A Collection of Curiosities

JUAN CARLOS LLORCA, Associated Press Writer

GUATEMALA CITY - Torrential rains brought by the first tropical storm of the 2010 season pounded Central America and southern Mexico, triggering deadly landslides. The death toll stood at 15 Sunday but authorities said the number could rise.

Tropical Storm Agatha made landfall near the border of Guatemala and Mexico on Saturday with wind speeds of up to 45 mph (75 kph), then weakened into a tropical depression before dissipating over the mountains of western Guatemala.

Although no longer even a tropical depression, Agatha still posed trouble for the region: Remnants of the storm were expected to deliver 10 to 20 inches (25 to 50 centimeters) of rain over southeastern Mexico, Guatemala and parts of El Salvador, creating the possibility of "life-threatening flash floods and mudslides," the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said in an advisory Sunday.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said Saturday night that the rivers in the country's south were flooding or close to it.

Colom said 4.3 inches (10.8 centimeters) of rain had fallen in Guatemala City's valley in 12 hours, the most since 1949.

As of Saturday night, 4,300 people were in shelters and authorities said the number could rise as figures come in from around the country.

Earlier Saturday, Agatha's rains caused a landslide on a hillside settlement in Guatemala City that killed four people and left 11 missing, Guatemalan disaster relief spokesman David de Leon said. Most of the city was without electricity at nightfall, complicating search efforts.

Four children were killed by another mudslide in the town of Santa Catarina Pinula, about six miles (10 kilometers) outside the capital. And in the department of Quetzaltenango, 125 miles (200 kilometers) west of Guatemala City, a boulder loosened by rains crushed a house, killing two children and two adults, de Leon said.

Calls to local radio stations told of many more landslides and possible deaths, but those reports could not be immediately confirmed.

A three-story building in northern Guatemala City fell into a sinkhole but there were no reports of victims.

Cesar George of Guatemala's meteorological institute said the community of Champerico had received 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) of rain in 30 hours.

"It rained in one day what it usually gets in a month," George said.

Colom said authorities have not been able to reach Champerico by "air, land or sea."

In El Salvador, President Mauricio Funes declared a "red alert," the highest level of emergency, after rains delivered by Agatha triggered at least 140 landslides throughout the country and killed two adults and a 10-year-old child. The exact cause of their deaths was unclear.

Civil defense officials said the Acelhuate River that passes through the capital, San Salvador, had risen to dangerous levels and was threatening to overflow into city streets.

Agatha formed as a tropical storm early Saturday in the East Pacific.

Before the rains, Guatemala already was contending with heavy eruptions from its Pacaya volcano that blanketed the capital in ash and destroyed 800 homes.

The volcano, which is just south of the capital, started spewing lava and rocks Thursday afternoon, forcing the closure of Guatemala City's international airport. A TV reporter was killed by a shower of burning rocks.

Would you shell out $5800 for a book? It may be worth it in the case of a new collector's edition atlas called "Earth." The book weighs 63 pounds, stands 2 feet high, and includes some incredible photography from all over the world. The maps in the atlas, put together by over 100 international cartographers, are accompanied by some beautiful pictures from the National Geographic archives, a few of which are below.

The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday."Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time."Also, Google made the doodle permanent.

Explanation: Long before Stonehenge was built, well before the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, ancient artists painted life-sized figures on canyon walls in Utah,USA -- but why? Nobody is sure. The entire panel of figures, which dates back about 7,000 years, is called the Great Gallery and was found on the walls of Horseshoe Canyon in Canyonlands National Park. The humans who painted them likely hunted Mammoths. The unusual fuzziness of largest figure led to this mural section's informal designation as the Holy Ghost Panel, although the intended attribution and societal importance of the figure are really unknown. The above imagewas taken during a clear night in March. The oldest objects in the above image are not the pictographs, however, but the stars of our Milky Way Galaxy far in the background, some of which are billions of years old.