Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Overview

I picked up this shot of a Chicago-area Target store on Tuesday (via via).

The initial write-up suggested that the big-box rooftop is advertising to the satellites orbiting on high, but the subsequent note acknowledges that the retail site is on O'Hare's well-traveled landing (or take-off) path. Whether it's aimed at folks in the window seats of airplanes or other sorts of eyes in the sky, the notion of discount retailers and other square-footage gluttons decorating their roofs for over-passers is something out of the ordinary (unless you count crop circles and Midwestern farmers cutting the hay-formations to root for the local team). You'll find a deeper collection of from-above shots at Google Sightseeing.

Ever since my days as an insurance claims adjuster, I've had a slight fascination with roofs, their ubiquity, their vital importance for the whatnots protected by them. Okay, so "slight fascination" is an overstatement. My first claim ever, however, as an apprentice adjuster ten years ago, involved a tornado-lifted rolled rubber rooftop at a sugar warehouse in Bay City, Mich (rel. to the Frankenmuth tornados in June of '96). The disaster had sort of created my job. In effect, the wind lifted the sealed roof, allowing the shallow pool of water accumulated on the top-side of the rubber to drizzle into the roof structure where it seeped along the steel beams and trickled steadily over the entire warehouse contents. More than a million bucks worth of rain afflicted sugar. It seems like there should be a point to this. Maybe it's that with logo-top roofs showing off to flight passengers and satellite mapping services, the underconsidered roof structures become even more complex. And so a claim for damages to the rooftop--beyond water seeping onto pallets of sugar--would now include a loss of advertising claim. Or something.

Also, it brings me all the way around to a few of the sites we looked at in GEO781 yesterday. I was especially impressed with the discussion of Dinkum Sands, Alaska, a seasonal speck of gravel-ice. Is it land sufficient for establishing coastal boundaries? I won't go too far with this because it's part of the professor's forthcoming book on coastal boundaries. But we looked at the charts of the area from the 1960s (right?), using the NOAA Historic Charts (search the charts for examples). We also looked at the American Memory archive at the Library of Congress (choose maps; MrSID viewing is enhanced with the downloadable viewer) and the intellicast.com US radar loops. For next week: ABAG on seismic activity and USGS GeoNames.

Posted by dmueller at January 18, 2006 3:50 PM to (Di)stances