I Should Be At Barcelona!

This post shall be nothing but my ranting. Cos this is my space!

• This is the second time which I felt so panicky after realising the scope and depth of my last paper. In a tad moment, I’m gonna suffer from a heartburn. After studying yesterday, I was utterly demoralised and mentally exhausted. Thank God for friend like Boying who accompanied me all the way to IKEA just for meatballs. In the end, we didn’t have meatballs. But we got ourselves all the FAT food (like, fried carrot cake, fried oyster omelette, DEEP fried wu xiang xia bing, damn fattening bo bo cha cha..) I was just too tired to think about what I am eating, so we basically gobbled down whatever that lied in front of us. But now that I am sober, gosh, how am I gonna lose all those calories??!!
• If studying is not already bad enough, friend so kindly offered me to go to Barcelona for FREE! Yeah, everything paid for. The catch is just hafta be at the product launch showcase and review about the product. Easy peezie japanizeee! That’s all I hafta do to earn myself a free trip, not anywhere but BARCELONA. As we all know, bad news no matter what don’t happen at good timing. The trip is effectively from today till next Monday! While it is just nice for me to hop on to my Australia trip, I won’t be able to sit for my exam! I have every reason to whine now! I WANNA GO TO BARCELONA, BARCELONA, BARCELONAAAAAA!!!!

Just look at all those pictures, tell me how not to whine about it??!!!

Fine, moving along, some rare wonders of our natural phenomenon.

1) Sailing Stones

The mysterious moving stones of the packed-mud desert of Death Valley have been a center of scientific controversy for decades. Rocks weighing up to hundreds of pounds have been known to move up to hundreds of yards at a time. Some scientists have proposed that a combination of strong winds and surface ice account for these movements. However, this theory does not explain evidence of different rocks starting side by side and moving at different rates and in disparate directions. Moreover, the physics calculations do not fully support this theory as wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour would be needed to move some of the stones.

2) Columnar Basalt

When a thick lava flow cools it contracts vertically but cracks perpendicular to its directional flow with remarkable geometric regularity – in most cases forming a regular grid of remarkable hexagonal extrusions that almost appear to be made by man. One of the most famous such examples is the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Ireland (shown above) though the largest and most widely recognized would be Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Basalt also forms different but equally fascinating ways when eruptions are exposed to air or water.

3) Blue Holes

Blue holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that get their name from the dark and foreboding blue tone they exhibit when viewed from above in relationship to surrounding waters. They can be hundreds of feet deep and while divers are able to explore some of them they are largely devoid of oxygen that would support sea life due to poor water circulation – leaving them eerily empty. Some blue holes, however, contain ancient fossil remains that have been discovered, preserved in their depths.

4) Red Tides

Red tides are also known as algal blooms – sudden influxes of massive amounts of colored single-cell algae that can convert entire areas of an ocean or beach into a blood red color. While some of these can be relatively harmless, others can be harbingers of deadly toxins that cause the deaths of fish, birds and marine mammals. In some cases, even humans have been harmed by red tides though no human exposure are known to have been fatal. While they can be fatal, the constituent phytoplankton in ride tides are not harmful in small numbers.

5) Ice Circles

While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of conspiracy theorizing, scientists generally accept that they are formed by eddies in the water that spin a sizable piece of ice in a circular motion. As a result of this rotation, other pieces of ice and flotsam wear relatively evenly at the edges of the ice until it slowly forms into an essentially ideal circle. Ice circles have been seen with diameters of over 500 feet and can also at times be found in clusters and groups at different sizes as shown above.

6) Mammatus Clouds

True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system. Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. While they may appear foreboding they are merely the messengers – appearing around, before or even after severe weather.