.

Update December 2025 corrected a couple of typos.