Rhinocrisy

This nice Monitor article about Iraqi graffiti contains the following excellent joke:

Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon’s favored exile, enjoys little popular support in Iraq. But pro-Chalabi slogans crop up in certain neighborhoods. “Chalabi is the engineer of democracy” is a common inscription near his headquarters in the upscale neighborhood of Mansour.

But these graffiti sound bites can bite back. “Chalabi, symbol of sacrifice,” proclaims one Chalabi supporter - in Arabic, “Chalabi, Ramz al-Ikhlass.” Underneath it, some wit adds “Chalabi, Ramz al-Ikhtilass” - changing the meaning, with the addition of one syllable, to “Chalabi, symbol of embezzlement.”

Some of you may have seen the news that a large amount of water ice has been discovered hidden under Mars’ south pole. Supposedly this is enough to cover the entire surface of Mars to a depth of 10m. Pretty cool!

Of course this doesn’t make much sense, since water falls to the lowest point it can, so it’s reasonable to ask what Mars would look like if all this water flowed down to fill basins. I did a pretty naive approximation of this, the results of which are below.

First we start with a topography map of Mars, courtesy NASA:

This is an equirectangular projection, which makes math easy on us. Given the surface area of Mars, we know how much water is sitting around (in cubic meters) based on the above figure. If we assume that this could all sit on top of the dry Martian surface without it being sucked up like a sponge (doubtful), we can work out what height this would fill merely by subtracting away the terrain. This works out to a height of 90m, surprisingly enough. Mars seems to be pretty flat. So we can flood everything below that:

Then some false coloring and completely fictitious clouds for jazz:

Looks neat! I’d live there.

Only slightly late^*, here are some pictures of me dressed as Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, from “Journey to the West”. In these photos the makeup is somewhat messed up, since I wore it to capoeira before taking them, where someone kicked me in the face and fouled it all up. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed with the full production… but there’s always next year. My current plan is to be Dr. Zoidberg. Woop woop woop woop!

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This project is brilliant. We’re already putting the tape up all around our burrow. An art installation about it is in the window of Artists Television Access in San Francisco and it looks like S.F. Critical Mass might try and follow a future waterline route this month. I can’t think of a better way to commemorate Hurricane Katrina — except, maybe, for listening to Fats Domino and eating a plate of my extra-savory vegan jambalaya.