They're watching you . . .

Composite atmospheric water vapor image derived from data from the SSM/I instrument on board the F-15 satellite. Water vapor signatures of Hurricanes Kyle and Isadore are in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. (Global Hydrology and Resource Center)

Have you ever had the feeling you're being watched? Poring over our Site Meter stats this morning, we noticed a visitor presumably in the Bahamas had spent 252 minutes and 13 seconds viewing 57 pages of our humble blog. Even our relatives spend maybe 15-20 minutes max at a stretch. Could this be a Government worker with too much time on his hands?

We typed the IP address -- 209.73.176.136 -- into a Google search and arrived -- yes -- at a Government site, Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC), "housed within the National Space Science and Technology Center, a cooperative venture of NASA and many Alabama colleges and universitites."  A little more Googling got us to Andros Island, the likely spot where our visitor sits staring at his computer screen. When not reading sisu, he may be conducting CAMEX field experiments:

The Convection and Moisture Experiment (CAMEX) archive provides data from the CAMEX-3 and CAMEX-4 field experiments. These experiments produced high-resolution spatial and temporal information of hurricane structure, dynamics, and motion [image above].

CAMEX-3 holdings include hurricane research data sets derived from a variety of passive microwave, radar, infrared, visible, lidar, interferometer, electric field, and lightning instruments on board the NASA ER-2 and DC-8 aircraft, as well as surface station instruments on Andros Island, Bahamas.

Just someone with too much time on his hands, or did NASA take The American Thinker's Thomas Lifson seriously when he warned -- tongue in cheek, in case anyone at NASA is really listening -- re one of our tinfoil-hat posts?:

I only hope that the CIA and Department of Homeland Security are paying attention to Sisu.

Questions:  How does a Domain name in the Bahamas (no.bs) square with a Time Zone (UTC:8:00) in the Pacific?  Also, plugging the IP address into Geobytes' locator tool leads to Saugerties, NY. What is the connection, if any, among Andros Island, Saugerties and Pacific Daylight Time?

Update:  Reader Tom Dilatush of JamulBlog has some answers: "There are many ways in which a particular site can be physically distant from the IP provider." Thanks, Tom.  It's nice to have readers who know things we don't.

Comments

[Sissy]

Ummmm, that's just a little freaky!

[Tom Dilatush]

There are many ways in which a particular site can be physically distant from the IP provider. My site, for example, is located in Jamul, California (outside of San Diego) -- but if you put my IP into Geobytes, you'll get Ithaca, NY. In my case that's because my site is connected via a satellite, and the ISP routes their traffic through a site in NY. The problem is that folks like Geobytes don't *really* know where an IP address is located; they're just making educated guesses based on information provided through registrations, etc.

[Teresa]

It's also highly likely that this is a computer that's been taken over by a spambot. It's accessing posts with the intention of dropping lovely bits of spam upon you... but likely blocked by typepad - therefore you don't end up with 1000's of annoying posts to get rid of! I've seen this happen on my site thru Stat Counter - it generally never shows on Sitemeter - don't know why.

[Sissy Willis]

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser . . .