In National Geographic’s Finding The Next Earth, an astronomer enters the Gemini Observatory at Mauna Kea and begins to weep tears of joy on seeing a brand new space telescope. There’s no crying in science, but I get it. The stuff we see and achieve is often too damned beautiful not to become overwhelmed with emotion. It’s the same way I felt when I first laid eyes on the Halema’uma’u summit crater inside the Kilauea caldera on the big island of Hawaii a few weeks ago. It’s all black rock and toxic quantities of sulfur dioxide to you, but for us geologists who love our planet, witnessing one of the world’s most famous active volcanoes in action is a life goal and akin to a religious experience. New crust forms right beneath our feet, the material having traveled miles up from the mantle, pushing, transforming, being transformed, rising into the atmosphere and, in the process, causing goosebumps of scientific elation. There is nothing more right and perfect than this moment.

Until D walks up and deadpans, “Oh geez, are you crying?!” Thanks for ruining it.

Halema?uma?u is a pit crater within the much larger K?lauea caldera at the summit of K?lauea | Big Island, Hawai’i | November 2011

The day started on the southern flanks of Mauna Loa with a drive from Oceanview to Southpoint or Ka Lae, the southernmost point in the 50 United States, situated at 18.91°N 155.68°W. Well below the Tropic of Cancer, but a stark reminder that it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the equatorial latitudes. Something that needs correcting soon.

The southernmost point in the 50 United States | Ka Lae, Hawai’i | November 2011

We then drove past many large windmills, Hawaiian grass-fed beef cattle and zebras (don’t ask) towards Hilo. After puttering around the town of Volcano (and noticing the Google Streetview car parked at a pub), we made our way over to the national park. The rest of this post describes the stops we made on Kilauea along with pictures, some pithy remarks, and tips should you choose to visit there some time.

Ever since Google killed existing features in Google Reader and began catering it to their new (mediocre) Google+ Social Media Extravaganza experience, I’ve been on the hunt for ONE quick and easy way by which to deliver media from around the web to a single archival list which I can then share here and elsewhere. The pattern that emerges from my investigation is one of inconsistency between platforms sprayed with a philosophy of We’re A Startup Waiting To Be Bought as opposed to Let’s Help You Share Information. Some of the avenues I tested and results in a convenient spreadsheet format:

The bottom line is that old Google Reader would update items in your carefully-compiled list of feeds, allow you to share your picks to Google Shared Items whether on a desktop, iPhone or iPad all through the same Google account and then give you the ability to publish that list to a page or the sidebar of your blog. SIGH. After this bit of research, the interim workaround I propose is to share these items in delicious and, if you use WordPress like me, can activate a seriously ugly delicious widget via a plugin called WP Delicious Sidebar, which then displays your items of choice in the sidebar. Doing this also serves to archive your links (with tags, if you so desire) in one place.

As I mention in the spreadsheet, Zite has potential but it is available only for iPad and doesn’t show every single item in a feed. As I mentioned to Patrix (who helpfully suggested that I sign up for HiveMined), I don’t want guesses at what I might want to read. I want to see every single item in every single feed to which I signed up, and the suggestions are lagniappe!

If you have any bright ideas or know of apps I’ve overlooked here, please let me know in the comments. Just remember that solutions have to work on desktop, iPhone and iPad and should not require having to turn around three times, pat your tummy and rub your head for five minutes, sing a song and tapdance before getting a piece of information from my screen to yours.

Back from Hawaii. Some panoramas of various places we visited for your viewing pleasure (please click on each picture to embiggenate). More complete descriptions and tales of hilarity after emergence from turkey coma.