billmorris.io

Atoms and isolation - Albuquerque, New Mexico An abandoned planned community?

Scenes from the coast of the Aral Sea - Deep, regular furrows have been carved into salt-capped clay in Northwestern Uzbekistan, along the border with Kazakhstan.

Thefts and repossessions - Barenstburg, Svalbard Svalbard is a funny place.

Muffins and Tacos - Salvador Bahia, Brazil Forte de São Marcelo had its first iteration in 1608 (before any enterprising Europeans had even so much as dipped a canoe paddle in the direction of Vermont), a wooden palisade planted on a coral reef to defend…

In both senses - Yes, obviously, ICE out as well.

Unknown unknowns - There is a lot that I’m able to learn from my desk in a now-frosty corner of Northern New England, and that remoteness is part of my delight in scanning the world like this.

Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo The Ruzizi river drains from Lake Kivu, and - like that large body of water - serves as the borderline between DRC and Rwanda.

Seasonal traversals - Portsmouth, UK Though the Christmas tree was first imported to the English-speaking world by the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Charles Dickens tends to get the credit for bottling up and distributing the seasonal vibe that we still…

What has been lost and gained - At work, I’m in the middle of the largest update of imagery I’ve ever supervised.

Additional discussion of baseball is pure coincidence - Aru Co, China In this image captured at the end of 2017, the surface of Aru Co - a lake on the Tibetan plateau - is frozen in ripples that seem to extend onshore, in waves of sand.

I haven't been able to get the song out of my head for months. - Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is currently dominating the talk of the critics.

Cultural exports, petroleum imports, and shellfish reports - Hoofddorp, Netherlands The fact that I find the Dutch language inherently hilarious is not something I’m proud of.

Decay and rehabilitation - Warsaw, Poland Skra Stadium, built in its current form after WWII, hosted 35,000 spectators for soccer, track and field, and motorcycle races.

We’re neck-deep in AI these days, the era of the Large Language Model (LLM).

Leopold's ghost train - Xinjiang, China There is a road in the Taklamakan desert that doesn’t bother to snake its way around dry streambeds or rocky landforms, it plows mostly straight through the dunes.

Earth observation is always political - Kilimanjaro, Tanzania In 1936, Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story called “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”.

Indulge me on a brief tangent: My parents are braggarts.

Light it up, up, up, light it up, up, up . . . - Shoyna, Russia At 67 degrees North, the village of Shoyna is just inside the Arctic Circle.

With sincere apologies to William Carlos Williams - Y’all know this poem, surely.

Last fall I visited the Morgan Museum and Library with my family in New York City.