Title Translation: Head study

Created between 1905 and 1915 by Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ, the corresponding print is in an album titled, “Various views and studies, Russian Empire and Europe.”

Medium: 1 negative (3 frames) : glass, b&w, three-color separation ; 24 x 9 cm.

(faces out of time 13)

Do you blog – or have you blogged?  If so, how’s the blogging going?

I’ve seen estimates online that about 60 to 80% of all blogs are abandoned within their first month and that, by the end of three months, the percentage abandoned rises to somewhere around 95%.

I’ve lasted far longer than most, I suppose – and I figure I’m just gonna stick with it – but I’ll be going about it with a bit more structure.

Here on Exit78, I’ve been trying out three regular posts a week.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, I post random photos from our travels.  All of the images that I use for these come from image sets where I’ve created a corresponding video that has been published on YouTube.

On Fridays, I’ll continue to post the series “faces out of time.”  This is intended to share interesting – hopefully –  public domain images of people from previous times.

I’ll continue to create new video slide shows of places that we’ve been.  However, I won’t be doing it day-by-day from a particular trip.  I want to include some material from older trips as well as the more recent.  Photos from those trips will go into the random sort bin after I’ve posted the videos here.

On future trips, I probably won’t try to post about the trip while we are traveling.  We’ve had two shorter trips this year and I avoided blogging-the-trip on both.

I hope to also do more commentary type posts, but that’ll be dependent on other things that are going on.

Random travel images 020

Custer State Park, South Dakota, August 22, 2007. (Wikipedia)

Over the next to the last weekend in September, new temperature records were set in places like North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa – record low temperatures, with some places dropping into the 20s.  Some parts of northern Minnesota even saw some white stuff – snow – with amounts approaching an inch.

There’s been a lot of press over the Arctic sea ice extent reaching a record low, many say due to global warming.  In virtually none of those stories do they mention:

1. The record is the for lowest that the sea ice has been during the era of satellite monitoring of the planet – satellite monitoring of sea ice began in 1979.
2. The Antarctic sea ice achieved a maximum extent record at about the same time.
3. While ice extend was trending low during June and July, close to that of 2007, an unusually intense Arctic summer storm churned the sea  for several days in early August, likely exacerbated the decline in Arctic sea ice extent.  During the storm, The Arctic Sea Ice Blog recorded on August 7 that “The trend line on the DMI sea ice extent chart keeps plummeting.”

It’d be interesting to know what the extent was during the hot period of the 1930s or during the medieval climate optimum when the Norse settled Greenland (abt. 980 A.D.), finding a land with considerable birch woods with trees up to 4 to 6 meters high and hills that were covered grass and willow brushes. It’s highly unlikely that this is the first time ever that sea ice extent has been this low.

Random travel images 019

Just outside Arches National Park Visitor Center front doors, Utah, 9/21/2011.

faces out of time 012

Library of Congress image: Unidentified young soldier in Confederate infantry uniform, possibly drummer boy, donated to the Library of Congress 2012 by Tom Liljenquist; Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs.

The Last Full Measure: The Liljenquist Family Collection.

Random travel images 018

A trip over Trail Ridge Road and back, Rocky Mountain National Park, September 14, 2011.

Random travel images 017

Garden of the Gods, September 8, 2011

faces out of time 011

Library of Congress image:

This photograph of a yardmaster in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad yards in Amarillo, Texas, was taken in March 1943 by Farm Services Administration photographer, Jack Delano.