Year: 2011

I saw an article about fires in southern Georgia recently. One of the fires has burned a huge area of more than 200,000 acres. The fire even has a name, the Honey Prairie Fire. You know it’s a really big fire if it even has a name. Not only does it have a name, it has a Wikipedia entry. 200,000 acres is a huge area: 400 square miles. Today I found out that almost the entire area is in the Okefenokee Swamp and particularly the national wildlife refuge. According to this page it looks like about two-thirds of the wildlife refuge has burned. Here’s a map showing the extent of the fire, but keep in mind that even the green part has also burned, it just burned back in May when the fire was first started by lightning. Maybe not so surprising, the Okefenokee Swamp is closed right now.

I don’t know how worrisome any of this is. The swamp is supposed to catch fire every now and then and clear out underbrush. However there has been a really bad prolonged drought in the swamp, so bad that some of the places where they take canoe trips are just dry ground now.

I was watching last night’s Daily Show today and the guest, Mitchell Zuckoff, was promoting his book, Lost in Shangri-La, about the rescue of some plane crash survivors in New Guinea during World War II. Some airborne soldiers parachuted in first and cleared off a patch so some gliders could land. Eventually they flew everyone out on gliders, which Zuckoff said was done with rubber bands, so I envisioned them building a giant slingshot and shooting the gliders into the air. I knew gliders were used on D Day, towed behind airplanes from England, but it was a one-way mission to land troops and equipment together in fields rather than spread out like paratroops would be. I didn’t think they could take off again especially since there was no runway, just a clearing. I found an interview with the commander of the rescue mission where he said they snatched the gliders up and everyone got out okay. Then I had to look up exactly how you snatch a glider up. It turns out they would tie an elastic tow rope up on some poles and a plane would fly in very, very low with a hook lowered that would catch the tow line and yank the glider up into the air. There’s even a YouTube video:

Today on one of the flashlight discussion areas, a guy had taken some macro photos of a flashlight he had taken apart. Someone said that if he used a Canon camera, he should use CHDK, which allows you to create RAW images and add a lot of features to your camera. Well, I have a Canon camera. And one of the things I would really like for it to do when I’m taking pictures of flashlight beams (shining them on a wall to see what tint, brightness, and beam pattern you get) is to turn off the automatic white balancing that the camera does. If I have a flashlight with a cool white, bluish beam, the camera will reduce the blue color and make it look more white. If the flashlight has a warmer, more orange, tint, the camera changes it to make it more white. So I end up with two pictures that look the same even though the tints are very different. I can shine both lights at the wall, which helps some, but often the camera will exaggerate the differences, especially if the tints are fairly close. So I’d like to be able to turn that off, but the only way I can figure to do that is some process where you take a picture of something that is totally white in order to set your own white balance. And I don’t know if that is stored or if you have to do that every time you want to take a picture.

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