e_boc's VirtualTourist Home Page

Hello, I live in the heartland of America: Galena, Illinois.
Take a look around my site (still working on pictures - been too busy traveling)

Click Here to Say Hello to the World

If you wanted to say hello to everybody in the world, how many people would that be? And how many languages would you have to learn?

You would have to learn at least 2,796 languages and say hello to 5,720,000,000 people!

The North Central Plains of the United States is sometimes called the Middle West or the breadbasket of America - much of the nation's food is grown in this region. But, it is more often called the Heartland of America.

It is located in the mid-center of the United States.
The region lies between the Ohio River, the Missouri River and the Great Lakes and stretches to beyond the 95th meridian to Canada.

Included are eight states: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri.

When people hear the word "Heartland" their thoughts are of living close to the land and rolling cornfields...rising phoenix like to the great cities like Chicago; Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Saint Louis.

Heartland has become an overworked word, rarely used by Midwesterners but beloved by visiting reporters and politicians. They like the way its warm and fuzzy sound masks what they really mean: hinterland. It is a euphemism favored by those who see the nation's midsection as a bucolic American Siberia - a nice place to pass through on the way to either coast, but not a place you'd really want to live.

Such visions are further perpetuated by presidential candidates, who every four years tromp through the late-winter mud on Iowa farms, wooing the "real folks" who supposedly represent real American values. When it comes to photo ops, candidates reason, you can't do much better than hogs, silos, and church suppers.

Those of us who grew up in the Midwest and now live elsewhere observe these images and stereotypes with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. But the 'Heartland' is as richly complex and varied as any other part of the United States.

Heartland Institute

Click Here To View Earth at Night - Full Page (534 kb)

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NASA - Astronomy Picture of the Day

This is what the Earth looks like at night. Can you find your favorite country or city? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe, the eastern United States, and Japan. Many large cities are located near rivers or oceans so that they can exchange goods cheaply by boat. Particularly dark areas include the central parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The above image is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the orbiting DMSP satellites.

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A Prominent Solar Prominence from SOHO


One of the most spectacular solar sights is a prominence. A solar prominence is a cloud of solar gas held above the Sun's surface by the Sun's magnetic field. Last month, NASA's Sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft imaged an impressively large prominence hovering over the surface, pictured above. The Earth would easily fit under the hovering curtain of hot gas. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) expelling hot gas into the Solar System. Although somehow related to the Sun's changing magnetic field, the energy mechanism that creates and sustains a Solar prominence is still a topic of research

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NASA's X-43A Scramjet Sets Air Speed Record


Using oxygen from the air itself, a NASA experimental jet propelled itself past Mach 7 in the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean this weekend. The small automated X-43A Hyper-X craft was dropped from a huge converted B-52 bomber and then accelerated by a standard Pegasus rocket. At Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, the X-43A separated and the novel scramjet kicked in. Atmospheric oxygen was then scooped up, combined with onboard hydrogen, and combusted in flight to propel the X-43A to record air speeds during maneuvers over the next 10 seconds. Engines of ramjet design have been suggested as a satellite launch method without heavy fuel tanks and even romanticized for interstellar space travel. The previously acknowledged air-speed record for jet-powered flight was Mach 3.3 for the decommissioned SR-71. Re-entering space rockets can start as high as Mach 36 before the atmosphere decelerates them. The X-43A, depicted in the artist's illustration above, might well propel itself past Mach 10 in future tests.

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Virgin Galatic

By the end of the decade, Virgin Galactic - the most exciting development in the story of modern space history - is planning to make it possible for almost anyone to visit the final frontier at an affordable price.