How far can you sail in a straight line without hitting land? The answer appears to be an almost 20,000 mile voyage from Pakistan to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. The red line on the map, above, shows the voyage.
OK, so the red line looks anything but straight. Nevertheless, it is a straight line as projected on a flat map. The earth is anything but flat. Check out the video below to see the line projected on a spherical earth. What we are seeing is a great circle route between Pakistan to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, which happens to stay clear of land. A great circle is an arc representing the shortest distance between two points anywhere on the Earth’s surface. Thanks to Patrick Anderson for uploading the video.
A straight line without hitting land from Pakistan to Russia
For the second time in roughly a week, a smuggler’s boat overloaded with migrants from Africa has capsized in the Mediterranean off Sicily, near the island of Lampedusa. At least 27 died, but 221 were rescued from the water. The boat capsized 65 miles (105 kilometers) southeast of Lampedusa.
For anyone in the New York Area I will be speaking at the New York Shiplore and Model-makers Club on Tuesday night at 7:30 PM on the “AC72 and the Evolution of the 
We recently posted 
The 
John F. Lehman and Christopher M. Lehman have a new plan to save the historic but endangered 
At least 130 African refugees have died and 200 are still missing after an overloaded boat caught fire and sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. More than 150 of the migrants have been rescued. Most of those on board were from Eritrea and Somalia, said the UN.
This is the tale of two very different men, from different places and different times. The first was a Welshman named John Roberts, though he took the name Bartholomew when he began his wildly successful but extremely short career as a pirate in 1719. Within three years of turning pirate, 
Over the weekend, a huge swarm of moon jellyfish shut down the 1,400 megawatt Unit 3 reactor at the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant on Sweden’s Baltic Sea coast. The jellyfish clogged the cooling water intakes, located roughly 60′ feet below the surface of the sea. They have since been cleared away and engineers are preparing to restart the reactor, but there is no guarantee the jellyfish will not return. “We hope we have solved the problem regarding the jellyfish, but we are not sure because they can come back,” Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for the operator, Oskarshamns Kraftgrupp AB, said Tuesday.
Back in 2010, we posted
We recently posted about a serious molasses spill in Honolulu harbor which has killed 26,000 fish and may have longer term consequences for the harbor ecology. Rick Austin was kind enough to forward an article about a far larger and more deadly molasses spill, the