Nah, it's one of the many art installations sprinkled over the dusty playa at Burning Man 2009. This year's theme is Evolution: A Tangled Bank. Safe travels if you're a weekend burner headed to the Blackrock Desert, and don't forget the distilled white vinegar to neutralize that alkaline playa dust!

One year later (and having travelled around three continents since), that stuff is still turning up in random places like my hiking shoes. [San Francisco Chronicle]

It's Burning Man 2005!

Giz reader Dean sent in a slew of aerial photos from the event four years ago after reading our post on the retro rocket being erected in Nevada this year.

These pics are cool because, as many of you know, we dig airplanes here at Gizmodo. And Burning Man, it just so happens, has had its own fully functional airport since 1999.

That's a good thing, believe you me, because it gives us some nice bird's eye shots of this immense event:

According to NASA, these are roads and circular fields in the Egyptian desert, as photographed from the International Space Station. I don't know about you, but I swear I saw labels printed there. [Boston.com]

That's the disclaimer on the BALLS Experimental Rocket Launch website. Their 17th annual meeting just concluded in Nevada's Black Rock Desert where at least one rocket cracked 70,000 feet. Many others had successful flights. And some just blew up. Photography by Erik Charlton. See more of his fantastic shots from the event here. [via MAKE]