Earlier this month, the New York Times took its readers to Angel Falls, Venezuela – and onto the terrain of a lost supercontinent called Gondwana.

[Image: A remnant glimpse of a lost supercontinent, via the New York Times; photographer unknown. "The path in some stretches was completely overgrown with trees, reminding me how oppressively dark the jungle can be," we read].

Throughout Venezuela, we read, there are dozens of sandstone mesas, or tepuis. These tepuis are “remnants of what geologists believe were the mountains of the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwana.”
Incredibly, some of these “isolated mesas are two billion years old, preserving an array of unique plant and animal life that rivals that of places like the Galápagos.”
According to the article, some of the “distances involved” in flying from one mesa to the other can be so extreme that many species of bird cannot make the trip; each mesa thus acts as a kind of evolutionary island, where genetic lines unfurl and develop in complete isolation over thousands of generations. Weird birds and flowering plants thrive.
Studying these sites might therefore give us a glimpse into “what the world was like more than a billion years ago.”
That last quotation is from Charles Brewer-Carías, a man the NYTimes describes as “a Caracas-based naturalist and explorer who is an eminent expert on Auyantepui and the country’s other mesas.”
He is also an “ex-dentist.”
In fact, during “186 expeditions into Venezuela’s backlands, Mr. Brewer-Carías has discovered the world’s largest sinkholes, on a tabletop mountain called Sarisariñama, and practiced dentistry among the Yekuana tribe, whose language he speaks fluently.” And he’s still going: “Accompanied by Czech speleologists” in early 2006, Brewer-Carías “documented what may be the world’s largest quartzite cave.”
In any case, it’s the tepuis that fascinate me here; these “sandstone mountains,” Brewer-Carías explains, “are the majestic leftovers of an enormous washover of sand that came from Africa.” This makes them “a window into what once was Gondwanaland” – laminated dunes of a lost desert – the remnant geography of a world that no longer exists.

Flickr user Seb Przd has been re-mathematizing his photographs of French cathedrals, using a program called MathMap.
The results are delirious whorls of rock and decoration, space folded onto itself and circled round again to match up with itself at the beginning. All very M.C. Escher-esque – but nonetheless exhilirating.

[Images: "Saint Etienne Two Times," taken inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris; another view of Saint Etienne du Mont; inside the same church; and a final view inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris. All photographs by Seb Przd].

Further clicking took me through to an entire Equirectangular Pool on Flickr, and further still to a specific Equirectangular set by another Flickr user called HamburgerJung. In particular, I like his shot “Treppe.”
However, even then I found myself clicking back to look at images by Seb Przd, including “On the side of the cathedral,” “Don’t drink and pray,” and “Notre-Dame de Reims.”
If you look at enough of these, though, you begin to see that specific styles of architecture are better than others when it comes to this sort of optical distortion. The old stone cathedrals of Europe are fantastic, for instance, but modern – even art nouveau – structures look pretty lame, frankly. I also think meadow shots, or straight-up landscapes, just look really gimmicky.
So perhaps we should send Seb Przd, armed with a camera and loads of film, on a six month trip through Europe, photographing every Gothic cathedral from within…
A kind of optical encounter between Christianity and mathematics.

A mountain quarry in the county of Fumin, China, has been “artificially painted green by the local forestry bureau” as a way “to simulate planted trees.”
Doing this apparently cost $51,000.
“Workers who began spraying Laoshou mountain last August told villagers they were doing so on orders of the county government but were not told why,” the Associated Press reports.
“Some villagers guessed officials of the surrounding Fumin county, whose office building faces the mountain, were trying to change the area’s feng shui” – others think they were told to do it by Pruned.
That, or they were just responding over-literally to the horrific slogan of chemical giant Sherwin Williams – who exhort their customers to “cover the earth” with paint.