Today’s peaceful distraction from an otherwise-hectic day: National Geographic’s WildCam, a live, streaming webcam from a watering hole in the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana. (A direct link to the RealPlayer stream is here.) Right now, it’s 8:30 PM in Botswana, and there appears to be an infrared filter on the camera — meaning that I’m being treated to a glowing elephant spending some quality alone time at the watering hole. The video and audio feeds are nice and fast, too; it appears that there’s an entire satellite uplink dedicated to the project, so it’s not too surprising that the quality is this good. It’s constantly amazing to me how the internet can bring unbelievably cool things right to our desktops, in real time and with minimal filtering, and watching African wildlife strolling around a watering hole at night just reinforces that amazement.