Doug Cornelius .com

Time made its annual pick of blogs they can’t live without for 2010. Making the list was my own GeekDad.

“There’s no better mix of cool stuff and nostalgia-inducing throwbacks online than on GeekDad. Targeted at fathers with a nerd bent, this blog from Wired includes creative, kid-friendly projects like making your own monster movie and shares how to relive your impoverished youth (think buying a massive box of ramen). The blog’s strength is that it doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t. GeekDad is laser-focused on the father who wasn’t the cool kid in high school but is now the envy of every dad on the block.”

I need to point out that there is plenty of stuff in GeekDad for the moms as well as dads. We even have several mom contributors.

Some of my latest posts on GeekDad:

• Find an ER With findER for the iPhone
• Whales Tohor? Comes to Boston’s Museum of Science
• We’ve Got Worms in Our Basement: Composting With the Kids
• 100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer (GeekDad Wayback Machine)
• Lego Bricks and Felt Tip Pen Become a Printer

from NASA:

“On Saturday, June 19, 2010, oil spread northeast from the leaking Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil appears as a maze of silvery-gray ribbons in this photo-like image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.”

To echo Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, Damn.

That is a lot of oil in a lot of ocean.

What happens when 1980s video game icons collide?:

Last week the Wall Street Journal featured an ex-lawyer in its Second Acts column: A Lawyer’s Life Turns to Cheese. I’m a lawyer and I like cheese so it caught me eye. And my stomach.

John Putnam spent 17 years as a lawyer, first at Craig and Macauley in Boston, then later at Stebbins, Bradley, Wood & Harvey in Vermont. He also bought a farm in Vermont and eventually went into organic dairy farming. Realizing that was not organic milk was not going produce enough money he and his wife decided to try cheese-making. In 1999 they went to the different cheesemaking regions in the Swiss, French and Italian Alps, seeking a cheese which they would love and climate that would be a match for the climate of North Pomfret, Vermont.

That’s their story. I was intrigued (and hungry), so I decided to order a quarter wheel of the cheese directly from the farm: Buy the Cheese.

The Federal Express man dropped off the package the next day.

Thistle Hill Farm cheese is delightful. I’m happily going to devour the four pounds of cheese sitting in my fridge.

Plus, they sent this nice note along with the cheese:

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy comes to a grinding halt with the The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I really enjoyed the cold, dark, Swedish landscape in the first book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The series then turned into an action thriller with The Girl Who Played with Fire. This third book comes across as police and courtroom procedural.

I’m not going to say too much about the book because it would be a spoiler for this book, as well as for the first two books. The character of Lisbeth Salander is fascinating and the highlight of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The rest of the characters are fairly cardboard if not caricatures.

If you liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo then you liked the characters. That book has a clear ending and you can move on with your literary life. If you wonder what happens next with these characters then you will want to read The Girl Who Played with Fire. If you read that book you know that it does not have a clear ending. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the second half. And it’s the boring half.

The book is largely focused on a trial and investigation leading up to the trial. It comes across as a boring episode of Law Order with Swedish names.

A disappointing third chapter of the trilogy.

From the Onion:

Boston Globe Tailors Print Edition For Three Remaining Subscribers

There is even a reference to Newton at the end.

When I first saw this picture, I thought it was fake:

It appears to be real.

• Street view of the sinkhole
• Other views of the sinkhole from CNN
• Guatemala: First, volcanic eruption; then, devastating tropical storm in Boing Boing

Apparently, the city sits on top of a Karst formation. The underlying limestone is highly soluble to underground water. As the underground water flows, the limestone is eroded, creating a cave. The Mammoth Caves in Kentucky is Karst Geology (.pdf).

In the sinkhole picture, the groundwater burst through the roof of the underground cave, letting the soil fall in and eventually creating a collapse sinkhole. Now it’s a portal into a deep underground cavern.