Current mood:	intimidated
Current music:	Best of Both Worlds--"Hannah Montana" tune on Disney

Prettier than a bloomin' onion
Having spent many moments at my desk browsing terrain at its various fractally-conjoined similarities as to complexity, I become amazed at the diversity of surface detail you can find throughout the world. The best example of this I've seen yet is the area of Australia, near the three corners of Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland, whose central focus is Lake Eyre and its basin. Variable endorheic lakes like this have been interesting to me ever since I got wind of the "Aral Sea Environmental Catastrophe", where that friendly-little body of water in Asia has now been split in 3, with the western part generally agreed to be lost for good. Oh, but it's those dirty humans, growing, of all things, COTTON, that have caused this. Yes, we're no good, and have our reckoning day coming. But back to Australia, and the Outback I happened across endless extents of in the maps.google.com interface with the scale marker at about the "2 miles" zoom level, you see vast surface effects of running rivers, what appear to be salt flat formation, and who knows what else. In one huge area there is some form of striation repeated across the earth at a particular angle, with the ridges perhaps 1000 feet apart (is this ordinary dunes, like in the Sahara?). One has to wonder what it's really like, down in some of that desolation. The indigenous there (do they still go by "Aborigine"? "Austronesian"? ?) would have good reason to find such lands to be inspirational. Oh, but there are no bad aboriginal people--why, even the Europeans, in pre-classical times, were all right. How did we in the West go wrong?